Core Performance Endurance: A New Training and Nutrition Program That Revolutionizes Your Workouts - Softcover

Verstegen, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594868174 ISBN 13: 9781594868177

Verlag: Rodale Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A leading performance coach draws on the strategies of his cutting-edge training system to counsel endurance athletes on the shoulder, hip, and mid-section regions of the body, in a guide that covers a range of concerns, from building flexibility and improving balance to pre- and post-race nutrition. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARK VERSTEGEN, founder and president of Athletes' Performance, is a widely sought-after performance coach, consultant, and motivational speaker who resides in Scottsdale, Arizona.
PETE WILLIAMS is a veteran journalist who writes about fitness, business, and sports. He lives in Safety Harbor, Florida.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER 1

A CALL TO CHANGE

Take your left hand and place it on a flat surface, preferably a table. Raise your middle finger and push it down as hard as you can. Really slam that finger down.

Now relax your hand. Reach over with your right hand, pull that same finger back and let it snap down. Go ahead. Do it again and again. How much effort did it take to do that? Not much, but it generated so much more force than through the first method.

If you were to keep raising that middle finger on its own, you'd get tired. But if you can store and release that energy, lifting with your other hand, you can do it all day long and produce many times the power with a fraction of the effort.

This is a good illustration of elastic power. We want to be able to store and release energy efficiently. Everything we do has some sort of elastic component to it, whether it's walking, running, going down steps, or playing sports. The more efficiently we can store and release energy, the less effort we have to expend.

Elasticity, this ability to store and release energy efficiently, is the reason people are able to run marathons in just over 2 hours. The foundation of elasticity is stability and mobility. Go back to our finger exercise: If you lift your finger and don't stabilize your hand on the table, you'll lift your hand as well as your finger off the table. Stability allows you to have a fixed point from which to stretch the muscle, so it can efficiently store and release that energy. Stability is your foundation.

Mobility is the ability to take that finger back through the range of motion, allowing for fluid movement and greater potential to store and release energy. Mobility can be restricted because of tight tissue or poor joint mechanics, problems that could come from traumatic injury or misuse through inefficient biomechanics over time.

Once we harmonize stability and mobility, we have the foundation for elasticity. These efficient movement patterns empower you to run, ride, and swim faster with less energy expenditure. This is all part of the Holy Grail of endurance training. And we'll show you how to get there.

ELASTICITY AND TISSUE TOLERANCE

Through this program, you'll develop tissue tolerance. Your body breaks down when it's overstressed or under-recovered. Training creates small microtears in your tissue, and ultimately, you're going to overstress or rip the fabric unless you address this problem.

Elasticity, along with mobility and stability, decreases the tissue load. When your body is more elastic, each stroke and stride puts less of a load on your tissue. Think of your body as a pogo stick. We want our bodies to be able to store and release energy powerfully, just like a pogo stick.

When you have good elasticity, your body stretches and snaps back well. But if the tissue is tight, with a dozen knots in it, it doesn't have the ability to store energy and it does not snap back. If you took a rubber band and stretched it, you'd notice its ability to lengthen and to store energy evenly. But if you tied knots in it and tried to stretch it, it wouldn't be nearly as effective.

In this program, we're going to make sure that knots don't form. You don't want to do the equivalent of letting your tissue sit in the sun and dry out. If you do, it's going to get brittle and lose its elasticity. If you tug on it, it's going to break.

If you're not building tissue tolerance--not taking care of your muscular and connective tissue--then you're going to be limited in endurance activities. Tissue tolerance is the foundation of your body's ability to perform and protect itself from injury.

I'm guessing you haven't given a lot of thought to tissue tolerance. Take a moment and consider your relationship with your tissue. Right now, you might not have a lot of respect for it. You do some stretching, but mostly on autopilot, not making significant improvements. Perhaps you get occasional massages; sometimes, they're painful.

I want you to have a better understanding of how important tissue is to your endurance success. Think about your tissue as a carving knife. If you keep using it without cleaning it regularly and sharpening it periodically, it's going to be rendered useless before long. If you ignore your tissue like this, the neglect will translate into injury that will set you back until your body can recover. Even if you don't get injured, your performance will suffer, like a dull knife.

If you don't do proactive maintenance on a consistent basis, this is what will happen. With the Core Performance Endurance (CPE) system, you'll learn how to obtain tissue quality and stay proactive, which will have you swimming, running, and biking with less pain and fewer setbacks over the course of the year.

Your relationship with your tissue is no different than a relationship with a significant other: If you neglect it, you're going to hear about it. Muscles let you know through spasm or injury. Give your muscle tissue a little love, and you'll be rewarded with a smoother, more productive training experience--just as the proper investments of time, communication, shared feelings, and gestures nurture a relationship and prevent major confrontations.

Many athletes have abusive relationships with their bodies. They assume their bodies will always be there for them. When their bodies don't respond, they get angry and disappointed, even though the solution to this relationship trouble is right in front of them. Don't get mad at your body for an injured hip or pulled hamstring. Instead, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you have done for your muscle lately. Are you guilty of neglecting a key relationship?

You can't turn the other (butt) cheek with tissue tolerance or dysfunctional movement patterns. Just as every fractured relationship shows early signs of trouble, your body gives hints in the form of spasms and tweaks. If ignored, they're going to progress into something more serious. But if you heed the warnings and take action, you'll keep these spats from becoming all-out wars.

Tissue tolerance is the limiting factor for people trying to complete a marathon, halfmarathon, or triathlon. It's not that their lungs can't handle it, or they run out of gas; it's that their muscle tissue can't withstand such a heavy volume of work. The inefficiencies and movement dysfunctions in the system cause the tissue to work harder and burn more energy. That fatigue creates more stress and requires more effort.

As a highly active person involved in endurance training, you probably don't think of yourself as lacking stability, flexibility, or tissue tolerance. After all, you're not one of the millions of overweight, inactive Americans who spend most of their time in front of televisions and computers, never getting any exercise. You've taken charge of your health. You live for competition. Carpe diem is your middle name.

But you still may not realize how inefficient your body has become. You're like an expensive, self-propelled lawnmower. When the lawnmower is new, it cruises through your grass. It's all you can do to hang on to the thing as it rumbles over your lawn, requiring little effort on your part.

Gradually, though, the machine loses power. It doesn't move quite as fast, and you have to push it a little bit, especially if you've neglected the routine maintenance. Over time, the mower deteriorates to the point where you're pretty much pushing a heavy piece of machinery across the lawn. Since the mower's decline is so slow and subtle, you don't realize how much power and efficiency you've lost. After all, it's a top-of-the-line mower. But it's no longer performing like one.

The same thing happens to our bodies. As babies, we learn these wonderful movement patterns. When you see young children at a park, look at their...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rodale Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1594868174
• ISBN 13: 9781594868177
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar