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Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and let’s begin your run smarter journey.
On today's episode, I'm answering all of your Run Smarter questions. Welcome to the only podcast delivering and deciphering the latest running research to help you run smarter. My name is Brodie. I'm an online physiotherapist treating runners all over the world, but I'm also an advert runner who just like you have been through vicious injury cycles and when searching for answers, struggled to decipher between common myths and real evidence-based guidance. But this podcast is changing that. So join me as a run smarter scholar and raise your running IQ so we can break through the injury cycles and achieve running feats you never thought possible. Thanks for joining me again, Run Smarter Scholars. I was starting to answer your questions a couple of episodes ago and have since had some time in the schedule to tick off some of the remaining questions. Can't get to all your questions. I think I had maybe about 30 to 35 questions come in and have to, you know, prioritize first come first served. So I'm trying to tick off the rest that I have included on my spreadsheet in front of me. Some people are, you know, getting in quickly, but asking three to four questions. so uh apologies, but I've tried to simmer that down to one to two. um And a lot of people have asked sort of questions that I'm not really qualified to answer. A lot to do with nutrition, a lot to do with hormones, a lot to do with more of like uh doctor medical side of things, which m unfortunately, you know, I'm not that capable of answering nor do I feel too confident with answering. So apologies if I didn't get to any of those questions, as well as like sort of diagnostic questions. I sort of make some exceptions here and there and try to answer them very carefully. But the sort of questions of I have pain here, it hurts when I do this, what could it be? How can I get back to running something like that would be very, hard to answer. because you know, we require a bit more of a thorough assessment and a bit more uh detail and to provide sort of the right guidance. Cause the last thing I'd want to do is assume something, assume a particular condition, give the advice on that assumption and then it just be the worst thing for you. So yeah, I have tried to navigate uh the selection criteria with included within this episode, but hopefully I try to pick some questions and try to answer it in a way that a lot of you benefit from so that you can train smarter, reduce your risk of injury, increase your running performance, all that good stuff. So first question for this episode comes in from Gleb who says, hi Brody, how can I prepare for mountain events while living in flat areas? It's nice question, one I haven't been asked before, I don't think, and sort of span my wheels a bit trying to think of how we could. best address this scenario because a lot of people are love doing hills, trail events um and mountain events and not all of us have access to mountains and so where does my mind go when asked this question? I would start off by okay, just making sure if we can we find a way to increase our engine size or like our VO2 max uh because you know, the mountain events, even though we may not be stimulated with the specific conditions. The bigger engine, the bigger you can sort of maintain and sustain those challenging terrains. And so I'd make sure even though we're on the flats, uh let's try to do some sessions that help increase our VO2 max. One of the best would be the Norwegian four by four, which a lot of people have heard of. It's, you know, four minutes hard effort, almost like your hardest sustained four minute effort. mixed with a followed by a three minute rest. And then you're doing that four times is a very good way of uh building up a VO two of building up your VO two max. uh The one that I particularly like it doing at this stage is doing 30 seconds on 30 seconds off, doing that at a hard hard intensity almost like an all out effort for 30 seconds. And uh when you do the 30 seconds on 30 seconds off, you do that you repeat that eight times. Once you've repeated that eight times, you have a two minute rest. And then you do two more rounds of that. And so it's a lot of on offs, which is why I have kind of a hit timer on my phone that just tells me what to do and how many I've got to go. Because it does get you do get lost in it a little bit sometimes. And I think I've mentioned this before, but my go to at the moment has been The 30 seconds on is on a ski erg and the next time I have to do 30 seconds on I go to the assault bike and the next time I have to do 30 seconds on I do it on the treadmill. I do quite fast 17 Ks an hour at a 10 % incline. So yeah, it's hard to sustain that effort for 30 seconds. And so this helps vary the loads up in my body while we're pushing those high intensities and yeah, my heart rate gets quite high during those efforts. So there's, you can be creative about workouts that increase your VO2 max, but I would definitely be doing that to prepare for mountain events. The other thing that, you know, sparks my curiosity is increasing muscular power or muscular strength. um Trying to be more robust, not only to produce force, but to absorb loads when it comes to mountain events. And so what does your strength training look like? Can we... be bit more efficient or proactive in that side of things. Some really nice exercises would be walking lunges. So holding onto dumbbells each side and just doing walking lunges forward, know, maybe six forward, turn around, do six back and have a rest. So it's, that would be one set of six on each side and then do three to four sets of that. If that feels too easy, maybe keep to six each side, but just go heavier. If you don't have the room or capacity for walking lunges, you can do split squats or Bulgarian split squats where you have your rear foot elevated on something like a bench and doing that lunge kind of movement. That could be really nice at building up glute max strength, quad strength. uh Really nice for when working the heels would transition quite nicely. Calf raises, calf raises are a must if you want to try to push uphill and create a robust body that can handle that. so yeah, doing some weighted calf raises, three sets of 10, if you want to just be generic, but increase the weight, we want to sort of keep the rep ranges quite low. So three sets of six, three sets of eight, maybe max three sets of 10. um And if that feels too easy, we increase the weight, we drop the reps down and sort of hover around that rep range. And what that's going to do is stimulate a lot of uh tendon adaptations, a lot of muscle adaptations to recruit more fibers, recruit more or build upon your tendon stiffness. So that, yeah, when it comes to producing force, absorbing loads, the tendons and muscles are better equipped for that. um If we're sort of flipping the script and looking at downhill, if there's these mountain events, you know, we're not just trying to become robust for the uphill, but we need to absorb the loads effectively going downhill. A lot of people who have done mountain events or trail events that haven't necessarily prepared for a lot of downhills will notice that the next day their quads are absolutely shot. They have a lot of domes in their quads just because your quads haven't been well trained enough to accumulate such a eccentric load when going downhill because your quads are working very hard working downhill to uh prevent you from hitting the floor, yet they have to lengthen while they're controlling that descent. And so that's an eccentric movement and a lot of eccentric movements uh produce a lot of doms. so we can, sure it'd be nice if we had the downhills because my usual advice would be okay, just get better at running downhills. But in this scenario, when we don't have that available, we can do some eccentric exercises in the gym to get used to eccentric load and reverse Nordics are a really good one for eccentric control of your quads. So that would be if you can imagine you're kneeling and uh sort of like an up high kneeling so you're up and you lower yourself backwards. You can always look this up. Just Google or YouTube reverse Nordics. uh You're lowering yourself backwards in a slow controlled fashion and then coming back up, but you're Eccentrically loading yourself. It's really tough on the knees put some pads or like a mat down and just make sure that your Knees and your shins can you know accumulate that high amount of force start with sort of three sets of five and slowly build your way up from there if that works quite well, you can progress by increasing the range of movement, maybe adding a weighted plate or a dumbbell to your chest and just crossing your arms across your chest holding onto that weight as you lower yourself down or backwards. But that can be a really nice eccentric exercise for the quads to better prepare yourself for the down descents. um But the obvious one that I haven't yet addressed is just practice, you know, your training or some of your training, incline on a treadmill. Like I said, with my VO2 max workouts, do efforts where I do pretty steep inclines on the treadmill. ah But you can do, I guess the idea is to try to bridge the gap between what the demands are for this mountain event. And, you know, how steep are we talking? Can we slowly progress your training in a way that the inclines uh match or get close to matching what the event is like? just so your body can get used to it, your heart rate can get used to it, your perception. m And yeah, start working in those sessions. And so that might be starting off with two minute efforts at um an incline that sort of best matches that those mountain events, then push that out to five minutes, 10 minutes, um you know, just make sure that we're being sensible with those progressions. But an inclined treadmill would be a perfect way to expose the body. to uphill event efforts. uh The downhills a little bit trickier. I know there are some pretty fancy treadmills that do have a decline on them. I haven't seen too many of them around to really, you know, say go out and do that. But that's one thing as well. And the other thing I haven't mentioned is stairs. Like if you have uh access to, you know, a stairwell where there's several flights of stairs that you could just run up and down. might have to be creative in terms of where you access that. You know, there can be some parks or stadiums, sporting stadiums that have these sort of things. um And yeah, you can just do sessions where you run up here, run up the stairs, run down the stairs, the downstairs will help with that quad eccentric control and adapting to that. Whereas the up going up the stairs can help with calf strength and power and sort of like I say, meeting those demands of those mountain events. So just be creative around that, know, running upstairs will help the VO2 max as well, depending on how hard you want to push it. um You can skip stairs, you can, if you want a higher cadence, higher heart rate, but more efficient, you could probably just do one step at a time. But if you decide to do something