What's the alternative? CrossFit Endurance!! Learn your sport's technique so you don't get hurt, and then train CrossFit supplemented with sport-specific interval and stamina workouts. This is the future of endurance training; amateur and elite athletes across the country and around the world are starting to get on board. I was lucky to be part of a CrossFit Running and Endurance certification this past weekend at CrossFit BWI. Under the excellent instruction of CFE mastermind Brian Mackenzie and assistant trainers Ben Kelly and Shana Alverson, the cert participants spent two days improving our run technique and learning the ins and outs of programming for the endurance athlete from a CrossFit perspective. It was an awesome weekend, and I highly recommend this certification to anyone who wants to be a better, faster runner and more knowledgable trainer.
Below please find the answers to some of the questions you all sent to me prior to the cert...
Q: Is there/are there physical sensations that can tell you whether or not you are POSE running properly, without someone else watching you?
A: Sort of... solid POSE probably does have a feeling: ease and flow of movement. (I'm not even close to perfect running and have yet to truly feel this, though I can feel when I'm improving.) When doing it properly, you're working with the forces of nature and using your body in the most efficient way possible. But I realize that's pretty vague. Run technique is something you can almost always improve on; even B-mack still uses digital coaching and does drills for his own technique. With perhaps the exception of certain gifted athletes and indigenous tribes that barefoot run often and from an early age, pretty much everyone can and would benefit from digital coaching or someone else watching/critiquing your running. And of course, injuries or pain (not hard workout, holy shit my heart is beating really fast pain; rather ouch what's that stabbing feeling in my knee/foot/hip/etc pain) are a dead give-away for bad technique.
Q: What about endurance training's effect on strength? At a certain volume of endurance training will you see a decrease in your strength and power i.e. your ability to move explosively?
A: Poor endurance programming - read too much training in the oxidative pathway i.e. LSD - will certainly have a negative impact on your strength and power... and muscle mass, flexibility, and a variety of other components of fitness. But endurance approached from Brian's CrossFit perspective is all about strength, power, speed, and indeed all ten dimensions of fitness. If you aren't doing CrossFit, your aren't doing CrossFit endurance - simple as that. B Mac wants his athletes to gradually progress towards CrossFit 4-6x/week and endurance work 2x/week per sport. If you don't see progression in both your endurance workouts AND your CrossFit workouts, you're doing too much or not programming properly. Done right, CFE athletes should see their times for endurance workouts and events improving and their benchmark WOD's and max effort lifts improving. That said, would a world-class powerlifter or weightlifter likely see a decrease in, for example, their max back squat if they started doing CFE interval workouts? Probably... but that would beg the question of why such an athlete is doing endurance work to begin with. The endurance training is done to address a sport specific need. If your sport or job (triathlete or soldier for example) requires going long on the road, in the pool, or in the field, you need to train for that. If your goal is general fitness, you're probably better off with plain old CrossFit (but don't skip those 5K and 10K days - cardiorespiratory endurance is one of the 10 general physical skills after all!). But I think pretty much everyone can benefit from working on their running technique, even if you aren't planning on doing much interval or stamina training.
Q: And how about nutrition? Should you stick to the CF nutrition programming (meat and veggies, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar; ideally in zone ratios) leading up to and during an endurance race?
A: Hell yes!!! The endurance community is hurting their performance and long-term health/wellness with high carb diets and particularly with the over-hyped pre-event "carb load." Your body is primarily a fat-burning, not a sugar/carb burning machine; fuel it that way. B-mack and his athletes have found the most success with paleo-zone, usually at anywhere from 2x-5x fat to sustain their training loads. Endurance competitors should condition their bodies to consume whole, paleo-zone foods during events. Throw out the high carb bars and gels.
If anyone has other questions, feel free to email or call me or make yourself heard in the comments section. And understand the above is my take on the weekend's lectures and information. Though I hope I've done their excellent training and instruction justice, I in no way am speaking for Brian and his staff.
Gonna be working through a lot of POSE drills and running technique training for the next few weeks, so let me know if you'd like to join in. I'll try to have a little UVAXfit run workshop sometime this summer. Keep training hard everyone!!
Your moment of [inspirational] Zen...
Brian Mackenzie, the man, the myth, the legend,halfway thru a killer 100m. interval workout.
