Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
There are a lot of metrics available to runners these days - pace, distance, time, V02 max, recovery advisor, race predictor, stress score, heart rate zones, lactate threshold, vertical oscillation, …
Continue Reading about 194. VO2 Max, Lactate Threshold, and Running Economy →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 194 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, VO2 Max Lactate Threshold and Running Economy.
So there are a lot of metrics available to runners these days, pace, distance, time, VO2 max, recovery advisor, race predictor stress score, heart rate zones, lactate threshold, vertical oscillation, I don’t know what that is, performance condition and on and on. And on.
A lot of these, I don’t think they’re really all that helpful. Some of these are important and you want to pay attention to them. So the whole thing is kind of confusing, and a little bit overwhelming. Especially if you’re trying to understand all the metrics or improve on them.
Okay, so today, I just want to look at a few key metrics. And I want to explain what they mean, and how you might be able to improve them. And the three key metrics you want to pay attention to as a runner are: VO2 max, lactate threshold, and running economy.
And I’m going to explain each of these, what they mean, how they affect you as an endurance athlete, and what you can do to improve them. But first, let me ask you a couple questions here.
What is it that you really want for yourself? Do you want to be healthy? Do you want to be happy? Do you want to lose some weight? How much weight do you want to lose? 30 pounds? 40 pounds? 50 pounds? Do you want to see your abs again? Do you want to PR your next marathon? What is it that you really want for yourself?
I would say most people want to be healthy and they want to be happy and they want to have that six pack abs they want to marathon their PRs. I think this is something that most of us probably would say yes, that we want those things. But not everyone is willing to endure the pain and the struggle required to achieve those things.
People want to lose weight or not, but they’re not willing to go through the struggle of giving up some of their favorite foods. People want the six pack abs, but they don’t want to spend the time that’s required at the gym sweating out those painful workouts.
People want to run faster, but they don’t want to struggle with the speed work the hill repeats the sprint workouts etc. The truth is the struggle is necessary. You can’t accomplish anything worthwhile without some degree of struggle. The struggle is a requirement of change, but most people will not choose it.
Instead, they choose a different kind of struggle. They choose to struggle with remaining stuck where they are. They choose to struggle staying overweight, or the struggle of never becoming a faster runner, or the struggle of never living up to their true potential.
Here’s the truth. Who you are is determined by what you are willing to struggle for. You can choose to struggle with where you are right now. Or choose the struggle that comes with change. So which struggle are you choosing?
If you want some help, want some support getting through the struggle of change, I got you, you can join the Running Lean Coaching Project. This is my unique weight loss coaching program designed specifically for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more. Book a call with me and we’ll talk about getting you through the struggle. Cool.
Also, if you want a little bit of help, just getting started with all this stuff with the right nutrition with strength training with, you know, improving your endurance and your mindset, I put together a free training, it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. All you got to do is go to my website runningleancoaching.com and click on the link that says Free Training.
You’re going to learn how to crush your weight loss goals and your running goals directly from me The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, cool. I spent a lot of time putting this together. It’s sort of the culmination of what I’ve been teaching here on the podcast over the last few years. So definitely check it out, runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. Cool.
Okay, so this week’s topic is VO2 max, lactate threshold and running economy. And the reason I’m talking about this today is because Brent sent in a question. A couple of weeks ago I asked for topics. So if you guys have a topic that you’re particularly interested in, then I would love to answer your question here on the podcast.
You can send me questions about weight loss, about running, nutrition, diet, fueling for running, feeling for training, strength training any of that stuff, find me on Facebook Running Lean Coaching or Instagram @runningleancoach, or you can just shoot me an email at patrick@runningleancoaching.com.
But Brent’s question was about VO2 max specifically. And he didn’t really understand what it was. And he wanted sort of a one on one lesson on VO2 max. You know, what is it? Why is it important for him and how it might improve his running? And I thought, you know, as I was putting together notes for this, I started to really see that there was this correlation between VO2 max, lactate threshold, and then running economy.
And so I wanted to kind of lump these all together into this episode, and you’ll see why they’re all pretty related here. Okay, but there’s some confusion as to each of these and what they are. So I wanted to kind of clear up the confusion today, hopefully, and give you some practical tips on how you can improve these things, so you can become a better runner.
So the reason I want to talk about this today is that we always want to improve as runners. You know, we hear all these terms like VO2 max, lactate threshold, whatever, we don’t understand them. We don’t know what they mean. Is my number good? Is it bad? And should I improve it? What if it’s going down? Like, what does it even mean to my running performance? Does this mean I’m never going to get faster?
So we got to clear up some of this stuff. Okay. I want to help you make sense of these numbers, at least. There’s a bunch of other metrics. Now I just looked at my Garmin and was looking through all these metrics stuff I’ve never even heard of before, like vertical oscillation. And I could probably look it up and figure out what it means. But I was just like, that’s just so funny. Because does that really matter? I don’t know. I don’t know that it really matters.
And like to somebody out there, like, yeah, I want to improve my vertical oscillation. It’s like you do that, bro, you go and prove that vertical oscillation all day long. But for me, I’m looking at some of these key indicators. And I want to get to the bottom line after I talk about all this stuff.
But you know, just understand that some of these matter more than others, and some of this stuff is interesting. You know, I find the data is interesting, but isn’t really all that helpful. Okay. So VO2 max is one of those things where it can be a little bit confusing, a lot of people really just don’t even understand what it is. Okay. So let’s talk about that.
What is VO2 max? So, VO2 max refers to the maximum amount the maximum volume, so V stands for volume, O2 is oxygen, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can absorb and use during exercise. So it is a way to measure your aerobic fitness. Okay.
So if you’re looking to improve aerobic fitness, and you improve your VO2 max, sometimes it’s called your oxygen uptake, then you could see some improvements to your aerobic fitness. Okay?
Obviously, oxygen is important. It’s sort of involved with like breathing, right, but the other part of this is that as you breathe in oxygen, your lungs absorb it and turn that into adenosine triphosphate, which is ATP.
So this is energy, right, so your body will turn oxygen into energy and power your cells to help them release carbon dioxide. And this is great as the more oxygen that you can move, the more that your body can consume, the more effectively your body can generate ATP, right. So that is a good thing.
So having a high VO2 max means that your body is able to oxygenate more cells efficiently right and produce more energy. So your body can handle better aerobic fitness activities like running that require a lot of oxygen uptake.
Okay, so a high VO2 max can be a pretty good predictor of athletic performance, especially if you’re a runner. You can also look at your VO2 max as a benchmark. So you can look at it as a way of improving so wherever your whatever your number is now you can look at that as a way of like okay, I’m maintaining that number which is good over time, but maybe you can improve that a little bit as you go okay.
And it’s not just for athletes. It’s also a way of determining like cardio respiratory fitness and anyone right and medical professionals use this as a way of determining your heart health basically heart and lung health okay. So everyone you know should probably try to increase their cardio respiratory endurance and a higher VO2 max is associated with a lower risk of death which is a good thing in general okay.
So the way they typically measure VO2 max is you go to a metal colo facility like a lab or a hospital, and you’ve got a specialist there, and they hook you up to a metabolic cart, and in a VO2 max test, you put a mask on, a breathing mask, and they want to, they want to see how much oxygen you’re taking in, and how much you know carbon dioxide is going out.
And I don’t know, they measure all this information. And they can figure out how many milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute that you are using. So VO2 max is measured in millimeters of oxygen per kilogram per kilogram of body weight per minute.
Right and so, you know, if you have a VO2 max of 80, then you’re able to use or utilize 80 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. So it’s a good thing, right? There are also other ways of kind of getting a ballpark of what your VO2 max is.
So that’s why when you look at your watch, it is not doing that metabolic cart test, obviously. So it is just guessing basically, and it’s guessing based on a bunch of different numbers. I know some of these watches now have the ability to track not just heart rate, but also pulse ox.
So they can see how much oxygen is actually being utilized in your pulse somehow and so you’re looking at things like that, your weight, your performance levels during running, your heart rate, whether you know your heart rate is improving your age.
So all these different factors can affect your VO2 max. Other factors would be your age, you know, your training performance. Altitude affects your VO2 max and gender. So after about the age of 30, VO2 max typically declines at a rate of 1-2% per year. So just understand that.
So if yours is lower, if you’re older, then your VO2 max is lower than it used to be. You could be just maintaining your fitness but it’s gonna go lower in general for most people. Also training you can actually train and get your VO2 max higher. Some people are just gifted with super high VO2 maxes and some people will never be able to get them super high, but you can improve what you have, which is good. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
Gender affects your VO2 max. So men typically have higher VO2 maxes than women. Men typically have more muscle mass and higher hemoglobin levels which can affect the VO2 max outcomes there. And then altitude affects your VO2 max. So there’s decreased oxygen as you get higher and altitude and this affects your aerobic capacity and decreases your performance. Okay.
So if you’re planning on training at altitude, just think about that. You may not be able to get to your maximum effort and it takes some time to adjust to altitude. But then when you come down from altitude, you’re going to have more oxygen and it’s going to feel amazing, you’ll feel like Superman or woman.
Okay, so those things affect VO2 max. So just understand that there is a way of testing your VO2 max using a field test, okay. And there’s a test that you can do. It’s called a submaximal exercise test. So you can’t really get to that maximum number because you’re not hooked up to a cart in a controlled environment where they’re, you know, pushing you on a treadmill as hard as you can.
But you’ll be able to get a pretty good idea of where you are by doing something like the Cooper test. So the Cooper test is pretty simple. It’s just how far can you run in 12 minutes. So you do a warm up, maybe 20-30 minutes, and then you just run as far as you can in 12 minutes, and you have to push yourself.
And I have not done this one. I’ve done some other max heart rate tests, which is a little bit different. But this seems pretty terrible. It sounds like it would be pretty hard to do. But let’s just say you did this. You run as far as you can in 12 minutes. And then you can put this into an online calculator.
You just take your the distance that you ran, and you put that into an online calculator, but basically it’s saying this that you take the number 36 times the distance that you ran in miles, and then you subtract 11.3 from that and you don’t have to remember this like I said you can go online and do this. But let’s say you ran two miles.
So you take two miles times 36 and then you subtract 11.3. And that gives you 60.7. And that’s your VO2 Max. If you’re able to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes, you take that and multiply it by 36. So 36 times 1.5 minus 11.3 gives you 42.7.
My VO2 max is somewhere around there. It’s like 45. So probably a little over 1.5 miles in 12 minutes, I like I said, I haven’t done the test. But I should do that. So I can share that with you guys.
But, and then you could also look up, I’m not going to go through all this right now because there’s a lot of information out there, but you can look up what good VO2 max ranges are, depending on your age. So I’m in you know, I’m in between the like 50 and 59 age range. And having a 45 VO2 max puts me at like the 90 or 95th percentile. So like the top five or 10% of people out there for my age, you know, I’m in the top five or 10%. So that’s a good sign.
You know, if yours is lower than that, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that you know, your performance sucks or anything like that, it just means maybe you’ve got a little room for improvement there. But you can look up those numbers online, you can just type in VO2 max chart by age, and it’ll give you a list of all the ages and stuff like that and what the different breakdowns are.
So let’s see. So what does all this tell you? So we want to, we’re focused on running improvement, right, we want to improve our running performance overall. So looking at VO2 maxes as one metric, you can see that having the ability to increase your oxygen intake can be good, it can probably help you to become a better runner. Right?
But it does not necessarily mean that just having a higher VO2 max means that you’re going to be a faster runner. Right? The potential is there. But there’s a lot of other factors that influence how you run. And we’re going to get into all that in just a minute. But just understand that VO2 max might tell you how big your aerobic engine is. But it doesn’t tell you what you can do with it.
Okay, so let’s say you have two runners who are training at the same speed, but one runner is using less oxygen than the other at that given pace, the runner who’s using less oxygen to maintain the same pace is running more efficiently right and probably running a faster race.
So you would think the one that’s running faster would have the VO2 max higher but not exactly. So the faster runner can actually have a lower VO2 max and still be the superior runner. And this boils down to how well that runner can effectively use the oxygen that they’re taking in. Just because you can take it in doesn’t mean you can use it properly.
Okay, so one can have a bigger engine. So you could have the increased capacity for more oxygen, but you may have a poor ability to use it because you haven’t trained for it. Right so you can’t produce the energy that somebody else can produce with a lower VO2 max.
Okay, so just understand that it’s not a direct correlation to running performance or speed okay. But if you want to improve your VO2 max you can you want to train at or near or above that VO2 max intensity.
So, when you increase oxygen intake, you’re going to improve the uptake in muscle fibers you’re going to improve how those muscle fibers function, you’re going to increase the ability to slow the buildup of waste products like lactate, which I’m going to talk about in a minute VO2 max training can increase the efficiency of your running and helps you improve your form as well. But running form is something that is separate from your VO2 max. Okay, so just understand that as well.
But training at VO2 max also increases your leg muscle strength that increases power which will help to improve running economy. And that’s really what we’re after here is going to be improving running economy with all of these things here.
So your muscles will become stronger and your muscle fibers will be able to last longer and produce more energy and that’s where you get faster and running becomes easier for you. Okay, so the way you’re going to do this is to train at your VO2 max or near it.
So that would be doing stuff like HIIT workouts, high intensity interval training. So an example that might be 10 by 400 meter intervals at a 5k pace that’s gonna put you close to that VO2 max and intensity.
Okay, tempo runs where you are holding a five or 10k pace for an extended period of time, maybe two miles up to four, six miles, something like that. Hill repeats where you’re finding a relatively steep hill, and then you’re running hard up at something that you can run has to be long enough where you can run up for like two to three minutes.
So if you can hit that two minute mark two and a half minutes, that’s perfect. Run hard up the hill, jog it back down and just repeat that. And all of these workouts, just make sure you’re doing a warm up and cool down, so that you’re not risking getting injured, you never want to, like go sprint from cold states, like you want to make sure you warm up before you do any kind of high intensity workouts like this.
So here’s the thing, knowing your VO2 max is only important if you make it important. And if your training plan like demands that you have to know this and that’s for most of us, we can estimate, it’s really not going to be that important.
But at some point, you can look at this number and see that maybe you’re improving it and that’s a good sign, that means that you’re improving your fitness, okay. But understand that highly trained people, people that have got like very fast runners, they may see their VO2 max go down, even if they’re running harder and faster and running feels great for them.
So it is a marker of cardio respiratory fitness, but it doesn’t necessarily relate to endurance training as a whole, because there’s so many other factors involved here, which I’m going to go over here when I get into these next couple of topics here. But just understand that, you know, it’s a nice measurement, and it’s something that we can look at, but it’s not everything. So just understand that.
Okay, so the next thing I’m going to talk about is lactate threshold. So, lactate threshold is the point during exercise, when lactate builds up in the bloodstream faster than the body can remove it. So this is the border between what we call like low intensity and high intensity work. And that lactate threshold is that divider, okay? So it’s a good predictor of your fitness.
Okay, so higher lactate threshold means that an athlete can run at a higher intensity effort for longer before they hit exhaustion. Right before that lactate becomes your body’s ability to clear it becomes impossible. So the lactate threshold training is where you’re, you know, doing some exercise at a specific intensity range where the blood lactate starts to accumulate, okay.
