How to Maintain Fitness and Wellness Habits: Tips and Techniques

How to Maintain Fitness and Wellness Habits: Tips and Techniques

Maintaining your fitness and wellness habits can be challenging, especially when life gets
busy. However, developing simple and effective strategies will help you stay on track and
keep your health a priority. This article will provide you with a comprehensive guide to
staying fit and healthy, complete with tips and techniques that you can implement in your
daily routine.

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Workout Wednesday: Run Strength

Workout Wednesday: Run Strength

Happy Hump Day!  Workout Wednesday’s will consist of favorite workout of mine that I either have prescribed to my clients or have been assigned by MY Coach.  It might also be a favorite of yours.  Feel free to send me any workouts you like.   There will be an objective for every workout for specificity.

Run Strength – Hill Repeats

I am not a huge fan of weights or being in the gym.  As the summer wore on and Florida continued to increase in heat I found myself spending more and more time in the gym and on the treadmill, but I still prefer to be outside.  This workout will work leg strength as a replacement for a gym resistance workout or a supplement to.  It can be done either on the Treadmill or outside with a hill that takes 2-3 minutes to run up, or here in Florida we use parking garages.

WU (Warm-up): Run Drills & Dynamic Stretchinghills
1-2 miles @ conversational pace

MS (Main Set):
Hill Bounders on uphill
Recover for 30 sec – 2 minutes
Speed over strides on Downhill
Repeat for up to 30 minutes

CD (Cool Down): 1-2 miles @ conversational pace
Lunges & Static Stretches

Objective: Leg strength, Aerobic capacity, Form Development & Confidence on Hills

Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE): 5-7 on the uphills (Talking should be very difficult)

Description: Run a hilly course.  Do not try to run fast on the uphills but rather concentrate on a good knee lift, strong arm swing, uplifted chest and full push-off extension in your back leg. Practice running efficiently on the downhills with high turnover and enough of a forward lean that your front leg lands directly under you.

Hill Bounders:  go up the hill with a bouncy action and a good posture, concentrating on a good knee lift and arm swing with a “snap” with your ankle. You should be thinking Spring up the hill.  Jog until recovered at the top.

Speed Over striders: Run down the hill with out breaking but increasing your cadence with the steepness of the hill.  Instead of completely striding out elongating your stride, focus on increasing your cadence with a normal stride.

Biggest Mistakes: Running too fast up the hill rather than concentrating on form.  Running too hard up the hill and getting into too much oxygen debt. This is not desirable in this phase  .Putting more stress on the legs than they are ready for with too much bounding or downhill running and getting injured.  Precipitating your peak with repeated speed bursts. Some people tend to develop speed very quickly once they start doing the hill circuit. If this is the case, go very easy with downhill striding and on the stride-outs. You’ll still have plenty of time to develop speed to maximum. Premature speed development would only lead to premature peaking and this should be avoided.

Warning: The first week of hill training is one of the times where injury is most likely to occur. This is a very demanding exercise, so be overly cautious and feel your way gradually.  After about 2 weeks in this phase your legs could feel very tired and you may feel you’re actually slower. This is normal and will pass within a couple of weeks of consistently completing the workout.

I hope you enjoy this one. I know I do.

 

What kind of workout do you do for run strength?

Carpe Vitam!

The Goof Guppy – Swimprove #2

The Goof Guppy – Swimprove #2

In my recent post, Effortless Swimming-Goof Out#1, I gave a summary of the introductory lesson in Effortless Swimming’s Mastering Freestyle Course.  This course is located within the Swimprove program hosted by Brenton Ford and his Australian company Effortless Swimming.  I continued with that lesson for a week which was dedicated to balance and streamlining within the water, and I recently continued with lessons 1 & 2.

Lesson 1 was specifically geared to the feel of rotating from your hips.  I did this workout 3 times and I want to nickname it the Core Killer.  I never thought working out in the pool with so little movement would cause such a tightness in my abs and core, but nevertheless, my abs, obliques, quads and hammies where a little tight the next day.  It consisted of 1800 meters of drills, plus a warm-up and cool down making it 2400 meters total.

The Workout

WU: 300m any stroke
MS: 300m Kick on side w/ shoulder to chin
300m Kick on side w/ hand-to-face
300m Kick on side w/ switch
300m Kick on side w/ arms at side
300m Kick on side w/ arms across chest
300m Kick on side w/ blockhead arms
CD:300m Easy Free

I do not have a strong kick, so I continued to use my Zoomer fins to reduce my worry of propulsion since I knew that was not the focus of the workout.  Lucky for me, Brenton actually suggests the use of fins in both the written material and the videos that accompany this course.