that's quite, uh I guess, more strength based, more lactic acid based, you could probably try skipping two or three steps. um and just sort of running up in that fashion. So you can be creative around that, but there are just some ideas. So Gleb, I hope that helps answer your question, give you some ideas to run with. Next question we have from Daniel who says, am 57 years old and attempting a 330 marathon this August. I have four running days and two days of strength. My routine is I have one long run, one speed session, two. very easy mid long runs. Am I on the right page? Do you have any other tips for me? Well, it's hard to know how long the long run is, how long the mid long run is, how intense and what structure is with the speed sessions, but it does seem right. It does seem like you've got a template in place. think most cookie cutter training plans will follow that same system. Maybe they might have a fifth run day, but um for the most part, it seems like it. you're on the right track there. You do want to self reflect on and like analyze what that intensity actually is and whether your body's responding quite well to it. We typically have the 80-20 rule of 80 % being really low intensity, 20 % being up in those higher intensities. So if you feel like, if you run the calculations based on the distances you're doing and you feel like 80 % is at that really, really low intensity, meaning you are able to recover really well, ah then yeah, sounds fine to me. Things that weren't mentioned, if there are any other tips for you, if it is a marathon goal and you do want to run your marathon in the fastest time possible, it is looking at your strength training, doing that once or twice a week, doing some squats, deadlifts, calf raises, lunges, and obviously making sure that your starting point is safe. effective but like I mentioned in the earlier question making sure that we're hovering around three sets of six to eight if you can tolerate higher weight it should feel really tough to do or complete eight repetitions if you're feeling like you've finished one set of eight and you've only got maybe two reps left in you before you can't possibly do it again that's a pretty good benchmark but that's only for experienced gym goers if you've never done the movement before and you're just working things out. Maybe you can start with a rep range of three sets of 12 and just having it quite, like I said, quite on the light side. But it does seem that when it comes to the evidence and translating to faster marathon times, heavier weights, the heavier the better. I think there is some research to show that even if you go close to like a three rep max, that's gonna translate. to better marathon performances compared to like a six to eight rep max. But I just don't really recommend that because that's for very, very experienced gym goers, which isn't a lot of runners. You still reap a lot of benefits just from the six to eight rep range and just doing three sets of those. But like I say, squats, deadlifts, lunges, calf raises, there'll be just like three exercises that you can smash out and do that once or twice a week. um but making sure you're listening to your body and making sure it feels right for you. The other thing that is yet not talked about for your scenario Daniel would be, you know, just self reflecting on your recovery. You can have a good training plan. But if you're under recovering, you're going to fall into trouble and just so you make sure that you're getting good sleep, getting good nutrition, giving yourself the right building blocks, whatever that looks like for you. I'm not a nutritionist or a dietician, but um just making sure that your fueling your body accordingly, both for not only the performance outcome, but also for the recovery outcome. So you know, good source of proteins, good source of carbs for the performance side of things and the recovery, I guess you could say, and hydration, which I'll get to soon. that the next question? Yes, it is the next question. ah So anything else for you, Daniel, by the sounds of it, it does sound like you are following a generic program. ah Maybe there might be some deload weeks in there. uh If not, then you know, you can structure that in. might get that to that in a later, a later question in this episode. But yeah, a D-load week may be something that's up your alley if you feel like, you know, 57 years old, maybe after three or four weeks of progressing, progressing, progressing, you might need some time off and some time to accumulate or absorb those training loads. That might be something that you may find advantageous. Okay, next one comes in from Peru who says, What part does hydration play in recovery? Looking forward to a scientific explanation. Well, I think hydration does a lot of things. You know, when it comes to your blood plasma, your blood plasma is like the fluid component of your blood. When you run, you reduce your plasma volume because you sweat and you know, there's fluid in your sweat, obviously, and that has to come from somewhere, it comes from your blood. And so uh with a well hydrated delivery system, one reason why we are, we're water based liquid based organisms that need water on our planet to survive is that, know, with fluid carries, like we use fluid to deliver things to deliver oxygen to do deliver glucose, amino acids, hormones, all those sorts of things like the fluid itself is the delivery mechanism to get to places they need to get to to function. And so when we're dehydrated, where it's a slower delivery of the nutrients, and when we're talking about recovery, some of those nutrients