So if you did 20-30 minutes of sustained tempo effort, something like that, and you hit that lactate threshold intensity, for that 20-30 minutes, that’s going to put you into that place where you’re really pushing the limit of that of that lactate, okay. But this is how you increase your running intensity by pushing that limit.
Okay, so that lactate threshold is a measure of the effort that you can sustain at a steady state for longer periods. So when we exercise we break down glucose to create energy. And part of the process is lactate is produced and hydrogen ions are produced, right, it’s just part of the process, these things hit our bloodstream.
And at slower paces, your body’s able to clear these byproducts pretty easily, that’s called buffering, your body’s able to buffer them. So if you’re doing a steady state workout, and you’re running at a comfortable pace, you can maintain that pace all day, right, you can do 24 hours. You know, people do that all the time, you run 100 miles, you get that 24-28 hours, something like that of a steady state, but it’s a low intensity, your body’s clearing that lactate.
But as you run harder, these byproducts are increasing in your blood faster than you can, you know, flush them out. And so that’s where you start to get into that threshold place. And once they accumulate so much that you can’t flush them out anymore, then you’ve hit your threshold, right and your muscles are gonna start to burn, you’re gonna feel like your blood is on fire, and you have to stop. Right?
You’ve probably felt that before doing some sort of interval training. Okay. So there’s lots of ways of measuring lactate threshold. Sometimes they do this with blood tests. So they will actually have you run intervals and gradually increase the intensity of these intervals.
And then they do like a finger stick or something and they test your blood to see how much lactate is there. And they look at your heart rate and your perceived exertion and and then you can kind of figure out where is that threshold? Or like, where’s the point where, you know, lactate accumulates too much, and you have to stop?
And again, this is one of those things where it’s probably not very practical, you’d have to get some kind of a doctor or scientist or somebody that understands all these things and have the right equipment to be able to test your blood while you’re running. But you can do some tests that are similar to the VO2 max test, you can do your own lactate threshold sort of testing.
And there’s a few different ways that you can do this, like you can do a 30 minute time trial, just to estimate your lactate threshold. And the way you do this workout is by doing this, like on a day where you’re feeling pretty recovered, so you don’t want to do it on a day when you’re super tired, and you go to a track or some flat road, you can even do this on a treadmill, but you you do a little bit of warm up.
And then once you’re warmed up, you start running at the fastest speed that you can maintain for 30 minutes. So this is going to be a 30 minute time shot. So you’re going to maintain a steady pace. So that’s important, you want to maintain the same pace if you can over 30 minutes. So you don’t want to start out too fast or too slow. But you want to maintain the same pace as close as you can to that same pace for 30 minutes.
And then at the 10 minute mark 10 minutes into that run, you check your heart rate, and you have to like write that down or make note of it, okay, and you could probably look at your Garmin data to see what that is. And then you continue running and then you check your heart rate at 30 minutes.
So at 10 minutes, you check your heart rate at 30 minutes, check your heart rate, you take those two numbers, you divide them by two to find the average between the 10 and the 30 minute mark. And that is what is called your lactate threshold heart rate.
Okay, so let’s say your heart rate after 10 minutes is 130. And then at the end, your heart rate is 170. So you take those two numbers divided by two that becomes 150. So 150 becomes your lactate threshold heart rate. So it may not be exactly the number that you know where your lactate is building up, but it’s a pretty good indicator.
Again, this is what we call a submaximal test, because you’re not going to be able to push yourself to the point where you’re getting to that place where lactate builds up so much that you have to stop because that’s a horrible, horrible place to be. But this is a good way of getting a number that you can look at and try to shoot for.
So then you know that that lactate threshold heart rate, let’s say it’s 150, or whatever it is that you know that you want to be working in that zone right there. Okay, so and you can create training zones based off of that number, they’re not the same as max heart rate training zones, just understand that it’s a little bit different.
But then you have something that you can kind of play with. And again, you can go online and look up calculators for lactate threshold heart rate training zones, and they’ll show you how to determine all that stuff. Okay. But here’s what I’m gonna talk about here, how to increase your lactate threshold.
So the way you improve this, because you want to be able to buffer more lactate. So you got to be doing your training at or above that lactate threshold pace or that effort level, or that heart rate. Okay.
So one thing that’s great about lactate threshold is that you can improve this over time with training. Much like you can improve the VO2 max with the type of training that you do, okay. And there’s a couple of different ways you can do this. One is steady state training. And then the other one is this lactate threshold training that you want to do a couple times a week.
So steady state aerobic training is where you’re just, you know, running at the same pace for an extended period of time. And this is great because it helps to improve lactate clearance in general and buffering, okay.
The lactate threshold training is where you’re going to be pushing yourself into those higher intensities, okay, so you don’t want to do these too frequently. And you got to keep them pretty short. So maximum might be 20-30 minutes, something like that. But the goal with these lactate threshold training runs is to keep your pace steady throughout the run.
So you want to meet that heart rate goal and the pace goal and you want to be consistent with that okay, so lactate training is generally below your race pace, but it should be done comfortably hard, like it should be challenging, but not maximal intensity like the VO2 max training.
Okay, this is where the pace calculators are handy since they can help you determine what pace you’re going to be running at the different lactate threshold numbers that that we all have, right? So what does this tell you about your whole performance and speed and your ability to improve and all that stuff?
Well, much like VO2 max lactate threshold is important. It’s actually I think it’s a great number to know and then to be able to improve. But it’s not the whole story. Right? It’ll help you to run faster. And at higher intensities. It might be a better indicator of overall running performance.
But I think the one thing that we really want to look at and it’s a little more nefarious here, just because it’s tough to like really dial this in, but it’s it’s running economy. Okay. So running, running economy is one of the cornerstones of physiological performance and distance running. Okay, along with lactate threshold, and VO2 max.
And the latter two are the ones that did get all the attention because it’s just a number you can look at. You know, lactate threshold is the measure of the effort that you can sustain at a steady state for longer periods. VO2 max is a measure of the total amount of oxygen you can take in and then you write running isn’t just about oxygen, though.
It’s not just about, you know, a threshold number or a certain pace, right. So when I talk about running economy, we’re talking about a whole range of factors that influence your running like your running form, your technique, your strength, your training, balance, all these other things.
So typically, when people look at running economy, though, if you go online and start doing some research on running an economy, they kind of lump it in there with VO2 max and the way they measure it is using the same equipment that they use to measure VO2 max.
So you put on this gas analyzer you put a mask on, you run on a treadmill, that I’m using this sort of broader definition of running an economy as a combination of VO2 max, lactate threshold, power, speed, strength, endurance running form, all of these things are more important as a whole to look at.
So this is more of a holistic look and improving your running performance than just looking at these two numbers, these two metrics that are, frankly, kind of confusing for some people, even though I just explained all that stuff, you might be still scratching your head a little bit. And thinking like, I don’t understand this stuff. It’s okay. You are not alone, for sure. Okay.
So I like that broader definition. I like just looking at running economy as your overall running performance and all the things that go into affecting that. Okay, so let’s just talk about, like how we can improve this running economy?
How do we improve that, one thing that’s going to help improve this a lot is just getting stronger. Right? We want to focus on strength work. And I talk to my clients about this every single day, the importance of strength training for runners, if you want to improve your body composition, like diet is going to be probably the number one driver there. But the number two driver is going to be strength.
If you want to improve your running, if you want to get faster or be able to run longer, strength training is going to get you there. It’s so, so important. In fact, they did a study in the Journal of Applied Physiology. And it showed that a group of runners replaced 32% of their running training with explosive strength training. And they improve their 5k times without any changes to their VO2 max.
So they were running less but they just did more strength training and they were able to improve their running performance. They’re running 5k times and their VO2 max stayed the same. So you can see that VO2 max isn’t all that great of an indicator, right?
But strength training is going to be one of the best things you can do for yourself. Like I said, it helps you improve fat burning helps to improve your ability to run faster. It helps you to run longer, because you’re going to be able to run longer distances before your muscles fatigue, it’s going to help you to prevent injury. So overall running economy is going to be improved by getting stronger.
Another factor is the type of strength training that you’re doing. So part of the strength training would be lifting weights and lifting heavier weights to build stronger muscles. But another form of strength training would be to do something like plyometrics and jumping exercises, hopping exercises, those kinds of things that help improve tendons and ligaments.
So this is going to improve flexion, it’s going to approve the elasticity of your tendons and ligaments. And so you’ll have a little bit more like spring in your step. All right. And they’ve done some studies where they showed that runners who performed five minutes of a double legged hop exercise, so they just like jumped up and down, saw improvements in the running economy at higher speeds.
So just doing something as simple as that can help improve your running economy as well. So stuff like Plyometrics, super important for runners. It’s one of those things, you can’t really improve tendons and ligaments through strength training alone, that does help, it takes a long time to get there to improve those things. But doing the plyometrics will help speed that process up a little bit.
Another way that you can improve running economy is just working at your goal, race pace. So the more you train, at your goal, race pace, the stronger your body’s going to be at that pace, and you’re just going to become more economical at that pace. Right, it’s pretty simple to just say like, hey, if you run a, you know, nine minute pace for a marathon, then you got to do a lot of training, a big volume of training at that nine minute pace.
And the more you do that, the more efficient, you’re going to be at that nine minute pace, right. So don’t be afraid to spend some time doing that kind of work and working at that goal, pace, right. Also, training volume is going to help to improve your running economy and the frequency of your training.
Like we want to make sure you’re running enough to where you are improving your volume, increasing your volume, and maybe your your frequency of running, but you got to make sure you’re doing in a way that isn’t too much, right, because if you increase your overall volume, a lot of people do that.
And they end up getting injured because they’re running too much too often. So you got to build that strong aerobic engine and volume will help you to do that. But then you got to be careful of the frequency and be careful of not, you know, going too fast or too adding too much volume too soon. Because that’s how you risk improvement.
Another way of improving your running economy is doing these interval workouts that I’ve mentioned, you know, the HIIT workouts, the high intensity interval training, and running faster, because when you run faster, you improve all these metrics, but you also improve your running form.
It’s really hard to run with terrible form when you’re sprinting. Or if you’re running hard up the hill, you’re naturally going to have better running form and better running form means that you’re improving your running economy there as well. Right. So there are a number of factors that affect your running economy, including VO2 max, including lactate threshold.
I hope you understand that I know this can all be a little bit confusing to the average runner, right. But I hope you understand now that how, you know just trying to improve one of these metrics may not be really worth it, or may cause a little too much stress or condition for whatever.
If it was me, I would focus on improving overall as a runner, I would look at my whole running economy in general. Is your effort level at a certain pace improving? Yes or no? Is your pace for that 5k 10k half marathon, whatever distance you’re using as a benchmark, is that improving? Does running generally feel easier? Or is running feeling hard? Or are you recovering properly from one workout so that you’re able to do the next workout to your full potential?
These are better questions to ask and better ways of looking at how you’re improving. I mean, the numbers are interesting, and there’s a lot of good data you can get from there. And improving VO2 max and improving lactate threshold will improve running economy as well. But just understand that there’s a bigger picture we want to be looking at here. Okay.
All right. I hope you guys got something out of this episode today. And as always, if you’re looking for some help with any of this stuff, we can talk about personal coaching, just head over to runningleancoaching.com click on Work With Me. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you are not engaging in some form of consistent, intentional strength training, you are leaving a LOT on the table. This is another episode I’m doing in my “Back to Basics” …
Continue Reading about 129. Back to Basics: The Importance of Strength Training for Runners →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 129 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, another in My Back to Basics series: the importance of strength training for runners. So if you’re a runner, and you’re not engaging in some sort of consistent intentional strength training, I’m just going to tell you right now you’re leaving a lot on the table.
So this is another episode I’m doing in my Back to Basics series, where I’m talking about the basics of good health: improved fitness, improved running, and really becoming your healthiest and most badass self. Okay, so today is all about the importance of strength training for runners.
To be honest, most runners that I talked to are not doing any form of strength training, like at all, or they’re not doing it properly. So in this episode, I’m gonna go over why strength training is so important. If you’re a runner, how it can help you to improve your running, how we can help you to lose weight. And all the reasons I believe that strength training is actually one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your overall health and fitness. So that’s all coming up here.
And I just wanted to let you guys know that this whole month, this month of June, is mastering your mindset month over in the Running Lean coaching project. The Running Lean coaching project is my coaching program. And this is our it’s it combines the best of my group program and one on one coaching with me, we put together a personalized plan that works for you, you get training, you get all the information you need, you’ll learn exactly what to do, how to improve your nutrition, how to take control of your food choices, how to lose weight and keep it off permanently, how to build new habits, how to get stronger, how to improve your strength, your endurance, how to fix your mindset.
This whole month, mindset is one of the most important things you can do. This shifting your mindset is one of the most important things you can do to take control of your health and fitness, you cannot succeed and cannot make these changes last, if you don’t have the right mindset. So we’re spending the whole month of June talking about how to improve your mindset. And don’t worry, I know it’s the middle of the month. But if you want to join us, you can.
And all the calls that we do and all the training I’ve been doing around mindset this month, they’re all recorded, and they’re all archived on to a private podcast feed that you can listen to, or you can watch the replays of the Zoom calls, you can watch the videos as well. So you won’t really miss out on anything.
So I just want you to know that anytime you hear me talking about what we’re doing in the current month, and every month, we pick a different theme and sort of just do a deep dive into that theme, you’re not really going to miss out on anything if you join in the first or second week or the middle of the month, okay. And then you can actually have access to all the back back months of trainings that we’ve done.
So if you’re ever interested in really taking control of your health and fitness for good, and understanding how to make these changes last permanently, then join us over in the Running Lean coaching project. There is an application process. This isn’t for everyone. And I want to make sure that we get on the same page before you jump into the program because I’m interested in working with people who are committed and who have what it takes, I think to succeed you so you have to have this commitment level, you have to sort of go all in on yourself in order to be successful with changing your health and fitness like this. So I want you to consider that. So we jump on a call and we talk about your goals and see if this program is right for you or not.
So if you’re interested in applying, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply We’ll jump on a quick zoom call you and I will have a conversation and see if this is good fit cool. But we’d love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. And especially for this month where we’re talking all about mindset that’s runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out your application and we’ll jump on and a zoom call and see if this is right for you.
Okay, another episode today’s another episode in our Back to Basics series. This is where I’m just kind of going over some things I may have talked about in the past. You know, maybe I’ve updated some of the information that today’s a good example of that I’ve got some updated information about strength training for you guys and about why it’s so important, especially for runners, especially if you’re somebody who’s trying to lose weight, especially if you’re somebody who wants to improve your health and fitness, I know you do. If you’re listening to this podcast, you want to become more, you want to become the most badass version of yourself. I know you.
So, you know, this is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Absolutely. People talk about, you know, how great running is for you. And I know I’m a runner, this shows for runners, I coach runners running is my life. It’s what I do. But I’m going to say something that may surprise you. I think strength training is more powerful and more important for you than running. Running is also important. Running is also important, okay.
But I think building strength is going to have ramifications that last longer, and will help improve your fitness in ways that I’m gonna explain today. So I hope you kind of agree with me by the end of this episode, how important strength training is for you.
But it can be more powerful and more effective on your overall health and fitness than running can be. Okay, I know it sounds crazy, right? But I believe it’s true.
So just to give you an idea of like, what I teach in my coaching program, there’s like four main pillars that I talk about in my program. And they are nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset. And all four are required. All four are important for different reasons. Nutrition, obviously, if you’re eating the wrong diet, and no amount of running is going to fix that no amount of strength training can really undo that. Okay, so nutrition I’m going to say is number one, and then I would put strength as number two.
