_THIS WEEK you will be adding one session of UPPER BODY STRENGTH exercises. Several exercises are listed on the PLAN. Click here for an updated version which includes a new link to the description of a standard and side plank.

If you don't have a resistance band the chair/bench dips and push-ups will work, especially if you add the planks. Although PLANKS (demonstrated at http://running.competitor.com/2014/07/injury-­‐prevention/four-­‐key-­‐core-­‐exercises-­‐for-­‐runners_41874/2) are heralded as great CORE STRENGTHENING exercises they also work arms and shoulders.

The link to the Runner's World video (http://www.runnersworld.com/workouts/upper-­‐body-­‐strength-­‐for-­‐runners) to view the upper body exercises is the correct link, but it doesn't always take you directly to the specific site. If it takes you to a contents page instead, the article is titled: "Top Story: Run better by working your upper body. By Nikki Kimball". I am sorry this doesn't consistently work but the video is the best for discussing standard push-ups and incline push-ups, which are easier to perform. I especially like the admonition to stop when your form breaks down. There's no good in performing an exercise with improper form, and injury can result. I follow this rule as well. Even if you normally complete a certain number of repetitions of an exercise, some days it's not going well. Best to stop yourself before your body stops you!

IT'S EXCITING TO HAVE ONLY A FEW DAYS LEFT BEFORE THE TURKEY TROT! If you feel like continuing your  training after the Friday 20 min Recovery walk, at the very end of the REVISED "ON TO NEW YEAR'S EVE PLAN" (CLICK on the "PLAN") there's a 6 week plan that can prepare you for a 5K on New Year's Eve or Day. The last 2 weeks prior to your 5K include a "taper" of about 10 days in which you run less mileage but maintain intensity (speed). This is not so easy to determine for a first race! The BLOG will have more about this after the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend.

WE HAVE SO MUCH FOR WHICH TO BE THANKFUL, as individuals, families, and as a country!
Thank you for following EARNED RUNS on the website and Facebook; your interest is greatly appreciated. The 2016 Bibs will be available in December; this date will be posted.

Here is the PDF for the 6 week plan to take you to New years Eve and Day

HAPPY RUNNING!

Coffee was in the news yesterday. A study published in the medical journal Circulation was reported on in the AMA Morning Rounds newsletter with the headline “Moderate coffee drinking associated with lower risk of death”. Over 200,000 people, mostly women and some men were followed for up to 30 years. The results indicated that persons who regularly drank moderate amounts of coffee had a lower risk of deaths from cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases (like Parkinson’s disease and dementia), type 2 diabetes, and suicide. The effect was most clear in never-smokers, ranging from 8-15%, and was greatest with up to 5 cups consumption/day, tapering off with >5cups. There was no difference between caffeinated and non-caffeinated coffee, indicating the findings were likely not related to caffeine. Information on use of cream, milk, or sugar in coffee was not provided. Most, 95%, of study participants were Caucasians so results can’t be generalized to other populations. The information was gathered by questionnaire. The authors concluded,  “Results from this and previous studies indicate that coffee consumption can be incorporated into a healthy lifestyle. (Click for link to abstract ”http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/early/2015/11/10/CIRCULATIONAHA.115.017341.abstract)
 
This unexciting statement may be a bit disappointing, as some of us would like to think coffee is the elixir of health, rather than simply not harmful. The study authors took steps to disentangle the effect of smoking in the research participants, as it seems the greatest number of moderate to heavy coffee drinkers are also smokers, who are prone to developing respiratory diseases and lung and other cancers that can lead to death. In this study there was no evidence of an increase in mortality due to cancer when researchers excluded smokers from the statistical analysis. So it’s actually a big step forward to say that coffee is not harmful and that it’s not the caffeine that is providing the benefit.
 
THAT BRINGS US TO RUNNING AND COFFEE! The urban legend has been that caffeine consumption can improve endurance athletic performance and research results have agreed. Coffee itself had not been studied much. However, a study in 2013 (Click for link to abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23573201  reported “that both caffeine… and coffee… consumed 1 hour prior to exercise can improve endurance exercise performance. “ In this study 8 males, trained cyclists/triathletes, with an average age of about 41 years, who were not heavy caffeine users, participated in 4 exercise sessions, each being 7 days apart, after an 8 hour overnight fast. One hour prior to exercise each athlete consumed drinks consisting of caffeine, instant coffee (same caffeine content), instant decaffeinated coffee, or placebo. At each session, 30 minutes of steady-state cycling was followed by a 45 minute time-trial. The participants were instructed to complete a target amount of work in the quickest time possible. Each participant completed a questionnaire to guess the test beverage after the session, as well as report any GI distress. Participants received no feedback about their performance until all 4 sessions were completed. Time-trial performance times were significantly FASTER for both CAFFEINE and COFFEE when compared to placebo and decaf, and were similar for both caffeine and coffee. Three of the 8 participants successfully guessed the correct order of test beverages; and guesses were better for detecting caffeine. No serious GI distress was reported in any of the trials.
 
