Category Archives: Training

Aug 25 2020
Leave a comment
Food, General health, Life, Running, Training

Food and Thermogenesis: How what you eat affects your body temperature

Energy produces heat. If you didn’t sleep through science class, they probably taught you this.

There are all sorts of circumstances behind what we now call climate change, the steadily rising temperature of the planet. But one key element is the fundamental existence of more human beings than have ever been on the planet in recorded history.

All humans produce heat. Every mechanical, electrical, chemical anything we have ever done produces heat. Vehicles and other machines produce heat when they operate. Anything we built that moves produces heat. Even the coldest fridges, freezers and air conditioners produce heat to cool what’s inside: The heat is just emitted out of the back or top of the device into the surrounding atmosphere.

And our bodies produce heat. The bigger we are, the more active we are, the more heat we produce. This is a key reason why your perceived temperature is hotter when you’re running than it is when you’re walking or still. You produce a lot more heat when you exercise.

Even the energy required to digest food produces heat. The act of digestion producing this energy is a little something scientists call thermogenesis.

Some foods require more energy from thermogenesis than others. This is one of the keys behind why it’s generally healthier to eat unprocessed meat and vegetables than processed sugar.

Insoluble fiber and most proteins require a lot of digestive energy for the body to digest its nutrients. These foods are highly thermogenic.

Meanwhile, chemically refined sugar is by design quickly digested, as these foods are chemically engineered to not satisfy you hunger and make you crave more of them. These foods are lightly thermogenic.

You can eat 500 calories of sugar cookies, and still be very hungry immediately after eating them. Meanwhile, you can eat 500 calories of steak, and be so full you won’t want another bite of anything for several hours. And woe is the poor soul who tries to eat 500 calories of broccoli… if he even manages to get it all down (1 cup of cooked broccoli is about 60 calories). He will end up spending a regretful amount of time on a toilet at some future point.

Broccoli and other vegetables are among the most thermogenic of foods. Many require more caloric energy to burn them than the calories the vegetables themselves contain!

Now, why bring up global warming when bringing up the thermic effect of food? Is Steven saying that broccoli causes climate change?

Continue reading →
Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 23 2020
2 Comments
Exercise, Food, General health, Life, nutrition, Recovery, Running, Training

Energy Availability and making sure you don’t undereat when training

Currently I’m tinkering with my diet, not necessarily the foods but the meal timing and the calorie macros.

It’s not so much that my weight loss has currently stalled. In fact, it did drop to a month-low 168.9 lbs over the weekend… though it has been tough, slow going to move the average down.

I’m trying to naturally maximize my energy levels, which when I’ve fasted had tended to stay low. This means I need more nutrients around these times, which indicates I should stop fasting.

However, I went back through my RRCA training course materials… mostly because I was walking on a treadmill for an hour and the spiral-bound book was one of the only books I had that I could suitably read while on the treadmill. In any case, I went through the information-laden appendicies and it includes a robust booklet on nutrition by the IAAF.

In the IAAF’s Nutrition materials, they mention an interesting stat: Energy availability. The idea of Energy Availability is that aside from calories burned in exercise, the body has a certain number of calories it needs to rebuild and recover from that exercise.

Continue reading →
Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Aug 22 2020
Leave a comment
Exercise, Recovery, Running, Training

My biggest Chicago training mistake

Hindsight is typically 20/20 when it comes to training mistakes. Often you couldn’t have known at the time you were making a mistake, as experience afterwards is what ultimately taught you that what you thought was right turned out not to be right.

I trained a lot in Chicago as a runner, and I got into pretty good condition for where I was at. I learned how to prevent and safely work through injuries, and I logged a substantial volume of miles while running in dozens of races during the few years I seriously trained.

Looking back, I realize that something I did at every speed or tempo workout was actually counterproductive to my recovery and growth. It was hard to miss in large part because most of the people I trained with made a habit of the same thing, and even coaches didn’t realize this was counterproductive.

But the mistake inadvertently slowed my growth from these workouts, and had I know not to do it then I likely would have recovered more quickly and grown stronger workout-over-workout than I ended up doing. It may have made a substantial difference in how I performed in marathons and other key races.

Continue reading →
Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Aug 21 2020
1 Comment
Exercise, Food, General health, Life, nutrition, Recovery, Training

Twelve (12) Training and Lifestyle Tips For Fat Burning

There’s a lot I could say about fat burning, and there’s a legion of users-guide material throughout the internet world about methods to healthy fat burning (and many more about unhealthy fat burning ideas, which I will not bother to cover). I could write a piece about a dozen topics.

But I think it would help you to get some actionable tips in one place, and perhaps a shorter bit of writing on each of those in one place may help you more in the present. I can always cover all of these topics in additional pieces later.

So instead, I’m going to put a dozen topics into this long post, and succinctly get into why you should make it a standard or best practice.

