Crossfit endurance, Tabata sprints, and why people just don’t get it

Crossfit endurance, Tabata sprints, and why people just don’t get it

Not terribly long ago, I stopped dating a girl because she did crossfit.

Okay, it wasn’t the only reason, but it was a major factor. I mention this not to show how messed up my dating life/requirements may be, but to show how strongly I feel about the marketing scheme that is Crossfit.  I’ve always wanted to write a blog post about it, but the article in this months Runner’s World has finally pushed me over the edge.  I’m writing this blog to give a 2^nd opinion and to combat the marketing hype that surrounds crossfit.  I wouldn’t take much offense to crossfit and would let it do its own thing, except when you start telling people that this is the way of the future and that Ryan Hall would run faster if he did this stuff , then I have a problem (Yes, CFE founder has made this claim)

For this post, we’ll focus on Crossfit Endurance because it got some major publication in this month’s Runner’s World and has been getting some hype lately.  If you were at my presentation at the American Distance Summit in North Carolina, you got to hear me take a few jabs at crossfit (and Renato Canova even threw in a jab or two!).  Since it’s a question I get asked a lot, lets take a look at crossfit endurance.

The claim and exploitation:

Altitude babies, Rats, and Epigenetics

New born rats, altitude, and epigenetics:

Over the past few years, the term epigenetics has kind of exploded in the popular science world.  I’ve discussed it at length in this blog and how it might have implications with a wide range of topics from obesity to African running dominance to how we adapt to altitude.

One of the basic ideas is that what happens in the time period before and just after birth is when a newborn is kind of adapting to its adjustment.  So if we look at diet, if a mother is going through famine during this time frame, then the baby changes to be prepared for this environment.  So it’s response to certain foods or its insulin response is adjusted.  Similarly, there’s been some studies looking at mothers who have high stress loads during and right after pregnancy result in babies have altered stress hormone responses for the rest of their life.

I always joke with my friends that whenever I have kids, I’m going to stick them at altitude during pregnancy and right after just to develop super altitude adapted kids (and my friends always respond with you better find a wife who is crazy enough to let you do all this wonderful experimentation…and that you’re kids are gonna be messed up…but that’s besides the point…).  Which brings me to the point of this…

A study in the Journal of Applied Physiology was recently published that took a bunch of rats that were at high altitude in Bolivia and made a group of them live in a simulated sea level environment.  So you basically had an altitude group and a sea level group, but it was only from 1 day before birth to 15 days after birth when they were in these two different environments.  Then they were brought together and lived their normal rat lives together.  Well, they checked them periodically through their life and ultimately at 600 days post birth. 

What is interesting is that those 16 days during development affected parameters for the rest of their lives.  For example, the “normoxia/oxygen” group had lower hemoglobin and hematocrit for the rest of their lives.  They also had “reduced right ventricular hypertrophy (both sexes); lower air space-to-tissue ratio in the lungs (males only); reduced CO₂ production rate, but higher oxygen uptake (males only);”

It’s pretty interesting that 16 days in the rat lifecycle affected various parameters for the rest of their lives.  It just goes to show how important that development period actually is and it brings up some questions about altitude training and whether just copying altitude born athletes is the key or if we should attack it from a different way with sea level born athletes.

I’m not really sure what the practical importance of this is, except maybe my crazy joking of having high altitude babies might be on to something…

(study abstract here: http://jap.physiology.org/content/112/1/33.abstract?etoc )

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be at the Canadian athletics coaching symposium to speak with Alberto Salazar on a couple of different topics.  It was a great experience and I picked up a lot of interesting ideas from other presenters and those in the audience who I chatted afterwards with.  While there, Jay Johnson asked me to sit down and do a podcast covering a wide range of topics from HS training to sprinting to what I do now with elites.  So head on over to Jay's site and take a listen. 

http://www.coachjayjohnson.com/2011/12/podcast-003-steve-magness-interview/
Also, a couple articles I wrote or contributed to for Running Times are online now so if you haven't checked those out, there might be something useful in them:

When to pull the plug on your season:
http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=24550

How to do a hard workout after a race:
http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=24260

Lessons from outside the running world

This is going to be an interesting attempt at a blog.  One that takes seemingly unrelated subjects and ties them into my main focus, running. 

