186: How to Start Running From Zero (Beginner Runner's Plan) | Jeff Cunningham

In this episode, I sit down with my running coach and host of the Consistently Good Podcast, Jeff Cunningham, to simplify running for beginners. We break down how to build an aerobic base, run easy without obsessing over Zone 2, introduce fartlek and speed workouts, warm up properly, combine running with strength training, and fuel for performance. The goal is simple: stop overcomplicating the process, start where you are, and build through consistency. CHAPTERS: 00:00 Intro 01:23 This is not for the top 1% 04:59 "I know I'm not fast enough to be coached" 06:03 Identity and habits for new runners 08:20 Why Jeff starts every new runner with fartleks instead of track work 09:28 Speed play explained simply for beginners 15:43 Sprint/die vs. speed up/slow down 20:07 Zone 2 running 25:29 The gray zone that kills your running progress 28:44 RED-S explained 34:00 How speed work makes you faster 44:39 Why static stretching before a run is a mistake 57:04 Running to lose weight 01:10:33 How to avoid injury as a new runner 01:17:36 The patience principle ORDER MY BOOK HERE: ⁠https://www.amazon.com/Go-One-More-Intentional-Life-Changing/dp/1637746210 FOLLOW: The Consistently Good Podcast:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdvAh1V7frci0Rfv0dfm9-g Become a BPN member FOR FREE - Unlock 25% off FOR LIFE ⁠ https://www.bareperformancenutrition.com/collections/performance-nutrition Bat City Track Club is an emerging national class and regionally elite team with a primary focus on distances 5,000m to the marathon. https://www.batcitytc.com/ FOLLOW: IG: instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: youtube.com/@nickbarefitness JEFF CUNNINGHAM: IG: @jdcunningham97 BAT CITY: @batcitytrackclub This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal [health or profession] advice. Bare Performance Nutrition (BPN) is not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice. This podcast may not be republished without the written consent of Bare Performance Nutrition (BPN) MB01A9GV3QTHSTE

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Nick Bare?

  Ladies and gentlemen, today, returning guest, my personal running coach, who has helped me go from a 415 marathon to a two hour 39 minute marathon, Jeff Cunningham.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Man, I'm fired up to be here. Excited to be back. It's been a while, man.

• 0:26Nick Bare?

  It has been a while.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  I like your hat. Where'd you get it from?

• 0:28Nick Bare?

  Uh, this is the hat that I've been rocking for almost 10 years now.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Listen, man, if you got rid of every VPN hat that's ever been made, the one that we're wearing, keep it.

• 0:41Nick Bare?

  It's my go-to.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Be gold, man.

• 0:42Nick Bare?

  It's my go-to. Uh, you know, now that I'm at high rocks training, I'll wear this hat for some of my high rocks workouts lately. And it gets absolutely drenched and they smell. I started throwing my hats in the dishwasher in the evening when they get just trashed.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 0:59Nick Bare?

  And it cleans them pretty well.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Well, I've heard that they actually have like things that you could put in your hats to put them in the dishwasher, like an insert or whatever to keep them from sort of losing their shape. But I don't know.

• 1:09Nick Bare?

  Yeah, this is my go-to hat.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, love it. This one shows sweat stains the least, just about any hat I've ever owned. And I'm an anti-sweat stain guy, so.

• 1:18Nick Bare?

  I sweat a lot, but I don't have a lot of sweat stains, surprisingly, even though I'm a heavy salty sweater.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I don't know, man. I love it. My favorite hat, so.

• 1:29Nick Bare?

  Well, I, uh, I provided you some context into this conversation where I'd like to take the discussion. And for context, for the listener, the viewer, what I was telling Jeff is sometimes I find myself creating content and sharing things for the top 1% of the population.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:55Nick Bare?

  The people who have been doing this for years and years and years. And they have systems and routines and habits in place. They are committed. They, they are already motivated and inspired. They're training for Ironmans and sub three hour marathons and ultras and all of these things, which is great. But I found myself neglecting

• 2:22Nick Bare?

  the people who are just getting started. And I want to take a lot of my content back to serve those people. The people who are having trouble just getting to the gym a few times a week.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33Nick Bare?

