Core Performance Endurance

CHAPTER 1

A CALL TO CHANGE

Take your left hand and place it on a flat surface, preferably a table. Raise your middle finger and push it down as hard as you can. Really slam that finger down.

Now relax your hand. Reach over with your right hand, pull that same finger back and let it snap down. Go ahead. Do it again and again. How much effort did it take to do that? Not much, but it generated so much more force than through the first method.

If you were to keep raising that middle finger on its own, you'd get tired. But if you can store and release that energy, lifting with your other hand, you can do it all day long and produce many times the power with a fraction of the effort.

This is a good illustration of elastic power. We want to be able to store and release energy efficiently. Everything we do has some sort of elastic component to it, whether it's walking, running, going down steps, or playing sports. The more efficiently we can store and release energy, the less effort we have to expend.

Elasticity, this ability to store and release energy efficiently, is the reason people are able to run marathons in just over 2 hours. The foundation of elasticity is stability and mobility. Go back to our finger exercise: If you lift your finger and don't stabilize your hand on the table, you'll lift your hand as well as your finger off the table. Stability allows you to have a fixed point from which to stretch the muscle, so it can efficiently store and release that energy. Stability is your foundation.

Mobility is the ability to take that finger back through the range of motion, allowing for fluid movement and greater potential to store and release energy. Mobility can be restricted because of tight tissue or poor joint mechanics, problems that could come from traumatic injury or misuse through inefficient biomechanics over time.

Once we harmonize stability and mobility, we have the foundation for elasticity. These efficient movement patterns empower you to run, ride, and swim faster with less energy expenditure. This is all part of the Holy Grail of endurance training. And we'll show you how to get there.

ELASTICITY AND TISSUE TOLERANCE

Through this program, you'll develop tissue tolerance. Your body breaks down when it's overstressed or under-recovered. Training creates small microtears in your tissue, and ultimately, you're going to overstress or rip the fabric unless you address this problem.

Elasticity, along with mobility and stability, decreases the tissue load. When your body is more elastic, each stroke and stride puts less of a load on your tissue. Think of your body as a pogo stick. We want our bodies to be able to store and release energy powerfully, just like a pogo stick.

When you have good elasticity, your body stretches and snaps back well. But if the tissue is tight, with a dozen knots in it, it doesn't have the ability to store energy and it does not snap back. If you took a rubber band and stretched it, you'd notice its ability to lengthen and to store energy evenly. But if you tied knots in it and tried to stretch it, it wouldn't be nearly as effective.

In this program, we're going to make sure that knots don't form. You don't want to do the equivalent of letting your tissue sit in the sun and dry out. If you do, it's going to get brittle and lose its elasticity. If you tug on it, it's going to break.

If you're not building tissue tolerance--not taking care of your muscular and connective tissue--then you're going to be limited in endurance activities. Tissue tolerance is the foundation of your body's ability to perform and protect itself from injury.

I'm guessing you haven't given a lot of thought to tissue tolerance. Take a moment and consider your relationship with your tissue. Right now, you might not have a lot of respect for it. You do some stretching, but mostly on autopilot, not making significant improvements. Perhaps you get occasional massages; sometimes, they're painful.

I want you to have a better understanding of how important tissue is to your endurance success. Think about your tissue as a carving knife. If you keep using it without cleaning it regularly and sharpening it periodically, it's going to be rendered useless before long. If you ignore your tissue like this, the neglect will translate into injury that will set you back until your body can recover. Even if you don't get injured, your performance will suffer, like a dull knife.

If you don't do proactive maintenance on a consistent basis, this is what will happen. With the Core Performance Endurance (CPE) system, you'll learn how to obtain tissue quality and stay proactive, which will have you swimming, running, and biking with less pain and fewer setbacks over the course of the year.

Your relationship with your tissue is no different than a relationship with a significant other: If you neglect it, you're going to hear about it. Muscles let you know through spasm or injury. Give your muscle tissue a little love, and you'll be rewarded with a smoother, more productive training experience--just as the proper investments of time, communication, shared feelings, and gestures nurture a relationship and prevent major confrontations.

Many athletes have abusive relationships with their bodies. They assume their bodies will always be there for them. When their bodies don't respond, they get angry and disappointed, even though the solution to this relationship trouble is right in front of them. Don't get mad at your body for an injured hip or pulled hamstring. Instead, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you have done for your muscle lately. Are you guilty of neglecting a key relationship?

You can't turn the other (butt) cheek with tissue tolerance or dysfunctional movement patterns. Just as every fractured relationship shows early signs of trouble, your body gives hints in the form of spasms and tweaks. If ignored, they're going to progress into something more serious. But if you heed the warnings and take action, you'll keep these spats from becoming all-out wars.

Tissue tolerance is the limiting factor for people trying to complete a marathon, halfmarathon, or triathlon. It's not that their lungs can't handle it, or they run out of gas; it's that their muscle tissue can't withstand such a heavy volume of work. The inefficiencies and movement dysfunctions in the system cause the tissue to work harder and burn more energy. That fatigue creates more stress and requires more effort.

As a highly active person involved in endurance training, you probably don't think of yourself as lacking stability, flexibility, or tissue tolerance. After all, you're not one of the millions of overweight, inactive Americans who spend most of their time in front of televisions and computers, never getting any exercise. You've taken charge of your health. You live for competition. Carpe diem is your middle name.

But you still may not realize how inefficient your body has become. You're like an expensive, self-propelled lawnmower. When the lawnmower is new, it cruises through your grass. It's all you can do to hang on to the thing as it rumbles over your lawn, requiring little effort on your part.