If you were to flip through any of the myriad of books I’ve read on some pretty random subjects, you’d see the margins littered up and down with notes.  If a stranger was to read them, they probably would make no sense, because they’re almost all about connecting whatever random subject I’m reading about back to running.  It doesn’t matter what the subject is.  Recognizing similar patterns in other subjects, or taking overarching themes and tying them to your specialty is key to broadening your horizons and not falling into the same dogma that gets presented over and over again within a specialty.  Making connections is a skill that should be learned.  Given that, I’m going to delve through several of my books and highlight some of the abstract lessons I’ve learned and what that means to my specialty, running.

This is somewhat related to a previous post where I gave my kind of overarching principles and rules for everything:

http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2010/04/my-rules-of-everything.html

The Sole of the Shoe: Looking at inside the midsole

The sole of the shoe:

With this whole barefoot/minimalist/running mechanics thing exploding right now, one fo the more productive outcomes in science is the realization that the body is smarter than we give it credit for.  All those old biomechanical models that presented the body as rigid mechanical body don’t quite accurately reflect what’s going on.  Instead, the body works in a nicely complex way where stiffness, tension, and muscle activity are adjusted on the fly based on feedback the body receives.  So it’s constantly calculating and preparing for what’s going on.  So that means adjusting for the ground surface type, the position of the legs and feet throughout, and so on.  Essentially, your body has an in built cushioning system.

Training to Kick

How to train a kick:

                In the last post, we took a look at the physiology behind the kick.  That’s all well and good but it’s pretty much useless unless we can translate that knowledge into something practical. So let’s give that a go based on theory and practical experience.  Here’s my guide to creating a kick:

Finding the weak point and attacking it from multiple ways:

                If you are at all familiar with my training style, one of my central premises is to attack a problem from multiple different directions.  The same thing applies to the kick.  What we ideally do is look at what each runners strengths and weaknesses are in terms of why they can or can not kick, place the emphasis on developing that attribute, but make sure we cover the opposite side too.

                That means the first question that needs to be asked is, what’s the balance between their aerobic strength and anaerobic capacity?  Obviously increasing both is needed, but this answers the question of whether they run out of gas during the race (lack the strength to stay more aerobic deep into the race) or whether they have the speed ability to actually kick.  This will develop the proportion of emphasis. You want to attack both sides, but sometimes one side needs a little bit more emphasis because it’s a bit weaker.  Given that, let’s go into the different ways of developing a kick:

The steps:

If you remember in the last post I gave a general outline of what you need physiologically.  Let’s use that as a template and I’ll show you how to develop those abilities:

The Science of the finishing kick

Kicking it into gear.

I’ve explored the phenomenon of the kick a little before but with recent research and with the fact worlds has just happened, let’s explore the kick phenomenon a bit more.  First, let’s look at what actually happens physiologically, and then what we can do about it.

The physiology of the kick:

Energy systems dynamics:

An interesting new study sheds some more light on why we might be able to run faster, particularly at the end of a race.  You can read about it here (LINK) but they took cyclist and had them do either solo time trials or against a computer which was really their previous selves.  What they found was that when racing someone, they were able to increase their speed and the sole reason was the anaerobic energy component.  In other words, the cyclists used the same amount of energy aerobically, but in the faster trial they were able to tap into more of their anaerobic capacity.  This has implications in regards to motivation which we’ll discuss shortly, but for now lets look at what this and other research means for the kick in terms of energetic.

If we define the kick as the last 100-400m or so of the race where the pace is increased you have to look at two factors in terms of what effects the kick.