Excerpted from Running Periodization by Jason Karp How much training should you do in each intensity zone? That’s a tough question to answer and depends on many factors. Several research studies have tried to approach an answer to this question by documenting what elite distance runners typically do. Those descriptive studies have found that, using …
Last year, I took a sabbatical from my entrepreneurial life in California and became a college professor and assistant cross country and track coach at Georgia Southern University. It would be an understatement to say that running in southern Georgia in the summer is a challenge. The summers are downright sticky, as stepping outside your …
One of the biggest mistakes runners and coaches make is not considering the demands of the race and not being specific enough in their training to meet those demands. If you don’t already have a strong background of speed, try devoting a significant amount of time to becoming a faster runner first and then training …
Capillaries, the smallest vessels of your vascular system, traverse your muscle fibers, leading to places deep inside your muscles. Think of capillaries like highways. With many highways in a city, you don’t need to drive far on local roads to get to your destination. You get off the highway at one of its exits, and …
Your Achilles tendon, named after the hero of the Trojan War and the greatest of all Greek warriors in Greek mythology, is the strongest tendon in your body. Your Achilles tendon, which connects the calf muscle to the heel bone, stores energy when your foot lands on the ground, like a tight rubber band when …
PHOENIX, AZ (November 17, 2022) – The International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA), the global leader in personal training certification, announced the acquisition of REVO₂LUTION RUNNING to educate coaches and fitness professionals and give runners access to certified running coaches who can improve performance and prevent injuries. By purchasing the program and its assets, ISSA becomes …
Running a marathon as fast as you can takes a long time to recover from, more than people realize, in large part because it causes a lot of muscle fiber damage. Even after 4 weeks after a marathon, damage is still present. My guidelines for how to recover and return to running after a marathon. …
Many endurance sports nutritionists claim that runners should spare their limited store of carbohydrate by trying to rely on fat for as long as possible, and possibly by becoming “fat adapted.” However, marathon runners can actually run faster by relying on carbohydrate for as long as possible in the race. As was first discovered more …
Ever been told that running in the heat is like running at altitude? Haha. It’s not. The reason why you run slower at altitude is because of less oxygen delivery to skeletal muscles because of the lower partial pressure of oxygen in the air. The reason why you run slower in the heat is because …
I once dated a girl who had a thing for my calf muscles. Seriously. Calf muscles. She may have been on to something. Did you know that the energy cost of calf muscle contraction in highly trained runners is nearly 25% of the total metabolic cost of running? In recreational runners, it’s 40%. That’s a …