So my 1st question is, can my early morning training session performance, before food is consumed, be improved by a cup or so of coffee? These participants reported to the lab between 6am and 8am for each 75 minute test session, after an overnight fast.  I regularly leave the house with only coffee taken before an early morning run of several miles.  Like the authors conclusions in the first study about risk of death, I hope this research is at least telling me it won’t harm performance! IF YOU DECIDE to INTRODUCE this into your exercise routine, be cautious. As always, start slow.  Initially take an easily digested food source with you (?banana, low fat chocolate milk, energy bar with carbs), and keep the distance short that you run from the safety of home or car.

My 2nd question is, did the athletes good guess of when they were drinking caffeine mentally help their performance? Perhaps their guess about when they were drinking coffee was not as good, and since performance was still better than decaf and placebo, proves that the effect was only physical.
Regardless, I can use both a physical and mental boost in the early mornings. Where's my coffee?
HAPPY RUNNING!
 
 
 
 
 
 

THIS WEEK YOU WILL ADD some lower body strength exercises and one Dead Bug core strengthening session. The full Turkey Trot Training Plan (Click on plan) on the PDF  has a description of a squat and the remaining exercises are demonstrated in a  video (http://www.runnersworld.com/training-video/winter-weekly-workout-week-5). The Dead Bug is also demonstrated on a video.

Some of the MYRTLs have a built in strengthening component (clams, lateral leg raise) for the abductor muscle and gluteus medius muscle, that is smaller than the gluteus maximus; both help stabilize your lower body as you run. The number of repetitions is too few to strengthen much, but it is a bonus move nonetheless. A physical therapist once told me that runners develop problems when they concentrate on strengthening the lower body's large muscles (gluteus maximus, quadriceps femoris) which move us forward, but neglect the small muscles that keep us from swaying from side to side. Swaying leads to inefficient running and puts great strain on the connective tissue and muscles that stabilize and move the joints, as they work harder to keep you steady. I chose exercises that only employ the body's own weight to perform and do not involve high impact movements. Resistance bands increase the performance effort and so increase the benefit of the exercise moves. Bands are worth the relatively low cost, as a gym membership or other equipment would be more expensive. The swiss/stability ball is also an economical purchase. You can use it for many other upper and lower body exercises and for core and balance work like the Dead Bug. The lower body exercises I chose target muscles that stabilizing the hip.  They work the gluteus medius, hamstrings, and hip abductors. The squats especially target the quads. If you have other favorites,  perform them instead, but try these too. If difficult, then you especially need them!

The Dead Bug is harder than it seems. It is a great exercise to strengthen the abdominal muscles and lower back. There are many others you may add but I thought just one to start would increase compliance.
GOOD LUCK! HAPPY RUNNING!! As you start this week you are more than halfway through the plan!

It is often recommended that for RUNNERS WHO WISH TO BE FASTER, training plans should include shorter-duration workouts of increased intensity in addition to regular longer-duration endurance running at a continuous speed. Mario Fraioli‘s article in Competitor.com "Running-101-basic-speed-workouts-for-runners" was sub-headed: “You don’t have to run fast in training—unless you want to run faster in races.”
 
It’s true, and this may cause you to stop reading these kinds of articles if you don’t wish to compete in races or care about your race times. However there also may be some health benefits in these shorter speed workouts as well.  HIIT (high intensity interval training) has been studied as a method to help runners increase speed and improve other physiological measures of performance.  The MEDICAL WORLD has also been interested in HIIT as a way for individuals to decrease the HARMFUL TYPE OF FAT that forms in the abdomen, called visceral fat, as well as to lower weight, blood pressure, and blood lipid levels (see references below) that increase risk for cardiovascular disease and death (1-4). HIIT is also thought to induce beneficial effects on psychological health (4). Low-volume (involves less time in exercise performance) HIIT programs in particular are perceived by exercise participants to be less difficult and less time consuming, and this attitude is thought to increase the likelihood of their compliance with a “fat-busting” exercise regimen, compared with endurance running and high-volume HIIT, leading to improved health and fitness.
 
Mackenzie Lobby Havey published an article in Triathlete in April 2015 that discussed a Danish research paper published in 2012(5). She offers readers a routine that follows the “10-20-30”  concept of training developed and supervised by researchers in that controlled setting.*(printed below) The good news is that a new study published in 2015 (6) reported, as described later in this blog, that HIIT training by the “10-20-30”method can be used successfully by everyday middle-aged runners, in a recreational setting, to improve some aspects of health as well as athletic performance. 
 