are required for repair. And so if we can think about it in that way, um how dehydrated do we need to be before those delivery systems get impeded or start slowing down? I don't know. But That's just an overarching purpose of why we why it's nice to be hydrated, why it's nice to have fluids. The other element would be from a muscle protein synthesis side of things. Synthesis meaning like the build up of proteins we need it because when we run when we exercise if it's hard enough, we get this breakdown of your tissues that we need to build up. And so when you're well hydrated, your muscle cells, they're more swollen, you could say, and that delivers the right signals to enhance this synthesis process, the build up and or guess rebuild process. When you're dehydrated, the cells are more shrunken, which leads to more of like a protein breakdown. So if you're dehydrated, you can blunt the actual muscle repair and therefore like the adaptation process, which we don't want because we don't get stronger during our running sessions, we get stronger after those running sessions once we have adapted to it. If we've adequately gone through the adaptation process. So that's another thing to think about. But like I said, like the fluid itself, when you're like the fluid delivers glycogen as well. And it can aid or hinder glycogen resynthesis if you are either hydrated or dehydrated. So after running, We want to be restoring our glycogen um stores. It's one of the top priorities. So if you're dehydrated, you reduce your capacity to restore these glycogen stores. And so that can delay recovery. And we don't want to delay recovery if we can enhance our recovery. Excellent. So how do we stay hydrated? You know, you can just make sure you're getting adequate fluid, how do we know we're getting adequate fluid? You can run a few little experiments for a week or two, just weighing yourself straight, well, immediately before a run. So take all your clothes off, jump on the scales, weigh yourself, go for that run, sort of measure the duration and also like the temperature. And if you did intake any fluid, how much that was, and then you just weigh yourself again, like ah when you get home, sort of get off any excess sweat with your clothes. chuck the clothes away, step on the scales again, what is the difference? Is it a pound or two? Is it half a kilo? Is it a kilo? Within a few experiments of different durations, so you might run for 30 minutes and then you might run for 60 minutes or you might run for 30 minutes easy, you might run 30 minutes hard effort, and then you might run sort of on a hotter day compared to a cooler day. Like you're just comparing different scenarios and it... doesn't take long before you start to realize what your sweat rate is like. I typically lose on an easy run, I typically lose half a liter per 60 minutes or something, know, might be something like that. But on the hotter days, that doubles and I lose X amount, you know, then we can come up with a fluid replacement strategy. And it can be as simple as that if you wanted to can get more complicated than that if you wanted to. But you do want to make sure you're not just replacing with water, particularly if it's a high sweat loss, you want to make sure that you're replacing it with some electrolytes too, because you are losing sodium, magnesium and those sorts of electrolytes during ah like when you sweat. But sometimes you just replace that with food. Sometimes if you have like salty foods afterwards, then they will be replaced. But obviously if you're if it's hot conditions, and it's a long condition, you are losing a lot of sweat, then be conscious to replace not only the fluid but electrolytes as well. Next question comes in from Rushini who says, hi Brody, I have a patient. So I'm guessing Rushini is some sort of therapist. uh I have a patient, is 45 and training for a marathon in six weeks. Maybe you're a running coach. uh She gets a pain in the lateral knee after about seven miles. So for an example, she tried running five miles on Monday. and then another five on Tuesday and then another five on Thursday, which was completely fine. Saturday tried a longer run, but couldn't get to three miles and started feeling the pain in the lateral knee. But the pain subsides after a few hours and she has no pain at all. I've given her a strengthening program. She has also tried increasing her cadence. Can you guide me through a training program that I can follow to improve her endurance and load management capacity? Thank you, kind regards. Rashini, thank you for your question. like, it's obviously gonna be very tough for me to provide a training program without knowing more information. I don't know the diagnosis, all I know is lateral knee pain. I'm not going to try to diagnose um and therefore it's hard to create a program without a diagnosis, but let me, I'll try to be as helpful as I possibly can by throwing a few hypotheticals at you and for... everyone else who's listening to just go through my thought process might help you with your judgment calls in the future. So one of the most common running related lateral knee pain conditions would either be patellofemoral pain, especially if it's around the border of the kneecap. uh If it's further off to the side and away from the knee, the border of the kneecap itself, it could be not saying it is could be ITB friction syndrome. uh That is a what we call a repetition injury. So the amount of repeats of you can just imagine say, uh someone might run a particular way that just ever so slightly just rubs the ITB in a certain direction, which for the most part is