Gradually, though, the machine loses power. It doesn't move quite as fast, and you have to push it a little bit, especially if you've neglected the routine maintenance. Over time, the mower deteriorates to the point where you're pretty much pushing a heavy piece of machinery across the lawn. Since the mower's decline is so slow and subtle, you don't realize how much power and efficiency you've lost. After all, it's a top-of-the-line mower. But it's no longer performing like one.

The same thing happens to our bodies. As babies, we learn these wonderful movement patterns. When you see young children at a park, look at their flexibility: It's amazing. Look how they're able to lunge, squat, and run. It comes naturally to them. Back when the United States was more of an agricultural and manufacturing society, people continued to use these movement patterns through adulthood in their daily labor.

Now look at what's happened: Technological advances have made it possible for adults to sit all day, whether it's at a desk and in meetings or on planes and in automobiles. Since we no longer draw upon our fundamental movements, we lose them. And even if you run, swim, or bike, you don't re- establish these movements unless you take specific action.

In fact, by engaging in endurance sports without re-establishing these movements, you put yourself at greater risk for injury and, arguably, illness than the person who never breaks a sweat.

THE SYSTEM AT THE CENTER

In the Foreword, you heard from Jessi Stensland, who, despite being an accomplished triathlete when she arrived at our Athletes' Performance Institute, could not stand on one leg. It was as if she had high- performance bicycle tires and wheels, but her spokes could not support them. Jessi, like a lot of endurance athletes, figured that the secret to getting better was to just train harder.

Endurance athletes have a martyr complex. "Yeah, my left hip is killing me, but I'm tough. I'll just battle through it; I'll be all right." That kind of mentality might work for a football player trying to slog his way through an important game, but it isn't going to work for an endurance athlete trying to maximize his or her potential.

Most runners figure that the way to get better is through more running. It's the same mentality we see today with youth sports. Parents all but force kids to specialize in one sport at an early age, figuring that the extra time spent will enable them to thrive. In reality, they're shutting down movement patterns that don't relate to their one sport. I'm amazed how often I see young, accomplished one-sport athletes who look downright uncoordinated when they attempt to play something else. Or worse--their bodies are incapable of performing the basic movements for the sport. That didn't happen 15 years ago.

Now, I'm not asking you to take up a different sport. As adults, it's all we can do to find time for one. But whatever sport you choose, take the time to re-establish and improve your fundamental movement patterns. Your health and performance depend on it.

If you're a recreational endurance athlete, you can improve your performance for years to come with the scientifically backed system in this book. As you work the system, you will consistently enjoy great gains, thrive in your endurance events, and improve the quality of your life.

If you're an elite endurance athlete, consider the system a means to maximize your return on investment. At this point in your career, you'll find that the return is far greater if you address the core fundamental movement patterns than if you add another 15 to 20 minutes to your workout. At this point, it's not about performing more, it's about performing better.

In order to optimize your performance, every aspect of your training needs to have a specific prescriptive purpose. This is how good athletes become great. All of the athletes who come to the Athletes' Performance Institutes are searching for ethical, meaningful ways to upgrade their current systems and rituals to keep them at the cutting edge of human performance. They know that if they don't improve, they will plateau and fall behind.

The reason the Core Performance Endurance system works for both recreational and elite athletes is because it's proactive. You won't allow yourself to keep going and going, accepting pain as part of your sport. You won't wait to address the pain until you've hurt your back or pulled a muscle. Instead, you'll heed the warning signs the entire way.

If you want to achieve peak performance, you have to take care of your most valuable machinery. As we discussed in the Introduction, it's time to wake up and go through a pre-workout checklist for the most important tool that you have in endurance sports and in life--your body. You'll listen to what it has to tell you, and then you'll develop the systems it needs to perform at a consistently high level. Along the way, you'll be able to avoid about 65 percent of the injuries that you're exposed to as an endurance athlete. (More on this in Chapter 4.)

Like a strong, stable hub on the wheel of a racing bike, the Core Performance Endurance system brings structure and efficiency to what once was a collection of parts. We'll align your body and your movements so that, like a wheel, you will continue to roll once you are set in motion. As with a bike hub, the system itself doesn't move much, but everything depends on it. It fine-tunes the wheel. Set the wheel in motion with the system for support, and it will roll along in perfect alignment, effortlessly eating up the miles.

When you work inside the system, you'll feel calm at the center, and you'll fly along. You will have done all the legwork necessary to get to, and stay in, "the zone." You'll move so efficiently that you'll feel like going all day long.

Longtime runners assume they know how to run. "I've been doing it a long time, thus I must have a good understanding of it." If you're one of these people, how actively have you sought to improve your biomechanics? Do you understand how the body transfers force? I want you to understand what your body is doing and how it works most efficiently. Don't just listen to hearsay. "Oh, that's just the way we do it." Too often, endurance athletes go until they drop, dealing with the pain and dysfunction. It shouldn't be that way.

The alternative to this system is pressing onward until you get hurt. Then you have to address what your body has been trying to tell you all along. It's not just about doing more volume and quantity and then tapering off and you'll be better. That philosophy does have a place, but only for someone who is already operating with maximum efficiency.

We want every stride to be perfect, and early on, this might take a tremendous amount of mental energy, just as it did the first time you embarked on a run. You've probably grown accustomed to running on autopilot, daydreaming. Instead, you need to focus and concentrate on biomechanics. This program is about becoming engaged, programming your body and upgrading the system so that you can get more out of each stride with less effort. It will be mentally exhausting, but over time, it becomes second nature. You'll build and hone these efficient movement patterns until you become them.

Think of it this way: Do you endurance train to work more and harder? Or is your goal to get better? If you want to improve your health, as well as your times and performance, I need you to think differently.