If you’re trying to burn fat and struggling with it, these tips should help spur things along or keep things moving in the right direction.

Continue reading →
Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Aug 18 2020
1 Comment
General health, Running, Training, Weather

Heat Acclimation and Blood Volume In Running

One of the subjects Jonathan Savage (the FellRNR running guy) discusses at length is heat acclimation training, where you train specifically in hot conditions to either prepare yourself to race in hot conditions or to successfully race in less extreme, even more normal temperatures.

This is of course amusing to me as we in Las Vegas (and most of the United States, admittedly) are currently suffering through a bout of extreme heat. And in Vegas, we’re used to high heat, with summer days topping 100° Fahrenheit (38° Celsius), but the 110-120°F heat we have now is even above our typical pay grade.

Thus, those of us who run in Vegas get to practice heat acclimation training whether we want to or not!

Of course, Savage refers mainly to winter training for a spring marathon. In the winter temperatures fall below freezing in most parts of the country. If eventually you have to run a marathon in 60-80°F weather (15-25°C), you’re going to get hit hard by relatively warm conditions, even though you’d love to have those conditions in the middle of August. Your body will have acclimated to the other extreme of those cold conditions.

On top of that, Savage typically runs ultra-marathons in more extreme conditions like the hot and dry Badwater 135 race. So he’s not just dealing with a slightly warm marathon in London or Boston. He’s dealing with potentially 100°F heat with doubly dehydrating dry conditions. So even if it’s negative celsius or fahrenheit outside he needs to bundle up to prepare for running in 100°F weather.

Now, all that said, just because you or I have no intention of attempting such a race coming out of winter doesn’t mean that heat acclimation isn’t valuable.

Even with no races on the horizon, running in summer heat and the resulting heat acclimation (within healthy reason: Don’t go taking extended runs once the temperatures are over 100° without an abundance of cooling resources and support)… has one additional key benefit.

Continue reading →
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 14 2020
1 Comment
Exercise, General health, Life, Training

The Learning Power of Habit

One of the keys to exercise improving your fitness is that humans are creatures of habit.

You probably didn’t think much about using the bathroom or preparing coffee or breakfast this morning. Your process for doing any of the above has probably become automatic. You have formed habits that eliminate your need to expend mental energy undergoing any of those tasks.

This is also why projects and complicated tasks can be so mentally tiring. Our minds are just as capable of fatigue as our bodies. When we are not used to doing something to the point of habit, we have to mentally work harder to do it because we have to think through it.

This is one reason why my 20 minute workout is so much easier and faster for me to do than someone else’s 45-60 minute workout, and one reason why if you were to try it you would initially find it more difficult.

I have gotten so accustomed to the exercises I am doing for my separate workouts that I don’t need to put a ton of thought into it during the moment, nor is the challenge of lifting a heavy weight compounded by the relative muscle confusion of having to work through a new, different exercise. This is often what pushes a lot of people away from exercise after a few workouts.

But, is that not harmful, as some fitness experts would say? Won’t that lead to training stagnation from the monotony of the same workout every day?

Continue reading →
Tagged , , , , , , ,
Aug 10 2020
Leave a comment
Exercise, General health, Running, Shoes, Training

On the Perils of Padded Shoes

I’m a believer in Phil Maffetone‘s approach to aerobic training, which is basically that you should do most training at no more than 75% of your max heart rate.

This doesn’t mean I don’t ever do anaerobic work, or speedwork, or anything else that elevates your heart rate past that. I just default my aerobic training to that lowered maximum. It’s also similar to the 80/20 approach that Matt Fitzgerald vouches for.

Maffetone is also in that esoteric ‘do everything barefoot’ camp, and it’s a key reason the Primal Blueprint’s Mark Sisson aligned with his beliefs in writing Primal Endurance. I don’t subscribe to that mostly because I live in cities where soft ground is often littered with hidden sharp objects, many of which can be very dangerous. I’ll trade the benefits of barefoot running for the needed safety of wearing shoes during exercise, thanks.

But I bring up Maffetone to talk about this piece on shoes that I’ve long since had loaded on a browser tab for discussion. Much like how Sisson wrote his “I hate endurance training BUT if I were to train for a marathon…” piece, Maffetone is anti-shoes but here he writes a piece on what kind of shoes you should get if you need them.

I’m always a supporter of the “not my thing but here’s a good way to do it if you must” perspective. I like being open minded to different approaches, even when I have convincing reasons not to follow them. I know others will follow them, and long as no one’s getting hurt or killed in doing so we’re typically better off helping each other maximize those efforts.

But, as I do, I digress. Maffetone raises a good point about what I call “The Hoka One One Problem”: We like padded shoes, but they’re not good for us.

Continue reading →
Tagged , , , , ,
← Older posts
Newer posts →