019 Running economy

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mouseri and we're going to talk about running economy today. Now, when we say running economy it just means the efficiency of the running gate cycle. You can also have cycling economy so essentially the efficiency of the cycling movement and really it is one of the components of endurance performance. So when we're talking about running performance or as cycling forms or any endurance sport and we have obviously the cardiovascular system so we tend to talk about VO2 max, we tend to talk about lactate threshold and obviously the other component is then the economy of the movement. Now most of the kind of endurance sport is going to cover all three of those kind of components but with strength training we can actually influence the economy of the movement. So we're going to talk about the economy movement from a strength training perspective today. That's really all I feel that I'm able to kind of comment on from a point of view of the expertise that I have. People keep asking me to comment on cardiovascular adaptions and I keep telling them it's not going to happen. I would need 10 years to really get my head around all of that the way that I've got it around, strength training and I don't really have that urge to do that. So basically we're just going to limit ourselves to that economy side of the things. So basically in the literature there are a number of kind of investigations that have been made into how strength training can improve running economy, much less so on the cycling economy side but there's a decent amount on the running economy side. Now basically I think there are two really solid candidates for how strength training can improve running economy. The first is an improvement in what we call vertical stiffness. So essentially every time you're running along you have a vertical oscillation movement up and down of the center of mass and if you have higher vertical stiffness that movement up and down of the center mass will be smaller. If you have lower vertical stiffness obviously then your kind of oscillation is much greater and you're actually using a lot more energy. So if we have greater vertical stiffness or if we can maintain greater vertical stiffness throughout our running kind of sort of race or whatever we're doing then we'll be able to achieve a superior running economy. Now, probably speaking how do we increase our vertical stiffness? Well it is pretty much what you would expect it's eccentric strength. So essentially if you have higher eccentric strength capacity especially in the kind of fibers that you'll be using in the running activity then you're going to be able to display great vertical stiffness. Now I'm specifying greater eccentric strength with the fibers that you're using in the running activity because a lot of people when they kind of look at eccentric strength training they realize that a big chunk of the eccentric strength gains in the context of strengthening programs come from increases in motine accruement or coordination in the strengthening activity. Obviously not relevant for what we're talking about. Really what we're going to want is a kind of actual muscle fiber related eccentric strength. Of course that can come from peripheral adaptions like, you know, kind of hypertrophy or lateral voltage emission but you know, potentially you could also get it from Titan as well. So ultimately we're looking at a series of fiber related adaptions that are going to contribute to an increase in our eccentric force producing capacity. So in terms of what type of strengthening will do that? Well obviously any strength training involves high activation or highest activation in the eccentric phase. So heavy strength training can be a lot better than sort of moderate or light load type strength training because you will get at least kind of 50% of activation in the eccentric phase which is kind of what you are going to be using in the running gate cycle more or less. So obviously, you know, theoretically you might get a little bit more benefit from the eccentric training by suspect that the muscle damage is probably going to have the benefits there. So the other variable or the other kind of way that we can contribute to an improvement in running economy is just by increasing the moment arm of the muscles involved in a running movement. So Terry speaking, hypertrophy will increase moment arms, moment arms will give you a greater amount of joint torque for the same muscle force and therefore will enhance your ability to produce torque with lower levels of muscle activation which is obviously going to be helpful to you because we use less metabolic activity for the same output. So obviously, hypertrophy is going to be an interesting kind of way to produce an increase in running economy from that perspective. Now obviously in terms of cycling economy, only the moment arm is going to really make a difference. The vertical stiffness effect is not kind of apparent. So you're only really going to have the moment arm of hypertrophy creating an impact. So heavy loading is going to be more interesting running point of view, not really quite so relevant from a cycling economy point of view. Now just kind of wrapping this up, a couple of things to be aware of. There are a number of other kind of potential ways in which economy of movement could be improved, especially on the running side. People have talked a lot about the stiffness of the tendon. Obviously if the tendon changes its stiffness, that will change your elastic energy storage. But ultimately if you have a tendon which is kind of more compliant, then it tends to alter vertical stiffness as well. So you actually have an interaction effect between your vertical stiffness and your tendon stiffness, obviously affecting the elastic energy storage. So at the moment it's really difficult to get at the true effect of elastic energy storage or kind of tendon behaviors and their contributions to running economy. So on balance