Sage Rountree: Yoga for Athletes, Training for Running and Triathlon | Blog

Consistency and Variety

Last night I gave a presentation to Team UNC Wellness, our local multisport club, on training for the run. As we head into our North American off-season, it's a good time to move focus to running. Weather often precludes more than maintenance riding, and that's OK, because bike fitness comes around pretty quickly in the spring. Depending on your swimming background and goals, one or two swims a week can hold your technique in line. But running demands greater devotion, because it is an impact sport.

I framed run training in light of two principles: consistency and variety.

First, you must establish consistency. Run regularly, three to five (or, OK, six) times a week, with mileage that doesn't jump by more than 10 percent per week (and a long run that doesn't grow by more than ten minutes per week). This is the sine qua non for running. You have to be consistent to see progress.

Once your consistency is established, though, you must introduce variety in order to see progress and avoid plateaus and boredom. Variety operates across space and across time. Vary the terrain on which you run; don't include only road or only treadmill running. Trails are ideal, and the track is good, too. Hills afford variety while building strength and lightening the load of impact (running uphill, at least). Variety plays out over time on levels from the huge to the small, from your lifetime running career to what you're doing in a moment.

Here's the breakdown, as I see it.

Variety over your career includes choosing progressive goals, from getting through your first races, to getting faster at short distances, to moving to longer races, to getting faster there, and so on.
Variety over the course of a year (macrocycle, in Joe Friel's terminology) includes one or two cycles targeting peak races.
Variety over the course of a month (mesocycle) includes weeks that build on each other progressively.
Variety over the course of a week (microcycle) includes workouts targeting various energy systems: endurance, neuromuscular efficiency, strength, speed, race pace.
Variety over the course of a day includes a warm-up/cool-down run at a pace easier than the rest of the workout, and may include other paces according to the workout's goals.

Variety is the spice of life, and, combined with consistency, the key to progress in running (and in many other areas).

One of the athletes asked me to explain "neuromuscular efficiency." Here, I mean any run whose goal is to improve economy of form. These include:

Cadence runs, where the goal is to teach yourself to take 180+ footsteps per minute, timing twenty seconds and counting steps with one foot, with a goal of hitting thirty.
Strides, on the track or on a grass field, for 100m or diagonally across the field.
Pickups in an easy run, each lasting twenty to forty seconds, or simply thirty step cycles.
Short hill repeats of ten to thirty seconds.
Drills, drills, drills.

If you are looking for progress in your run training, review your training log for signs of consistency and variety. If one is lacking, work to improve it this fall and winter, and you'll be running stronger by spring.

October 19, 2009 08:03 AM | Training and Racing | Permalink

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Pigeon Pose and Its Variations

Athletes have a love/hate relationship with pigeon pose. Most who hate it at first do so because it hits all the tight places in athletic hips. Once those release, folks learn to love it. But in its traditional orientation, facing downward, pigeon pose can be far too intense in an athletic body, causing more trouble than it solves. That's where changing the pose's orientation to gravity can be really useful. Practicing the leg action of pigeon (external rotation and abduction) from your back helps you target the stretch while holding your back in neutral alignment. It's much safer for your knees, since—provided you move into it safely—it doesn't transfer any tightness from the hip directly to the knee joint.

On this video, just posted at Competitor.com, I discuss and demonstrate how to safely get yourself into pigeon pose. If you like it, feel free to add a comment at the video's original site.

October 15, 2009 03:58 PM | Training and Racing, Yoga, Media | Permalink

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Hip Openers

Today I was asked why we call hip stretches "hip openers." I don't have a good answer! Are we opening something that's locked? Is "openness" of the hips even desirable, given the stiffness that's required for good running? I decided that a better term might be "hip balancers," since there's so much going on anatomically around the pelvis, and much of our work in yoga is to stretch the tight parts and strengthen the weak parts.

For many of us—not just athletes, but Westerners, who sit in chairs and cars, with our hips and chests closed off under desks and over keyboards and steering wheels—the problem is tightness in the front of the hips, usually in the iliopsoas, the major hip flexors, combined with weakness in the glutes and hamstrings that attach to the back of the pelvis.

