unCoachJasonTM
VO2max
The monthly newsletter of RunCoachJason.com
Dr. Jason Karp, running & fitness coach, consultant, freelance writer
Director & Coach, REVO2LT Running Team™
June, 2009
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In
this issue:
Running Clinics in the Park™
Marathon Training DVD
Bones
The Runner’s Heart
Rest Periods
Rock 'n' Roll Marathon Pacesetter
In
Press
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Running Clinics in the Park™
Beginning
this month,
RunCoachJason.com will host Running Clinics in the Park™,
a unique, laid-back series of educational clinics for runners
of all abilities at Morley Field in Balboa Park in San Diego,
California.
The PowerBar-sponsored clinics will be held on Thursdays at 6:00 p.m.
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Marathon Training DVD
Are
you training for a marathon this fall and want to know the best training
secrets so you run your best and not get injured? My new DVD—Chasing
Pheidippides: Marathon Training 101—presents
an overview of the science of the marathon and how to specifically prepare for
it, with detailed advice on the most important workouts and tapering.
To order a
DVD, go to http://www.runcoachjason.com/merchandise.
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Bones
(excerpted
from Karp, J.R. The Bare Bones. IDEA Fitness Journal. May 2009.)
Just like your muscles get stronger when you apply stress to them, so do your
bones. The elegant adaptation of bone to withstand stress is called
Wolff’s Law, and is explained by the changes to the internal strain of bone
caused by external stress, which activates mature bone cells called osteocytes
that alter the balance between bone resorption and formation in favor of
formation, leading to greater bone mass. External stress is so important
to bone health that the absence of stress by immobilization results in losses
in bone mineral density (BMD)
of 1 percent per week. If you have ever elevated a leg off the ground by
using crutches, you have seen the massive muscle atrophy that occurs when not
bearing weight on the injured leg. Interestingly, the lack of stress on
your leg by not bearing weight affects your bones just as much.
While weight-bearing exercise is better
than non-weight-bearing exercise for burning calories and losing weight,
it’s also better for your bones. Research has shown that people who
participate in sports involving running and jumping, such as soccer, distance
running, basketball, gymnastics, and volleyball, have greater BMD compared to
non-active people and even compared to athletes in non-impact sports, such as
swimming, cycling, cross-country skiing, and rowing. While some running
is good for bones, more running is not necessarily better, as research has
shown a negative association between running mileage and BMD when people run
more than 20 miles per week. Comparing athletes in different sports, a
number of studies have found that athletes in high-impact activities, like
gymnastics, have the greatest BMD.
Despite the repetitive stress of running, which imposes two to three times
your body weight with each landing of your foot on the ground, the large
forces associated with weight training have an even greater impact on
BMD. The strong contraction of muscles as they pull on the bones to
which they attach influences the magnitude of stress on the bones
themselves. And the magnitude of stress on the bones is more important
for increasing BMD than the number of times the stress is repeated, so you
only need one set of a heavy weight to increase BMD.
For bones to maximize their adaptive
response to exercise, they require a dynamic, rather than static, stress;
either a low-frequency, high-intensity stimulus (e.g., heavy weight training
with few reps per set) or a high-frequency, low-intensity stimulus (e.g.,
running five miles at an easy pace), with a high-intensity stimulus being more
effective; and a direction and magnitude of stress different from what are
normally experienced.
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The
Runner’s Heart
The heart is the
symbol for our most powerful emotion, love.
It can be found among the scribbles in a lovestruck girl’s high
school notebook, as a figure of speech when we thank people (“from the
bottom of my heart”), and as a metaphor for life and death when beneath the
delicate hands of a surgeon as he performs a bypass operation.
Even when we salute the American flag and sing the National Anthem, we
place our hand over our heart as a symbol of loyalty to and respect for our
country.
The ancient Greeks may have been the first to acknowledge the existence of the
heart, which they named kardia.
Our words cardiac, cardiovascular, electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG),
echocardiogram, and cardiologist are all derived from that word.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that the heart was the seat of
the soul and the center of man. But
it is certainly also the most extraordinary muscle in the human body.
It is always working, from before we are born until we die.
It has both the unique ability and responsibility of delivering the
most important chemical element—oxygen—throughout
the body to sustain life. And it
is how our most vital body fluid—blood—is
delivered to our organs and running muscles.
With running, we can actually train the heart to pump more efficiently,
to pump more blood (and hence, oxygen) with each beat.
The amount of blood the heart pumps with each
contraction of its left ventricle (the heart’s largest chamber that is
responsible for sending blood to every part of the body except the lungs) is
called the stroke volume. Multiply
the stroke volume by the heart rate, and you get the amount of blood pumped by
the heart each minute, called the cardiac output.
