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Welcome!
Running Capacity is a podcast for exhausted runners working 50+ hour weeks, aiming to give you the no BS tools to keep you running, when work and life have other plans.
Hosted by me, Chevy Rough, a Running & Strength Coach since 2015.
Learn more at www.chevyrough.com
So today I want to take you behind the curtain. Right? I want to show you, or should I say talk you, through a typical week of programming for one of my clients who's in their first month of training with me. Now it's important to understand the context of the people that I work with. I predominantly specialize in people who have fifty plus hour workweeks.
Speaker 1:They're leaders, they're founders, they might work in financial services, professional services, tech. There's a lot of responsibility. They have a lot of people relying them in the workplace and also outside of work. And so the reason they come to me is because they need to make training work within the context of those lives that they've spent a lot of energy and time and ambition and focus building. And so when someone does sign up to work with me, there's often been one of a few reasons as to why that is.
Speaker 1:Firstly, it could be down to recurring niggles and injuries. I'm not a physio and I make that really clear, but once they've been signed off, they come and work with me and I'm able to help build the foundations, rebuild confidence to ensure that they don't just feel like they keep going back to square one. The other reason that they might come and work with me is because they've seen a steady decline in performance, from slower times to fewer to no workouts in a week. And again, that's just frustrating. They sit there after their run, they look at their Strava, and they're just comparing their splits to how they were three years ago.
Speaker 1:And they're just thinking, how will I ever bridge this gap again? And it's annoying. The next reason could be down to motivation. It's just completely vanished. But the desire to train hasn't.
Speaker 1:So they call me in because they want to understand how to find that motivation again, and maybe that's initially just down to accountability, but they need someone to help them make training work. And then the final reason which I'm seeing more and more of, funny enough in the last twelve years to twelve years? In the last year, twelve months, is I'm working with people who've had a bad experience at a recent race, and that experience has really caught their attention and made them realize that something needs to change. So that could be a DNF, right? They didn't finish, but it could also be that they just hit that wall hard, and the experience was so bad from mile x that they never ever wanna go through that again.
Speaker 1:And they realized that actually, maybe my body wasn't ready to race that day, and I need to give it a little bit more attention, and I need to give it the foundations so that experience never happens again because they want a race, they want a challenge, they want to push themselves. Right? They want that goal. It's important, but they just don't want to go through that bad experience again. And, yes, people come to me when they have a race.
Speaker 1:Might be a marathon, half marathon, or these days again seeing a lot of ultras, ironmans, triathlons, but usually that's the thing that they've signed up to to hold them accountable, But then the reason they've come to see me is because they know that they need to solve one of these issues to be able to achieve that goal. So that's the context. Context is king because then you can start to understand how I program for people. So based on these challenges, the niggles, declining performance, the motivation, the bad experience, month one goals tend to be pretty universal for eighty percent of my clients who work fifty plus hour work weeks and are facing these challenges. Step one, the first goal, is we need to make all elements of training work in a week that just does not care less about training.
Speaker 1:And I'm talking about training as a whole because the odds are my clients aren't just not running consistently, they're also not doing everything else around training that they should be, and that makes complete sense. Right? Why jump on a foam roller when you can't even run? And look, to be able to build back the habits that we need in the first thirty days, we're not looking for perfection to hit everything. Right?
Speaker 1:We're not looking for perfect mobility, perfect strength and conditioning, perfect running drills, perfect running training consistency in a week. But we do want to aim to nurture the habits, the training routines and systems that are going to help us with our second goal. This to me is is the most important way. They're both in equal measure, but what we really need to try and achieve in the first thirty days is winning the nervous system over. Fifty plus hour work weeks, niggles, plateaus in performance, lack of motivation, these are all signals that my client's nervous system is likely dysregulated.
Speaker 1:Put simply, there's a lot of stress and tension in the body that we need to move through, we need to figure out, and to do that, we need to help the body relax into training. And I hate to other the body, I get very cautious of doing this, but at first, it does help to be able to look at the body objectively, to remove these layers of emotions and feelings and thoughts that we kind of express within ourselves as we think about how we feel, how our training is. But at first, I really am just looking at helping the body reset. I'm helping the nervous system let go. We're looking at the body to start to trust us that the extra activity we're going to build into the week, the runs we're going to do, the strength and conditioning, the mobility, it's not just more stress that it can't regulate effectively.
Speaker 1:Because we need the body to give us energy, the energy is stress and the body is going to hold on as tight as possible to an energy budget that has historically been mismanaged. If you've been working fifty plus hour work weeks, if you're an ambitious human, you've been doing the late nights, if you've not been sleeping that well, if you've been working on the weekends, if or you've just been looking after your family and being present and playing with your kids, like living your life, then the odds are that your energy budget has not been balanced that well. And, you know, I always say, of the body like a cautious CFO who's seen your expense account and is no longer trusting you with the company card. And I think this is the thing, this kind of taps into this motivation side of things when people aren't motivated. I'm like, look, I don't think you've got a motivation problem.