Weakness? Indeed. The number-one complaint I hear in yoga class is "my hamstrings are tight." What do you mean by "tight"? Are they tight because they're so strong, or are they tight because you spend most of your day with the hamstrings in a state of overstretch? If, when you come into a low crescent lunge, you feel more stretch (or, yes, "opening," which leads to balance) in the front of the back leg than in the back of the front leg, it may be the latter. In this case, you'll want to target the hip flexors.

Last week in my yoga for athletes classes, I taught a sequence with a ton of hip-flexor stretches, which got us primed for some nice backbending. (Without that release in the front of the hips, any backbend just crunches the lower back and doesn't target the thoracic spine.) Here's what we did (not all of this may be appropriate in your body!):

Supine warm-up
One knee to chest, releasing the other leg straight along the ground (apanasana)
Reclining lunge position, bent-leg foot to the sky (half happy baby)
In both, keep reaching through the long leg to target the front of the hip. Next, we flipped over to enjoy six moves of the spine before . . .

Main sequence
Downward-facing dog to three-legged dog, bending raised leg slowly to feel a psoas release
High lunge
Low lunge
Low lunge with closed twist
Low lunge with reach behind body to quadriceps stretch (i.e., with left leg forward, left hand reaches around to the left to grasp the right foot)
Crescent lunge with lateral stretch (if leg leg is forward, right arm reaches over left shoulder)
Low lunge with straight-facing quadriceps stretch (right hand to right foot)
King Arthur pose (back leg against the wall)
Bow-pose sequence (as in The Athlete's Pocket Guide to Yoga)
Revisited three-legged dog with psoas stretch, flipping to a three-point backbend
Finishing sequence
Supported bridge with block under hips
Psoas exercises on the block à la Jill Miller (her Hip Helpers DVD is fabulous)
Supported fish over two blocks
Knees-down reclining twist
Full happy baby

Some of the lunges appear in the Lunge Series episode of Sage Yoga Training, and much of the above appears in my books.

One of my students, a professional French horn player, was very excited to get home and play after class. She said she felt like her lung capacity had grown immensely! Here's what she wrote me the next day:

You asked me to email you, so here it is: as measured on an Inspirometer, a simple device that provides a gross measurement of exhalations, my lung capacity increased from 3.0 liters to 3.5 liters as a result of class tonight. It's not consistent, but most likely could be with time and practice. Very exciting for me as a professional brass player. I have tried many things to increase my lung capacity and have never been able to exhale over 3 liters.

And that's just one side effect of conscious attention to form and breath in opening the hip flexors! Try dropping a few hamstring stretches and adding a few more stretches targeting the front of your hips, and let me know how it affects your training and your practice.

October 7, 2009 04:59 PM | Yoga, Media | Permalink

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Pre-marathon Yoga

My cardinal rule in yoga for athletes is that the intensity of the athlete's training and the intensity of the athlete's yoga practice must be in inverse proportion. That is, the closer you get to your peak competition, the more mellow your physical practice should become. Hence power, flow, Ashtanga, or hot yoga have their place in the off-season or early base period, not later in the season; gentle and restorative classes suit the bill as athletes' training builds to a peak.

What, then, should a yoga practice look like on the day before a marathon? Very, very mellow. Remember the rule of "nothing new on race day [or the day before]." But even if your yoga experience is limited, it's more restful and productive to move slowly through a gentle restorative sequence than to tour a noisy city, to pace back and forth at the packed race expo, or to sit in a crowded theater.

If you're going to be in New York City for the marathon on November 1, join me at 2 p.m. on October 31 at Om Factory for two hours of pre-marathon yoga, and see what I mean. If you're not running the race, you're still quite welcome. This will be a simple, doable practice suitable for anyone and everyone. Registration and a full description are available at the Om Factory site.

October 5, 2009 03:31 PM | Training and Racing, Yoga | Permalink

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Reclining Twists

It's been a year since the last episode of Sage Yoga Training, but at last I have put together a new episode, and I have more on deck for the coming months. The podcast is a series of brief routines, generally under ten minutes, for practice after a workout or on their own. You could string them together to create a longer sequence, of course. They are presented in slideshow format for reference, and I measure how long each pose is held so that they're quantitatively even. You might prefer to hold these poses longer, so please use the routines as a starting point, and customize the practice to suit your own needs.

This episode features some reclining twists to stretch the hips, spine, and chest. These are some of my favorite poses, and you can find them elsewhere, too: