Should we be training with a lot of variety (different speeds, shoes, cross training, strength training)? Or should we get really good at running on one surface, in the same shoes & not deviate? Brodie dives into the pros and cons of both strategies so you can self-reflect & come up with your own decision. To finish off, Brodie fires away 6 questions you should ask yourself: What type of runner do you want to be? What has your injury history been like in the past? Do you enjoy variety? Are you spreading yourself too thin? Should I be upping my specificity close to race time? (Apple users: Click 'Episode Website' for links to..) Become a patron! Receive Run Smarter Emails Book a FREE Injury chat with Brodie Run Smarter App IOS or Android Podcast Facebook group Run Smarter Course with code 'PODCAST' for 3-day free trial.
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on today's episode, variety versus specificity. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast. The podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life, but more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission, to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brodie Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, a physiotherapist, former chronic injury sufferer and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. new microphone and it's pretty much last episode, the weakness versus sensitivity episode was actually yesterday and about an hour later my microphone arrived and so I've set it up. I think I still might have to adjust the volume settings here and there because I'm still getting a little bit of buzzing and background noise. But thought I'd give it a try and thought I'd see how this episode goes and see if it sounds any different. So today we're still following our theme. I'll just bring up my notes. We have variety versus specificity in your training. And this is on the back of this kind of versus segment, I guess you could say, because last week was that weakness versus sensitivity. And I've got another versus. Next time, I'll let you know now it's load versus capacity. And I'll do a nice deep dive into that one because I'm quite passionate about that topic. But today, let me, I guess, start with some definitions of what I mean by variety versus specificity. Variety means how much, well, I guess that's self-explanatory. How much are you changing up your training? Are you doing the one speed, one distance, one terrain? or are you varying it up? Are you doing like cross training? Are you doing, are you changing up your speed? Are you doing tempo sessions? Are you doing different terrains? Are you wearing different shoes? How much are you steering away from the conventional training that you normally do? Whereas specificity would be how specific you want to train. What are you training for? Are you training for a marathon? Do you want to train as specific to that marathon as you can? We'll discuss the benefits and the, I guess the pros and cons for each. And there's not a definitive answer. It's not like last episode where I'm educating you on different pieces and what's right and what's wrong. This one's just a self reflection on your own training and whether you need to, what way you find the balance and make the decision yourself. And so, um, Yeah, hopefully you have a little bit more clarity and maybe it might help change up your training after listening to this episode. When it comes to specificity and how specific you wanna be, the analogy that I could think of was a tightrope walker. How narrow do you want your beam to be? Because you can train to be a tightrope walker. You can train really specific and be on a really narrow edge. and get really strong at training on that narrow edge. But as soon as within your training, if things get, um, if there's something that might go wrong, or maybe you all of a sudden decide to train for something else and you're just not adapted to it, then you're at risk of falling off that tight rope. And so how narrow do you want to train? Do you want to think, do you want to offer a bit more variety and broaden that rope that you're currently walking on? Some benefits of variety, I've got a list of pros and cons for each. But the variety, first of all, it just helps break up the load within the body. And you're still staying active. You're still doing things. You're not resting. If you're finding yourself getting overuse injuries, you can still remain very active, but just change the load on the body. What happens is with a lot of injuries, it's either due to load doing too much. or it's due to repetition. So let's just say for ITB friction syndrome, it's a repetitive injury because of the every time you turn your legs over, it's the angle that it puts on the joints every single step that you take. So you do that thousands, tens of thousands, hundred thousands of times within a week. And that repetition can start to irritate things. And so when it comes to variety, If you're doing different speeds, if you're running uphill, downhill, if you're changing direction around trails, that variety helps reduce the risk of these repetitive injuries. And same with load. If we're running constantly throughout the week and getting these overload injuries, some variety like strength training, swimming, cycling, just changing the load on your body, you can still stay very, very active, but just change things up. And so you guess. One of the benefits is it does reduce the risk of repetitive injuries. The loads on the body are just impacting you in different ways. And it's just different to your current training. So fitness classes, if you want to go to a gym and do a high intensity class, if you want to change up your terrain, if you want to change up your shoes, I'll talk about shoes a little bit more in a second. These all offer different benefits and the body will adapt to these different variations and in turn, you sort of build up resiliency. And I like to think of it as resiliency as a, you can be thrown anything at you and the body won't break down. That's kind of what I think of resilience. You can go do a trail run, you can go do a fast 5K, you can do a long 20K, and the body just doesn't seem to break down. You can go play team sports, you can go do a gym class and the body just doesn't