Doing any type of exercise is going to help build your physical fitness. Most people often forget the benefit exercise and training can have on you mentally too.
Exercise and training releases endorphins in your body which stimulate your brain, often know has the happy chemicals, which is why you feel better once you’ve trained.
It might be hard dragging yourself to the gym or going out for a run when the weather isn’t too appealing but you always feel happy and when you’ve finished.
Its' important to perform running drills if you're wanting to become a more efficient runner. By doing them you'll find your improve your running speed.
Running drills help to improve the communication between your brain and your legs, strengthen your muscles and joints, improve your coordination, agility, balance and proprioception.
I’m going to go through what rotator cuff injuries are and how that can then lead to shoulder pain and shoulder problems.
You might think that shoulder work as a runner might be lower down on your priority. You might be thinking your legs need a bit more strength work putting into them, but your shoulders are just as important, particularly when it comes to obstacle races. It is a given that your shoulders and your upper body strength is going to be needed, particularly if you're thinking about pull-ups and monkey bars and any rig work that you might be doing, but link it back into your running form. You're going to be using the arm movement through your normal natural swing. So the positioning that you're going to be in is really important.
I'm going to go through what IT band syndrome is, you might know it as your iliotibial band, it can be shortened to IT band, ITB syndrome, ITBS. It’s a common over use injury that leads to a thickening of the connective tissue that runs from your hip to your knee. And as that thickens, that causes the tightness, tensions and inflammation within that area, which then leads to the pain in your knee. Your IT band helps to stabilize your knee joint, it stops that rotational movement happening. When it gets weakened, that's when it becomes painful.
We're going to look a little bit today about what is runner's knee. Commonly, this is when you're getting pain at the front of your knee when you're running.
Orthotics are inserts you put in your shoes and they’re designed to support your foot. They can change the way your foot performs, specifically looking at the degree of pronation. There are a variety of orthotics on the market ranging from custom made to the generic off the shelf type.
I always like to praise my clients for the accomplishments they achieve, no matter how big or small they are.
A number of my clients this year have wanted to take on new challenges and for them in meant upping the distances they were running to include marathons and ultra-marathons and events.
I’m sure most of you in the Obstacle Racing scene will have over the last few weeks been hearing non stop about the Obstacle Course Racing World Championships.
If you haven’t and wonder what it is all about, it’s an amazing event where countries from all over the world come together to celebrate and test themselves amongst some of the great OCR athletes out there.
It can be your worst fear as a runner getting injured and not being able to train or race. Often getting knee, shin or foot pain you can it put to the back of your mind and hope that it’ll go away. But unfortunately that is never the case. In most circumstances if you ignore the problem it is only going to get worse.
I've been all go this week with work and this weekend was a family party so it gave me a chance to properly sit back and relax and look back on this last year.
Time has flown by and to think that I've been in the studio for 1 year has been amazing. Lots of clients have stepped through the doors all set on challenging themselves with the events they have planned and want to build their fitness for. For some its just been to get focused again and needing that friendly and supportive environment to exercise in.
This year has seen me become more focused with my training and to do that I booked my place at the Obstacle Course Racing World Championships. Training has been going well, I've hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, one little niggle I have at the moment is with my shoulder and neck, which is stopping me from training quite as hard as I want to.