And then endurance would be number three, you know, we need to build a strong cardiovascular system. So you know, running, run, walk, or whatever you like to do. For endurance, some people are cyclists, awesome rowers, swimmers, whatever you’re into from an endurance mindset. And endurance standpoint is awesome, do that. Do that.
And then underlying everything is mindset. Mindset is like, sort of the foundation that makes everything else possible without the right mindset. All this stuff is really hard to do. Okay, but armed with the right mindset, shifting your mindset, changing your mindset for the better, will make huge improvements, all these things you think are impossible for you become possible with the right mindset. Okay, so all four of these elements are required to be a fit, healthy, happy human being, you have to have all four, nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset.
And today, we’re gonna be talking about strength. We’re going to talk all about why it’s important. And I don’t want you to skip this. It’s probably the most important. Okay, next to nutrition. All right.
So the problem I see with a lot of runners is that they just don’t do any kind of intentional strength training, or the strength training they do is, is not they’re not doing it, right. I hate to say that. But I’m just going to tell you right now that there’s kind of like two different ways to do strength training.
There’s one where you’re intentionally building muscle. And there’s another way where you’re basically it’s more like a cardio workout. Right? You’ve seen this like Orangetheory, and, you know, certain, you know, HIIT classes maybe, or yoga, like power yoga and things like that. These are, these are great, I love all that stuff. They’re all good for you. But a lot of times these workouts tend to be more cardio based.
And that’s fine. But as runners do, we really need to be engaging in more cardio. It’s not a bad thing. Cross training is great. I love it. You know, if you’re a runner and all you’re doing is running, I think that can be detrimental after some time. You know, you start to get overuse injuries and things like that. So engaging in some other types of cardio activities like cycling or swimming. Great, awesome stuff to do.
But don’t pretend like what you’re doing is strength training because a lot of times it’s not, you know. So, bodyweight isn’t really enough sometimes, and I’m gonna get into that in just a minute. But we want to be intentional about building strength and building muscle.
And if you’re a runner and you’re not doing this, you are leaving a lot on the table, you’re not going to be as efficient as a runner, you’re not going to be as efficient as a fat burner, you’re not going to lose weight, if that’s something you’re interested in as effectively as you could be if you’re doing some intentional strength training. So running is just not enough on its own.
There’s three main systems that runners need, and they need to improve and need to work on. And that is endurance, strength and explosive power.
So most long distance runners especially we get into marathon runners, or ultra marathoners, they just focus on endurance. And that’s it. So again, you’re just leaving a lot on the table, you’re leaving out two very important systems that you should be improving in order to make writing that much better for you. Okay. So endurance is great, we want to build our endurance, but you’re leaving a lot on the table, if that’s all you’re working on.
Now, I get some times, you’re training for 100 miler, and, you know, that might be where you’re gonna focus on the long, slow distance, and totally make sense. But incorporating strength and explosive power into your training cycle, and into your regular workouts is going to make that endurance even better, you’re going to improve your endurance, because you’re improving these other systems.
Think about it like this, we need all three systems to function properly, to be at our best, to be at our strongest. And if you’re only working on one of them, endurance, for example, you’re just gonna leave out a lot of potential for improvement, you know, running improvement, performance improvement, power output, even endurance, like, just if you just work on endurance, and that’s all you’re working on, but you’re not getting stronger, you actually are not going to improve your endurance the way you could be, if you were if you were doing some intentional strength training, okay.
So, you know, like to build endurance, you just want to run more, you keep increasing your distance, you keep increasing the time you’re out there running, you know, to build explosive power, you can do things like HIIT training, plyometric exercises, stuff like that. And then to build strength, we have to lift weights, we have to have some sort of resistance.
Okay, so bodyweight usually isn’t enough. So we need to have some more resistance, some body weight can be fine, especially at the beginning. And there’s some exercises where bodyweight is plenty. But really, to work your entire body, you have to be overloading muscles. And so I’ll explain more about that in a second here.
But just understand that we need all three of these systems functioning properly, endurance, strength, and explosive power. And if you do have all those things, firing on all cylinders, so to speak, you’re going to be at your best, right, you’re going to be much more, you’re going to be much stronger and much more powerful as a runner, and a healthier human being overall.
So some of the things I see as a result of people not doing regular resistance training, regular strength training, is they have reduced power output. So they cannot run as hard, or as intense, or as fast as they want to, their running performance is impaired. Regular strength training will fix this. People that don’t engage in regular strength training, especially runners are more prone to injury.
You have a reduced ability to burn fat, if you’re not engaging in regular strength training, your metabolism is actually slower than if you were doing some regular strength training. And there’s just this overall kind of lack of energy that happens, that I see in a lot of people who aren’t engaging in regular strength training. Okay. So just understand that some of the negative things, and I’m gonna talk about how we fix these things right now, right.
But the important thing I want you to understand here is that we have to be engaging in regular consistent resistance training of some sort. And when I say resistance training, there has to be some sort of resistance in order for you to overload your muscles. So that can be free weights, it can be machines at the gym, sometimes it’s bodyweight, it could be those bands that you hook into a doorway or something like that.
I’ve got a set of those bands that I take with me on vacation. If I can’t get to a gym with actual weights, and they work really well. They work really well to do all kinds of resistance exercise, we just have to be, we have to push ourselves to the point of failure. muscle failure is what we’re looking for here. Okay.
So let’s talk about why strength training is so important for runners and what it does for you like, what are the benefits? Why would we want to be engaging in regular strength training? So one of the most important ones that I like to talk to, especially with the people that I work with who a lot of times they’re trying to lose weight, is that your strength training will play a big role in helping you to lose weight.
So when you are carrying around more muscle mass, when you actually have more muscles, your metabolism speeds up, you can actually burn more calories, and therefore burn more fat when you’re carrying around more muscle. So one of the best things you can do to lose weight and improve your body composition, is to do regular strength training. So your muscles require more energy than fat does.
So muscle requires more energy to be on your body than fat does, that doesn’t require a whole lot of energy for your body to carry it around. But muscle does. And so your metabolism will actually be faster if you’re doing regular strength training, and you’re building some muscle. So just understand that if you’re trying to lose weight, like if that’s a goal of yours, and you’re not doing regular strength training, it’s just going to take longer.
Okay, so don’t you want it to go faster? Yeah, I know you do. Another benefit of strength training is that it helps you to get fat adapted and helps you to stay fat adapted. So this whole idea of speeding up your metabolism helps to improve fat burning, it speeds up the fat adaptation process as well.
So if you want to get fat adapted, which is where we’re transitioning our body from being primarily sugar burners to being primarily fat burners, then regular strength training is going to help speed that process up, and it’s going to help you to stay there again, your metabolism is faster, you’re burning more fat in general, then you can stay fat adapted, if you’re doing regular strength training, it’s a much, it’s a much better way to stay fat adapted, and it’s really powerful. And if you can keep your metabolism operating faster, then you keep the engine burning hotter, basically, when you have more muscle on your body, okay, so it’ll help you to get fat adapted and help you to stay fat adapted.
Another benefit of strength training, especially for runners is that, you know, when you, when you build strength, you’re increasing the strength of your muscles, but you’re also increasing the strength of your connective tissues. So ligaments and tendons, this will help protect joints around things like your knees, and your ankles and your hips.
And if you’re a runner who’s prone to injury, and you want to know, like one of the best things you can do to help prevent injury in the future, regular strength training is going to do that for you. So having stronger muscles, having stronger connective tissues, having stronger joints will mean that you are you have a less reduced risk of injury. Right? So this is something that I think is very important, especially as we get older, okay.
Which brings me to another important benefit of strength training, which is it helps to increase bone density. So, bone density is one of those things that people think, oh, you know, you just need to, like, take calcium supplements or something and, and there’s actually some sort of controversy around that and how taking too much calcium can actually diminish bone density.
So it’s better to do something like strength training to improve bone density. So as we get older, one of the most common issues with people is that they lose muscle mass, and they lose bone density. And then they you know, as they get older, they do things like fall down. And when you fall down and you break a hip or something like that, you become sedentary and then your overall health and fitness declines very rapidly at that point.
This is one of the most common causes of death in the elderly is complications from falls, that can be prevented with regular strength training, just stay strong. I want to be like 101 years old and still be able to like, go for a run, lift weights, I want to be in good shape. So that’s my goal. I don’t want to fall down and break a hip or break a leg or something like that. Okay. So, if you’re an endurance athlete, and you’re getting a little bit older, you’re over 40 or whatever. You especially will benefit from strength training, because your strength declines faster than your endurance as you get older.
So you may still be able to run longer, but you could be breaking yourself down. Remember that running is catabolic. Running kind of breaks you down. And one of the best ways to reverse this or prevent this from happening is to maintain muscle strength.
I am currently 55 years old, and I have never been stronger in my life. And I just started this a few years ago, this very intentional way of strength training that I teach to my clients that is very effective. And if you engage in regular strength training, it doesn’t matter how old you are, you can improve, you can make improvements, you can become stronger. And you should be doing some sort of regular strength training, it doesn’t matter how old you are, okay, but strength training will help increase bone density and help you to kind of prevent aging, it’s like magic. Another benefit of strength training is that it helps to improve your overall energy. So consistent anaerobic exercise, like sprinting or intense weightlifting, you know, lifting heavier weights, this is going to give you more energy and give you more energy for your next bout of intense physical activity.
So this is actually going to improve your overall athletic ability, this isn’t going to improve your overall athletic performance. And this is going to improve your overall energy levels. So doing some sort of consistent, anaerobic type of exercise, like strength training, will help you to have more energy just throughout the day.
Another important aspect of strength training for runners is that if you want to improve your speed, if you want to become a faster runner, you need to be doing some regular strength training, there’s no better way to get faster. And then to build stronger muscles. When you start to build stronger muscles and you lose the fat weight and gain some muscle weight, you improve your power to weight ratio, so you have more power on a smaller frame. That means that you can run faster, you have more power output at that point.
So this is about body composition. This is about losing fat weight, gaining muscle weight, and it will help to improve your running performance, you can run faster for longer, okay. And that brings me to my next point, which is improving endurance. So being being stronger means you have more long lasting energy, you can run further, you can run longer distances and longer amounts of time, you can be out there running, because you have stronger muscles, right, you’re not going to break down and hit the wall, like you would if you were super weak, you know. So stronger muscles means you can sustain running for longer periods of time.
And it also has to do with increasing your lactate threshold. So regular strength training will help to improve your lactate threshold, increase your lactate threshold. So that means you’re just shuttling more lactate out of the bloodstream. So you’ll be able to work out harder and more intensely for longer periods. Right. So again, this is about helping to improve performance in general helping to improve speed, power, output and endurance. So all of that gets improved when you’re engaging in regular strength training.
Then there’s a couple of benefits of strength training that I thought were interesting. For example, regular strength training can help you fight depression, improve your mood. So regular strength training releases these feel good hormones and neurotransmitters. And we call this your daily dose. So its dose stands for dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, D O S E. And the effect of these feel good hormones can last for, depending on the person, up to 12 to 24 hours.
So if you’re doing regular strength training, you’re doing regular workouts every day, every other day, whatever. You are just going to be a happier human being all around, you’re going to be nicer to be around, you’re going to be in an elevated mood. And so if you’re somebody that has struggled with some, you know, mental health issues, or maybe a little bit of depression, anxiety, that kind of thing. I know this was me.
Years ago, I really struggled with some anxiety issues and depression. And running regularly and doing regular strength training was one of the things that really pulled me out of that, and really helped me to stay above that. And, you know, I still had some of those issues. It’s not like it’s going to fix everything, I had to do some, you know, some counseling and therapy and things like that, which I think is so, so important.
But this regular release of these feel good hormones, just puts you in a little bit of a better mood, and it lasts for a while. And so this is one of the reasons why I continue to do regular exercise and regular, intense exercise. So when I go to the gym, and I lift weights, it’s a hard workout. When I go run, I usually do one of two things, I do super hard, fast runs, I did some sprints the other day, super hard, super hard. And then today, I did a very slow, easy run.
And I kind of balanced the two out, you know, so I’m not always just doing some medium hard runs, I’ve kind of balanced them out with some pretty intense runs, that release more of these feel good hormones, regular strength training, that can be pretty intense to release, these feel good hormones, and I’m just in a better mood all the time, I’m a lot nicer to be around when I’m exercising regularly. I like myself better and other people like me better.
And another thing I thought was interesting was that regular strength training can help reduce risk for some diseases. They’ve done some studies that show that increasing muscle in your body, increasing bone density can actually help reduce the risk for diabetes and heart disease. So if you’re somebody that maybe has a family history of these kinds of things, then regular strength training can be a factor to help to reduce the risk of some of these things. Obviously, your diet is gonna play a factor into this.
Genetics to some point. Don’t smoke cigarettes, that kind of thing, right? You don’t smoke cigarettes, right? I used to smoke cigarettes, I can’t believe I did that today, I look back on that and go like, that was dumb, right? I smoked for like 15 years. Terrible. Kids don’t smoke cigarettes. Okay, stay away from cigarettes.
Alright, now I want to talk a little bit about what it means to do strength training and like kind of how we do it and how we shouldn’t do it. So I was kind of mentioning this earlier, but we want to make sure that we are intentional about building strength.
So when I say that what I mean is like, we don’t want these workouts to just be another cardio workout. And I see too many people, especially runners who they’re like, well, you know, I just need to lift really light weights and do a million reps, you know, because that’s how you get toned. And really, it doesn’t really work that way.
In order to build strength, you have to create an overload in the muscles that you want to build strength in. And we should be working out the whole body here. Okay, so a whole body workout is what we’re talking about here. Tip to toe.
So when you do intentional strength training, you should be overloading the muscle group you’re working out. And this is a principle in strength training called progressive overload. So as you lift the weight, and you get to rep number 12, or 15, whatever it is, and you can no longer lift that weight, even though you’re trying with all your might. And it’s hard and it hurts and you’re like I can’t do it.
That’s overload, you have overloaded that muscle, you can no longer lift that weight. If you could still do another 20 or 30 reps, you’re not there, you’re not going to have an adaptive response. When you overload the muscle, the muscle responds by then, growing stronger, there’s an adaptive response to that overload.
Right? So what we don’t want to do as runners is more cardio, you don’t really need to be doing more cardio, most runners do plenty of cardio. So make your strength workouts very intentional about building strength and don’t make them about more cardio.
So we got to overload the muscle. And we want to do that in a very intentional way with some sort of resistance. So how much resistance Well, studies have shown that light weights will not create the overload required for your muscles to have that adaptive response and grow and get stronger.
So what you want to be doing is lifting heavy and I know what people are thinking you’re like, Oh, but I don’t want to become some big giant bodybuilder. And I’m just gonna tell you right now, do not worry about that. So many people tell me this, they’re like, oh, I’m not gonna I don’t want to lift weights because I don’t want to be all big and jacked. You know? I will tell you right now that to become big and jacked takes so long and it is so hard to do.
Go tell a bodybuilder that you know you’re not going to lift weights because you don’t want to get jacked like them. And they will just laugh in your face, they’ll just be like, yeah, whatever, don’t worry about it, you got to eat a ton more food, you got to be intentional about taking certain supplements, you got to, like work out really intentionally, really hard, like, five, six days a week at the gym.