I would probably say it's not probably a big deal or at least if it is, then it's kind of variable and depends on the relationship with vertical stiffness. So very, very hard to pin that one down. In terms of other stuff that people talk about, there are certain kind of adaptions. I just hinted at it when I was mentioning the eccentric strength stuff a moment ago. Sometimes you will see people writing up kind of reviews and describing how running economy might work. It might be influenced by strength training and they'll refer to things like motina recruitment changes. Well recruitment isn't really going to change anything in a submaximal activity. So yeah, sure, recruitment will help you increase maximum strength in a maximal effort, but recruitment changes aren't going to change how you perform a submaximal activity. So yeah, maybe it would contribute in a kind of sort of a maximal sprint situation although I'm not really sure even then I see how the logic works. But it's definitely not going to contribute in a submaximal activity. It just can't really do that logically. So I think really what we've got then is two really solid candidates for how strength training can improve running economy. And obviously that is vertical stiffness changes and/or increases and momentum increases of the muscle. And then on the cycle economy side really just the one which is the muscle moment on increase. So that's the physiological introduction. I'm obviously now going to ask Rob how he is currently programming strength training for anybody who is wanting to compete and endurance activities like running or cycling. But Rob, let's start with the running one because obviously that's probably going to be the more interesting one for most people. Yeah definitely. And to be honest, I have not worked with any cyclists. So also not really my specialty at all. Tons of people that are gent pop clients and that especially that I have really want to do half marathons, marathons, things like that on the side. So just endurance running is a pretty common thing actually. So programming for that, I mean, I keep it super simple. Like you said, heavy strength training is going to be the way to go. So heavy loads, you know, three to six ish, you know, kind of rep range there, low volumes. Definitely wanting high volumes because if people are doing a lot of running, obviously you're going to get toast, the post workout recovery is going to be really bad. So usually two, three, four body sessions a week for the lower body. I think a lot of people tend to think you need like movements that look kind of like running-ish, split squats, lunges, things like that. I really don't tend to do any of that. A lot of bilateral stuff, a lot of machine work. So just focusing on, like you said, my hypertrophy is going to be big, so increasing size of it. You're going to get that from heavy loads if they're taking and then a couple reps of failure. And then you're still going to get all the strength adaptations, the eccentric strength and that. So just, you know, hacks, squats, leg presses, things are going to target the quads and the adopters, hip thrusts, say it a million times, going to be great for glutes, short positions, super recoverable hamstrings, lot of leg curls, things like that. Generally going with leg curls a lot, you know, just super easy to recover from a lying leg curl, some more of that. I tend to keep things very, very simple on the strength training in, when people are running a ton, and then just some calf work. I would say the big note, I'll calf work, I said to you before the podcast. For some reason, everyone comes in thinking they're going to have to like train their slowest, friend-frontally and train their anterior tibialis, like a tib raise machine. Immediately off the battle, like we're not doing any of that. You know, have you do heavy straight leg calf raises on leg press, a hacks pot, standing calf machine, anything like that, and just getting, you know, full stretch through the bottom, and then coming up about halfway. Another thing with calves is everyone thinks they need some big squeeze and a pause at the top still. And if you want to get a lot of load in your calf raise, you'll notice really immediately. If you have someone pretty strong in the gym, like quite a few You're not getting significant loading in the calf and the Achilles in that with those really contracted position focused calf raises, and certainly not on a bent knee seated calf raise, with the load is going to be super limited and, you know, just, now we're very useful. Exactly. And just for people who are listening to that, the reason for that is because you're not getting significant loading in the calf and the Achilles in that with those really contracted position focused calf raises, and certainly not on a bent knee seated calf raise. And for that is because of the overall calf muscle moment on, which is, you know, basically really, really long in that bottom position, allowing that much higher kind of torque to be generated. As you come up to the top position, that moment on decreases and you end up with a very, very small moment on so you can't produce anywhere near the same amount of joint torque. So this is why we tend to see really big difference between the amount of kind of weight that we can lift in that bottom position, compared to the top position. Definitely also why, you know, we generally recommend that people are using exercises that train the bottom range of motion in body holding context for the gastroc, because ultimately it turns the exercise into more of a soleus exercise if you use the full range of motion. So it's really actually very interesting because there's a kind of, it's kind of a sort of a disagreement in the literature, where there's some researchers who think that the moment times go the opposite direction. It's really strange because, you know, everybody kind of knows that they can, as you describe, you can use load more weight, you know, essentially if we are working in that