Phuket Health: Exploring island fitness

PHUKET: Thousands of long-distance runners are starting to get the butterflies ahead of the eighth annual Laguna Phuket International Marathon (LPIM), which takes place early tomorrow morning (click here for story)

To help prepare, if not calm some nerves, fitness contributor, Hayden Rhodes, has provided some more training tips and advice in this article, which will elaborate on last week’s feature, ‘Marathon Training in The Beauty of Phuket’:

It is important to note that anyone can improve his or her strength and fitness and I encourage you to do so while exploring this beautiful island and neighboring regions. So, here we go, the next seven training fundamentals continued from the last article:

1) Fuel is vital. Your nutrition intake will either enhance your performance and recovery rates or deplete your life energy. Because you are now ‘in training’ you will require more substantial foods to sustain your training lifestyle. Many people think because they train they can eat anything and get away with it. You can’t. It catches up with you in the long run.

Focus on highly nutritious natural foods and ensure you consume quality essential fats, proteins and carbohydrates at each meal.

2) If you are out of breath, you are going too fast. Building endurance means remaining aerobic and ‘running easy’ or ‘training easy’. If you are panting heavily or struggling to breath, then sooner, rather than later, your muscles will pack in and your endurance efforts will be squashed.

In Christopher McDougall’s book, ‘Born To Run‘ he suggests that going too fast too early is one of the biggest mistakes beginners can make. Always remember that distance determines your pace, so on your weekly long training sessions, you should start at a very comfortable pace.

3) Days that are not set aside for sport specific training can be used as active rest days. This means you exercise but are giving your body a rest from the sport that you predominately train for. Active rest days are vital to avoid injuries and overtraining, and should include activities to help your overall performance/ These include joint stability, muscular balance, connective tissue strength, improving posture, and low intensity technique work or simple X-Training. Oh, and you will obviously want at least one full recovery day each week! (Think Spa and massage)

4) Having good alignment is golden. Do what ever it takes to stretch muscles in your body that are overly tight – this will help balance and strengthen your entire body and plays a vital role in performance and endurance capabilities. As society continues to speed up, we ironically are forced to slow our bodies by sitting down in front of screens all day, Corrective stretching is one of the best forms of medicine we can use. Find a trainer to help utilize specific techniques to make it fast and effective and I recommend you stretch everyday. You read that right. Everyday.

5) Hydrate or die. A huge part of endurance performance comes down to water balance within the cells of your body. The smallest amount of dehydration can lead to fatigue, pain, poor concentration, cramping, mental mind freaks – I could go on. Hydrate regularly with small sips of quality water all day and every day, and aim to stay cool.

6) It may be a good idea to find some local 5 -10k or even half marathon events (depending on dates and training age) during your build up period to experience an actual race.

Race day is very different to going out for a jog round the block. It is a good idea to consider that the month before competition, the goal should be to go 85% of the race distance during at least one of your weekly long training sessions.

7) Lastly, as the event comes closer be sure you have a tapering period where training volume is dropped considerably.

Tapering allows your mind and body to build energy and reserves and create stimulation to allow you to perform at your best and stay cool on race day.

Follow Hayden on W: Facebook/RhodesToHealth.

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