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Double Your Pleasure

Having trouble finding training time? Make better use of downtime or your training run to get the most out of your day.

Many of us find ourselves with time during the day where our cognition is not critical to what we are doing. We might be standing in line, taking a shower or unfortunately sitting in a meeting where the current topic isn’t very relevant to us. Or we might be out for a training run or walk where we are just trying to accumulate mileage. We often fill up this time by checking our phones, listening to music, people watching, thinking about something else or just tuning out, all of which might be enjoyable and perhaps productive.

If you are serious about improving as a runner, it represents a perfect opportunity to train some running skills that you don’t often get around to, like running form, vision, balance, breathing, and mobility to name a few. One of the things we love about NeuroTraining is that many aspects can be done almost anywhere, e.g., home, office, gym, road or trail. NeuroTraining while you are running is particularly appealing, because you are not only learning a skill, but applying it in the context of the activity that you are hoping to improve.

The only requirement is singular focus or mindfulness on the skill you are trying to improve. Your brain is most likely to remember things that are important. If you are not focused or are trying to improve multiple things at once, it’s almost a direct message that says, “What I’m doing right now isn’t that important.” If you want to train several things when you run, do them one at a time and take a little time to just run without a focus in between. We often call this “Do the drill, forget the drill”. “Do the drill” is a conscious, focused acquisition of skill or knowledge and “Forget the drill” is a non-conscious application and integration of what you’ve just learned.

Keep Your Navigation System Up to Date

You’re in a different city and trying to get to a friend’s house. You were there years ago, so you decided to wing it without a map or navigation system. You need to be on time, and you haven’t left much margin for error. The city has changed, and your recollection is a bit fuzzy. Would you imagine that the trip would go smoothly? Would you get there on time? Would it be stressful?

The analogy is apt for how you move athletically. Your brain requires detailed, current information to plan and execute efficient movement. When you don’t have it, you are stressed, tentative and prone to movement mistakes. You may even not be able to move at all (sensory motor amnesia). It’s like getting to an intersection and not knowing which way to go. When you have the information you need, your movements are decisive, efficient and often effortless. Contrast the previous scenario with driving home from work. You’ve done it so many times that you automatically adjust routes for traffic and accidents. You may not even think much about what you’re doing and be able to carry on a conversation or solve a nagging problem at the same time.

Where does your navigation system get the information it needs? All information comes to your brain through your senses. Your senses capture a broad range of information (see Changing Inputs Changes Outputs) – what’s going on inside of you, outside and how your body is positioned. The accuracy and completeness of that information depend on your sensory acuity. If you can’t see much out of your dirty, cracked windshield, you may still be tentative and stressed even if you have perfect directions.

So, your brain is constantly building, updating and, unfortunately, forgetting sensory maps. Just like any memories, it’s “Use it or lose it”. Unfortunately, most of us don’t consciously think about building our maps. We just let them happen. We move throughout the day, probably sit a lot and run a lot. We don’t consider the quality of the movement usually, just the quantity. It’s a pretty good recipe for inefficiency, injury and dysfunction.

The quality and completeness of your maps will ultimately dictate how well you can perform in your sport because they will affect your form, your threat (and therefore more access to your fitness) and your risk of injury. If you are a beginning runner, you may need to create a map of good linear movement. Eventually adding in other movement patterns can make a huge difference in performance. We’ve seen elite endurance athletes who can barely stay upright when doing side-to-side shuffles like a football or tennis player might do. They had huge libraries of linear movement. Adding some lateral movement skill to their maps made a significant difference to their results, even though they didn’t often use those skills when running. But having that abiliity for whenever it might be needed mattered a lot.

Like any other form of learning, focus, or mindfulness, is essential when building maps. Tuning out when we run (listening to music, podcasts, solving the problems of the word, etc.) is a great way to enjoy and benefit from running for many of us. However, it’s not a great way to become a better runner. So it may be important for you to separate training (working to intentionally improve) from performance (satisfying your reasons for running).

You get plenty linear movement every time you run, so your training focus should be on quality form particularly at the end of your run when most people let their form deteriorate.
Good maps may require specificity, so running at different times of day, in different weather and wind conditions, at different speeds and even on different sides of the road may benefit you.
Lateral training can be a grueling set of shuffle drills or as fun as a game of soccer, Frisbee or tennis as long as you focus on quality movement from side to side.
You can add significantly to your movement maps by doing yoga, tai chi, dance or Z-Health. Again it’s key to intentionally try to control your movements through varied ranges of motion and speed.