Speaker 1:I think you want to train. I think that your brain is just doing what brains do, which is going into survival mode and protecting any energy that it has because historically, all it knows is that you're all or nothing, that you push hard, that you spend energy that you don't have. Right? So to be able to build the right habits at the right pace while not bankrupting us, we do need to be able to answer the following question. What is the minimum effective training dose in a week to create the adaptations that we need?
Speaker 1:A repeat. What is the minimum effective training dose in a week to create the adaptations that we need? Remember, now at this stage, first thirty days, I'm not talking about increasing v o two max, building an aerobic base, getting hench, one rep maxes. The adaptations we need in the first thirty days for eighty percent of my clients who work fifty plus hour work weeks and come to me with the context of the issues that I spoke about earlier are consistent training habits and a nervous system that trusts us to train. This is what we're trying to develop.
Speaker 1:And so some people might ask, why not the maximum dose? Right? Like, don't we wanna make the most out of our week as possible while motivation is high to train? Why don't we want to push things? And this is where kind of a lot of A types can go, right?
Speaker 1:They just get back to training, and they fill their diary back up to where it used to be five years ago. And we get a surge of energy to start training, to go to the gym five times a week, to run three times a week, and we push to failure with every lift and run, right? Often it can be right, the benchmark of success within my training is I need to give it my all, I need to crawl out of the gym, and if I'm not hurting the next day, then I haven't done a good job, I haven't put my full effort in. And the thing is we beat ourselves up for then failing at our goal because our CFO is restricting the energy budget even further because we've just overspent. And this is, again, a big, big challenge.
Speaker 1:And so what I need you to understand is that it's better to be a little bit undertrained than overtrained. Better to be overcooked than undercooked. And I wanna know the minimum amount of training required for my athletes to achieve whatever goals they set because time and energy is so often very limited. So let's make sure we leave something left in the tank. I want headroom to operate, I don't want to push the nervous system to the red line because it won't take much to go over, and then the system to just go, no thank you, I'm not giving you anything else.
Speaker 1:For us to go into a state of dysregulation, and also things like injury, right? I think sometimes we see reoccurring injuries and niggles because the body is never given the opportunity to recover, repair, adapt. It's just constantly pushed to the edge. So what I'm looking at is can we train for a marathon by running three times a week? Can we get strong in the gym by training two times a week?
Speaker 1:These are just examples. And can we combine those five sessions into three sessions in a week and service both goals? Like, is that actually a possibility to do? But 80% of a marathon cycle, there will be weeks where we can and hit the minimum effective dose to keep progressing in our training towards the goals that we set ourselves. But look, again, most clients aren't training for a marathon in those first thirty days of working with me.
Speaker 1:They're often just finding their feet in training again, so the minimum effective dose is a lot simpler. And so let me talk you through what that actually looks like, and I want to talk you through the of Rishi. Rishi is a client of mine in his first month of coaching. He works fifty five to sixty plus hours a week in the city. He ran a marathon a couple of years ago, hasn't been consistent since, and he knows he needs to get back to it before it completely vanishes out of his life.
Speaker 1:And he knows that when he runs, he's a better human for it. He's able to show up for his loved ones at the dinner table at the end of the day, and he feels more relaxed and more energized and more focused on not only the tasks at work that are important, but the people that are important. And Rishi wants to keep nurturing that. One of the things that we had in common was talking about how the workout that we do today is all about who we want to be in ten years time. It's all about paragliding into whatever challenges are coming down the line with more energy, more health, more fitness, more juice, so we can be there and show up for the people that we love when it counts.
Speaker 1:And so this is what a typical typical week looks like for Rishi in those first thirty days. So Monday is a rest day. Not a full switch off day. Like, I'm trying to get him to do ten to fifteen minutes of breath work and mobility in the morning just to start the week off with a little bit of movement. We're telling the CFO the money's coming back into safe hands.
Speaker 1:We can move, we can breathe, we can regulate the system as we try and, like, touch our toes or get into the end range of a movement pattern. Like, we're just trying to get the body to just trust us, the nervous system, just to kind of accept that movement is a positive thing. And also teaching Rishi just to regulate his nervous system through breathing while moving, while challenging himself a little bit within that mobility work. And that's it. I'm I'm not looking for much more on a Monday there's a great bit of Russian research, which I should try and find and put in the comments.
Speaker 1:But people tend to pee on a Thursday, right? I see a lot of people load their diary up on Mondays. Monday can be quite a mentally taxing day at work and in life as we try and find the juice to navigate the rest of the week, we find the willpower which only has a small reservoir to pull from, to get going for the week. There's a lot of organization that goes on a Monday, a lot about finding our rhythm and it's like a rocket ship, It starts off slow and then as the week goes, we start to find more power and things start to speed up and that's why people tend to PB on Thursdays. Wednesday, Thursdays.
