Archive for September, 2007

How much sleep do you need?

admin September 25th, 2007

There is a book called “The Promise of Sleep”, an excellent read and highly recommended. The book was written by the MD who discovered REM sleep as a medical student and devoted his life to sleep research. The book presents scores of research information that will blow your mind and change the way you think about sleep.

Studies done on people without time constraints of family, workouts, work, crying babies, sleepovers, etc … OK, mostly 20 something army recruits and college aged kids… showed that the vast majority of people need very close to 8 hours of sleep per night with very little variance, mabye plus or minus 15 minutes. But informal polls (like this one) will reveal most people saying they only need 7 hours of sleep per night. The truth is that they “Function” on 7 hours a night, but they need more.

Sleep debt is cumulative and for every hour under 8, you need to make that hour up. Top end studies on sleep debt were done only for 2 weeks (imagine the logistics of doing a sleep study on a confined group of people for longer than 2 weeks), and it held tru for the duration of the 2 week study….miss a few hours of sleep, and even 2 weeks later, your body still craves the need to make it up, and when given a chance, it will do so, hour for hour. (so if you lose some sleep one night, plan to go to bed x hrs earlier the next night and you should feel great)

Sadly, most people get far less than this and have learned to tolerate it. They may say that they only need 5, 6 or 7 hours of sleep, but they have only just learned to function that way. THey really need right round 8 hours of sleep.

Ever notice how if you go on vacation, or say get a 4 day weekend off or whatever, you are capable of sleeping 10-12 hours each night? It’s your body trying to catch up…yes, you CAN catch up on missed sleep.

My father retired a few years ago, formerly got about 6 hours of slepe a night and thought that was all he needed. He now routinely sleeps 10 hours a night without difficulty with the time constraints of work removed…and he feels much better than he used to.

A seventeen year study of 10,000 government workers in Britain, just released yesterday from London associated increased risks of heart disease with getting fewer than 7 hours of sleep per night.

Lack of Sleep May be Deadly

So you may all wonder, if I’m so knowledgable about sleep, what in the world am I doing up at 2:30 AM? I do shift work and just came off night shifts..trying to flip back to days.

Can I use my new Max Heart Rate for training zones?

admin September 24th, 2007

A recent question about Maximum Heart rate involved a rider who sprinted through an intersection at the last second while going downhill.  His question was whether or not this heart rate caputured on his monitor (189) was valid, and why it appeared while riding downhill.   Most coaches suggest that there is no real value in identifiying your maximum heart rate.  After one forum member suggested that Max Heart Rate served no purpose, I replied with the following:

Max HR doesn’t serve NO purpose, but it serves no useful purpose for designing a training plan using HR zones.

Max HR is pretty much fixed and non-trainable and declines steadily with age, while your fitness continues to improve if you are training, even as you get older. So it doesn’t make any sense to use your Max HR, weather by testing or by equation, to figure into a training program.

Your SUB Max HR, however, is extremely valuable in determining yoru responses to a training plan, your response ot a particular workout, or your results of a particular test.

There is no value in going to a MAX Hr during testing as the submax HR tells you MORE, including an estimation of your VO2 Max.

Max HR efforts are great for research studies, and add to the wealth of information that show the sub max HR is a great predictor of aerobic fitness, and a great indicator of our response to aerobic training.

Should you Bonk on Purpose?

admin September 22nd, 2007

I say why not? Go ahead and bonk on purpose, in a controlled environment, where someone is with you or knows where you are if you don’t show back up. Here’s an article by Matt Fitzgerald that discusses a physiologic adaptation that occurs after bonking, which may make you better prepared to handle endurance sports.

I’ll let you read the original article here, entitled Should you bonk on purpose

An exerpt:

“Believe it or not, one highly respected exercise scientist has suggested that it may be beneficial to bonk regularly in training. Her name is Bente Klarlund Pedersen, Ph.D., and she’s a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Klarlund recently explained her rationale for “intentional bonking” in a lecture entitled “Signaling the Muscles to Adapt: Train Low, Compete High?” which was delivered at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine.

Benefits to under-fueling workouts

In this provocative lecture, Pedersen made the case that athletes — and especially endurance athletes — stand to gain greater fitness by performing some of their workouts in a glycogen-depleted state than by trying to perform all of their workouts in a glycogen-replete state.

In practical terms, she said, they should do some workouts within hours of having completed their last workout, such that there’s not enough time to replenish muscle glycogen stores between workouts, and they should also leave their sports drinks and gels at home for some workouts (that is, intentionally under-fuel their muscles during training).”

Read. Digest. Discuss.

When to introduce “Speed Play”?

admin September 19th, 2007

A new triathlete asks:

When I look at my training plan it seems that Fartliks are sprints in a foundation run, and Lactate thresholds are sprints in a race tempo run?

I run 12 min. miles, I don’t have a tempo run yet. And I’m not very fast on sprints. What does any of this mean for me? What should I be shooting for?

and, what is VOmax something or other?

Fartlik is a Swedish word for “speed play”.

In practice, it just refers to random short increases in pace during an otherwise moderately slow run. THere is no specific speed or pace associated with it. They do not have to be sprints.

I am also a slow runner and remember the feeling of having only “one speed”. Fartleks or pickups or strides are a nice way to increase your pace briefly (even 10-20 seconds will feel like a lot at first) to introduce your body to the idea of a faster pace.

You should only begin to add these if you have been consistently running at least 3 times a week for a month or so for 30+ minutes at a time. That’s not a hard rule, but just a suggestion. Then you can start adding in short fartleks during a run, say 4-6 total for 10-20 seconds. Don’t do it more than once a week for the first 4 weeks, and then re-evaluate things.

Lacate threshold and VO2 max workouts are based on your specific physiology and are much more specific than a “sprint during a tempo run”. It sounds like you don’t quite need to worry about those yet, but educating your self about physiology and fitness will benefit you in your overall training.

Here is a great article from Running Planet that explains several types of running drills that you can integrate into your base training period.