If you focus when you are training you will perform better when you are not. And if you consciously try to build and maintain a good map of movement, you may find surprising and disproportionate improvement in your running because you took the brakes off.

Everyone is Different

Everybody is different. This seems obvious. Then why do most training programs and advice start with this premise – “it worked for someone else, it should work for you”? Even when advice targets a group of similar athletes, there is still a broad assumption that everyone in that category is equivalent. They may be in one way (e.g., age or years of experience), but in every other way they are likely quite different. Everyone comes with their own strengths and weaknesses. Consider this:

You have unique physiology, reasons for running, lifestyle and preferences.
You have genetic potential which is characterized by the size of your bones, limb length, muscle leverage, etc.
You have had your own unique prior experiences, environment, and diet.

There is no chance that you are the same as anyone else. Two people with similar builds, age and experience may respond completely differently to the same training run, strength training routine or running shoes. One may have experience running in the heat, the other not so much. One may have an injury history that impacts their running, the other duck feet. We get better at some things and worse at others over time. We change our nutrition and environment. What worked for us at one point may not anymore. How can we know if an exercise is effective for us?

Fortunately, our brains can tell us! You just have to know how to ask. You can perform assessments to understand whether what you are doing is beneficial at this particular time. Assessments are critical in determining what your brain considers threatening or non-threatening to you. It might be worth thinking of something that assesses well as reducing overall threat and something that assesses poorly as increasing threat. And the greater the threat, the more your brain is going to constrain your performance. Think of it as putting on the brakes. Conversely, reducing threat by performing beneficial activities, is like stepping on the gas.

For example, a pebble in your shoe is very unlikely to assess well. Your brain can predict that over time the pebble will likely cause harm. You will likely perceive pain and a reduction in performance until you fix the problem. That response is going to be pretty common for everyone. Now imagine two people wearing the same make of shoe. The shoes may be perfect for one runner and awful for the other. Neither runner may be able to cognitively perceive the difference. However, their non-conscious brains will perceive the difference and the shoes will assess differently for each.

At NeuroRunner, we offer individual assessments to help you be a better runner in the context of your own goals. For example, you’ll be able to:

Pick the most effective training for you
Improve the quality of your training mileage
Pick the right equipment
Find the best warm up
Perform better when it matters
Measure improvement

You will find that you are not always conscious of threat, so assessments are critical. Over time you may find that you become more intuitive about the process and be able to feel a positive response to a change. But by assessing regularly, you will improve the specificity, efficiency and results of your training. Doesn’t that beat taking training advice that worked for someone else?

Changing Inputs Changes Outputs

Why do I have good days and bad days? Do I run better when it’s hot or cold? Can I run as fast at night as during the day? Does my performance deteriorate when I’m dehydrated? Do I have more pain some days than others?

Your non-conscious brain receives millions of sensory signals a second. Additionally, it’s taking input from your conscious brain. What’s it doing with all that information? You might think it’s just storing some of it away and tossing the rest. Making memories, right? It’s certainly doing some of that. Its most important function is to keep us safe. It’s constantly evaluating all available information to do so.

Sensory Inputs

Your senses allow you to perceive the outside world, right? Right, but also your inside world and the position of your body in space. They tell your brain:

What’s going on inside your body, like the state of your organs and blood chemistry
What’s going on outside your body, like temperature, sound, smell, taste, touch, etc.
Where your body is and how it’s moving through space, like the angle of a joint or the location of a body part

Physiological and Emotional Outputs

You’re surely aware that your heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, sweat and pupil size all change in response to stress, general or acute. This is what allows a polygraph to detect whether you are lying or not. You also likely know that extreme stress results in fight, flight or freeze responses.

What is less widely understood is that your brain is also constantly adjusting local blood flow, muscle firing rates, hormone release, strength, coordination, range of motion and sensory acuity. It’s triggering feelings or emotions, like pain, fatigue, anxiety and elation in response to its interpretation of sensory inputs.

What Are You Thinking?