Throughout the workout, I noticed that when it was more difficult to rotate from my hips, I was not streamlined, however when I engaged just my core, and lengthened myself, rotating the hips became a lot smoother and I did move faster to the other end of the pool.  I also learned more about breathing, because when you have one shoulder out of the water and you are look at the bottom of the pool, once in a while it is nice to turn your head and breathe.  The breath is quick, so I started to breathe out during the drill and breathe in when I rotated.  This was never natural for me and I know it caused a lot of anxiety for me.  It still isn’t natural, but it makes a lot more sense.  Once I finish the lessons, I will be able to develop a relaxing pattern with this new revelation.

Lesson 2 added the arms.  I kept the fins with these drills, but because there were only three drills, I dropped them afterwards and swam one thousand meters without them.  I was still slow, but I noticed it was quite a bit easier.  I also developed a patter of breathing for myself, which I still am not consistent with but, when my position is streamlined and I am keeping a high elbow, it is a lot easier with the new breathing patter. It makes for an interesting alert.  If I begin to feel like my breathing pattern is off, most likely it is because my swimming technique as fallen apart.

The Workout

WU: 300m any stroke
MS: 300m Shark Fin Drill with pause & return
300m Shark Fin Drill with practice entry
300m Shark Fin Drill with switch
10×100 Free Form Focus
CD: 300m Easy Free

This weekend will be the test.  My first triathlon of the season is Sunday at the HITS Ocala Olympic Triathlon.  I still have one more module of the Mastering Freestyle Course, but that will have to wait for next week.  I am going to use my last workout this week to continue with the lesson 2 drills.  We will see what happens. I am really excited

You can checkout the Swimprove program at www.swimprove.com

Carpe Viam!

Effortless Swimming Goof-Out #1

Effortless Swimming Goof-Out #1

In my post Goof Views and News #1 I again mentioned that swimming is my weakest event in the sport of Triathlon.  I remember completing a bike workout with the A-Train and one of our athletes David Nardoski was complaining of how slow a swimmer he was.  When we compared times, he was still 20% faster than I was or, am.  (Just for your information, David did not one, not two, but FOUR Ironman triathlons last year, plus a couple 70.3s as well.)

I also mentioned that I enlisted the help of Brenton Ford from Effortless Swimming and his Swimprove program.  If you are ready for a laugh here is the video I sent him for analysis.

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Interesting right?  Can you see those ankles?  How the heck am I supposed to move through the water with ankles that barely straighten past 90 degrees?  Unfortunately, the video didn’t exactly have the best angles so Brenton wasn’t able to analyze it, so I am hopefully going to enlist the help of a friend to do some more recording.  More videos are on the way. (Oh goodie, just what you wanted to see.  More horrible swimming.  Right?)

Yesterday, I completed the introductory lesson in the Swimprove Mastering Freestyle Program, which was 2000 meters of drills.  While at first glance the drills seemed rudimentary, even for me, they helped tremendously.

The workout when like this:

  1. WU(Warm-up): 250 any stroke
  2. MS(Main Set): 12×25 Kick on Back
  3. 12×25 Kick on Back with 20 degree rotation
  4. 12×25 Kick on Back with arm straight
  5. 12×25 Kick on Side
  6. 12×25 Kick on Side with arm straight
  7. CD(Cool Down): 250 Free

At first glance it doesn’t look so bad does it?  I didn’t think so either until I dug into it.  It was the amount of kicking.  As proof from the video, I do not have what any swimmer would call a strong kick, so it felt like forever for me to move from one wall to the other, but luckily that wasn’t the point of the drills.  It was to learn balance. and that, ladies and gentlemen, is a lesson I learned.  I finally felt what it was like to be able to have a steady plane toward the surface of the water without a lot of effort.

From the second set on, I put on a pair of Zoomers(short fins) so I could at least get through the workout in time for work, and with each set I felt myself feel the water a little more.  Of course all the “feel” in the world didn’t keep me from zigzagging down the lane, at least while I was on my back, but my whole body was at least on the surface without dragging my legs, which is a huge issue for me.

By the time I turned over and was kicking on my side, and allowed my arm to dip below the surface about thirty degrees, I felt like I was really moving.  I even had an epiphany about breathing because while on my side I was forced to exhale out and almost roll completely over to get a breath.  I even started to relax a bit.  The cool down, while still not effortless, was far more streamlined than when I first entered the water that workout.

I think Brenton might have something with his Swimprove program.

Stay tuned, boys and girls, for more highlights from my journey to a faster more efficient swim.

Gasparilla Distance Classic

Runners – Have a great race weekend!

Carpe Viam!