If you want to get jacked, you can, but it’s going to require a lot of work, a lot of, lot of work. And I’m just going to tell you as a runner, if you’re a long distance runner, right there is going to be, that’s going to kind of be working against you a little bit. Because running, like I said, is catabolic, it breaks you down, running can break down muscle.
So in order to build muscle, you got to be pretty intentional about strength training, do not worry about getting huge. Do not worry about getting muscle bound, it’s just not going to happen. Okay, so lift heavy weights, lift weights heavy enough to create that overload, that’s what’s going to get you there, that’s what’s going to create the adaptive response and get you stronger, we’re not in you know, if you want to see some muscle on you, that’s fine, you can do that you can do that.
You don’t worry about getting huge. More importantly, is getting stronger, becoming a stronger human being. That’s what we’re really after here. So sometimes you’ll see some of those muscles, sometimes you won’t, it’s okay. But if you’re working, if you’re working out properly, you will get stronger. Now this is what’s going to create all these benefits that I talked about here.
When I say you’re going to gain muscle, I mean, you might gain a few pounds of muscle, you probably won’t even see it on the outside of your skin, you might even see bulging muscles coming out, especially women, if you don’t want that look, don’t worry, you won’t get that look. Okay.
It’s very hard to do that, it’s very hard to get these big jacked muscles, I’m trying to do that right now. And as a 55 year old runner, it’s challenging, it’s taking me a lot of effort to like actually build some bigger arms and bigger chest and things like that. So just know that is very hard to do. Don’t worry about it.
So lift heavy, make sure you’re doing some sort of intentional strength training twice a week, and you should be doing a full body workout twice a week, this is what’s going to improve your strength and you know, help to build muscle, once a week is enough, if you just want to maintain where you are. But twice a week, if you want to build, you know, if you’re doing it three or four times a week, that’s fine, too. But twice a week is all that’s really required if you want to build muscle, okay, and then you want to work all your muscle groups.
This isn’t about like just working your arms or just your legs, you know, we want to work the entire muscle groups, all the muscle groups in your body and your entire body from top to bottom. And we work these in order from largest muscle groups to smallest and yes, you’re going to do legs too. Just because you’re a runner, doesn’t mean you get to skip leg day.
It’s important that we work all the muscles and that you’re, you’re improving strength in all areas of your body, especially your legs. So runners will tell me this all the time. They’re like, well, I just don’t do legs because I run so much. So I don’t really need to do legs. You absolutely need to do legs.
Yeah, you might have pretty strong legs right now. But what if you could improve that what I know it would be amazing, wouldn’t it? And think about this. We store glycogen in our muscles. Even if you’re a low carb runner or a fat adapted runner and you’re really efficient at burning fat, you still need glycogen in your muscles for your muscles to operate.
And you get all that you need from you know, your liver like producing glycogen for you don’t need to eat a bunch of gels and stuff like that. But just know that glycogen is stored in your muscles. The biggest muscles in your body that store the most glycogen are like your legs, your quads, really. So if you have larger quads, you can store more glycogen, just something to think about as you’re considering whether or not you want to build muscle. Okay.
So all these reasons I just mentioned, are why I think it’s so important that if you’re a runner, and especially if you’re somebody who wants to improve their overall strength and overall health and fitness and you want to become your most badass self, you cannot skip strength training, you got to do it intentionally. You gotta do it consistently. And you gotta do it in a way that will help to make you stronger, and build muscle. Okay.
And if you’re interested in getting some help with all of this and you want to become a stronger leaner runner, you want to lose weight. You want to do it in a way that supports your running and you want to do it in a way where you get stronger as well as leaner then join us in the Running Lean coaching project.
I’d love to have you in the program, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply And as always, I love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon
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Jen Wright is a co-founder of Real Human Performance here in Cincinnati. Jen specializes in stress management, performance optimization, and mind-body resilience training. She spent 18 years in health …
Continue Reading about 31. Jen Wright on How to Breathe for Long-Distance Running →
Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 31 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and the weight loss coach for runners. And I’m on a mission to help you eat real food, lose weight, look better, feel better, run lighter, run longer, and run faster than ever before. And today, I’ve got an awesome interview with Jen Wright.
And if you’re not familiar with who Jen is, you will be by the end of this episode. But here’s a little bio. Jen is co founder of real human performance here in Cincinnati. And she specializes in things like stress management, performance, optimization, mind-body resilience training, and she spent 18 years in Health and Human performances as a science and tech advisor with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Defense Sciences Office and then later as a deputy at the Air Force Research Laboratory in the human performance wing. She’s kind of a big deal.
For the past 10 years she has been working as a post traumatic growth coach and mind-body researcher working in Trauma Recovery, addiction recovery and with other growth minded humans that value things like personal development. Jen believes in the human potential, and she believes that each of us deserves to learn how to self regulate. It’s a really cool interview, stick around for just a minute. Get to that in just a minute here.
Just a reminder that our next six week intensive weight loss masterclass for runners begins Monday, August 3, that’s just a few days from now, if you’re listening to this on Friday, when this comes out, you will learn how to become a fat-adapted runner, you will learn how to control your hunger so you don’t feel deprived.
Because you can’t feel hungry and deprived and lose weight, that doesn’t work. You will learn how to control your hormones, especially insulin to get your body into that optimal fat burning mode. You’re going to learn how to do intermittent fasting combined with low carbohydrate, high fat so that it’s like rocket fuel for your weight loss and for your energy.
You’re gonna learn the benefits of training in a fasted state and how to do it properly. You’re gonna learn how to fuel your body while you’re training while you’re doing your long runs and how to properly fuel for those events. And those longer events and races.
You’re gonna learn how to break through weight loss plateaus so that you’ll, you’ll be able to dial in your exact weight, your natural weight for good. You’re gonna learn how to break the emotional eating habit, how to incorporate strength training and explosive workouts into your training because let’s face it, most runners, we tend to just stay in that chronic cardio zone you got to break out of that.
You’re gonna learn how to lose weight, you’ll feel better, you’ll have more energy, you’ll enjoy eating again, you’ll learn how to eat real food. And you’ll run leaner, stronger, faster and longer. Most importantly, though, you’ll have the mindset you need to be able to sustain this for, for life.
Okay, this isn’t a temporary thing. It’s not a diet. We’re changing our lifestyles. We’ll teach you exactly how to do all that. And I wanted to share a quick story with you guys. Here’s a former student of this masterclass Amy, and she really recently posted in our Facebook group, some before and after pictures a little bit about her experience. And if you’re not in the Facebook group, I would encourage you to go check it out. Just search Facebook for the Running Lean community and join the group. It’s fun, it’s fun in the group. But here’s what Amy had to say.
She said, “A couple years ago, my running was struggling. I was slow and felt weighed down. My heart rate was over 200 most days while running, which is high. I was a mess. Fast forward a year to meeting Patrick who introduced me to a new way of eating and making me realize what my body really needs. Not just all pounding the pavement, but in my everyday life. I could never imagine cutting all the crap out and I never would have guessed eating high fat would help me be leaner faster and a fat burning machine or that my running would improve. Well, this past Saturday I ran a half marathon as a training run for my Marine Corps Marathon this October and since April I’ve cut out all the stuff my body doesn’t quote unquote need so no goos, no chews, and certainly no carbs that weighed me down from my run. I use a little bit of Gatorade diluted in water for hydration, but that was it. My running was effortless. I’m down over 30 pounds, and I’ve shaved off over a minute per mile. I’m feeling lean, and pretty badass these days.”
Amy, I am so proud of you. You’re so awesome. You’re badass, you totally are badass. And here’s the difference. You can do this if I can do this. If she can do it, you can do it. The only difference is Amy made a commitment. She made a commitment to make some big changes. Was it easy? No, it was challenging.
But I helped her get through all that challenge, all the tough stuff. Now, she’s on the other side of that. And she’s a lean, mean fat burning running machine. And if you want results like this, join us in our next master class starts Monday August 3, just go to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass to apply.
So here’s what Jen and I were talking about. We talk about how to breathe as a runner, which is, surprisingly, something I get a lot. It’s a question I get a lot from people, how do I breathe as I run? Breathing is hard. So we talked about that we talked about using breath as a way of releasing relieving stress.
By the way, Jen is a breathwork expert. She’s amazing. She’s so knowledgeable when it comes to breathing. So we kind of talk a lot about that today. She talks about using breath to promote mindful running. So how to get into that flow state. We talked about that a little bit. We talked about belly breathing versus chest breathing, like which is better, which is more recommended.
There seems to be some, you know, debate out there about this. We talked about how to get rid of side dishes and a bunch of other stuff. Jen is amazing. She’s an amazing human. She’s doing amazing work. She’s transforming lives. So I’m gonna stop talking. Let’s get into this interview.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay, today, I am talking to Jen right. Jen is co founder and co owner of real human performance here in Cincinnati. And today, we’re going to be talking about breathing, which is something we should all be doing, right. Thankfully, we already are.
But Jen is an expert when it comes to breathwork and breathing, and always has a lot of amazing, cool stuff to share. So Jen, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about a little bit more about what you do.
Jen Wright
Yeah, thanks for the introduction for having me, Patrick, you one thing that wrath is something that we all have in common. And once we harness this literal energy potential, the breath for fuel for waste removal for self regulation, and just for overall efficiencies, we live with a completely different experience, a real, richer experience. So I’m excited to talk with you today and share what we know about breath and how it can literally shift us at the cellular level.
Patrick McGilvray
So you just mentioned something and I wasn’t going to talk about this. But now I have to ask it. So you mentioned like waste removal, though. You said something I heard recently, tell me if this is true, is that when we burn fat when we burn body fat, most of that gets eliminated from our body through our breath. Is that correct?
Jen Wright
So breath, that exhaled breath condensates one way you know our muscles when they’re working, whether it’s running or just for moving our muscles excrete CO2. And so it’s our job to then help that removal process when we’re high performers, especially when endurance athletes that just enjoy running, enjoy moving, that CO2 comes back to our lungs.
And it’s only then that the brain gets the signals that we need to breathe more to increase our oxygen intake. Lymph, the lymph itself, the lymphatic fluid is what carries away waste. It’s our waste removal system in our body. And there are two ways that lymph launches and three ways that lymph really gets removed.
And that is through our movement through local motion and through breathing. And then we can do specific techniques like lymph drainage and brushing and all of that. But breathing is one of these things that we’re already doing is foundational activities, this foundational movement that we do 20,000 times a day. It’s more than just oxygen exchange. It’s also waste removal.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s fascinating. And when I heard that, I was like wait, that can’t be right because it just seems crazy. Like we’re breathing out all this, all these toxins and all this waste and all our body fat is basically, you know, just being expelled through all these different manners which is it’s really fascinating. The body the human body is fascinating, Jen. Okay.
Jen Wright
It is so fascinating and we are designed to heal. In my previous life and working with the Defense Department one of the programs that I was involved with was looking at exhaled breath condensate and how each of us are so unique. We are as unique as we are with our fingerprints, our odor signature is equally unique.
And we look at odor signature to identify susceptibility and resistance to certain diseases. And what influences that is really the inner fire tribe tenets and the real human performance tenets is that it’s not just one note, or one node. It is our nutrition. And it is our movement. It’s our mindset, it’s the stress and how we how resilient we are to that stress. So those factors really make a difference on our odor signature. We know that if we even see it in commercial because stress, sweat smells different. One example…
Patrick McGilvray
For those of you listening, Jen is just checking her pits haha. So yeah, that’s very interesting. I have heard people say that when they start eating cleaner when they start eating a different kind of diet, they like don’t smell anymore. And it’s interesting. I mean, they still do, but it’s not strong and powerful like it used to be. And which makes sense, you know, because your body isn’t, it doesn’t have to, like release all these toxins and unnecessary things anymore. You know, you’re you’re you’re kind of back to homeostasis, right?
Jen Wright
Yeah, that’s right. And you mentioned nutrition. It’s similar when, when someone brings in the oxygen advantage and starts breathing for our fullest potential. The oxygen the oxygenation itself is it’s our foundation for cellular repair. Each cell receives these oxygen molecules and the bloodstream carries this oxygen through first to the organs because everything tends to the organs first organs demand the most.
So it goes to the organs first and through the major muscles through the fascia, rides the fluids, and eventually this oxygen arrives to every single cell for cellular repair. The blood production itself is such an interesting component of oxygenation.
Only in the last two years, have researchers discovered that the what do you want to call the blood cells, the stem cells that live we think that it’s the the white blood cells that are helping to create blood, but it’s actually these blood cells that live within our lungs, like 10 million cells, and even outside of our lungs that are, they’re doing the blood repair and the synthesis of blood itself.
So for organ fatality nutrition’s a core component. Before nutrition, our most foundational thing that we do before eating, before drinking water, is breathing. And, uh, you know, I like to say we can go technically weeks without food, only days without water, but really only minutes without oxygen.
And, oddly, this is getting into the subconscious mindset that lives in each of us. But oddly, it’s one of the last things that we tend to look at. When we’re looking at overall performance, although it’s the first and last thing we do in life. Rarely are we taught how to do it, to breathe.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And gosh, you bring up a good point, which is like breathing is just one of those things that we don’t pay attention to. And we don’t practice how to do it better. And so when I’m, when I talk to runners, a lot of runners will say like, I’m having trouble breathing, like, what can I do to improve my breathing?
Like, should I be breathing from my chest or from my belly? Because you kind of hear different opinions on things like that. So as a runner, like, especially somebody that’s maybe just getting started running, and it seems like the breathing is the thing that’s keeping them from performing better or makes it hard. So the breathing is the thing. They identify as being like the running as hard because of the breathing part. What can we do about that?
Jen Wright
Well, noticing is the first step. That is, so we don’t want to take breath for granted. Until we are without it, we take it for granted that it’s just going to be there because it is, thankfully it’s automatic. And then when it’s short, when it’s cumbersome, when something takes our breath away.
We’ve all had that experience where we see something, hear something, remember something, and it literally, gut punch takes our breath away. And we’re left without our most basic resource, which is oxygen. And it really strikes at our core survival. And that is part of the rewiring of our stress response. It’s more than just running for breathing for running performance.
It really how do we source this oxygen, so that we can tend to our needs at the most basic level. So when we start to pay attention to this very fact that we can indeed, source our own resources that we can, can select are in modulate our ability to intake air differently, we start to receive it at the cellular level, but something in our mind happens as well.
There’s a shift in our mind that it’s a shift in our nervous system really towards a new rhythm towards regulation, where we adopt a mindset of like, I can, oh, I’ve got this I can, I can source what I need when I need it. And I can. So this is like an echo chamber, not just for the running trail, for the road, but just for life.
So first things first, is noticing when our breath is short, notice what takes our breath away. So breath in that moment becomes a clue, you know, our breathing our breath awareness is a clue. It’s a clue or cue to something that has changed. Something has rocked me off that state of homeostasis, off balance, and is demanding more from me.
Okay, no problem, we encounter this throughout the day, every day. So breath is not only a clue or cue, but then it also becomes the tool. So we’re talking about two different things, the potential of breath, disrupting the usual and then a breath also being a tool to be set in the moment and recharge throughout the day.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and one thing I understand is that when you do start experiencing, like, let’s say shallow breathing, or, you know, you know, struggling with your breath, it can create a stressful environment. And your body releases cortisol. So now you’re like in that fight or flight kind of mode, and you’re putting yourself under more stress.
So I noticed this, when I’m running with other people, there are certain people that you know, you might be running next to them or behind them, and they sound like they’re going to die. You know, everybody’s running this comfortable pace. But then there’s that one person that is breathing, like, they sound like they’re going to die.
And I’m gonna imagine that they are kind of putting themselves under a lot of undue stress, and that they’re stressing themselves out at the cellular level, and stressing themselves out mentally. And running for them is going to be a lot harder than for the person that is practicing a more slow, steady and mindful approach to breathing while running.
Jen Wright
Absolutely, and thinking of this individual, or these experiences when you observe people breathing heavy. What do you notice about their gait? Are they also running heavy? Kind of clotting or maybe compensated running? Can you when you think back to running groups, if someone’s breathing really hard is their gait also?
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I think they’re, yeah, they look and sound like they are really struggling. So yeah, and I know people that run like that all the time. That’s their, like, default.
Jen Wright
And we do it that way until we learn a different way, especially for those of us that find such freedom in running and just in being, you know, just getting into that stride. So, you know, kudos to those of us that have been running heavy and fatiguing yourselves and sticking with it because you’re right there is an additional stress that is just inherent to our most basic thing that we do in life 20,000 times a day being stressed.
It’s the it’s the most, it’s the major movement that we do, we think of it as automatic, because it is yet is the most mechanical, and most chemical, mechanical, chemical process that’s happening when we intake the air for, for that breath, and each cell takes it oxygen and through a chemical process converts it to fuel, you know, it’s just, it’s a beautiful, brilliant design that we have here.
And, and we can be better at it, it’s just stepping into that place where it feels more comfortable. And literally, we are lifted, we’re propelled by the oxygen because it is our fuel. So when we think about that, in like when we’re walking through the grocery store, we get, you know, we get the oxygen advantages to that little lift, but how that translates to the gait, during running and your running stride and footstrike it’s so important because it literally lifts us.
It’s interesting to think about breath cadence and footstrike cadence and exercise physiologists belong studying the impact of stress of running, right, and the diaphragm plays a lot in that capacity to maintain structure and stability. And conversely, it also plays a lot in instability, if we’re just repeating the same patterns of exhaling on the same footstrike, for example, so we, we… My friend, I can talk about breath work for many hours. For today, how would you like to take our conversation? Would you like to talk about more of the diaphragm?
Patrick McGilvray
Well, like, I want to go back to that question I asked about the belly breathing versus the chest breathing, because there’s some different schools of thought on that. And I’ve heard people talk about both as being better. And what do you think about that?
Jen Wright
Breathing is good, breathing is good. And that’s, that’s good advice right there. And I tell people all the time, they’re like, it’s just hard to breathe and like, just make sure you’re breathing, you’re fine. As long as you’re breathing, you’re good.
The beauty is, is that our body breathes. Now we can breathe more efficiently. Some days, we’re breathing efficiently. And some days, we’re breathing less efficiently, suboptimally. And there’s a lot of information available out there about deep breathing, you know, slow, deep breathing, and I’m here to say that one, we’re still breathing, check. Two, there is some modulation here. Not all about slow, deep breathing, there are breaths that specifically activate our nervous system that give us a boost.
Because we need a boost when we need it, we need the energy when we need to boost. And there are other breaths that intentionally slow and move us towards restoration and activate our parasympathetic nervous system. So we have the ability to operate with breath. And to down regulate with breath.
I’ve got a trusty little diagram here that anyone that knows me, I’m holding the EU. And this literally is a U it’s a U shape and it depicts our autonomic nervous system will post in the comments, because our autonomic nervous system tells us how we’re going to feel. But it’s important to note that every inhale that we take is an activation of our nervous system. And every exhale that we take is settling of our nervous system.
So just by nature of working with complete breaths, and that’s I’m a proponent of Complete Breathing, is that it’s a complete cycle, it’s every inhale is sourcing the energy that we need the air to convert to the energy, and every complete exhale is ridding our body of old toxins and waste so that we can be, quote, empty, the container more ready to receive more of that oxygen.
Patrick McGilvray
And so the inhale is kind of activating that sympathetic nervous system, which is our kind of fight or flight, you know, nervous system in our necks. What’s that?
Jen Wright
The gas. Yeah, yes, they step on the gas..
Patrick McGilvray
Step on the gas, okay. And then the exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our relaxation, you know, kind of mode. I always remember it by S for stress, P for peace, you know, and so that’s easy for me to remember sympathetic versus parasympathetic. So that’s really interesting. So then the argument about the belly breathing, chest breathing is just more about well whatever, like data isn’t as important, it sounds like what you’re saying?
Jen Wright
It’s all super important. And step one, we’re still breathing. Yes. Step two, we have so much, there’s so much to unpack here. But it’s really quite simple. The Complete Breathing is how we are born to breathe. Some of us were born with warning conditions where our breathing, our respiratory system is challenged in some way.
But most of us our respiratory system is challenged by sitting, by collapsing and so we are unable to access our fullest breath potential. So diaphragmatic breathing, chest breathing and clavicular breathing are three different places three zones or respiration that we have.
The diaphragm, the chest, and the clavicle. The Complete Breathing is a three part long breath, the low the mid the top lung, when we’re in fight or flight, we don’t need to be sourcing our breath from our belly.
Because we’re not looking to relax, we’re not looking to digest food in that moment, we’re actually just looking to survive. And so our breath becomes really short and shallow. We’ve all experienced that. And it’s when that becomes our default pattern, that the downstream effects are detrimental.
Because we’re just subsisting in that time, we’re just getting enough. And really, what would life look like, feel like when we are sourcing more, and at our most optimal state? Now for evading a lion, or if we are sprinting, for the finish line, diaphragmatic breathing is not going to be our natural go to place, we’re just going to be taking enough in so the oxygen exchange is just minimal. It’s just enough to get what we need to achieve the goal, which is to evade the line cross the finish line.
Patrick McGilvray
Right. Or if you’re like doing a heavy workout at the gym a bunch of heavy lifting, you know, you’re gonna, it’s gonna be higher, you know, right?
Jen Wright
So often, yes, because that’s what leads to, and it’s here at our thoracic cavity that really is that place where it’s, it’s the max expansion here, the ribcage. Taking a breath in here, the thoracic cavity for our big muscle movers when we’re doing the heavy lifting. When we’re looking to set a pace for a longer run then we can access the respiratory movement here at the thoracic cavity to help sustain that pace.
So we’re not just relying on the small muscles, the muscles, the intercostal muscles that live between the ribs, we can access the diaphragm, our major muscle, our major break breathing muscle, but it’s um, it’s not the only muscle that moves respiration, the diaphragm just happens to be the major muscle that moves respiration and helps us to maintain posture.
So sitting in as we do in our culture, as I am right now, we tend to overlook the access of this diaphragm, which I could go off. I love talking about breath, it is my favorite topic. And I just want to add this point.
Down here at our diaphragm when we breathe into the space of our diaphragm, it’s actually where serotonin and dopamine more than half our dopamine and serotonin is synthesized and created at in our in our viscera, in our in our belly, in our gut. And when we activate our diaphragmatic breathing or complete breaths, we’re helping that that process of synthesizing the dopamine and serotonin which then gets transported back up to our brain and distributed throughout our body. And who wants to feel good, you know? We want the ability to regulate, you know, the my life’s work. So it’s just one of those things where we aid the process.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that diaphragmatic breathing is something that I’ve experimented with, with great results. So I’ll do some diaphragmatic breathing exercises like before a run where I’ll just sit with my back straight and just practice that deep belly breathing into that diaphragm. And, you know, just do you know, five minutes of that so it doesn’t take very long right.
Right, but it starts to put you into this calmer state of mind. And now I understand what’s happening more, because you just said, you know, you’re kind of releasing that dopamine, you’re getting some of that some of those that serotonin going.
I would imagine that this would be a great thing to do before run, and to practice on longer runs to. Because if you can access that sort of calming, relaxing, those chemicals, basically, you know, those calming relaxing chemicals into your body, then I would imagine running would be a little bit easier for you, especially on those longer runs when you’re out there for a couple of hours at a time.
So I love the the idea of using breathing, not just as a way of like, oh yeah, I got to live, you know, gotta get the air in or whatever, but as a way of reducing some stress and reducing the, the toughness of the run, you know, because you can actually, so I guess the two things.
So I’m hearing, because I’m gonna keep pushing this point here, Jen, you’re like a politician with your answers here. But I’m gonna say like, belly breathing is probably the better way to go. For our long distance runners, you know, which I’m just kind of, you know, I’m, making that that jump, you know, just just say that. So whatever, it’s all good.
But it does reduce the stress, and it puts you into this more calm state, where, you know, you got to, you got to save your energy, you know, it’s all about energy conversate conservation, when you’re out there for several hours, you’re running a marathon or something like that, you’ve got to conserve your energy.
And to have this high chest breathing, you know, the shoulders start to get scrunched up into the ears. You know, you’re activating that stress response. And you’re putting your body in undue amounts of stress, which is, you know, really going to use a lot of energy to be in that state right there.
Jen Wright
I think you, you phrase that beautifully, and I’ll add that it takes a lot of energy to contain all that. Just to sum it up. It takes a lot of energy to contain this manufactured support of bracing so that the hip doesn’t hurt, so that the stitches subside, you know, running with our fullest breath potential keeps us fueled up and stitch free.
And it’s all about working with the diaphragm, I would encourage the listeners to start where it is easier. You’re talking about priming your body and your oxygen supply. You’re talking about priming your system before you go on a run. Awesome. That’s something that free divers figured out, you know, eons ago.
Because you know, underwater, we don’t have the luxury of taking air when we need it, even if you know even just emergency breath. So free divers and swimmers had to figure out this oxygen conservation and exchange rates really innately and on land as we are and working with the forces of gravity as we do.
It’s really important for us to figure out just what that impact is because during inhalation, we create a container. There’s the expansion, but stability is created. And on exhalation, the diaphragm and the external intercostal muscles relax and the space around the thoracic cavity gets smaller, it gets pushed out.
Well that’s also where we are the most vulnerable that you will though the most, the least stable when on our exhale. So if we’re always foot striking on the beginning of our exhale, we’re creating even more of a clobbed fatigue to one side. Most runners scientific most runners are taught to breathe, inhale for two, exhale for two. That’s old school. And that even number of breathing makes it so that the exhale and the foot strike are always on the same side.
The numbers show that most runners exhale, the beginning of the exhale is on the foot strike on the right side, which means most runners get stitches on the right side. So it’s just interesting to think about as listeners is let’s start not worrying not when they’re middle of mile five, or on a long run. But let’s start while we’re walking. Let’s walk and practice this breathing thing. Let’s sit in a chair, lie down and practice this breathing thing. And just to really exercise the muscles and get them tuned, tuned and get the maps of how they were born, were born and designed to function.
Patrick McGilvray
When I was training for my 100 miler a couple of years ago, I remember I came to you and I was like, Jen, I need some help breathing. Just anything you can tell me that will make running just a little bit easier, I need every little tweak I can get for this thing. And you gave me some advice, that was amazing.
And it was basically, like, try to stop doing the breathing on the to like every other foot strike, and switch it to three. So that you know, your in breath is on one foot, and then the next time it’s on the next and so you’re, you’re more balanced that way. And I practiced that and it was actually really hard to do at first, you know, it took a little bit of, you know, there’s a little mental like, because I’m just so used to just doing it the same way all the time.
And it requires you to slow down your breathing, because you’re not, you’re gonna breathe. You have to breathe slower in order to do it this way. But it was amazing. It allowed me to really be in a more peaceful state running it really, it was awesome. So that’s good advice.
What is a side stitch? Exactly?
Jen Wright
Ah crap, you know, it’s where the muscle’s contracting really fast, you know, it’s just spasming.
Patrick McGilvray
What muscles is that? Exactly? Do you know?
Jen Wright
It depends, but a lot of the time, it’s the diaphragm itself.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay, because I know that one way of getting rid of a side stitch very quickly, is to breathe out really fast and hard. Like you’re blowing out candles on a birthday cake. You know, just as a lot of air really fast do that, like three times and then the stitches goes away. So
Jen Wright
Because you’re filling your body was oxygen, you know, it’s and it’s and you’re exhaling out old condensate, old CO2, you’re getting it out of the system and pushing out rather quickly. Those the old old stuff.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay, so it is like a diaphragm thing that’s really fascinating. This whole breathing thing.
Jen Wright
You brought up when you’re training for your 100 miler, because I just thought you were so brave into being open minded into considering a different way before such a, you know, a big event for you. And knowing how important the breath is, you’re right, it does take; we get used to it just happening.
And to bring awareness to it, it does insert a level of pause kind of slows it down. What’s happening in the brain is it what’s happening in the brain is happening at the level of the brainstem. So again, this is our basic survival brain. And it’s in the medulla.
The prebotzinger complex is basically like our it’s like a pacemaker for breaths. And so when that when that CO2 gets back to our lungs, because we’ve been breathing deeply enough to push the co2 back to the lungs to be expel, the messages get the signals are picked up from the medulla that sets our rhythm. The prebotzinger complex, the prebot-c is actually our our rhythm said it so it’s our pacer. And so when we get into a rhythm of breathing, the brain helps us out. Chicken or the egg, but it’s uh, it’s one of those things where it literally, it literally just makes life easier, makes running easier.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I will, I will say that like that, slowing down the breathing and doing that diaphragmatic breathing when you’re running at all, even if it’s just a short run is it makes a difference, it makes a noticeable difference that you can go out there and do you know, a five mile run at a slower pace.
And it can be you can make it as hard or as easy as you want it to be. And I’m not talking necessarily speed because you can kind of maintain the same speed but you can make it harder or easier. Just by slowing down that breath. It’s wild. It’s wild stuff. There’s a beautiful book that talks a lot about this called, oh my gosh, what is it called? Mindful Running.
And it just talks about getting into that sort of flow state while running, and she talks a lot about the diaphragmatic breathing and, and that’s kind of where I learned the exercises to do before going out running. It’s a really great book, I think definitely people get a lot out of it.
But the part that I liked about it is how she talks about slowing down, you know, you start getting more oxygen exchange, you start, you know, becoming into this, like more peaceful kind of flow state that she calls it, which is just being mindful, you’re being mindful of your breathing, you can just kind of focus on your breathing, you’re being mindful of your body, you’re being mindful of your feet hitting the ground, you can actually take in what’s happening around you.
And it all starts with the breath. And you’re always kind of coming back to the breath, as in meditation, when you’re running in, that becomes your sort of anchor, you know, and so you can be mindful of what’s happening. And then you’re not focused on how hard this is, you’re not focused on what you’re going to do.
You know, later today, what’s on your to do list, you’re just being in the moment, and into this flow state, which is such a beautiful thing. And it all centers around the breath, just like mindful meditation centers around the using the breath as the anchor, you can do the same thing while you’re running, and get into this more relaxed, more peaceful state in I say this, because I want to enjoy running, I don’t run it one running to be hard.
And so when I learn things like this, and I practice them, it makes running more enjoyable for me. And it makes it easier for me and I and I look forward to getting out and doing those runs, when I know I’m going to be in a kind of a peaceful state. And it all starts with the breathing, with breath.