typically fine. There's a lot of bursa and lubricant in that area. So they just glide off one another. But when the amount of repetitions is quite excessive and beyond your capacity, that rubbing, i.e. friction, can start to irritate that area. And therefore, when you start running, you might have a certain sensitivity. So let's just say in a typical runner, uh the way they're running, they can tolerate 100,000 repetitions before it starts getting irritated. And for the most part, most of their runs are less than 20,000 steps. And so they never ever get beyond what could possibly irritate it. But some people have training for marathons. Some people are have a certain gait pattern that might load up the ITB slightly differently. And all of a sudden, if they have exceeded that capacity, that sensitivity starts to become more sensitive. So now your amount of repetitions is now only maybe 10,000 repetitions. And so after that 10,000 repetitions, when that sensitivity and irritability starts to increase, once it's increased further, it's even more irritable than it was before, that amount of repetition now is 3000. And so they can only tolerate X amount of running. And so Seems to be like where my mind goes when you say okay, they can only tolerate seven miles uh If we go just below that seven miles, we're fine Monday through to Thursday And then for whatever reason on that Saturday who knows maybe there was something done in cross training the day before or something was done prior to that that just led to the momentary Level of irritation being less than three miles um But seems like we're in the sort of ballpark based on behavior Um, so yes, like I said, this is a repetition injury. Uh, it's worse when people have low cadence, definitely with running downhill. So maybe this person on the Saturday started running downhill within their first three miles, which led to the irritation a lot sooner than anticipated. Um, downhill seems to be a particular vulnerability, but also a narrow step width. I've talked about step with a couple of times on this podcast, but that tends to load up the ITB a bit more than someone who has more of that natural wider step width. So if this were, if we are sort of running with this hypothetical, we'd be better suited to reduce the amount of repetitions, addressing their gate issues if cadence or step width is an issue. And yeah, just trying to see what capacity we have because if we are dealing with an irritable structure and let's just say the amount of repetitions right now is at 5,000, within a couple of days of just settling things down, that might increase to 8,000. And then with modifying some gate patterns, we might get that to 12,000. Then if we do say a walk run strategy during that run, maybe that 12,000 increases to 20,000. But then if we can... load manage you and run under 20,000 steps and do that for a week or 10 days, that's enough time for it to settle that that 20,000 turns to 40,000. This ah is just an oversimplified example. And we never really know who where that benchmark is or how many repetitions before it starts to irritate. It's only just theoretical. But typically with someone with ITB friction syndrome, I say, if you're running, keep the pain level between a zero and a one. If it ever creeps up to a two, walk for a few minutes and try again. If it stays at a two or climbs up to a three, just shut it down because people with this condition will know. If you run on it, goes from a two to a three, it jumps to a five really quickly. And if you persist, it jumps up to an eight really quickly and then you're hobbling home. And so we don't want to get to that scenario because then you just irritated for several days and it's really hard to manage thereafter. So keeping things really settled, being creative with a run walk strategy could help you generate more, accumulate more distance and more running volume than a continuous run because we're just breaking up that level of repetition and letting it settle down briefly. So all of those strategies can be useful. Strengthening is like, yeah, you do some strengthening for the uh I guess the glute medius, but like hip hikes would be one crab walks would be one but it's not really high on my priority list for this condition. And it definitely wouldn't help coming into this marathon because we don't have enough time to build up strength and apologies for getting to this because this is probably three, three weeks after you asked this question. So the marathon is probably only three weeks away. So apologies with this matter. uh But, you know, addressing cadence can help navigating towards the marathon can be tricky. ah If it's still irritated, you might have to forego the marathon because that is extremely risky. If you really want to do the marathon, it's probably best that you adopt like a walk run strategy. What ratio that is, I don't know, might be five minutes on two minutes off and just seeing if you can get to the finish line with that strategy. But Yeah, like I said, it's very tricky to navigate. um That's if it is like hypothetical number one ITV friction syndrome, but it could also be patella femoral pain, uh a common cause strengthening would is way higher on my priority list when it comes to that condition, increasing cadence also reduces overall load on the patella femoral joint. And so yes, increasing cadence would be a nice intervention for that condition if it was patella femoral pain, uh and then just gradual rebuild based on symptoms. Very, very generic. But yeah, like I said, tricky to navigate with this marathon fast approaching, but I'll throw another hypothetical