High-intensity interval running is defined as running at or above an intensity that corresponds to a person’s maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max). It has been shown to be effective in improving VO2max, blood pressure, and running economy in both untrained and endurance-trained (traditional, continuous, same-pace, moderate intensity running) subjects. In well-trained subjects especially, this type of exercise seems to be more effective in improving performance than moderate-intensity exercise training. Intervals of near-maximal sprinting by runners, as short as 10 seconds in duration, have been shown to increase short- and long-term performance, running economy, and VO2max (5).
 
Much of this research has been performed on test subjects who were closely supervised by scientists in a controlled setting. Hoping to incorporate HIIT in an easy-to-perform format for recreational runners, Danish researchers (5) developed a “10-20-30 training” plan (1-min intervals of 30, 20, and 10 seconds** at an intensity corresponding to ∼ 30%, ∼ 60%, and ∼90–100% of maximal running speed). In 2012 this group of researchers demonstrated that 10-20-30 training was superior to endurance training in terms of improving performance and health parameters in a group of recreationally active runners. However because the training sessions had been supervised by scientific staff, doubts still remained that HIIT could be easily implemented in the real world without researcher oversight.  In 2015 the Danes (6) reported that they studied the feasibility and effect of 10-20-30 training conducted in 8 local running clubs, involving 160 recreationally-active runners (>2 years of consistent run training), some of which had high blood pressure, over 8 weeks. Both men and women, with an average age of about 47-49 years, were enrolled in one of 2 groups, a 10-20-30 experimental group and a control group.
 
In the 10-20-30 group, WAIST CIRCUMFERENCE (a proxy measurement for abdominal fat) and BMI were significantly lower after the training, 5K time improved by 38 seconds; systolic blood pressure was lowered 2mmHg; in HYPERTENSIVE runners both systolic and diastolic pressures were lowered (systolic to a greater extent than in runners with normal pressures, by 5mmHg and diastolic by 2mmHg), and VO2max was increased. Only body mass was reduced significantly in control runners. Other tests were performed to study the effect of the two training types on blood vessels in muscle, but did not show evidence of change. There were also some increases in blood lipids that could not be explained. The researchers concluded: “these results suggest that 10-20-30 training is an effective and easily implemented training intervention improving endurance performance, VO2max and lowering BP in recreational runners, but does not affect muscle morphology…”.
 
What this last study shows is that a relatively straightforward method of HIIT can easily be incorporated into your existing training plan without special oversight, and it has a good chance of improving your running performance AND overall health. Especially if you have high blood pressure as a runner or you have the dangerous abdominal type of fat, this workout may be of help. Other methods of exercise may be just as effective (4), but HIIT seems to be perceived as “do-able” by sedentary individuals (7), and the 10-20-30 method in particular by runners who have an endurance training base (4.)

 SO TRY HIIT! The research programs were 7-8 WEEKS duration, with sessions performed 2-3 times a week. Don't expect immediate results. Try one session a week. If the workout protocol is followed as directed (see below), the time you spend is 3 x 7 minutes, or about a half hour with a short warm up. I have tried it on a treadmill but paying close attention to the time, and cranking up/down the speed after short intervals not my idea of happy running. I enjoyed an outdoor session better. Once i figured out how to count the intervals mentally, I did not even need the phone app timer. The time just flew by.
 
*The 30-20-10 Run Workout
Do a short warm-up then 30 seconds of jogging, 20 seconds of running at a regular training pace, and 10 seconds at an all-out sprint, four times in a row continuously (I think she means 5 times total to correspond to the research protocol). Follow that 5:00-minute routine with a 2:00-minute jog and then repeat the cycle two more times.
http://triathlon.competitor.com/2015/04/training/the-30-20-10-run-workout_114707#e56Ux6lGJBK3pevb.99


**The method is named “10-20-30” because the researchers thought it was easier to remember than “30-20-10”, the actual running sequence from low to moderate to high intensity!


References
1. Giannaki C. D., Aphamis G., Sakkis P., Hadjicharalambous M.  Eight weeks of a combination of high intensity interval training and conventional training reduce visceral adiposity and improve physical fitness: a group-based intervention. J Sports Med Phys Fitness 2015; Jan 8.
 
2. Irving BA, Davis, CK, Brock DW, Weltman JY, Swift D, Barratt EJ, Gaesser GA, Weltman A. Effect of exercise training intensity on abdominal visceral fat and body composition. Med Sci Sports Exerc 2008; 40(11): 1863-1872. 