Jen Wright
Being with the breath is the most effective way of being present. And most runners that I know, love running, so we can get out of our head, you know, and really being or get into our thoughts being present with our thoughts kind of one or the other, but just getting kicked into that flow state, a place where we’re just sliding and just present and just one with nature, one with the road with a trail, it’s breathing provides us the ability to pay attention to what’s going on on the internal inside.
And at the same time as the ability to be present with the road, with the external. And it’s, we really don’t see a difference or experience a difference, we’re just kind of one with the road. And that, that fluidity is something that’s often described. And the key component of breath is just ever present.
So teaching people how to harness that on command, if you will, as kind of the default not, rather than that one run, we’re so amazing, you know…
Patrick McGilvray
Well you know, it takes practice, you know, like anything else, like you just have to practice it. And, you know, I will tell you that when I first went out and started like trying this, it was very difficult, you know, and my mind was wandering and my, my I was thinking this is so hard, I don’t get it, it’s not working, you know what all those thoughts that come into your mind.
But after a while, if you can get into this kind of flow state, it’s really something that you are always kind of working on, like you’ll never get there. 100% You know what I mean? But when you can practice it more, just like meditation, where you practice meditation, you never perfect it, you know. So if you can practice getting in this flow state, but with running, start with your breath, slow down, use that deep diaphragmatic breath, try it on the threes instead of the twos and start becoming aware of your body.
I think, as runners we were not good at really getting into our body and being aware of our body. We use running as a way, a lot of people, use rowing as a way of getting out of their body. Like say they can sort of just like give their body something to do while their brain just starts thinking about something else, you know, but when you start to become keenly aware, like radically aware, of what’s happening in your body while you’re running, it can be a kind of amazing thing to pay attention to.
I do this when I’m running out in on trails more than anything, because I’m just so like in my element and out there in nature and I just feel like it’s like there’s this primal thing going on. I’m and and I just, I am just so aware of like my feet and my legs and my arms and my, my torso and just like all these things working in unison, and I’m just always fascinated out there. So I tend to get into that flow state more on the trails. I don’t have as many distractions as when I’m running around, you know, downtown Cincinnati with cars and traffic and stuff like that.
Jen Wright
Well, I mean, that’s, that kicks back to the beginning of our conversation, it just makes so much sense I was having a conversation with a gal about this very thing that running on the road, we are still in our survival mind, we need to pay attention to the car to the bike to the person to the pothole, all those things that could inadvertently interests.
And on the trail, likely, we’re not going to run into a lion. There, there’s less distraction at our survival, for our survival brain just to narrow down where we are. And there’s more opportunity to explore. When we’re in nature, there’s more opportunity to explore our own nature.
Really pay attention to these elements, oxygen, that sustain us, it’s in the trees, we’re work, there’s a relationship, the trees, and ourselves, there’s a relationship with our breath and our footstrike and just becomes relational. It’s not so, uhm, not so, alone.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s cool. I love all this, Jen. We got to do this again, we got to talk more about some other things in regards to breathing and the nervous system. But for now, I think we’ve covered a lot. And I think we’ve given people a lot of amazing things to think about and to go and practice. So that’s awesome.
So where can people like learn more about you? I know you were talking about a workshop that you got coming up in August. So what is that? And where can people find out more about it?
Jen Wright
We will be posting the link, and you’ll find it in the comments, in the notes. August 11 is Breath Workshop: Fueled Up and Stitch Free. We’ll be spending two hours really learning the mechanics of breathing. And working with what we’ve got. If I could add one thing to pay attention to between now and August 11, is notice what takes your breath away, not just on the trail, but in life.
Notice what takes your breath away. Notice when your nostril breathing nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. I train so many people that when I ask them to take a breath, it’s breathing into the mouth, sucking in that oxygen. And that’s a topic in and of itself. So I would love to get into another podcast but certainly won’t be in the workshop, the importance of nasal breath, and how breathing is so important.
We have two ways of doing it primarily through our nostrils and secondary through our mouth. But nostril breath is controlled breath filters the air, it communicates more concretely and directly with the brain creates a human environment in our lungs. So the blood itself can absorb the oxygen molecules and efficiently carry it through the body.
Mouth breath is there when we need it, emergency breath taking the hill all these things that we’re used to, and yet it’s more fatiguing. So we’ll be talking about in the workshop, breath awareness, nasal breath, mouth breath, we’ll be working to create our most complete breath.
We’ll be working with resistance breathing to help build capacity. Because once we build, once we become skillful at Complete Breathing, the place to go is working with modulation to expand our capacity. Literally the way that those air sacs exchange the CO2. We can work with them. We’re not beholden to that first thought.
But we think that first feeling that we have that first breath that we take we thankfully breeze throughout the day. And so we can use breath to reset to reorient ourselves when we drift off. Use breath to build rhythm to recharge throughout the day.
And then we can use it to kind of prime ourselves to set up at the end of the day so that we can restore appropriately based on our demands like meeting really meeting the demands of the day. Every day is different. And these days, my goodness. We are at a greater capacity
Patrick McGilvray
Who knows what’s gonna happen? Every day is an adventure. Cool. What was the name of that workshop again?
Jen Wright
it’s called Fueled Up And Stitch Free, August 11, two hour session over zoom, I look forward to the day that we can meet at the park. We’ve been talking about that when we could do that. But first, we’re going to meet over zoom, because we can meet in the comfort of wherever we choose to, and work on this thing we call breadth.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And where can people find out more about that?
Jen Wright
Well, I am always at real human performance.com Reach out to me directly via questions my emails, jen@realhumanperformance.com. A little bit about my business partner Chris Amis listed on our website. But we are all about physical fitness and mental well being. So just training, training up our human to become more ourselves.
Patrick McGilvray
We want to be the best humans we can be Jen, I love it. Love it. Thank you so much for this conversation. This has been really fun. And we’re gonna get deeper into some of these things and explore some other topics. I really love these conversations. Really cool. Thank you, Jen.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you, Patrick.
Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, that’s so awesome. Jen is so amazing. Love her so much. So good. And just to give you guys a quick heads up, she’s got that breath training workshop for runners called fueled up and stitch free. That’s coming up on August the 11th.
She’s going to teach you all about how to oxygenate prior to a run, how to stay fueled with oxygen during a run and for recovery after your run. And she’s going to teach you practical skills that you can put into practice in your real life.
She’s going to teach you the practices that will build breath capacity, which is so important for running, especially for the long distance running you want to have you want to be able to increase your oxygen capacity. I’m gonna have a link to this event on the show notes page over at the running mind podcast.com forward slash 31 And you’ll have all the information there.
So definitely check it out. And then lastly, remember the next Running Lean weight loss masterclass for runners begins in just a couple of days. If you’re listening to this on Friday, when it comes out, there’s still a couple of spots available, learn more and apply at innerfiretribe.com/masterclass. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
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Chris Wissman is a personal trainer, a movement and lifestyle coach, and an all-around badass when it comes to functional fitness. He's co-owner of Real Human Performance in Madisonville. Today we …
Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m your host. And today I’ve got a really cool treat for you. I’m talking with my good friend, Chris Wissman. Chris is a personal trainer, he’s more of a movement and lifestyle coach. That’s what he calls himself.
And Chris and I can have conversations that just go, who knows where, and they’re awesome. We talk about mindset, we talk about physiology, about physiological load. In this particular show, we get into running form and posture and how important that is, and what happens to your body when you don’t have good form.
We talk about things like being hunched over all day sitting down and what that’s doing to us, maybe the importance of having something like a standing desk. And we talk a lot about diet, too, and how there isn’t one diet necessarily for everyone, there’s not one diet that’s perfect for everyone. And then it’s important for you to figure out what your metabolic diet type is.
Chris has a wealth of knowledge on all this stuff. And like I said, we could go in many, many different directions here. And we could talk forever about some of this stuff. We don’t talk forever, but we do talk about a lot of different things. This is really cool. I love love, love talking to Chris. And then at the very end, he gives us a couple of simple, very simple tips for endurance runners to help us to be more efficient in what we do.
So you have to wait until the end of the podcast for that one. But before we get into that, I wanted to quickly go over something I’m very excited about. And I just recently launched Inner Fire Tribe’s group coaching program for runners. So this is a comprehensive online training program.
And it’s designed for you if you’re a long distance runner, if you’re a half marathon or marathon or ultra runner; it’s designed to help you bring your mind and your body into alignment so you can get the results that you want. It’s designed to show you and teach you how to train your mind like you train your body. So you can get those powerful results. So you can reach your goals, whatever those may be, they may be running faster than you ever have before or completing a distance you have never done before.
So when you become a member of the Inner Fire Tribe, you’re gonna get detailed training plans. So we’ll have comprehensive half and full marathon training plans. And then a training library that’s going to continue to grow. So new training plans will be added all the time, you know, we’re going to be adding 5k and 10k. And you run your first ultra plan that’s going to be coming very soon. You’ll get mindset training.
So I will do weekly, live mindset training, so you can learn how to train your mind to work for you. You know, the key, the key to success in all of life, but especially in running is to get your mind and your body into alignment. If your mind is fighting against you every step of the way, running is going to be very challenging for you. So as a master mindset coach, my focus is helping you build the mental toughness that you need to make running easier, you know, get faster and actually have more fun doing it.
You will get live online coaching. So I do a live coaching in a private Facebook group. And let’s face it, running is hard, right? There’s a lot that goes into becoming a successful long distance runner. And not everybody’s needs are the same. So what I want to do is some one-on-one coaching with you in an environment where other people can benefit from it. You’ll also get that supportive community of the Facebook group. It’ll be comprised of runners just like you. So it’ll be fun, I’ll be supportive. It’s a great place to ask questions, get help about all things running nutrition, gear building, mental toughness, and so much more.
And then everything we do, becomes archived into a comprehensive video library. And then we’ll be adding to that video library all the time. So we’ll be covering main topics like running forearm strength training, stretching, recovery, nutrition, fueling for race day, proper nutrition, hydration, pay strategy, tapering, all the things that go into running rain, seems easy enough, right? Just put on your shoes and head out the door.
But when we get into the sport of running, and especially the sport of distance running, there’s a lot of factors involved. And you can almost not have too much training when it comes to that. So this video training library will be ever growing. Now, here’s the best part about joining Inner Fire Tribe, this is not something that is going to break your wallet. Okay, you’re gonna get the training plans, the mindset training, the instructional video library, live online coaching, and a supportive community, you’re gonna get all of that. It’s less than $1 a day, you can find $1, you know, right now in the couch cushions, probably.
So when you join the Inner Fire Tribe group coaching program for runners today, it’s only $26.2 per month. And here’s what’s cool about it: it’s a subscription based system. And the longer you stay, the more valuable it becomes for you. Because we’re always gonna be adding new strength routines, new exercises, new training videos, new coaching sessions, and more and more and more, get in on this today, because it’s only going to get better.
And I can’t guarantee that I’m going to keep things at this low price point. So it’ll probably end up going up soon. So go there today, there, you got nothing to lose, really go to innerfiretribe.com/coaching. And you can sign up today, come and be a part of the tribe. I would love to have you there. All right, cool. So let’s get into my interview with Chris Wissman.
Today, I am joined with Chris Wissman. Chris is a movement and lifestyle coach, and just kind of all around badass. If I can say that, of course. Chris, why don’t you tell me and tell everybody else a little bit about what you do.
Chris Wissman
So at Real, Jen and I owners of a company called Real Human Performance. So we really focus on specifically the gym floor, just corrective movements and making sure everybody’s moving for their kind of individual approach. We also do stress management courses and workshops, outside of real and different corporations to the city. My passion is becoming more and more oriented towards kind of helping people through their, like changing their lifestyle factors.
That way we can like what you’re focusing on, help people ease the load, so their mindset can be even stronger and better than it’s ever been. So we approach it from kind of a pillar standpoint. And we can get into those pillars as we, as we were we record here, but um, movement, and then just like lifestyle factors and I help people with that.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool, so you’re different from the traditional gym or from, you know, traditional, yeah, something like CrossFit, you know, so explain a little bit about the differences and how that would relate to somebody who’s let’s say, an endurance runner.
Chris Wissman
So running is the perfect thing to compare that or to relate that to, because CrossFit tends to stay in what we call the sagittal plane, which is just up and down movements, a lot of barbell movements, a lot of burpees, they’re not really incorporating the way that our core is originally designed to move our core is meant to propel us through locomotion is we’re meant to locomote and to run.
And that’s why I love this approach, because with running, you oftentimes see posture starts to either deteriorate depending on how you’re built, or just be stronger than it’s ever been because of that rotational ability that we train on the gym floor. So a lot of the things that we do on the floor, are oriented back towards restoring our core function and our back functions so we can locomote better. Locomote just meaning walk and run, just go through that plane of motion.
So do a lot of rotational drills, a lot of anti rotational drills, a lot of ground based movements, stuff that’s really designed to restore that style of movement and just recognize that not everyone needs to do the same thing. And everybody’s starting in a very unique spot. And we have to be very intelligent about how we deploy these movements to people to make sure benefits them because what use of it is that if we’re not if we’re not benefiting that person.
Patrick McGilvray
I want to go back to something you just said about posture. And for me when I think of that when it comes to running I think of running form. For sure a lot of people have what you would consider like terrible running form, terrible posture so they may stand like they may be really hunched over over, you know, their shoulders are up in their ears. They may be rounded at the back, or, you know, they may be flailing a lot, you know, and I see this in long distance runners, especially, you know, because we spend a lot of time out there running together, and you see some people you’re like, how’s that guy able to run a marathon like that?
Yeah, and some people are pretty, you know, they seem like they’re pretty fast runners. But my guess is that they could be a lot more efficient for sure and probably stay injury free. Like talk a little bit about the importance of posture.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, exactly. So that posture, you talk about that anterior rolled, forward posture has a lot to do with being seated. Unfortunately, we’re both seated right now. I usually try to sit on like a Swiss ball or something that keeps me active, that way, it stimulates my posture throughout the duration, which is just a big exercise ball for, for lack of a better term.
But um, basically, when you see that for rolled posture, and that kind of head for neck, it’s something that I still suffer from. And that’s kind of why I went out on a limb and tried to learn so much about it. It’s a lot of times that dysfunctional breathing pattern, when we start really heavily mouth breathing and getting exhausted, the musculature on the front side of our body, and our chest will start to constrict and just pull ourselves forward.
Which makes us have to try to keep our head up, our head is trying to do our head and eyes are trying to do anything they can do to stay in the horizontal plane of motion to make sure that we’re not going to fall over, right.
So as our chest falls forward, our head will start to come up. And that’s where you see what’s called back kyphosis, which is just lack of thoracic extension, lack of keeping what I’ll cue in the gym is just like, hey, keep up, keep up proud chest when we’re down there. That way, we can restore some of that extension to the mid back.
And when we’re able to train ourselves to maybe not so much panic, breathe throughout the day, use our nostrils, you’ll and just be very cognizant of our posture, you’ll slowly start to notice that improving. Again, it’s something that you can’t just fix overnight. Keep in mind how long it took us to develop these postures and, and so you have to really reinforce it every day, with everything that you do.
