In defence of the humble push-up.

I won't hold you for long. The humble push-up is a fabulous exercise for building shoulder and tricep strength and your core as well! 

Set your feet at least shoulder width apart to support your stability. More stability in any movement allows the bigger, stronger muscles to devote more of their performance to the target movement (instability causes these muscles to be coopted into supporting the smaller, stabilisers).

Next comes hand position. There is no one, right position. Closer together and you will load the triceps more, further apart and the chest and anterior shoulders will have a greater proportion of the work. For what it's worth, I am a big fan of treating the triceps like the most important muscle in pressing movements.

There is a single biomechanical pre-requisite for pressing movements, which is the path and stability of the elbow. At all costs, we need to avoid the shoulders blades elevating and rolling the shoulders up and over when we press. To this end, the elbows need to remain slightly tucked throughout the movement, i.e. they shouldn't flare upwards. 

Pressing is punching, essentially. The elbows come from a relatively low position. The second, important effect of a low and controlled elbow position is that we can lower our bodies using our lats for support. This stabilises the shoulder blades and puts us in a good position to éfficiently 'punch' our bodies back up.

One thing that is not important at all is how low we go. One inch with good control will grow the press over time.

Five sets of 5 reps or 3 sets of as many as you can do with 60s rest between.

The humble press-up, complimented by pull-ups, will develop a strong and muscular upper body. It's also a fabulous bridging exercise and hits the core superbly!!

The main points:

• The push-up will develop a strong and muscular upper body and strengthen your core.
• Don't sweat depth.
• Set feet shoulder width apart to aid stability and support the shoulders.
• Hands can be narrow to favour the triceps or wider for more chest/ shoulder.
• The only mechanical necessity is that the elbows remain slightly tucked and don't flare up because this put the triceps and lats in an excellent position to support the push. It also ensures we avoid rolling the shoulders up and over, which we don't want!
• Five sets of 5 reps or 3 sets of as many as you can do with 60s rest between.

 

Running as an adult: the perspectives I wish someone had shared with me.

I'm in my 14th year of running after taking much of my early adult years off. I ran as a teenager and though I loved it, I gave it up for the lifestyle of a typical young adult in which cardio or endurance exercise had no place. Twenty years later, my body was not the same and I paid a big price for refusing to consider this.

Depending on your point of view, running has been extraordinarily generous or tragically unkind to me. I have experienced most of the common injuries, including an early and nasty bout of compartment syndrome (shin splints), and even discovered I have an unusual reaction to electrolytes - where for most they reduce symptoms of fatigue and discomfort, they actually cause them in my body. Running is never easy for me and, occasionally, it's brutally hard. One particular event has broken me every time. I have only ever ambled under considerable duress over the finishing line. So, why bother?

Why is the most important question, and my first bit of advice is to take time to carefully consider your answer. When I started out, my 'why' was performance related. For me, that was a big mistake because, as it has transpired, my body wasn't up for that. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to compete but your capability needs to match your expectation or there will be nothing but disappointment and frustration. There is also a risk of an imbalance between internal (instrinsic) and external (extrinsic) motivations. 

External motivations are those set of ideas or values that involve value judgements in relation to others and they typically play out as feelings before and afterwards. Internal motivations, in contrast, centre on how something makes use feel in the performance of the task. An experience that makes you laugh or cry is an internal effect. Internal motivations reflect how our minds and bodies connect with the task. A basic rule of thumb is that the stronger our internal motivations, the stronger our connection to the task. Not surprisingly, we are more likely to participate for longer and with greater interest or engagement.

In my case, the difference between what my body was capable of and my running ambition caused problems that impacted my enthusiasm and my understanding of how my body operated. Too much external motivation drowned out what my body was trying to tell me. If I had taken the time to consider what my internal motivations were or could have been, I may have put myself in a state of mind to hear the feedback and make changes that would have improved the experience. 

This provides the basic answer to the question of why I participate in an activity that hurts as often as it does. Because the discomfort and pain is balanced by many moments of enjoyment, and this is only possible because of the changes I made to my plan. These changes, that were designed to improve how I felt when I run, led also to a better understanding of how to engineer greater levels of fitness and overall capacity.

In the early days, I felt frustrated and trapped by the physical experiences. I tinkered endlessly with the training equation for little reward. It wasn't until I got out of my own way by examining my motivations, that things began to improve. What I learned was that my sport was not primarily a physical challenge but a psychological one. 