seem to get injured. That's what I call resilience. And you need variety throughout the week, throughout the month, if you want to start building up that resiliency, if you're just running and you're just running in the same shoes and you're doing the same distance every time, and you're running the same speed every time, you're just narrowing that training focus, which can be a good thing in certain circumstances, but like I said, we are that tightrope walker and we're just narrowing that beam, building resiliency, building variety. just helps broaden that tight rope. And so it becomes like a plank, a wooden plank rather than a string that we're trying to walk across. However, we'll talk about the benefits of specificity because we do want to prepare the body for certain demands. If you have a goal, if you have a race in mind, if you have a marathon to train for, we kind of need, you will become a better runner or you'll perform better on race day. if you prepare for that race. And so that's where specificity can really come in nicely. You can build, you can get really, really good at one thing. And depending where in your training you want to do that, that's up to you. You can train for a marathon and only prepare yourself for that marathon. And you can get very good at that marathon and you'll perform well on race day. And that's all road running, that's doing your long distances. is running in the same shoes, running at the same time of the day, running at your race pace. Yeah, and you can get very, very good at that, especially if you want to do a slow, like if you're one that just wants to finish the marathon, then you can just do slow case the whole entire time. If you want to do, if one of your goals was a PB, maybe get it under four hours or under three hours, you might need to start varying up the speeds and race it. race pace or train at race pace during very specific times of the training cycle. But you can see where I'm going here. The, the next thing I want to talk about is kind of like the cons or like the difficulties with these two components. First of all, variety, there are some difficulties when it comes to variety. It depends how broad you want to go. Depends on what you want to implement because it's tough to do. If you want to really broaden your horizons. you might be spreading yourself a bit too thin because we've only got so many hours in the day. And I know a lot of runners will be like, yeah, I probably would benefit if I start some team sports or if I started trail running or if I started some gym classes. But where's the time of the day? When can I do that? And we can't really broaden ourselves too much because if you say, oh, I can fit in a fitness class once every three weeks, you're not gonna really adapt to that. It's going to be Um, just, uh, you're spreading yourself a bit too thin. And the example that I can think of was when I started CrossFit a couple of years ago, I was attending twice a week and I thought I'd do it twice a week, plus a little bit of strength training at my house because I know that strength training two to three times a week helps running and helps you as a runner. And so I thought, yep, let me do my strength work and let me do my CrossFit sessions. the structure that they had for CrossFit were for those who were attending about five times a week. And so Monday, there'd be a certain, like they'd find two movements that you're focusing on, say lunges and deadlifts on the Tuesday. They're focused on something else like snatch. Um, and then they just worked their way through the days. And then when it got back to a Monday, they're hoping that, um, the, the exercise might be slightly different. So if Monday was deadlifts, the next Monday would be. um, say a push press and then that was fine. I was okay to just jump in and slowly adapt to those, but it was so, so slow. And I remember I did deadlifts the day, my first ever class, I worked on deadlifts and worked on that technique. And I wasn't reintroduced to deadlifts in CrossFit until about five or six weeks later. And that's because the days that I was attending those two days, there was too much variety. And. I'm just like, I'm never gonna get stronger deadlifts if I keep up with this frequency. And so that can be a bit of a downfall with variety if you spread yourself too thin, you just, you won't adapt. So it's finding that balance. And so I guess they're the difficulties that can come with variety. A lot of people have different running shoes and they've just got a whole bunch, they're trained for so many different things that they're spreading themselves a bit too thin. The specificity downsides. is you can, like I said, you can be really, really dedicated to one specific purpose, but any little wobble on that tightrope, any, if you stra, if you steer away from any sort of norm that's outside of your specific training, you might get overloaded and it might increase your risk of injury. And so running in the same type of shoes constantly for years and years, and then all of a sudden going to a different shoe, different style shoe. might increase your risk because we're changing the load on your body. That might be too abrupt, might be too drastic. Similar with, let's just say, you're running roads the entire time and then you decide to do a 5k trail. That might be too much demand for your ankle stabilizers or the heels might get you and cause an overload there. So the downsides, any sort of steering away from the norm might increase your risk of overload or... repetitive type of injuries. The other downside is the body likes variety. The body, like a tendon, will like the endurance component, but also needs some strength components and also needs power components for it to be at its full capacity. So it just needs variety. We can't, it's gonna adapt to yours, specific training really quickly, and then just kind of lull and not really do anything. It wants to change, it wants to get stronger. And even just our chat. well for me was a couple of days ago, with Belinda Beck talking about bone health, and she says the healthy bone likes being pulled in different directions. The bend of the bone actually is what stimulates growth and stimulates that bone density. And if we bend it in different directions, it tends to respond a lot better