And that has effects way deeper than we know and has effects on our nervous system. It has effects on our digestion, it has effects on how our feet strike the floor. It’s very, it’s a, it’s a feedback loop from up, up and down and down and up. And it’s constantly talking to itself to help us try to find balance.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, that sort of proud chest that you know, sitting up straight, basically, right. It’s kind of a, it’s kind of a trendy thing right now, because there’s all these gadgets that you can wear, you know, that’ll bind you to, yeah, right. I’m like, okay, why is this all of a sudden a thing? You know, are we really that bad hunching over? And I guess we are.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, we are and, and that kind of pulls us back to it makes us a really quad dominant runner as well. And as we become quad dominant, then our glutes, and the hamstrings kind of start to relax or not do what they’re supposed to do, which is the pulling part of the movement. So the more anterior we are, the more front of the body we are with our posture, the more that’s going to go down the chain to our feet, and our knees, our quads and our shins. So you could see shin splints because of this knee problems, and all of that. So it’s kind of just a cascade of effects, if you will.
Patrick McGilvray
So really just stand up straight when you’re running with a proud chest. That’ll really help a lot, right?
Chris Wissman
Oh, for sure. For sure. There’s some really good people in the city if you want to get down deep in the nitty gritty with this. But I mean, generally speaking, we want to try to strike the ground with ease, we don’t want to be slamming down. We don’t want to be landing too much right on the heel immediately, we want to land kind of whole foot or maybe even front foot. And again, everybody’s really unique in that regard. It’s just about doing it, like you said, efficiently if it sounds and looks not efficient, and probably isn’t.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I don’t know how people get through like 26 miles running the way they do sometimes. Well, I’m not saying I’m perfect at all, but…
Chris Wissman
I’ve seen like good posture, you hold really, really good posture while you’re moving. You’re a lot better than I am. So that’s great.
Patrick McGilvray
Well, yeah, and just full disclosure, I do work out with Chris. So that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to get him on here to talk about this is because we talk about this at the gym extensively. And I’m like, dude, we just need to get a conversation or record it and share it. It’d be awesome. So here we are.
Chris Wissman
Heck yeah.
Patrick McGilvray
So you mentioned like sitting on a Swiss ball is something you do to stay active while you have to sit because I mean, let’s face it, we do have to sit sometimes, yes. Or there are alternatives like a standing desk. Have you seen people having actual results from that? And what are the results from that, because everybody’s talking about, you know, they’re telling me like Patrick, you should really have a standing desk. Because I sit a lot.
Chris Wissman
I’m very big on the approach of individuality and almost like in everything that we talk about. And if we have bad posture, and if we’re not using our, our glutes or hamstrings, our knees, and if we have a dysfunctional breathing, pattern standing, and sitting really don’t make a difference.
In my opinion, if we’re able to stand upright, correctly, and be very long in the spine and access our proper breathing mechanisms, then yeah, it’s awesome. And it’ll keep us active throughout the day. If you’re someone that’s not getting enough movement throughout the day, it gives you a chance to just slide side to side, and it gives you a chance to stretch and open up. But I guess, standing desk with awareness, awesome, without it could lead to some long term things. But they’re great for some people.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And you’re touching on something, though, that I think is important for us to all remember, which is that it’s different for everyone. Yeah, you know, everybody has their own needs. Everybody has their own things that work for them. And, you know, I’m in a lot of groups, and I see people post questions in groups, like, what’s the best way to do x? Or what’s the best shoe for x? Or what’s the best watch to where it’s like, dude, who knows?
Whatever works for you, you know? Yes, it is the best. Anyway, and I like your approach with that, like, when we do work out at the gym, you’re very much about the individual person and what their needs are. It’s not just about like, everybody do the same thing, no matter what. Yeah, you know, you take into account what people need, you know, I need certain things, and somebody else might need something completely different. So that’s cool. For sure.
So we’re talking about building strength, right? Yes, you’re talking about becoming stronger. You know, what are, what are some of the benefits of strength training for runners, because here’s, here’s something I’ve heard before. You know, runners, you know, you don’t want to bulk up. Because, you know, you got to stay lean. So, you know, the standard thing is, like, just don’t lift heavy weights.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, I think there’s benefits at certain times for that heavy lifting category for certain people. The main benefit that I see with the model that we use is restoring the transverse abdominis and your inner unit, so your, your core and your back and the way that functions, I don’t see a lot of people teaching humans how to rotate.
And there’s a ton of different ways you can approach this and it’s really not all that come left, you just have to know how to not go too far. So basically, you would teach someone how to resist rotation, via just like a planking platform or a box plank platform. And then you would slowly start to maybe lift a hand or a foot and make sure their hips don’t die from side to side, we can get activity in that deep pelvic floor, then they’re ready.
And I’m kind of fast forwarding a bunch, but then they’re ready to use resistance on the rotation. And if we can really learn how to powerfully rotate, then we’re going to go through that gait cycle fast, and you’re going to be very strong in it. So that’s really my focus on strength training around running.
I mean, there’s all the normal things such as, you know, just having more strength, your muscles, more endurance, the remote tools, you’re going to build, like stronger ligaments and everything around that joint. That way, that joint works better. And we’re at less risk for injury as long as we’re safe on the gym floor. But my real focus is restoring that rotation because we don’t do enough of it anymore.
Patrick McGilvray
And what a lot of people don’t realize is that running is a very rotational activity. Yeah, yes. You’re rotating. Yeah. You do use your core a lot if you’re doing it right.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, if you look at like these guys that are on the track for like, the Olympic athletes, you’ll see them literally, chin to hip. They’re ripping their hands as they go through and they’re doing our T spine is meant to have a ton of rotations. That’s why we’ll start our day off with mobility drills such as like the 90/90 sweep to open up the ribcage and intercostals and get everything available to move again, because it’s so stiff from just being forward all day. Seated and watching TV or in the car on the cell phone. Everything is just very stiff and rigid. So it’s just like let’s build some rotation back in this game and then people tend to do better?
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I know that when I first started distance running, I was not focused on the core at all. And then I started doing some core work and started to realize how important it is. Especially the outside. Your oblique slings, man.
Chris Wissman
Those are obliques. Yeah, you’re good at that you have the anterior and posterior oblique slings that connect. And this is why we go through a gait cycle that connects your shoulder and your hip. So it’s a big cross pattern from the front and the back of your body. And that’s what propels us through the so when we can if you look at a six pack on someone, this is like the most desirable thing to see as a six pack and someone that might not be the most functional. That’s our rectus abdominis. That’s like the top layer. And that doesn’t really have anything to do with the way we were built to rotate. It’s just kind of our protection mechanism for our organs. So it’s really good in that regard. But as far as locomotion, a six pack, isn’t that functional.
Patrick McGilvray
So interesting. Yeah. So it’s all vanity.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, many people picked up on it. And they just want to keep it and so I get it.
Patrick McGilvray
I get it. Good. Well, then I’m gonna stop. Yeah, I’m going to stop going for the six pack, then there it goes. I know. It’s just a vanity thing, you know, strong oblique slings.
Yeah. That’s cool. So let’s talk a little bit more about that. The gait pattern, you know, in that whole gait cycle, because it’s fascinating to me to just kind of learn a little bit more about, you know, propulsion, and how we are, what we’re actually doing when we’re running. You know, I’ve heard it said that running is like a controlled fall, you know, you’re sort of falling forward, you’re leaning forward at the, at the ankles slightly. And so that your body is just sort of controlling that fall, you know. So anyway, that’s just one way of looking at it first, talk through that a little bit.
Chris Wissman
So there’s a really awesome woman that I studied through, named Katie Bowman. And she’s got a couple of books, one of which is Movement That Matters. And there’s another one called Move Your DNA, she talks about that, you can see people that lose their core propulsion.
And while they’re walking, it’s like they are falling, and they’re just catching themselves every step, and that’s pretty abrasive to the joint. So if you can take that, that controlled fall and make it more fluid, and I’ve heard it explained to me like you’re Spinning the globe, if you can make it be very easy, that will help that control fall. And that will propel you forward.
Ultimately, you really want to see at the end of that fall, aka push off your foot, you want to see full extension. And we practice that a lot when we’re doing our, our drills from from deadlift to overheads or whatever they might be, is extending through the hips, and pushing and plantar flexing off the ground and really learning to get as long as you can, the more we learn to extend, the more using that your posterior chain, your backside, your body, your hamstrings, your glutes, and you’re really able to fire them.
And that will help that fall that you’re talking about. Just be powerful. So extension, in regards to power will help you a ton. And there’s a lot of drills that you can do around that as extension base drills. So for power extension up, up, up those drills man, they’re my favorites.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I don’t love them. No, they’re good. It’s good. I know I complain about the workouts, Chris, but I know.
Chris Wissman
You really don’t, man. I noticed when you came in, when you were really interested in starting this and have you started it, you had a different energy about you entirely. You literally were, you’re glowing. It’s a you’re a different Patrick than the one that I met, not that you weren’t a great human before. It’s just like, do you see Patrick? He’s dude, he’s radiating like he’s fired up. I really really like what you’re doing and everything. So that’s why I was stoked that the mind approach is what you’re choosing because it’s so important.
Patrick McGilvray
Well, that’s a good segue. Let’s kind of talk about that. So you know, I’m, I’m under this I’m operating from this place of like, mindset is everything. Okay? Yeah. Like everything that you want in your life was, you know, first created as a thought, and that our thoughts create the things we feel the emotions that we have. And it’s those emotions that create our behavior or actions, okay, so when you say or inaction.
You know, so when you say like, why did you do that? Oh, I felt like it or I didn’t feel like it, you’re talking about an emotion. Why didn’t you feel like it? What’s the thought that was telling you that you didn’t want to work out today or you didn’t want to go for that run, it might be some belief that you have about yourself that, you know, you’re not a good runner or something like that.
Anyway, so our thinking creates our emotions, our emotions, determine what we do our behavior, and then our actions or behavior gets us our results, okay, you want better results in your life, change your thinking, you know, that’s where I’m kind of, yeah, that’s where I’m operating from here,
Chris Wissman
It’s literally that because with your thoughts, you’re changing your hormones, and that, and that is what propels our emotion. So hormones, control emotions, emotions, control what we do, and then reinforcing them by embodying that thought. And it’s, literally, it’s the most powerful thing that you can, you can change. And it’s, it’s incredible. It really blows me away.
Because it is, the higher it is, the top notch in the hierarchies scale on what we want to address. When it comes to lifestyle coaching, if you’re constantly in an automatic negative self thinking, then you’re going to just repeat your cycle over and over and over again. And it’s not like I’m perfect, I still struggle with it in multiple categories. And the best thing that you can do when you’re in those thoughts is just stop the thinking and interrupt it with something that you really think is positive, or you want to it’s an affirmation, essentially.
But with that information, I found it really important. And Elliot Horowitz kind of reinforced this to interrupt it with something you’ve experienced very positive in your life, something that, like I used to ride BMX and dirt bikes a ton, and I can just visualize myself flying into the woods. So that is just like, my utmost flow states.
So if I can reinforce my affirmation, with a feeling that I got was riding dirt bikes are as close as I can get, then you’re more likely to achieve that positive thought or what it is that you want to do. And you’re interrupting that negative thought, right now, and with some success.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and people really think that this is more complicated than that, you know, and, like, and it really isn’t. So, you know, being happy or being confident, you know, those are just states, their states of mind, you know, and if you want to be happy, go back to a time when you were super happy, like go float back into your body.
In that time, close your eyes, float back into that time, see what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel those feelings of happiness. Once again, I guarantee you if you take 30 seconds to do that, you’ll have a big smile on your face, for sure, man now, but what happens is we choose different thoughts. We choose thoughts of stress and anxiety and fear and hurt and sadness and guilt and shame. Like we choose these things. I think about choosing them.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, I think the statistic on that is like, like 90% of the population today is 90% of the thoughts are negative.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it would have something like 60,000 thoughts a day? Yeah. So think about that, like, okay, what’s 90% of that? I don’t know, 50,000 of your thoughts are negative. What are we doing to ourselves, you know? And then we wonder why everybody’s on Lexapro or whatever, you know.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, with those thoughts, you’re not only reinforcing a negative mindset, you’re feeding an overall disease. I like the disease that broken down like that because it is just that, it’s a disease. And with just, I remember at an old company, I worked at the stress that it gave me and went off to get into the details of it but I had a chronic ulcer and I had just really really bad stomach pains really bad digestion and the day that place stopped my stomach problems, I stopped right along with it.
So these can manifest as anything like headaches, stomach aches, actual joint pain. If you have a vulnerable spot in your body and your real for reinforcing a negative thought, that vulnerable spot like I will know if I’m experiencing something out of the norm or negative via my diet or my mindset if my knee starts throbbing, like just like, hey, here’s here’s a sign for you. Something’s a little off you know, pay attention because I’ve beat my knee up so many times it’s very vulnerable to inflammation and we’re creating inflammation with the reinforcing negative thoughts and debt and bad lifestyle factors.
Patrick McGilvray
It’s crazy. Yeah. So your thoughts create these, this release of hormones and chemicals, right? Like serotonin. I can’t remember the other ones.
Chris Wissman
It’s complex, but you’re right on. I can’t really remember them either. But adrenaline…
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, stuff like that. And they can have an effect on you. So you can think yourself into, you know, a panic attack, basically, you can think yourself into that fight or flight kind of, right, where you’re, like, so anxious, and so fearful that you, that people actually have a panic attacks have to go to hospital, just because of thinking, you know, isn’t that wild? Like wouldn’t it be in our best interest to think something more positive instead?
Chris Wissman
Yeah, you’re right on and with that, that psyche is like the hierarchy of, of everything that we do, like I said, and therefore, like also reinforcing that you’ll also be you’ll see people that have that, that panic attack kind of mindset also, or those same kind of people that maybe are casting blame, or holding, like forms of resentment towards other people. And that really reinforces that anxiety. Yeah, it is crazy man.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and Bruce Lipton talks about this, in his book, The Biology of Belief. I don’t know if you’ve read that one yet. I actually haven’t. But you’ve told me about it. I will.
So you know, he basically just talks about this relationship between the mind and the body, and that we think ourselves into health, or we think ourselves into disease. And, you know, he goes on to talk about how most disease and especially chronic pain, any any pain that lasts more than like, 90 days, or something like that, is is all based on our thoughts, our beliefs, and that you can change that and change the physiological makeup, you know, the chemical cocktail that you got floating around in your body, and cure yourself?
Chris Wissman
Yes, yeah, without a doubt. And with that comes like, the other things in life. And this is where I, I’d love to kind of dive into the other things that make our mindset vulnerable are like just just things in our modern day world, whether it be sleep or eating out of your diet type, or moving too much or too little or not, or having too many stimulants, you know, and breath is a huge one, we talked about that a little bit.
The environment that you place yourself in the actual environment, with the people you surround your wit itself with, and the environment via like, the things we put on our skin, the things that we breathe, the things that we put in to our mouth, the things that, yeah, just the actual, like the physical environment that you put yourself, put yourself, then it’s, they all play a role in our low, or what you and I’ve talked about before, are physiological below to potentially compromise our mindset.
So if we can reduce the that load through any of the number of like pillars that we work on, then our mindset has a better chance of like, hey, let’s take you know, maybe we can have 80 or 80% of our thoughts be negative instead of 90, and then slowly work your way into just being a person that really believes what you say, and what you say is a positive thing to yourself. Yeah, I’m really interested in Bruce Lipton’s work, I’ve heard a lot about it.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it’s pretty wild stuff. There it is. It’s just really fascinating. Like, I can go, I’ve read a bunch of books like this, and I can just get really deep into that rabbit hole of like the mind body connection. It’s fascinating.