3. Sahakyan KR, Virend KS, Rodriguez-Escudero JP, Hodge DO, Carter RE, Sochor O, Coutinho T, Jensen MD, Roger VL, Singh P, Lopez-Jimenez F. Normal-Weight Central Obesity: Implications for Total and Cardiovascular Mortality. Ann Intern Med. Published online 10 November 2015 doi: 10.7326/M14-2525.
 
4. Shepherd SO, Wilson OJ, Taylor AS, Thøgersen-Ntoumani C, Adlan AM. Wagenmakers AJ, Shaw CS. Low-Volume High-Intensity Interval Training in a Gym Setting Improves Cardio-Metabolic and Psychological Health. PLoS One 2015 Sep 24;10(9):e0139056
 
5. Gunnarsson,TP, Bangsbo J. The 10-20-30 training concept improves performance and health profile in moderately trained runners. J Appl Physiol 2012; 113(1): 16-24.

 6. Gliemann L, Gunnarsson TP, Hellsten Y, Bangsbo J. 10-20-30 training increases performance and lowers blood pressure and VEGF in runners. Scand J Med Sci Sports 2015: 25: e479–e48

7. Jung ME, Bourne JE, Little JP. Where Does HIT Fit? An Examination of the Affective Response to High-Intensity Intervals in Comparison to Continuous Moderate- and Continuous Vigorous-Intensity Exercise in the Exercise Intensity-Affect ContinuumPLoS One. 2014; 9(12): e114541. Published online 2014 Dec 8.
 
 
 
 

THE ENTIRE 4 WEEK PLAN that includes links to all the routines can be accessed by clicking on "PLAN".

THIS 2nd WEEK you will continue to perform the MYRTL routine (http://www.njsportsmed.com/files ) but only to prepare for runs. In addition you will learn DYNAMIC WARM-UPS http://health.clevelandclinic.org/2015/06/try-­‐these-­‐4-­‐dynamic-­‐exercise-­‐warm-­‐ups-­‐video/
also performed before each run. You'll need to have a FOAM ROLLER  to enjoy a "roll-out" on non-running days (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzAv0fnB2fg ). To start the week you will recover from your longest run the prior week with a brisk walk. Water and energy needs are the same as week 1.

FOAM ROLLING has been promoted (click here to see Brett Contreras article) as a self-induced method for breaking up restrictive fibrous adhesions that form (between the thin tissue layers that cover muscles, called fascia) after intense exercise. The result is muscle soreness and decreased performance. Foam rolling is thought to restore the extensibility of this "soft-tissue" (it's not bone) and improve range of motion and athletic performance. The small undulations of rolling apply pressure to muscles, in a way that is similar to therapeutic massage, create friction, and warm the fascial tissue, making it more "fluid".
A recent study (abstract at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25415413), involving young men tested in a laboratory setting, demonstrated that a 20 minute session of foam rolling immediately after and every 24 hours thereafter enhanced recovery and reduced decreases in physical performance due to delayed onset muscle-soreness. It concluded that "self-massage through foam rolling could benefit athletes seeking a recovery modality that is relatively affordable, easy to perform, and time efficient and that enhances muscle recovery."
There is much more science to this discussion, but it is beyond the scope of this blog. You should try this method to determine if it can help you. Generally the areas/muscles that are most tender during the rolling process are those that will benefit the most! In the Turkey Trot Training Plan, foam rolling is scheduled the DAY AFTER a run; ideally it should be performed IMMEDIATELY after a run, and on following days as needed. However, beginning runners may find that the pre-run dynamic warm-up and the run consume enough time, and skip the foam roll session. This plan is encouraging you to take enough time to perform the routine, thinking you will eventually decide the timing best for your schedule and needs. By the way, depending on your fitness level, upper arm fatigue may limit the amount of time you can roll. It's a built in workout for your arms!!!

DYNAMIC WARM-UPS represent a functional way to prepare your muscles for exercise. You may find that at first these moves seem more like actual exercise than warm-ups to exercise! They are different from the static post-run stretches that have the most benefit after your run. Some overlap with the MYRTL's. As in the demonstration video prepared by Cleveland Clinic staff, each person should determine whether performance is possible, stopping if any of the moves are too difficult or are painful.

ONCE YOU MASTER THE NEW ROUTINES INCLUDED IN THIS WEEK OF TRAINING you are ready to concentrate on running!!!!  You can consider yourself officially a runner in-training when you prepare and recover with these routines. Stick with them. They will allow you to continue to work toward your goal without injury.  Before I trained properly, I would recover by attempting to soak in an ice bath; that's the advice that was given in the old days to runners experiencing soreness after a long run. Now, 30 years older, I warm-up and roll beforehand, complete my long run in the morning, stretch and roll afterward, and spend the afternoon at the mall, beach, or a football game; feeling great the next day. It's amazing!

GET OUT AND RUN, AND BE PROUD OF YOUR PROGRESS!