bottom range of motion, because there really is the test. Yes, really is the test. And yet, when you kind of look at the literature, there's actually kind of, there are people who are doing kind of investigations that have shown the exact result. I mean, you can find that. But you can also find people who are kind of saying, oh no, we found the opposite result. We think that, you know, maximum leverage is actually in the top position. Like we'll just find me somebody, find me somebody in the gym who can do that. I'm like, if I see someone to do a heavier top half calf raise. I know. And I'll buy that. Absolutely. It's just not a thing. So, but yeah, so ultimately where we've got this kind of the reason for that is the is the kind of the greater leverage. So, yeah, ultimately, what you're describing then is kind of a routine maybe to, well, probably to potentially sometimes three times a week, you're doing maybe say one or two sets of, you know, kind of say four or so exercises. You've got a like a squat or a leg press or a hack squat in there. You've got your leg cool, you had a line like that. You got your kind of straight position kind of straight leg calf raise. What have I missed? You had a, I hope for us in there. Yeah, yeah. And then a lot of times I'll add some hip flex to work as well. Okay, cool. A cable hip flexion, some of that. Same thing, you know, two which working sets, still heavy loads. Sometimes if people don't have that, like I have a lot of people to train at home some days. It's those isometrics that we've discussed like on the bench and stuff before and just kind of to cover all the muscles of the lower body there. And then, you know, respirators keeping them long. I was going to say another thing I wanted to mention is that people always think that their strength training work to improve their long distance running should kind of feel similar to their distance running in terms of like short rest periods. High reps, you know, getting the heart rate up things like that. And sometimes it does take a good amount of convincing to get them on board with, hey, like no, we're going to do sets of five reps. We're going to rest a few minutes between you only going to do probably two works sets and just, you know, breathe and relax between and the special people to love cardio, they want to feel that they work hard. And they want to feel that they're doing something super significant. So until they see a lot of times the benefits, which you know, most times is like shaving a ton of time off their half time off their marathon time things like that. Then they're really on board until brand, you know, sometimes it takes them talking to and convincing before they're really in with it. And I think that's probably one of the motivations I had for kind of doing this topic today because, you know, a lot of people haven't been asking about, you know, how strength training can contribute to endurance sports. And I don't think many people in our community in the strength training community in the kind of personal training and strength coaching kind of environment, have a clear message that they can give to the clients and say, this is what the strength training is doing for you. This is why it works. And I think it's really helpful to have that right vertical stiffness. Basically, we're reducing how much your center of mass is moving up and down in every single gay cycle. That's what we're doing. By doing that, we're going to make you more efficient and you're going to waste less energy in every football and you're going to be a faster runner. You're going to be able to be a more efficient runner. Therefore, you can run faster or you could just run longer. I mean, it's up to you. So you're also going to get, you know, the moment I'm increased, which is going to be produce a higher joint to talk for the same muscle force or the same joint talk for a lot of muscle force. So you're using less muscle force, using less energy, you're again going to be a more efficient runner. So really simple messages. Well, I say really simple messages. If you're familiar with this physiology that we talk about all the time, there are relatively simple messages. I mean, okay, fine. If this is the first time you've come across me talking about this stuff, it's not going to sound that simple. But in the context of what we know and talk about, this is not, you know, kind of massively massively complicated. And hopefully there's a route to communicating that, and I think that is a good thing because it not only sort of justifies or kind of provides more kind of weight to the idea of using strength training in first place, which is a good thing. But also it gives a very clear programming kind of structure like the way you described using those heavier loads. It's like, well, why are you using heavy loads? Well, using heavier loads because it gives you the vertical stiffness improvement. You don't get the same magnitude of vertical stiffness improvement. Not happening with sets of 15. No, not really. Yeah, no. But I mean, like on the cycling side, I mean, I do have familiarity with the cycling side. It's kind of grew up in a part of the UK where cycling is really big. And so I kind of participated in that. And ultimately, you could literally just do something relatively similar. You'd probably not need to do the heavier loading. You could just do, you know, moderate bodybuilding style loads. I mean, you wouldn't need to do the heaviest stuff if you didn't feel comfortable with that. And I would probably focus mainly on the quads and the glutes. I wouldn't necessarily do a, you know, quite so much on the hamstrings or the calves or anything like that. But rather forced them on that German guy. Really, yeah, it really is just kind of crossing glutes, honestly. But, you know, fundamentally, you could still, I mean, you could still do kind of sort of a leg press or something like that. That would be, you know, perfectly cool. I wouldn't just need to do any extensions in blue bridges. You could