than just constantly in one direction. And so that goes with, yes, running is in one direction. And we know that if you change directions, say if you're playing team sports and you're cutting, you're constantly changing directions, you're jumping, landing, taking off in different directions, that would be a lot more variety and a lot better for the bone health moving forward. And if we're talking about osteoporosis and still on that bone health topic, we need to challenge the body in different ways, let's just say for your upper body, because you might get really good at running, but... First of all, running isn't enough to shock the bone, enough to stimulate growth, but your upper body's being totally neglected and that the bone health there might start weakening and becoming quite frail. And like Belinda was saying, someone might have a fall and then break their wrist or break their arm because they haven't really challenged the bone with some upper body weight exercises like pushups or just pushing themselves off the ground, tricep dips, those sort of upper body exercises. So if you really, if you love running, and you want to do that really specific training segment, just know that you're neglecting other parts of your body for overall health. And like we said, running, especially road running, it's just one directional, it's just doing the same thing over and over and over again. And yeah, if you deviate from that tight rope, you might fall off. The last kind of section of this was just diving into shoes because a lot of people, there's a bit of a topic around, should I just train in the same type of shoe or should I have different style shoes that just offer different variety? And it will depend on the runner. It will depend on you making a conscious decision because the advantage of having different style shoes is that yes, it offers variety. We've talked about that before. It is loading the body differently. depending on the type of shoe and the style of shoe you want to go with. And we know that injuries, like I said before, are due to load and sometimes being overloaded and repetition. And so if you're wearing the same shoes and exposed to the same load every single time and repeating that same step every single time, that might increase your risk of an overload injury. If you have different shoes and every third day, you take your conventional shoes out and you do something with a bit more support or maybe something with a little less support, you're loading the body differently and those repetitions are a little have changed slightly. And let's just say we've we're talking about heel drop. If you the heel drop is the difference between the height, the stack height of the heel and the height of where your toes are when they sit in the shoe. And I guess eight to 10 mil is quite average. If you go from a heel drop from 8 mil to say 0 mil, you're putting a lot more load through the feet, a lot more load through the Achilles and calf. And so that could be good because you could build up the tolerance of your Achilles and calf and then you could actually get stronger. But on days where you want to rest the calf or Achilles, if it's feeling a little bit tight and you still want to run, then you'd slow the pace. You'd wear your conventional shoes say a 10 mil heel drop and just give them a bit of a break. So that's a way to keep that variety and make sure that we're not just loading one specific structure. However, if you're happy with the current shoes that you have, you think they're really comfortable and you don't wanna deviate, then that's totally fine. We just need to be smarter with all of our other training decisions. And if you do feel tight in your calves and you do only wear, say, minimalist shoes, then we might need to find other ways to recover, maybe slow down our speed, maybe slow down our distance, particular days just have a lot of recovery days, allow that stiffness and soreness just to dissipate and then you're going back into your normal training. So we can use our shoes as tools to help with our recovery and help with our training. But if you just wanna stick to the same shoe, we just need to make smarter decisions in other parts of your training. So it's a decision that you need to make. Um, there's no right or wrong here. Uh, things like the rigidity of the actual shoe itself or the in-cell support, uh, other components. Weight is another component that we can, uh, vary up depending if we want that more variety, um, just to give other parts of the body a break, um, keep that in mind. I did have shoes as tools as a, um, as a past episode. So have a look through that if you're, if you're interested in. that in a bit more detail. My personal preference, I have two different types of shoes. One is a minimalist shoe with a zero drop, very light. I love running in those about 80% of the stuff I do is in those. However, I also have more of a standard runner. They still innovates, but they've got a 10 mil heel drop, a lot more support, a bit heavier, which usually is the balance like usually the ones with a bit more support, a bit more stack high, they usually do weigh a little bit heavier. Um, but of recent times, I have been spending more time in those supportive shoes while looking after my foot injury. And so, um, this is like the options that I have available to me, which is really nice and so that's my preference. I just have those two different style shoes. They feel really nice. And I'm just going to continue with them. If I do run in my minimalist shoes four times a week. And then I start to notice that my achilles might be getting a bit stiff on my calf is getting a bit tight. The next week I might just run 50% in my, um, minimal shoes and 50% in my, um, shoes that offer a bit more support. This is the decision that I make and I I'm happy with that balance. So because I said that this topic, uh, does require a bit of self reflection. It is no, there is no one answer. There's no right or wrong. It's just, you have to decide what type of runner you want to be. And so I have. Um, listed some questions that for you to ask yourself as we close up this episode. And exactly what I said, number one that I've written down is what type of runner do you want to be? Do you want to be a tightrope walk, a tightrope runner