VO2max

The monthly newsletter of RunCoachJason.com

Dr. Jason Karp, running & fitness coach, consultant, freelance writer

Director & Coach, REVO₂LT Running Team™

January, 2010

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In this issue:  

Southern California All-Sports Clinic

New Year’s Gifts

Running Clinics & Workouts in the Park™

Workout Speeds

Recovery Intervals

In Press

New Year’s Message
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Southern California All-Sports Clinic

This month, I will be speaking at the Southern California All-Sports Clinic January 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Irvine, California.  My two presentations—5 Lessons I Have Learned From Physiology and How They Can Make You a Faster Runner and Periodization Training—will show you how to become a better, faster runner.

The Southern California All-Sports Clinic brings together coaches from a number of different sports.  For more information, go to http://www.nationalcoachesclinic.com/Socal_Clinic.html.
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New Year’s  Gifts

Know someone who wants to lose weight and get fit, is training for a marathon, or wants to become a better runner in 2010?  A personal trainer or coach is the perfect New Year’s gift because its effects last a long time.  Research shows that people who work out with a trainer or coach see better results than those who don’t.  To receive coaching or personal training gift certificates, my popular customized training programs, or my educational DVDs that contain cutting-edge training information, go to http://www.runcoachjason.com/merchandise.  

Know someone in graduate school who wants a unique self-help book that simplifies and facilitates the PhD process and offers provocative advice about exactly what they’ll need to know to succeed?  My new book, How to Survive Your PhD is the perfect present!  To order a copy, go to http://www.amazon.com/How-Survive-Your-PhD-Professors/dp/1402226675/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248764657&sr=8-1. 

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Running Clinics & Workouts in the Park™

Beginning February 1, RunCoachJason.com will host Running Clinics & Workouts in the Park™, a unique series of educational clinics and workouts in San Diego, California for runners of all abilities.  Learn how to train most effectively and then experience the workouts for yourself!  For more information, go to http://www.runcoachjason.com/runningclinics.

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Workout Speeds

One of the biggest mistakes runners make is running workouts at speeds that are either too fast or too slow to obtain the desired result.  Problem is, they don’t know what the desired result is.  To determine the correct speed, you must know the purpose of each workout.  Is it to improve lactate threshold?  VO₂max?  Anaerobic capacity?  Muscle power?  Technique?  Each one of these variables requires a different speed that will optimize the workout.  

Each of the next few newsletters will focus on a specific type of workout and discuss the correct speed for that workout.  Having begun with easy and long runs last month, we continue this month with lactate threshold (tempo) runs.

The lactate threshold, or what I often call the acidosis threshold (AT), demarcates the transition between running that is purely aerobic and running that includes significant oxygen-independent (anaerobic) metabolism and the development of acidosis.  Therefore, AT is the fastest speed that you can sustain aerobically.  The purpose of AT training is to raise the aerobic ceiling by increasing the speed at which the pace becomes anaerobic.  As you can imagine, this takes time.  

As a coach, I’ve noticed that the AT workout is the most difficult type for runners to run at the correct speed since it requires holding back and not pushing the pace.  There’s a comfortably hard feeling to the pace that requires practice.  

AT pace is about 10 to 15 seconds per mile slower than 5K race pace (or about 10K race pace; 75 to 80 percent max heart rate) for recreational runners and about 25 to 30 seconds per mile slower than 5K race pace (or about 15 to 20 seconds per mile slower than 10K race pace; 85 to 90 percent max heart rate) for talented and highly trained runners.  The better your endurance, the longer you can hold your AT pace and the better you’ll be at sustaining any fraction of your AT pace.  Running much faster than AT pace is not any better than running at AT pace. 
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Recovery Intervals

While the focus of interval workouts is almost always on the work periods—how fast, how long, how many repetitions—the reason they are called ‘interval workouts’ or ‘intervals’ is because of the recovery interval between work periods.  When interval training was first studied in the 1950s, the belief was that the primary stimulus for cardiovascular improvement occurs not during the period of activity, but during the recovery interval.  The original interval training method incorporated periods of effort ranging from 30 to 70 seconds at an intensity that elevated the heart rate to about 180 beats per minute.  The effort phase was followed by sufficient recovery time to allow the heart rate to return to 120 beats per minute, signifying the readiness to perform the next work period.

During the recovery interval, the heart rate declines at a proportionally greater rate than the return of blood to the heart, resulting in a brief increase in stroke volume (the amount of blood the heart pumps with each beat).  The increase in stroke volume places an overload on the heart muscle, which makes the heart stronger, and enables the skeletal muscles to be cleared of waste products quickly due to the elevated rate of blood flow when there is little demand for activity from the tissues.  Since stroke volume peaks during the recovery interval, and because during an interval workout there are many recovery intervals, stroke volume peaks many times, providing a stimulus for improving maximum stroke volume and thus the capacity of the oxygen transport system.