do, you could do the kind of leg press or squat as well. So I think, honestly, there's not that much difference. You know, I think I would just be less kind of focused on the heavier loading. And of course, also, you could do a little bit more and get away with it because honestly, most of the time the cycling isn't going to cause very much more damage at all. So you can kind of, it's very much the easy version. I mean, like programming strength training for cyclists is very much easy version compared to programming strength training for runners. You know, that's that's some, you know, kind of the hard mode that you're playing on. I think a lot of people like when it comes to hypertrophy running to are so afraid that like getting, you know, bigger and, you know, quite a quote, unquote, here is going to slow them down a ton. But obviously everyone also overestimates. I was just literally laughing about that as you said it. I was thinking to myself, what do these people think is going to happen to them? Yeah, like you're not getting a ton, especially with just some some well-read heavy strength work and a lot of running. And, you know, once you try very hard, you're not going to be big enough, you'd see any negative effect. Yeah, I mean, it is like, yeah, I mean, honestly, there's there's very little scope to that for that to happen. And I think, I mean, ultimately, you know, I think most most of the time, how much somebody weighs in those kind of scenarios, probably more diet related than it is training related. Yeah, so many Harvard guys now that are like snooper jacked, and just having just absurd running times. Pretty clear evidence, and it's not really a big deal. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I don't think that's that's a concern. I mean, obviously some, you know, kind of clients are going to have that concern and that has to be addressed therefore. But, you know, from our perspective, I don't think it's an objective thing to worry about. It's more of a communication issue. Yeah. Cool. So, actually, we've kind of covered a lot of ground really quickly, haven't we? Yeah, that's that's there's not really a lot more to say. I mean, and in fact, you've already covered some of the mistakes that you commonly see, which is the kind of going down the light load kind of high rep stuff. Or kind of, you know, using short rest periods or things like that, you know, fundamentally, that's probably the opposite to what we need for the vertical stiffness kind of adaption that we're looking for improvement in vertical stiffness adaption that we're looking for. And it's not actually hell. or for the hypertrophy one, either from the internet. - Yeah, so I can do it. People use it then, obviously, you know, you'd get more metabond stress and get more capitalization and get all these things that we've gotten over before that are gonna, you know, improve in local muscular endurance and some how all these things are gonna contribute to your running performance so much. - Capitalization is a really interesting one because there is this belief that increases in capitalization are greater with lighter loads, higher rep ranges than they are with modern or heavy kind of loads and those kind of-- - Very common. - And so people go, "Oh, look, you know, well, clearly. " And if you look at relative muscular endurance increases, they pretty much do increase quite linearly with increasing rep range. So using higher rep ranges, you will get better increases in relative muscular endurance. But the capitalization data, don't track that. The capitalization data is much more-- - It's more flammest lines. - Much more closely track five of size. There's a little bit of a kind of relationship there with five of type as well, but very much it's a five of size kind of thing. So you get an increase in muscle size and the capitalization increases to track that. You know, which, from my perspective, thinking things through from a muscle physiology point to be a makes a lot of sense. You basically just saying, you know, the fiber is demanding. That kind of greater kind of that oxygen supply and the capitalization adjusts to provide it. So ultimately, I think five of size is probably the bigger factor. So capitalization really probably isn't the local muscular endurance kind of driver that we see after strength training kind of programs. I think it's probably buffering capacity that's mainly doing that. So then I think, you know, in terms of a kind of an adaptions point to view from the endurance guys, trying to drive capitalization improvements by doing higher reps is just not probably happening. You probably just getting buffering capacity, which I'm kind of skeptical about, whether that would be helpful in most of the situation. - I don't think it would be. - Yeah, so yeah, so, but yeah, capitalization is a really interesting one because I think there's been a lot of cool work done on that in the last kind of 10 years or so. It started to move us away from thinking about it as being a local muscular endurance adaption and more about just a kind of a co-adaption with hypertrophy really. - Yeah. - But yeah, so the local muscular endurance not probably isn't helpful. What we're really trying to do is kind of target that bit of costiveness or that moment on length. And as I say, you know, heavier loads are gonna do that on the kind of a bit of costiveness side and just anything that creates hypertrophy or do that on the, it's kind of crazy when you say that. So I think, okay, just train like a bodybuilder and it'll work. - Yeah, pretty, pretty easy. - It's fighting for the walking ones. - But yeah, yeah, no, of course. But I was thinking just from the cycling point of view, just kind of-- - Oh, yeah. - Really just pure bodybuilding program for the low body with kind of a bit of exercise selection in there. But yeah, so fundamentally there's not really much more to say. So I guess we will call it there this time, short episode. - Yeah. - And we will come back with another topic next week.