How does your brain evaluate the information it’s receiving so it can make the proper adjustments to outputs? Prior experience. Your brain is a predictive organ. If it has positive experiences that match your current circumstances, it’s likely to promote more of the current activity. If it has negative priors, it’s going to make corrections that reduce the activity. If you’ve never experienced anything like you are now, or haven’t in a long time, it’s likely to reduce that activity also. The familiar and positive is relaxing. Everything else is potentially stressful.

Additionally, your brain is keeping a running tally of stress, or maybe a better term is threat. In addition to evaluating your current activity, it’s evaluating everything else that’s going on in your life. If your boss is on your case, you fought with your spouse; you’re recovering from an injury, you sit too much, have over-trained and move badly, it all adds up and you are not likely to perform well. The activity you are currently engaged in may not be threatening to your brain, but the sum of other things in your life is.

So What?

After having read all this, you could come to the conclusion – “Interesting, but I can’t do anything about it, so why should I care?”. In fact, thats where most people land with or without understanding. There is a huge opportunity, though:
While you can’t easily change how your brain’s responds to threat (outputs).
And you can’t change your brain’s threat evaluation process
You can increase your library of positive prior experience and reduce overall levels of threat.
You certainly can change your sensory inputs, both what you are experiencing and how well you sense it (sensory accuity).

You are changing your sensory inputs every time you move or change your environment or body chemistry. The resulting physiological changes are nearly instantaneous. Not every sensory change is important enough for your brain to change threat levels and physiological outputs. NeuralTraining will help you explore changing sensory input, improve sensory acuity, accumulate beneficial experience to find what works best for you. You can also experiment for yourself to see if the following items (and much more) could make a difference:

Different shoes or clothing?
Different sunglasses?
Belly breathing and breathing cadence?
Improved mobility?
Different warm-up routines?

The result will be reduced threat and better running performance because you’ll be taking the brakes off of the fitness you’ve earned.

I didn’t have the mileage, but I had the lungs

I’ve really enjoyed the personal challenge of triathlon over the years. I’ve done four Ironman races including the World Championships in Kona, as well as a variety of triathlon distances over the years – Sprint to Half, and Xterra. While I’ve had some personal successes, I’ve also had challenges with gut issues and feel like I have yet to do my best, so I have more to prove to before I’m done with the sport.

After my last race three years ago, a combination of job workload and a weird recurring injury (Morton’s Neuroma?) pretty much reduced my activity to nothing (maybe an occasional hike). Then, I felt the urge to race again, even though my injury had not cleared up, and picked the AZ Ironman race for my return. I had performance and “gut issue” goals to measure my success.

I discovered that the time off had really taken its toll – my ability to train was significantly limited. I started with some very light bike rides six months before the race. About three months out, I “amped up” my training, if you can call it that. In total, I was only able to do about 20 rides before the race, a few of them were 3 hours and the rest shorter – 2 hours or less. I got to the pool five times, accumulating 35 minutes of continuous swimming, and never more than 15 minutes in one session. Running wise, I did a total of 3 run/walks of 10 minutes each (after three of the rides). My total training load over the months was only a small fraction of what I have done in the past. Additionally, I trained nowhere near the actual discipline distances I would be covering in the race.

Two weeks before the race I decided to do a daily regime of respiration training (breathing drills), because I was going to need any help I could get just to complete this race, let alone meet any pre-race objectives. I spend about 45 minutes every day on various inspiration and expiration drills in the hope that it would make some difference in my performance. As it would turn out, the results were mind-blowing!

I swam 2.4 miles in 1:20, just 4 minutes off my Kona time! I was purposefully trying to take it easy, but I never expected to feel as great as I did. My breathing was never challenged which is really unusual for an IM swim under any circumstance, and I felt great getting out of the water. The bike was even better! I finished 10 minutes off my best time (on the same course) and 10 minutes better than Kona! My speed was better than any of the bike training I had done (which preceded respiration training), and yet I felt like I was riding very comfortably below my lactate threshold, but still with power for the whole 112 miles! My run/walk was about on par with prior IMs, but I had already had way more success than I felt I deserved. I had the usual leg fatigue and crisis to push through but generally felt fresher and less winded than prior IMs. Even my recovery was quite normal. Using Z-Health drills, I’d always been able to recover fairly quickly, and I saw no differences this time despite the massive training deficit.

All in all, I was amazed at how much respiration training and relaxed racing made up for my injury, time off and lack of mileage! I can’t wait to try it again when I’m healthier and better trained.

Shannon Mauck – Phoenix, AZ