Also during the recovery intervals, a portion of the muscular stores of runners’ quick energy—adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and creatine phosphate (CP)—that were depleted during the preceding work period is replenished via the aerobic system.  During each work period that follows a recovery period, the replenished ATP and CP will again be available as an energy source. 

You can monitor your heart rate during the recovery intervals either by wearing a heart rate monitor or the old-fashioned way by palpating your carotid or radial artery and counting pulses for 10 seconds and multiplying by 6.  

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In Press...
How to Survive Your PhD: The Insider’s Guide to Avoiding Mistakes, Choosing the Right Program, Working with Professors, and Just How a Person Actually Writes a 200-Page Paper, my self-help book for graduate students published by Sourcebooks, Inc., appears in bookstores nationwide.

All Downhill From Here, my article on downhill trail running with tips on how to prepare for downhill trail races, appears in the Race Issue 2010 of Trail Runner magazine.

Muscle Fatigue, my article on how to combat muscle fatigue in a race, appears in the January 7, 2010 issue of Athletics Weekly, the world’s only weekly track and field magazine.

Muscle Fibers, my article on the different types of muscle fibers and their implications for training, appears online at Personal Training on the Net, an online education resource for personal trainers and fitness professionals.

Should You Always Train to Failure?, my Chest Essentials piece on whether you need to train to muscular failure when lifting weights to see results, appears in the January/February, 2010 issue of Maximum Fitness. 

Bones, my article on everything you wanted to know about bones and exercise, appears in the Winter, 2010 issue of Duke City Fit, Albuquerque, New Mexico’s premier fitness magazine.

Also look for my quotes on how to most effectively warm up to run a 5K in the January/February, 2010 issue of SOBeFiT magazine and weight lifting for seniors in the January 4, 2010 issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper.

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New Year’s Message

Every time I used to watch Michael Jordan play basketball, I was amazed at how he moved his body over the court, got past defenders, drove toward the basket.  It was as if each of his individual movements were scripted, even though he was really making them up at that instant, his body knowing what to do to be successful.  He was able to see openings on the court, just as great running backs are able to see openings on the football field and cut sharply from one direction to another.  His body knew and felt its position in space and time.  Every movement was automatic.  Give him the ball and his body knew what to do with it.  Michael Jordan had a great kinesthetic sense.  On the other side of the spectrum is the infant just learning to walk, whose brain must concentrate on taking a single step forward.  The infant is beginning to learn his or her body and how it moves.  He or she is developing a basic kinesthetic sense. 

Kinesthetics describes the sense of detecting the position, weight, or movement of the muscles, tendons, and joints.  The word comes from the Greek word, kinein, to move.  It is the root of the words kinesiology, the study of movement; kinematics, the branch of science that studies the motion of a body with consideration to its position, velocity, and acceleration; and kinetics, the branch of science that studies the forces produced by and acting on a body in motion.  A child, whose brain is just beginning to write the motor pattern for walking, initially has a poor kinesthetic sense, while elite athletes have a great one.  Having a good kinesthetic sense means knowing where your body is in space and time as it moves through those two entities with incredible ease and fluidity.  It is beautiful to watch.

But it is hard to emulate.  We have all tried to drive to the basket like Michael Jordan, take a slap shot like Wayne Gretsky, drive a ball off the tee like Tiger Woods, or sprint like Carl Lewis.  We compare our actions to those of elite athletes and wonder how they can make their movements look so easy as we labor in our attempts.  And we notice, through the flurry of slam dunks and goals and tee shots and gold medals, that there is one thing they all have in common—the unfaltering ability to move their bodies perfectly to suit the task.  Maybe the ultimate reason why sport is so engaging to the spectator is that it is a form, maybe the highest form, of art.  And the athlete is the master artist, the Picasso.  But in sport, as distinct from art, everything actually happens: the movements of the athletes are real, happening in the moment, right before our eyes.  Moreover, despite the similarities of movements, each action of the athlete is unique and unrepeatable.  The manipulation of the human body to perform beautifully complex movements is one of the most aesthetically pleasing sights in this world.  At least to me.

We can learn a lot from the athletes we watch.  The process of training necessarily makes us more aware of our bodies and how they perform.  The greater awareness improves our kinesthetic sense.  Maybe that is why I appreciate running so much—for its constant state of awareness.  Putting one foot in front of the other is, after all, the most basic movement humans can make.  It is the purest form of sport.  It is the essence of kinesthetics.

May 2010 be the year you find your own kinesthetic awareness so you can be the athlete you want to be. 

Happy New Year!

Coach Jason
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To view past newsletters, go to http://www.runcoachjason.com/newsletter.

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©2010 Dr. Jason Karp.