that, um, gets really good at one thing and just stick to that and be happy sticking to that. And then if something comes up where you do say, Oh, let's join our mates and have a trail run, then you have to say, okay, well, let me just allow enough time to adapt to that and so you slowly adapt to that along the way. And so you allow enough time for the tightrope beam to broaden slightly instead of just jumping straight into it because we do know that you are currently on a very thin, very, yeah, thin beam. Keep that in mind. The next question, what has your injury history been like in the past? Well, History in the past is kind of the two things, but what is your injury history like? Do you have the same type of injury over and over and over again? Are you getting injured every six months? Are you finding it really tough to come back from an injury and does it keep flaring up? Self reflecting on this could almost help answer whether you should vary things up or become more specific in your training. because if you're getting the same injury, if you're getting same knee pain over and over and over again every time you run or every time you build up your mileage slightly, maybe that's a message that we do need to, first of all, build up the strength in other ways, build up some resilience, doing other things. And maybe if you're running six times a week and then you're getting these overuse injuries, maybe we need to vary it up. Maybe there is too much repetition throughout the week. So keep that in mind. The other question, do you enjoy variety? Like I love going for bike rides. I don't like swimming that much, but sometimes I do it. Do you love trail running? Do you love team sports? If you enjoy it, you're going to do it. If you listen to this episode and said, fine Brody, I'll build up my variety. I'll start a gym class or something, but you don't like the gym class. It's not gonna last very long. You're just gonna go back to running very soon. So if you love running marathons, and you love road running and that's all you want to do. Maybe you just want to be more specific, but if you enjoy the variety, then you will become more resilient and the adherence will be a lot better. Next question, second last one. If you do enjoy variety, are you spreading yourself too thin? Back to my example with CrossFit, recognizing that I was doing similar, I was doing a movement once every four to five weeks isn't really gonna do much for me because my body is just gonna be like, what the hell did you just do? And it's gonna be really confused, but then I'm not gonna do it again anytime soon for it to be like, oh, I recognize this. Okay, let's get better at this. It's just spreading myself too thin. Keep that in mind. The last one I have, should I be upping my specificity close to race time? Because we don't, we can continue our variety. We can have a really nice variable training load. But then as soon as you load up for a race, as soon as you sign up for a race and it gets close to race time, if it's four weeks away between six to four weeks away, maybe we want to start reducing our variety and using this as a crucial time to be more specific and therefore increase our likelihood of performing better on race day because the body will adapt and you'll still maintain a lot of the variety adaptations. because you know, four to six weeks, if you're still running and you're probably doing some cross training once or twice a week during that specific moment, then you're not going to get weaker at that variety and you're going to perform better on race day. So keep that in mind. When are we choosing to be more specific? When are we choosing to have more variety? So those sort of questions. Um, bit of a recap. So the variety Benefits, it just helps break up the body, helps change the load and helps reduce our risk of overload and repetitive injuries. But the benefits of being specific is that if we're very goal orientated and we have a race in mind, we can get very good at that race if we're more specific. The difficulties with variety, sometimes we can spread ourselves too thin. Sometimes this is hard to find a routine to if your variety is too much. But the downside to specificity is that if we are, if we do get a slight breeze in the wrong direction, if it steers a slightly astray, then it increases our risk of injury. And so that's a good summary and things that you need to ask yourself and self reflect on. I know runners don't really self reflect. I think we should do it more often. And yeah, see if there's anything we need to change within our training. And so that's what I have for today. Hopefully you noticed that I sound a little bit different, but it does look very cool having this microphone. And even if the quality is exactly the same, I think I feel more of a podcaster. I feel like I feel more like a podcast host when I have this sort of device. It wasn't really that expensive anyway, but yeah, at least my illusions have been complete and I kind of build up my own self-confidence and convincing myself that I'm a podcast host. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I look forward to bringing you this next one when it comes to load versus capacity. Really excited to bring that one. And we'll see you then. Thanks once again for listening. To take full advantage of the knowledge you are building, you need to download the Run Smarter app. This contains all of my free access podcast episodes, written blogs and ebooks, along with my paid video courses, all neatly housed into categories for you to easily navigate through and find content you're interested in. Also be sure to check out the show notes for links to the podcast Facebook group and links to learn more about becoming a podcast patron who contribute $5 Aussie per month to get inner circle VIP access including an invitation into the exclusive Patreon Facebook group and a complete back catalogue. Patreon only podcast episodes, which you can access within the app. Also on the app you can even find a link that takes you to my online Physio Clinic where I assess and treat runners from all over the world, so I can be on standby if you ever need one-on-one physiotherapy assistance. Once again, thank you for listening and becoming a Run Smarter Scholar, and remember, knowledge is power.