We have to be able to listen and hear what happening within us. We also have to put ourselves in a position to enjoy and be grateful for what we have. It also helps to know that signals of fatigue and discomfort are not absolutes. They are experienced through the lens of how we feel, emotionally and generally speaking. Physical discomfort after an emotionally taxing experiencing registers far above what it does when we feel good. 

The true extent of what we're physically and athletically capable of has to be discovered through experience. We have to learn that not only are we ok when our bodies are sending us messages that its uncomfortable, but there can be a big difference between our perceptions, informed as they are by how our bodies feel when we're exercising, and the limits of what we can cope with and adapt to.

I need to add an important disclaimer at this point. Know your body! Endurance exercise and physically challenging events are fatigueing and will make you feel uncomfortable. That is their nature. There is an importance difference, however, between a healthy level of duress and acute physical distress. If you are unsure of the health of your body please consult your GP. Even then, time is needed to learn the meaning of the signals associated with fatigue and significant physical exertion. The reality is that adaptation is a very slow biological process. The only way you're gonna climb that really big mountain is slowly. Patience is also one of the best friends of long-term participation.

For the first few years in the resumption of my running, I boxed on with a poor understanding of my physical needs engendered by unhelpful expectations. The basic difference between the early and later years was progress. Hard work and duress are not side effects of the endurance training formula - feelings to be tolerated regardless. They must have the correct meaning. My training plan was not a match for my body, so the fatigue did not produce meaningful adaptations.

I'm getting at two things here: there is a difference between learning to live with the discomfort of hard work, and operating a bad plan. Fortunately - I wish someone had given me this information at the start! - endurance training plans are comparatively straight forward and only really involve an understanding of the responses in a single tissue: the heart. What's very useful about the heart is that it informs us immediately about changes in cardiovascular demand by increasing or lowering heart rate. 

My early plans had me running too fast and my heart rate was, as a consequence, too high to efficiently stimulate and grow my cardiovascular capacity (and my VO2max by extension). The improvements started when I discovered polarised training. The term was made popular by an American physiologist: Stephen Seiler. Seiler profiled Norwegian skiers, the most successful endurance athletes in the history of the Winter Olympics, and he discovered and then confirmed in his laboratory that there are essentially only two critical heart rate zones for endurance training: 

• A low HR zone, termed Zone2, of between 60 and 70% of our max heart rate, and 
• Zone4 in which your HR is at about 90% of its maximum. 

Seiler's critical discovery was the training time required to be in these zones. 80-85% of total training time or volume should be in Zone2 and about 10% in Zone4. The remainder is what's termed, drift. Your heart rate will naturally drift upwards as your body fatigues. Some drift up and out of Zone2 is permissible and actually impossible to avoid. What Seiler says about endurance training in general is that it's not slow enough on the slow days or fast enough on the fast days.

A short note about the difference between endurance plans for high performing athletes and the rest of us. Endurance athletes very often have a third training zone: tempo work in Zone3. As far as I am concerned, these sets are much less about stimulating physiological gains and are primarily 'psychological' sets. They condition the mind to coping (and ideally thriving) under the duress the body will experience on race day. 

The key for athletes is to understand the balance of the work required to meet their physiologic and psychologic needs. For us nonathletes, Zone3 represents 'junk' mileage. It is not a match for event day as we're not racing in this zone and it's a weak stimulus of cardiovascular capacity.

My final piece of advice is to fully appreciate what the human body gains from being really fit. In short, high cardiovascular capacity is number 1 on the list of effect sizes for therapies that improve health and extend human life. I run (and gym) to give myself the best chance to participate in life's awesome events as I age. Naturally, this wasn't something I thought about when I was younger but it certainly is now. 

Here's a summary of the ideas:

• cardio is good!
• endurance exercise is sustained hard work. this is it's nature.
• the nature of endurance exercise also makes it a psychological challenge.
• know your body and learn to listen to and intrepret the signals correctly.
• your training plan needs to match your body. Polarisation is an excellent, evidence based methodology, that can be easily adapted to all bodies.
• be patient as you have almost nothing to gain by rushing and potentially everything to lose.
• I have intentionally stayed away from talking about the tissues of the lower legs and how running affects them. Get in touch if you have any concerns or questions about this.