out there as well, just because I don't want someone to listen to this and be like, oh yeah, it's definitely this condition. It could be just a knee joint pathology. It could be something to do with the articulation or cartilage or meniscus or something within the knee joint. Could be a knee joint effusion, could be fluid within the knee. which all of this advice I've just given would be out the door, which is why I started off by saying don't want to diagnose ah and also don't want to give out advice without a diagnosis. like, hopefully, like I say, my thought patterns, just me talking through a few things help people understand some of these conditions, know a bit more about ITB friction syndrome. And yeah, hopefully that helps. So next one comes in from Carol who says, hi Brody, can you cover how to do a D-load week for strength training. Okay, happy to help you out with this one. So we have to start off by talking about what the purpose of a D-load week is. Why do we have D-load weeks? Some people don't have D-load weeks. Some people don't need D-load weeks. But I've explained before that most people can grasp the concept of when we work hard, when we do one session that's pretty difficult, it stimulates the body. pushes the body into being like, Oh, that was tough, let me adapt and get stronger. So it's a bit easier next time. But what follows that is you need to have a period of relative rest. ah That might be a day for someone, it might be three days for another on various factors doesn't need to be complete rest, but it needs to be enough uh low intensity something that your body has enough time to accumulate and adapt to that process and then we become stronger. next session becomes slightly easier, we put that on repeat. Most people can appreciate that on a session to session basis, but the same thing can happen on a larger time scale when we accumulate, say three or four weeks of build, build, build, deload, then build, build, build, deload. So by the time we get to the deload week, maybe we've slightly accumulated enough fatigue that week by week is slightly harder and slightly harder, but then we can just relax. for something like a week, and you can just accumulate all those adaptations, come back into the next week one of the next training block, feeling fresh, but feeling really strong, really powerful, getting that spring back in your step, and we can go harder. So this will all depend, all depend on your recovery strategies, all depend on how hard you're training uh to know if we do need a deload week, and if so, how often. um For most, I would say if you're planning on training for a race or your volumes are quite high, I'd say every fifth week would be a pretty decent frequency for most. That's what I put into my training programs and what I do myself. So I'll have four weeks in a row where I build, build, build, build, and then one week where I just relax and then come back in. ah I typically use my D-load week. I still train, I still run, I still do my strength training, but I just sort of feel it out and say, you know what, let me just, you m back off the intensity, let me have a couple more rest days. um It all just depends on how my body's feeling. I'm pretty good listening to my body in that sense. um Typically, what it looks like for running, I know this, I'm sort of going off on a tangent with your question, Carol, but typically what it looks like for running is whatever your body is required, like we usually can whatever achieves the goal of getting into week one of your training block of your next training block and feeling fresh, powerful and ready to go. So that might be just taking out all speed work and keeping the same amount of volume and seeing how you go. It might require halving your weekly volume, maybe keeping in some speed just to keep some springiness, but that halving of your load is enough. I don't know. Like you don't know unless you test it out. There's no, there's going to be no straight formula for everyone because everyone trains differently, absorbs differently, different ages, different, so many factors. ah Um, so what I'd suggest is yeah, put a D-load week in and see if it suits you. Play around with massaging the numbers of mileage, intensity, frequency, and seeing if that works for you. And then getting into that week one of the next training block and seeing did I achieve what I want to achieve? ah And yeah, let's see what it's like. So for strength training, now that we've gone through all that the same process and rationale applies. We want to say, okay, am I feeling fresh by the time week one comes around? How can I do that with my strength training? You can do it in several ways. uh Three, I would say three main ways. One, you can reduce the frequency. So if you're training Strength training two or three times a week, try one to two ah and see what that's like for you. You can reduce, you can keep the same frequency but reduce the weight. So maybe just take 30 % off all of your weights and see what that's like. The other more creative thing would be to keep the same frequency, the same weight, but just reduce the range of movement. So your tendons are still exposed to that high load. Still the same time under tension. So if your leg press or your squat was three seconds down, two seconds up, half the range, but still go three seconds down, two seconds up, your tendons will enjoy that and see what that's like. Or just like a mixture of all of these things, frequency, weight, range. You could just skip some exercises altogether. Like typically during my D-load weeks, I don't do squats. I don't do chin-ups. They're