The first documented case of an enlarged heart in a distance runner may have
been Clarence DeMar, who won the Boston Marathon 7 times between 1911 and
1930. A large heart is so
characteristic of genetically gifted and highly trained runners that it is
considered a physiological condition by the scientific and medical communities
called Athlete’s Heart. Specific
training can make your heart larger and increase your maximum stroke volume
and cardiac output. Since cardiac output is one-half of the equation
that determines VO2max,
when maximum cardiac output increases, so does your VO2max.
Intervals of 3- to 5-minute work periods provide the heaviest load on the cardiovascular
system because of the repeated attainment of the heart’s
maximum stroke volume and cardiac output (and, by definition, VO2max). In response to the imposed threat of running
at the heart’s maximum ability to pump blood, the heart responds by
increasing its contractility (pumping strength) and by enlarging its most
important chamber (left ventricle) so that more blood and oxygen can be sent
to the working skeletal muscles.
The larger your left ventricle, the more blood it can hold; the more
blood it can hold, the more blood it can pump.
If
you can’t
get to a laboratory to tell you the pace
at which your VO2max occurs, you can use your current race performances or heart rate.
VO2max pace is close to 1½-mile race pace for recreational
runners and close to 3K or 2-mile race pace (10 to 15 seconds per mile faster
than 5K race pace) for highly trained runners.
You should be within a few beats of your maximum heart rate by the end
of each work interval. Examples of
workouts are: 1) 3 x 1,200 meters (or 4-5 minutes) at VO2max pace
with 3 to 4 minutes recovery; 2) 4 x 1,000 meters (or 3-4 minutes) at VO2max
pace with 2½ to 3 minutes recovery; and 3) 6 x 800 meters (or 3 minutes) at
VO2max pace with 2½ to 3 minutes recovery.
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Rest Periods
If you lift weights, do you ever wonder how long you should rest between sets? A study published in the January, 2009 issue of Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that resting 2½ minutes between sets caused a greater increase in muscle size after 10 weeks of strength training than resting for only 1 minute between sets in men who had not weight trained before. The longer rest period enabled the subjects to use a higher percentage of their one-rep max for each set, so it’s possible they recruited a greater percentage of the available muscle fibers, giving them a greater hypertrophic response.
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Rock 'n' Roll Marathon Pacesetter
On a rare but welcomed overcast day in San Diego on May 31, I had a chance to be a coach and a runner at the same time by pacing the second half of the San Diego Rock 'n' Roll Marathon for the sub 3-hour pace group. With all of the coaching I do, it’s largely from the outside; I can’t run the races for my athletes. All I can do is prepare them the best I can and advise them about how best to race. Being a pacesetter gave me the chance to help people while they were actually running. After all, they were relying on me to pace them. While the group expectedly got smaller as it got late into the race, two people, including one woman, hung on to the pace and finished the marathon in under 3 hours. Picking up the pace in the last mile, and finishing side-by-side with Cici Ramirez from Colorado, who said her previous personal best was 3:06, was a great experience. I found myself surprised to be proud of someone I had just met one hour and 29 minutes earlier. The experience showed me that when people work together, more can be accomplished than when they work alone.
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In
Press...
Training by Time, my article on why runners should focus on the time spent
running rather than on the distance, appears in the June, 2009 issue of Running
Times.
Chasing Pheidippides: Marathon Training 101 appears in the May, 2009 issue of IDEA Fitness Journal, the
premier trade magazine for fitness professionals.
Training Characteristics of the 2004 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials
Qualifiers,
my research article documenting how
the best marathoners in the U.S. train, with comparisons made between men and
women and elite and national-class runners, appears in the May/June,
2009 issue of Marathon & Beyond.
Free
& Not So Free Energy: Understanding Energy Pathways, my
article that explains how humans get the energy to exercise and how to train
the energy pathways to get more energy for muscle
contraction, appears in the
June,
2009 issue of the United Kingdom’s Ultra-Fit magazine.
How
Many Sets Do You Need, my Chest Essentials piece on how many
sets men need to maximize strength and hypertrophy of their pecs to make women
swoon, appears
in the May/June, 2009 issue of Maximum Fitness.
Weight Machines vs. Free Weights, my “boxing-match” comparison
of the two types of weight training, appears in the May/June, 2009 issue of Max
Sports and Fitness.
There’s
no “I”
in Team: How to Find a Training Group, my article outlining the benefits
of training with a group, with suggestions on how to find one, appears in the
May/June, 2009 issue of Washington Running Report.
Five Lessons I Have Learned From Physiology and How They Can Make You a Faster
Runner appears in the Spring, 2009 issues of
Duke City Fit, Albuquerque, New Mexico’s
premier fitness magazine and San
Diego Running, the newsletter of San Diego Track Club.
Also check out my quotes on
changes you can make to enhance your workouts in the June, 2009 issue of
Marie Claire.
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To
view past newsletters, go to http://www.runcoachjason.com/newsletter.
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©2009
Dr. Jason Karp.
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