Speaker 1:And so I think about that from a training perspective, want Rishi focusing on just owning the week from a work perspective, getting organised, not worrying about training too much Because if he owns Monday, the rest of the week is going to be much more positive experience for him. We're priming him for success for the rest of the week by giving him all the time and energy and resources just to focus on work and get that done. And again, just priming the nervous system a little bit in the morning. Tuesday is a, forty minute easy run, and that's at a pace where he can hold a full sentence conversation. If he can't, he's going too hard.
Speaker 1:And that's, again, a run that is just about building that aerobic base, but it's just a run where the body is going, okay, like, I trust you to better regulate your energy and stress levels out on a run here. This isn't going to cost me too much to recover from. One of the consistent challenges that I see within athletes who come and train with me is they think that their zone, two is zone two when actually it's zone three, and effort level is always just a little bit higher. If I ask them to run a four out of 10 effort level, 10 being really hard, one being really easy, if I ask them to run a four, it's more of a six, even then starting to lurk into lurk, move into an eight. And so really teaching people what does that four feel like?
Speaker 1:What does zone one, zone two feel like? What's the difference between that and then a three as it were? Like, how can they feel what's going on in their systems? Further down the line, we'll look at things like, certain breathing rhythmic patterns that help them understand where they are from an energy perspective, PACE perspective, a governor, PACE governor, and then we'll look at things like breathing, nasal breathing and stuff like that. So these are all things that we can do.
Speaker 1:I don't want to outsource this to their watch, I want them to be able to feel what's going on. So that's the task for that run. And then Wednesday will be a thirty minute strength session. Squat, hip hinge, push pull, carry, some step ups, maybe a bit of core work. That's it.
Speaker 1:It's But a training unit that is no longer than thirty minutes, we're talking two sets of five reps, moderate load, good, good solid technique, good breathing, good recovery, like we're just taking it easy again, just warming the nervous system up in the sense of like, you can trust me to move here. And we're also looking at sending the right signals that we can teach the tissues that they're safe to load, waking that nervous system up, as I said, and it's about different movement patterns beyond sitting and running. Right? So again, this helps us start to reduce those likelihoods of injury, but just a super, super easy, easy session. And if Rishi misses it, and this is key, it can be bolted onto the Tuesday or Thursday run.
Speaker 1:And I'd probably say over ten years of coaching, I've learned that that is a key hack for people who are fighting diaries and energy, is being able to move these training units. So I call that right, that strength and condition session is a training unit of thirty minutes. And I talk about that run on Tuesday is a training unit. The long run on the weekend might be two or three units, but ultimately, I'm looking for a run during the week, an easy run to be one unit ish and then a strength and conditioning always to be one unit and that goes for conditioning and mobility, all individually one units and then I'm looking at can one unit be added onto another unit to make two units? Will the individual be able to recover from that?
Speaker 1:Does it work from a time perspective? So being able to move this strength session to Tuesday and do it as a warm up or cool down or do it as an AMPM versus the run is a superpower for a client who's trying to make things work, where weeks can be unpredictable, and the same goes for Thursday. They can move it to Thursday. So Thursday becomes optional. So over a thirty to forty minute easy conversational pace run as per Tuesday, or a full breath work and mobility session if feeling totally cooked from work.
Speaker 1:Again, I'm giving him a training unit within his programming to be able to pull off the shelf, like I can go for a one run, that's one training unit, or I'm doing a conditioning piece, that's another. And again, it's just about what does he feel like doing on that day. The point is he's got choice. And in the first month, look, if he chooses to skip, that's absolutely fine. If we skip the last couple of days, that's absolutely fine.
Speaker 1:It's not about win or lose. It's a signal. Right? It's a signal that we need to listen to because the CFO is telling us something, and we need to listen for that and we need to better understand what his minimum training dose is, and we will learn that through those signals. Friday's rest full, no mobility, no breath work, the body just gets to be.
Speaker 1:So the reason I do Friday rest days is because, you know, we're gonna probably do a little bit of a longer run on the weekend, but also, again, it's I want my fifty plus hour work week runner to have all their energy and focus at the end of a long week to be able to wrap up work. Because if they can wrap up work, they're less likely to work on the weekend. They're more likely to switch off on the weekend. So for me, Friday is the priority again from a work perspective. Let's just put all our energy and resource into getting that done.
Speaker 1:Saturday is anywhere for Rishi for a fifty to seventy minute seventy seventy minute long run. Again, giving them a window to operate in. He'll know when enough is enough based on discussions that we've had about does the rate of perceived effort drift through that run? I want it to stay at four out of 10. Is he sixty minutes in and it's now six or seven or eight out of 10, then we've gone too far.