Chris Wissman
You are, your mind is your body, man.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it really is. I mean, it’s like, it’s like the central processing unit. You know, it’s the CPU of your body, you know, it’s controlling everything. So you mentioned something in passing just now. I want to go back to that a little bit. You said something about diet type? Yeah, that.
Chris Wissman
So everyone has genetic makeup. And we all have what’s called a metabolic diet type or something, also referred to as bio biochemical individuality. So our gut is predisposed to absorb some things better than others. And when we have more eating out of our diet type, and really now, we have so many availabilities to eat healthy foods.
It’s more about not eating like the processed garbage and trying to eat foods that you know where they came from, you know, they’re clean, they’re not doused with herbicides and pesticides, and then that will help us and help our gut not be inflamed.
And if you can even take it a step further and do some diet typing questionnaires and you get really in the nitty gritty with what kind of vitamins and minerals that you might be an excess of or are not an excess of you can really dial in your nutrition and be right on the money with backing up your genetics.
So like people from like extreme northern climates would have like. It’s a shame that keto has gotten such a bad rap, but also a good rap because there are some benefits to it. Maybe if you’re an Eskimo I had the mistake of like, of getting wrapped up in the rabbit hole being keto, and I, I really messed up my gut.
And I don’t want to deter people from trying that because there are some definite benefits of having fats in your diet, but they have to be the right fats. And you have to know who you are, individually, if you’re going to get benefits from that. And so, it’s really more about just taking a step back and talking to yourself after you have the food.
And just see how you feel like I’m the weird person in the grocery store going, Hey, Chris, do you want do you want that? And like, you get an answer right away? You do, you do? I swear if you just, if you stop for a second and ask, you get an answer right away.
Like there’s sometimes that this company Jackson’s Honest, has these really good corn chips that are just it’s literally sea salt, blue corn and coconut oil. And sometimes my body’s like, yes. And other times, like, nope. And it’s just you just talk to yourself and your innate wisdom knows what you need.
Patrick McGilvray
My body always says yes, when I’m standing in front of the ice cream display. Patrick, do you need this? And I’m like, yeah, do you know, it feels so good.
Chris Wissman
I got really caught up again, when I sort of learned all this stuff. I got really caught in a rabbit hole just thinking all that was bad. And like, to kind of back up the mindset. Like if that eases your mind. And that’s something that is a treat to you and you really enjoy it. If the juice is worth the squeeze mentally, and you don’t feel terrible, like maybe not make it a habit, but enjoy that, like, enjoy the Graeter’s, you know what I mean?
If you’re gonna do it, enjoy it, don’t beat yourself up about it. Because that will really throw you down a spiral. And I’ve seen a lot of people, including myself, not get the benefits from that. Yeah, it gets a little tricky. So I kind of live and this is kind of a popular thing. But I kind of do live by the 80/20.
And just been taking a step back and asking myself if that’s what I wanted, that’s what I needed. I’m actually more of a carbo type if I were to do my metabolic diet typing, so I do really well on on like good carbohydrates. So I will have like Ezekiel bread, which is a great source of like sprouted soaked seeds and grains.
And for a couple of years ago, you wouldn’t catch me eating that because I thought that was bad. And it causes inflammation. And it sounds like it’s got gluten in it. It’s got gluten and, and to gluten is defense, everyone that has been tested, like they get a couple of controlled studies and everyone that had gluten showed gut permeability, which is like inflammation. So there is some truth to it.
But that was American gluten. Keep that in mind. We could go down a really deep rabbit hole here. And there’s American gluten and basically American students got a bad rap. Oh, it actually doesn’t have a bad rap. It’s bad because it’s been sprayed with so many chemicals and actually mutated what it is. So if you find an organic source of gluten, you might not unless you’re celiac, you might not get that effect.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, I mean, corn apparently is a good ancient grain. That’s low in gluten. Yeah. Yeah, man. So Metabolic Typing, this is very interesting. I’m interested in doing this, you know, like, how would I go about doing this?
Chris Wissman
So there’s an actual book called Metabolic Diet Typing. And the company that I do my training for, the Czech Institute, has their own version of it that I like. And so if you’re ever interested in a questionnaire, I’m more than happy to pass it to you. I like some things from the Czech Institute. And I like a lot of things from the diet, the diet typing from the book is very in depth.
So if you want to go down the rabbit hole, I’d go that route. If you don’t, I would just just ask yourself some questions, you know, and just be really honest with yourself about what’s benefiting you and what’s not.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay. So I did a quick search here on Amazon, like the Metabolic Typing Diet. Yep. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, that’s it. And Walt, and Trish Fahey. You got it.
Chris Wissman
It’s been around for a while. And, you know, there’s, again, a lot of questions when you start to identify your diet type, but it’s really intuitive, and it’ll help you. And keep in mind, our diet type will change seasonally because our ancestors had different foods available at different times throughout the year.
We have the luxury now to just eat food from anywhere at any time and just go to Whole Foods and grab whatever. So if you got down into the nitty nitty gritty of your diet type you may change your food according to like, when it’s wintertime or when it’s spring or summertime, you know, you might eat a little I’m hotter and heavier in the winter, and more dense foods and in the summer of cooler, lighter foods, and it just, we crave those things, and we crave the soups, you know, in the winter, and then the salads in the summer.
Patrick McGilvray
So, pumpkin spice chai latte, fall in.
Chris Wissman
That’s, that was I think that was programmed later.
Patrick McGilvray
I don’t know, it’s pretty been around forever. What I love hearing you say is that, like diet, it depends on you. And I love this idea of just like figuring out what works for you, because so many people in the fitness community have kind of a one size fits all, you know, everything’s a nail, and they’ve got the hammer, you know, approach for diet, you know, it’s got to be keto, or it’s got to be, you know, paleo, or it’s got to be, you know, plant based, or it’s got to be, you know, whatever, or no carbs, or whatever it is. And I’m like, you know, it’s not that simple. You know, we’re not one size fits all people, you know?
Chris Wissman
Well, and when you when you start to make your, your transition into caring about what you how you treat yourself physically, and mentally, you’re gonna get some things that you identify with, you want to be like, that helped me like, so starting to clean up my diet and getting rid of X, Y, and Z, eating more of a paleo heavy fat approach was something that helped me and I identified with it.
And that was a part of the growing process. So I can really relate to where people are there. But it would be really sweet to start seeing people take a step back and just understand how different we all are. It is extraordinary how different of human beings we are, our gut microbiomes are totally different.
The way we move is different, the way we sleep, the way we act throughout our day, and our requirements are all different there, there might be some people that are just naturally deficient in vitamin A and others that aren’t at all. So you know, like, finding that kind of stuff out takes a little bit of work, but it’s well worth it. And just acknowledging the differences, I think is really important in it. And it kind of sets the ego aside for a minute. And, and allows you to relate to people and understand where they’re coming from.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, no, I love that. And, you know, I went, I was on a standard American diet for a long time. And that led me down the path of a lot of diseases, you know, me is what changed my Yeah, and I changed my diet. And I went from like, you know, pescatarian to vegetarian to plant based. And now I’m not as hardcore about plant based, I’m still vegetarian, I don’t crave eating, you know, meat at all.
And I don’t have anything against people that do. And I’m not saying one way is right or the other, but it’s just for me, I don’t have that desire for that. Yeah. So like, yeah, and I do like to have like a little cheese on my pizza, sometimes, you know, or, of course, whatever, you know, whatever. And I don’t beat myself up about it. Like, I have to do it this way or that way. So when people ask me, I say that I’m like, 98%, plant-based, you know, and that 2% is like, some Graeter’s every now and then you know, and cheese pizza, and I enjoy that it’s fine. And that way when I go to a party, and they’re like, have a cookie, I’m like, sorry, you noticed that it has butter in it? I’m like, Sure, Alex.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, my family just, oh, man, it’s been really accepting of it. But I can see the frustration on their face when I choose. I’m like, so every year that goes by, I experiment with a little more and a little more and, and I’m like, okay, I’ll try this this year. They’re like, why you’re gonna you’re gonna eat. I’m like, It’s not that I don’t think your food is good. It’s delicious. Which is like, since I’ve cleaned up so much when I do introduce something out of the ordinary for me, I just get, like ramifications sometimes. It’s like having a hangover. It’s not worth it.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, that’s a whole nother topic. So, just to kind of recap, like, I love this approach of like, do what feels good for you. Yeah, ask yourself, Do I want this? You know, and I think that can apply, you know, to a lot of things, you know, we could do that in our training. We can do that. You know, am I is this hurting my body? Is this form hurting my body? Is this long run good for me right now?
And it’s probably good for us to you know, ask those questions of ourselves on a regular basis, you know, and just just kind of check in with our mind. You know, what do you what does my body need here? Because your mind is so powerful that it really does know your your subconscious mind actually has a a blueprint of your of your body at perfect health that homeostasis.
Yeah, so it knows what that looks like for you. Yes. And if you can just tap into that, if you can just sort of like, let it be, you’re going to be much healthier, you know, for sure. Your subconscious mind is always trying to get you there. And we fight it, we fight it every day, we have a lot of this has to do with us wanting just wanting to feel good, we just want to feel good. I want to eat that bag, you know, of potato chips, because that’s salt in the ocean fad is just gonna make me finish sugar from the, you know, she’s gonna feel so good.
Chris Wissman
They have actual scientists that are behind, like, like flavor profiling now, so they don’t, I don’t even think they do nearly as many taste tests as I used to, they know it’s gonna taste good. It’s gonna, it’s gonna trigger our brain, and we’re gonna want more of it. And it’s already sugar. Yeah. And you have the brain addicted, the Holy Trinity, right?
Yeah, we can talk about something. So you mentioned the standard American diet. And what the standard American diet for you and I did was create disease, it may not have showed its face and shown its face. It’s like an actual, like a modern day disease yet, but we probably had a lot of different things going on with us, whether it be mood dysregulation, or aches and pains, or maybe weight gain or whatever it might have been.
But when our gut gets that much stress, it starts to become permeable. And you’ve heard everyone talk about leaky gut. And that’s kind of a really common topic to talk about. But the thing that I really love to dive into is something called visceral somatic inhibition. And those are just a bunch of fancy words for saying, when our gut is inflamed, that it’s taking over the nervous system response, the blood flow, and the hydration from the surrounding musculature.
The musculature is connected on those on those different on those nervous system pathways to protect itself. So when our organs are in bad shape from something like the standard American diet, or from maybe negative self talk, then our core, our transverse abdominis, and all these things don’t really have the opportunity to run at maximum capacity.
But when all the nutrients are taken away from the musculature and put in towards the organs, our liver and our in our gut and our small, large intestines, then we’re losing the availability to even use our core properly. And then we go down that rabbit hole of like, this is potentially where low back injuries come from, you know, our inner unit shut off, it can’t even work, right.
So it’s just all these stabilizing muscles up our spine that are responsible to take all the load of the spine and support us. And I’m sure they get mad, you know, and they want to shut down as well and take a break. So it’s very interesting to see what all these stressors can do on our body. And one of them is shut our core off. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s wild. And so like you said, though, the most powerful things in line if we continue that positive mindset, you can heal your gut through that. Just know that.
Patrick McGilvray
Fascinating. So give me one tip that we can take away as long distance runners. So if I’m running a half marathon or a marathon or an ultra marathon, you know, what’s something we can do? What would you recommend if you just met somebody at a party and you were like, Hey, do this one thing that’ll help you a lot.
Chris Wissman
Sleep and breathe, sleep and breathe. The more we can, but those are going to be really important as far as our availability to perform the next day, no matter what. Like your lifestyle prior to the couple of weeks before the race is going to be what it is. But if we can get a good sleeping pattern set, set and balance our circadian rhythm. Like you mentioned, we can come back in homeostasis relatively easy enough, we can start reincorporating diaphragmatic breathing, which would just be breathing down the deepest layers of our lungs and quit the panic breathing up into our chest. If we can breathe low and not high, then I think it would really set yourself up for some good endurance.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, how long does it take to for that sleeping pattern to kind of have an effect like is it right away?
Chris Wissman
I mean, I mean think about it the next day after you sleep eight hour you feel infinitely better than if you slept five. Especially again, everybody’s really different. Some people can get away with less but I wear an aura ring. And I know when my REM sleep is off. I know when my heart rate variability is often when my heart rate is elevated and it’s and really I don’t even need it because I can just tell it’s funny because I knew I just needed some reassurance and sleep affects so much. It’s so important to just sleep in a cool dark room. Try to get rid of the blue light before you go to bed and just get a good night’s sleep. And that’s helps me more than most things.
Patrick McGilvray
And then diaphragmatic breathing, that’s kind of like what you would call belly breathing. Is that right?
Chris Wissman
Yes, yeah. And you can get really complex with it. But if you just train yourself maybe lying on the ground, and expanding 360 degrees around your stomach, your back and your hips, and then coming back in, if you could expand 360 degrees, you know, efficiently learn to essentially diaphragmatically breathe. And my partner Jen is a expert with breath, if you ever want to talk with her, so she can, she can niche out on that.
Patrick McGilvray
I’ll be getting her on here, for sure. Cool. Is that something we can do while we’re running to that diaphragmatic breathing is that?
Chris Wissman
Yeah, it definitely will help. It will definitely help. And as long as you can handle maybe trying to train yourself to nasal breathing. I’ve read that that really helps her endurance. I don’t know, I don’t want to speak out of context. I don’t know the science behind that. I think Jen would be able to speak to that better. But no matter what I know that the guy frantically diaphragmatically breathing will help you whether or not you transition from nasal to mouth while you’re running is something that I’m not as familiar with yet.
Patrick McGilvray
I’ve done the nasal breathing while running. In fact, Jen and I, she gave me some tips when I was training for my 100.
Chris Wissman
Oh, cool.
Patrick McGilvray
So she yeah, so she helped me with that. And it worked for me for slower paces, you know, because you get to a point where you just I couldn’t get enough air to my cells.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, you have to oxygenate.
Patrick McGilvray
And so it was like mouth and nose and ears, anything I could just open up to get as much air in. But then there’s a lot to be said about that. Nasal Breathing. So we’ll get into that later. But that’s cool. That’s cool stuff. Heck, yeah, man. All right. Thanks, Chris. for hanging out with me. I know, I didn’t really know where this conversation was going to go. And it kind of went in a bunch of different directions. And that’s awesome. I just love to have these conversations with you. Where can people reach out to learn more about you or to learn more about Real Human Performance?
Chris Wissman
Real Human Performance on Instagram spelled out just like it sounds. And that’s where Jen and myself are and there’s a couple of our co-workers that are awesome coaches there. And my personal Instagram is @wissmansworld. But I do all my business there, so you can check both of them out. I do my weird stuff on my personal page. I’ll do like ice plunges and ice cold showers, and just act like a wild man and get out in nature and then keep it more professional at Real.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you don’t have to keep it that professional. You’re not that, why is that wild? Honestly, good. Okay, cool. So thanks again. This has been awesome. Looking forward to having another conversation like this with you sometimes.
Chris Wissman
I really appreciate the opportunity to vomit my thoughts everywhere.
Patrick McGilvray
We love being the recipient of your vomit.
Chris Wissman
What a way to end.
Patrick McGilvray
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