To the Frustrated Athlete (and everybody else)

I love people and I love to challenge what they believe.  I don't mean to pick a fight.  I am truly an dismal fighter unless I were somehow able to sucker punch you and take off running before you had a chance to ever catch up.  No I really mean to say that I believe there are very few absolute truths in this world and it's important to know which ones you subscribe to.  When we make absolute statements we immediately close the walls around ourselves and our life's possibilities.

I do this because I know it's not worth limiting yourself to feel secure.  If you aren't sure about this, go ask someone who's lived more than 90 years.

So coming off of injury last year, I was reluctant to pressure myself by signing up for any races this year.  Then I realized I didn't have to actually race, that was just one of those things I "chose" to make an absolute truth.  But it really wasn't, you don't have to race a race unless you feel like it!  So the races I've signed up for this year are all about scenery and camaraderie with the other runners.  It's had nothing to do with performance.  Instead I have focused on my health, which in exercise terms means that I have begun paying great attention to the details of my lifestyle.  The running is a joyous "extra" in the scheme of nutrition, sleep, and mindset.  I enjoy running fast as much as anyone else, but my running for health is mostly aerobic and in a moment I will explain my reasoning.

But first let me say that performance is not a given...no matter how hard you work or how much you think you deserve it.  When I hear whining from athletes about their "poor" performance I cannot help but think it's yet another box they've chosen to put themselves inside.  It's a mindset of entitlement and it's limiting (and believe me I used to do it too).  But performance is not a birthright.  When you get pissed just remember that.

 

I was explaining to a good friend this past week how I view the aerobic system and its contributions to our health (and performance when applicable).  My argument was that much of the injury and burnout that people face could be due to a lack of basic aerobic development.  Aerobic fitness has taken a beating with recent studies showing how effective for weight loss and muscle growth HITT training can be.  At this point in the evolution of the blogosphere, even your grandmother has likely heard something about HITT training.  Nothing wrong with that, HITT training has some very important applications.  I would imagine that without descent anaerobic development our ancestors wouldn't have lasted long.  But I'd like to take a small step back and discuss aerobic training from a physiological standpoint and why I believe that our lifestyle has created a "workout crisis."

Consider that humans are designed to move all throughout the day and that this is increasingly NOT happening in our modern societies.  So we've built these things called "gyms" since most of us don't have to do much real physical work anymore.  But consider how much we used to walk and how often we might find ourselves in a trot to get somewhere a little quicker.  That my friends used to be the baseline aerobic development of which I speak.  I'm not talking about 2-3 hour runs and marathon training, although our ancestors would probably wonder why we celebrate the physical feat of a marathon when their lives revolved around traveling on their own two feet for long distances.

 

Modern societies have systematically lessened the requirement to develop the aerobic system.  I truly think that many people "hate running" simply because they do not have the basic aerobic development from "living life" to get through an easy jog without feeling like death or something on their bodies hurting.  They are nowhere close to their natural baseline of health, they are in a state of disuse!  We can blame it on the running, which some choose to do, but the reality is that humans have been walking and running for a solid 2+ million years.

 

We see many unsuccessful attempts to supplement this lack of natural aerobic development.  The problem with attempting to supplement a poor lifestyle choice is that you will be minimally successful at best.  How successful?  Maybe 20%, maybe 60%, it varies of course.  But we know you won't do your biology justice living the standard modern lifestyle.  That's why you can't "out-exercise" sitting for 8+ hours a day.  It's nice to have the official research to back up what we intuitively know, that desk jobs and shift-work are hazardous to your health.  We know that we are adapted to move at low levels with occasional bursts of energy throughout the day.  This is a law of nature that we cannot escape.

 

So what about HITT training?  I think HITT is appropriate if you already have a basic level of aerobic metabolism.  For example, can you hike all day in the mountains with just water?  If you can't I would say you're attempting to build HITT training on a body that can't metabolize its own fat for energy.  Without full aerobic development, you limit how much HITT training can benefit you.  Now what isn't agreed upon is "how much aerobic activity gets you to the healthy baseline?"  How much "base" do we really need?  While we have tried to study this in large populations so that we can come up with appropriate recommendations, it's really just a question of how much are we supplementing our poor lifestyle?

Our poor lifestyle being the lazy modern lifestyle.

If you have the desk job, you're just supplementing.

If you never get sunshine on your skin, you're just supplementing.

If you can't function 12 waking hours without food, you're just supplementing.

I get that we don't live in a perfect world and there may be a season of your life in which a "supplementation" for the real thing is all that you can manage.  But I think it's important for people to know the reality and the reality is that until we use our bodies in the way they were designed to be used (aerobic activity all throughout the day), we are only supplementing.

I should be fair.

This is not a black and white scenario in the sense that I've seen many endurance athletes who can go all day on their feet but have compensations with basic daily activities because they have lost a severe amount of basic strength (again this is due to disuse, not so much the nature of aerobic metabolism but rather the choice to not perform activities that require strength).  As we age we absolutely need to get serious about using our strength if we expect to be our healthiest.

 

But get away from the marketing for just a moment (or permanently if you can).  Imagine yourself in a time when you had to walk everywhere, perhaps climb some rocks or a tree, maybe you farmed, maybe you hunted, maybe you gathered.  Either way you were getting lots of aerobic work and a healthy dose of anaerobic work (lifting/carrying things) pretty often.  It's not complicated.  If someone is making it complicated, beware of the sales pitch coming soon.

If you can't do the small things, don't expect to be able to do the big things.  This is a message for the frustrated athletes.  I was one of them.  I was injured and I let the pressure to perform well for many years drive the way that I trained.  And after all that time I realized I had simply placed myself in a miserable box.  It was completely my choice to sacrifice my body for nothing more than a "perception" of success.  Bottom line, no one gives a flying crap about my performance (or yours).  If I wasn't going to do it solely for me, because I wanted it and I enjoyed it, then it didn't really need to be done!  I started training aerobically again, like I did before I gave a sh*t about performance.  Then a funny thing happened, the injuries got much better and my performance in both endurance and anaerobic activities improved.

When we lived in nature we didn't have this problem.  We didn't have to think about aerobic or anaerobic metabolism because we did the former all the time and the latter when we hunted, gathered, farmed, built shelters, searched for water, etc.  This is a great reminder because it means that many of us could see better health (and performance) if we lived a little closer to nature (and a working lifestyle) and a little further from marketing BS.

If you're having any frustration in your training, give yourself a break.  Put your health first.  Build a solid foundation.  Be able to work for more than a few minutes at a time.  If you're injured or burned-out or just not progressing anymore, go back to the basics.