Speaker 1:Also within that, is his technique starting to diminish? Is it starting to feel really hard? So again, I will be really doing a heavy wash up with him after that loft run to make sure that he finished at the point where he was totally in control. He was a four out of 10 on the easy effort. It was conversational pace.
Speaker 1:If he's outside of that conversation, he knows he's drifted too far. And that's again, just making running easy and where the body wants to do it. And obviously, we're building that aerobic base again. And it's just really where he starts to feel like a runner again, Which matters more than any of this. I just want him to go for a nice long run-in the weekend because that's what helps him process the week, switch off, organize his to do list.
Speaker 1:And Rishi, you know, if he can get that run done on a Saturday morning, he says, I'm great. Like, I'm set up for the weekend, I'm ready to spend time with my kids, which is super great. And then Sunday is a minimum of thirty minutes of walking or mobility flow. I say a minimum of thirty minutes, there's a few caveats to this, so I would really like it to be much longer. Like to go through and I'd like to go for a long run outside a long walk, sorry, outside, moving without stress, hopefully in nature and with his family, like that's the gold for me.
Speaker 1:And I know that if I can get Richie out the door, get most of my clients out the door doing that on a Sunday, life dependent, challenges dependent, it's just such a big win. There is nothing greater my clients love more than just going for long walks with their kids and family for those who do do that and enjoy doing that. So that's really what I'm looking at. And that's it. Two runs, one strength session, one optional, two active recovery days, total time in the week, about two and a half hours actual training, that'll be hugely affected obviously by the Sunday, but that's under our control, that's absolutely fine.
Speaker 1:But when you're talking two, two and a half hours for somebody who works fifty plus hour work week, it's not a burden, right? It's just that's the price that you've got to pay to showing up and getting the work done to build the health so you can keep being the leader that people want to work for, you can keep showing up for loved ones around the dinner table without burnt ends, and you can feel like you're moving towards a future whereby you're not sacrificing your health to achieve other goals. The reason I wanted to talk you through this is because if you're a runner who is used to grinding five, six sessions a week and pushing every workout, Rishi's week is gonna look like nothing to you. You're gonna think, what? Like, she'd be doing so much more than that.
Speaker 1:And that's the whole point. Rishi is not going to do this week for the rest of his life. He's going to do it for the first month, and then we're gonna layer in more once his nervous system trusts the process. Everyone tells you that recovery is king. You know, this is all part of it.
Speaker 1:It's not just about recovering after the session. It's about, are you able to regulate your nervous system effectively throughout the session as well? And that's where the body starts to kind of trust you and let go and go, hey, right, we can do this today. I'm motivated to do it because it's not gonna cost us so so much money. If you layer too much work in too soon, you're back to square one, you're chasing the deficit.
Speaker 1:Layer at the right time and everything from here on out, it just compounds, compounds, compounds, compounds, compounds. And that's what a minimum effective dose really is. It's not about doing the least, it's about doing the least that leaves the room for you to keep progressing. And at times progressing might not happen, but at least understanding the minimum effective dose to be able to plateau where you want to plateau, right? So I know I've got an energy demanding month ahead of me, I know what my minimum effective dosage is for adapting towards my goal, but sometimes it's just what do I need to do to not lose anything over the next month as well, so the lessons also lie in there.
Speaker 1:You've got to take the pressure off your shoulders in month one. You should be walking out the gym feeling like, God, I could have done so much more, that was so easy. Honestly, I have clients who message me after week one and they walk out the gym twenty five minutes later and they're like, Chev, that thing was too easy? And I'm like, perfect. And you need to trust that process.
Speaker 1:You need to give the body a chance to go, yeah, cool. I'm in. I get it. I trust you. And so this is the work that I do with my clients.
Speaker 1:It's about getting them back to the sport that helps them navigate lives that can feel exhausting. It's about giving them the tools to train that keeps them on the road even when turbulence hits, which it will, it always does. That comes back to what I talked about with me and Rishi bonding over our desire to be a paraglide into whatever challenges are coming down the road because they will, because that's life. Look, if any of this rings true and you want a bit of a sanity check about where you are, like, me a DM, or email me at Chevy@ChevyRuff.com. No pitch.
Speaker 1:I will just happily I'm not here to sell you anything there and then. I'll talk you through how I work in a second. But, you know, if you just have questions, then throw them at me. I enjoy answering them, and I'm more than happy to help. And, if you do wanna work with me, applications for in person clients are open over in Canary Wharf.
Speaker 1:I've got two spots remaining over there for my ninety day program of work, which is all about building your running capacity, ensuring you become the leader people wanna work for or simply that loved ones don't get burnt ends. And I've also got an online coaching version of that as well. Links are in the comments below. That is it, people. Happy running.