HOW TO IMPROVE

A series of articles by Mike Potts

Article 1 - The Basics

When I sat down to start writing what I hope will be the first of a series of articles for the Corsham Running Club newsletter, I spent rather a long time trying to think of a good, punchy and dynamic title. Ideas such as ‘The Need for Speed’, ‘Look Good, Feel Great!’, or ‘The Process of Training Explained via the Principle of Supercompensation’ (!) and other cheesy one-liners were considered and rapidly discarded as I tried to find a title that would appeal to all levels of runner. I thought about why people come to the running club, what most runners want to achieve and what motivates us to run in all weathers and conditions when most sane people are tucked up in bed: in essence, why do we do it? I think I’ve managed to capture this in the title as I mention both the fact that we generally want to get better at running and that I’m going to tell you how to go about this.

The first thing you should ask anyone who wants to tell you how to do something is, ‘What qualifies you to do this?’. Well, although I’m about to embark on getting formal coaching recognition, thanks to the Club, I don’t have any academic qualification, I haven’t worked in the leisure industry, and I’m not an international level or elite athlete – not by a long stretch. However, what I do think I have is an inquisitive nature, a reasonable level of fitness, personal experience of a wide variety of running injuries and treatments (!), and, above all, enthusiasm for the subject as a whole and a desire to put something back into a Club which has given me a great deal of pleasure. Practically all of what I’m going to write about is sourced from fitness books and magazines, and the principles can be applied to most endurance sports; I will also get some ‘top tips’ from members of the Club on realistic training that has worked for them. I will try to mention examples of training ideas and match the theory to the practical aspects of improving. I’m not going to mention any radical new training ideas and will stick to widely-recognised, tried and tested methods; I’m not going to get over technical, although I firmly believe that people who genuinely want to improve need to understand some physiological basics about how our bodies work; and I’m not going to berate anyone for not wanting to improve – some people run with the Club purely for the social aspects or are perfectly happy with their levels of fitness. What I will state, though, is that if you do want to improve, there is a level of sacrifice involved as there is a lot of truth in the saying ‘no pain, no gain’. By ‘pain’, I don’t mean feeling like someone has stabbed you in the leg with a red-hot poker; I mean ‘pain’ as the feelings of discomfort experienced when you push yourself beyond your normal levels of exertion.

First of all, I’d like to introduce the idea of ‘supercompensation’. Whilst this sounds more like the sort of thing that would effect the UK economy , it underpins how our bodies adapt to the stresses of training and how we consequently improve our fitness. It will also introduce and prove one of the most important concepts of getting fit –getting enough rest!

When we go for a run, we stress our heart and lungs, our skeleton and our muscles – these actions manifest themselves in heavier breathing, an increased pulse rate and tired muscles. Concentrating on what happens to our muscles, repeated motion at a reasonable level of exertion actually damages the muscle fibres in our bodies! But surely this can’t be any good for us? Actually, the damage happens at a microscopic level with the tearing of a mere few thousand tiny muscle fibres out of a total of hundreds of thousands, even millions. It’s these microscopic tears that give us muscle ache the day after a hard training session. What happens next is that, during the time we rest, the body repairs itself but – and here’s the crucial bit – it actually repairs itself to be stronger than before! Our muscles compensate for the exertion of training and become stronger in the process. This overcompensation, or ‘supercompensation’, is the fundamental principle of how our bodies improve when we train and is critical to the understanding of any training programme for any endurance sport. The classic diagram below shows this in terms of fitness improvement following a training session:

The action occurs in every muscle affected by training – and the heart, in particular, is a very trainable muscle. So, as we train and rest, train and rest, etc, during a training programme, the heart, lungs and muscles become stronger and more capable. However, it’s important to note that training is a delicate balance: if we do not continually increase the stress we put our bodies under as we train, our fitness will level off and we will no longer improve; conversely, if we over-stress our bodies without adequate rest, the muscles will not have time to repair themselves, we will get injured and not be able to train – clearly, this is counter-productive. It is most important to accept that if we do not allow our bodies adequate rest to repair muscles and become stronger, we will become overtrained and more prone to sickness and injury.

So, what important points can we infer from above?

a. We have to gradually increase the loading on our body in order to improve our fitness. This is why we have progressive training plans at the Club, where the level of effort required increases slightly every week. This also explains why, when you first start running, you make large increases in fitness very quickly as your body rapidly adapts to the new training stress. Unfortunately, if you carry on doing the same thing, say, running 5 miles a session at the same pace every week, your fitness reaches a plateau and you don’t get any better. This is why we mix training sessions at the Club so the body experiences new stresses.

b. We must allow the body adequate rest in order to grow stronger. This is why you don’t do back-to-back hard sessions on consecutive days – otherwise, you’d be knackered all the time! By using a progressive training programme, you gradually improve your fitness in small steps to avoid injury and get enough rest between sessions. Note that all of the training programmes you see in magazines and books will have a hard day followed by an easier day to allow the supercompensation process to happen. See - I’m not lying to you!

In the next article, we’ll build on this idea of supercompensation by introducing the types of energy systems in the body – aerobic and anaerobic - and how each of them can be trained. I hope that this has been easy to read, been simple enough to understand and has explained some of the basic ideas behind training. If you want to make any comments or have any ideas of what you want to see in future articles, please either collar me at Club, or email me at mikey.potts@btopenworld.com. Hopefully, this article will also be put on the website if you want to refer to it again in future.