extremely taxing on my body and I just want to take a week off. um But you know, for chest press and deadlifts and lunges, I typically keep them in. ah So see, see what works for you. Hopefully that helps answer your question, Carol. The last one we have comes in from Mick who says, how do I hold off on heart rate drift or cardiac drift in long trail ultras? uh to maintain a steady state for as long as possible. Okay, so what is cardiac drift? um Cardiac drift is like if you are training at the same intensity, even though your effort is consistent, your heart rate starts slowly creeping up. And that's what we call heart rate drift or cardiac drift. And so Mick's asking, how can I hold off on this for as long as possible? and sort of maintain a steady state uh as long as I can during these long trail ultras. uh The theory behind the cardiac drift is uh several, I guess, things interplaying at once. uh The fluid balance, I think, seems to be the most common as well as neuromuscular fatigue, something to do with thermoregulation as well. But like... uh as you lose fluid, your body struggles to circulate the remaining fluid and therefore you'll have to work harder, your heart has to work harder to pump the fluid around the body and therefore you can travel at the same effort, same intensity, same terrain and your heart rate starts to slowly drift up. um You'll typically see this like beyond like 60 minutes. I don't think you'd um typically see it too much before that. ah And so, If you're doing these ultra events, you can't eliminate it. I know this isn't your question, Mick, or you're not alluding to this, but uh for people listening, you can't delay your cardiac drift. Well, you can't eliminate it. You can, I guess, delay its onset and reduce its amplitude if you're sort of trained smart enough, but uh it's not going to be the goal to totally avoid it. Some strategies that come to mind for me would be just to make sure you're capping your heart rate early. So we're looking at like 70 to 75 % of your heart rate max if someone's used to, you know, training within their heart rate zones. This is like well within your zone to keep it really easy, really early in the race and sort of like, you know, just creating that buffer. So you can use RPE as an anchor as well. Everyone says, make sure you can talk, can speak a few sentences or speak in full sentences. um You're still allowed to have a huff and puff, but you can maintain. conversation pretty easily. You know, you can power hike the climbs early instead of running the climbs early, so we're just like preserving as much freshness as possible. Therefore that neuromuscular fatigue is more delayed in its onset and with the neuromuscular fatigue and even like thermoregulation, so like your body temperature being regulated and also you're not going to lose as much fluid as quickly. So all of those things into playing will just mean that it delays the onset. Unfortunately, that means a slower start. But you know, the goal is to avoid or prevent maintain this like lower heart rate. That's what's required. But the other things would be just like if thermoregulation is one of them, just heat, heat management. ah If it's a hot day, making sure we're putting like ice on your hat or in your bath or arm sleeves, just trying to cool off as much as possible, get to aid stations, pour some water over your head, like a lot you lose a lot of heat in your head and neck. And so you know, if you're douse your that area of your body with water, that's going to help cool things off. If you're running, um try to seek the shade like there might be a section of the path that's more shaded compared to the other stick to the shaded like just little strategies like this can can help. And just make sure we're just adjusting the pace based on temperature. If it gets hotter than expected, slow things down. um Yeah, these things are going to be uh little, little tips that you can try. And the obvious one's just maintaining an optimal hydration. ah If you are doing long trail ultras, hopefully you've got your hydration dialed in, knowing how much your fluid you're expected to lose. um But also, yeah, carb management as well. because like if we have a drop in glycogen, a drop in your carb stores that increases the reliance on fat being used, which increases the amount of oxygen that's required to produce that energy, which leads to that cardiac drift. And so not only that hydration strategy dialed in, but also the carbs dialed in, you know, for most 60 to 90 grams of carbs per hour, if that suits your gut. If you can tolerate that, great. But, you know, these are the things I think about. Hopefully that helps. There's going to be a lot of things at play, but also know that it could be completely normal, the drift that you have. And it's just all about sort of managing it to the best of your ability. Thanks for sending in your questions. Hopefully you've enjoyed listening to these answers and uh sparking some curiosities about the tweaks that you can make in your own training to train smarter, reduce your risk of injury. Hope you've enjoyed. We'll catch you the next episode. If you are looking for more resources to run smarter or you'd like to jump on a free 20 minute injury chat with me, then click on the resources link in the show notes. There you'll find a link to schedule a call plus free resources like my very popular injury prevention five day course. You'll also find the Run Smarter book and ways you can access my ever growing treasure trove of running research papers. Thanks once again for joining me and well done on prioritizing your running wisdom.