  Or waking up without hitting snooze in their alarm. Or who want to start logging some miles. So that's what I would love for this conversation to be grounded in, is that we're providing information and resources and a, a training philosophy, but also a mindset philosophy as well, of where they should get started when they first get started with running. And training for maybe a 5K, half marathon, full marathon, if you fancy. But I hope that shapes kind of the people that I hope this podcast reaches and helps.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  It's funny because I think that you and I have had this discussion before, um, about how sometimes we get so close to it, um, that we can't see the whole forest, you know, because our nose is so close to a tree trunk. There's a whole forest. There's a whole landscape of people who are getting into the fitness space, who, uh, may sometimes view, um, anything, whether it's experienced high rocks athlete, experienced bodybuilders, experienced runners, where I don't want to say there's embarrassment, but there's reluctance to get in there because there's this fear, um, maybe of judgment. Um, sometimes it can be projection and I really want to help erase that. And I don't want to be sort of part of that machine that only speaks to the 1%

• 4:00Speaker 01

  because I think fitness and moving our bodies, whether it's running, whether it's high rocks, bodybuilding, hybrid, uh, being a hybrid athlete in a general context, I think is for everybody. And it's generally helpful, both from the neck down and the neck up. Mental health, physical health, everything, you know?

• 4:18Nick Bare?

  Trey described it to me a few, uh, weeks back. And I feel like I've, I've quoted him many times since then. And we were talking about, you know, building business and brand and serving the committed athlete.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:32Nick Bare?

  And you find yourself in this echo chamber sometimes where you forget about the people who aren't that committed or that experienced, or have that much wisdom around what to eat, when to eat, how to train, what to train. And he said, dude, sometimes we find ourselves just smelling our own farts. And I was like, you know what? That's pretty accurate. And we gotta get out of that space of smelling our own farts to talk and, and help and share information to more people.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  I can tell you, there is not a week that goes by that somebody doesn't either text me, DM me, email, reach out in some way, shape or fashion and say, I know I'm not fast enough yet for you to help me. Or I know that I would be one of your slowest, or I would probably be the slowest person you've ever coached. And I always stop them. I try to stop them in their tracks, if I could actually be there and be like, hey, stop with the self-denigration. Stop with sort of positioning yourself as less good, less relevant, as if you matter less, just because you can't run laps as fast as somebody who you saw on Instagram.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  You can't run a mile as fast as somebody who you saw, uh, me talk about on a podcast. Let's stop. There's space for everybody here. And so I, I always lament that that's the perception is, well, Jeff Cunningham only wants to coach fast people. That is so far from the truth.

• 6:04Nick Bare?

  Yeah. That's great. That's great context for you to share.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:09Nick Bare?

  You know, one of my favorite quotes is, belief comes before ability.

• 6:14Nick Bare?

  And I just finished reading, rereading Atomic Habits by James Clear. I created a lot of content, uh, around

• 6:24Nick Bare?

  that book and the message of that book. And he talks about how important identity is. Like we have to

• 6:33Nick Bare?

  believe we are who we say we want to be. But then our habits, our routines, our systems have to reflect that identity. You can't say you want to be a fast runner or a runner in general, or you want to finish and complete a marathon. And then your systems don't reflect that person you say you want to be. So that's what I hope this podcast, you know, addresses in some way. So I'd love to dive right into it. You know, we, we were briefly talking about this. For someone who's just getting started with running.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:12Nick Bare?

  You know, if you're just getting started, you're probably not incorporating speed work yet. You're not going after critical velocity workouts on the track or tempo and threshold workouts. But for a new runner who has spent weeks, maybe a few short months, just easy running, gradually progressing volume, time on feet. When they start to incorporate speed workouts, they go to the track. Part of their program is eight times 800 meter repeats. Or they have a tempo workout where it's a two mile warm-up, a two times two mile threshold run, and then a two mile cooldown.

• 7:55Nick Bare?

  How do these individuals figure out how fast they're supposed to be running? Whether that's a track workout, 800 meter repeats, or what does tempo and threshold mean? Where do you get started if you don't have paces prescribed for that specific workout? Is it, is it a pace? Is it an effort? Is it a feel? Like, how would you describe to a new runner how to run at tempo, a threshold, or a track session?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  One of the things that I do with every runner I coach, in fact, I even do this with runners who are starting a new training block, or maybe they've just completed an ultra, they've just completed a marathon, completed some sort of a goal race. Even those people fall into this category. But especially for new runners, what I tell people is, let's hold off on going to the track and creating both the emotional distress of having to spin laps in a mostly arbitrarily picked time and being married to looking, you know, at our wrist and, and wringing our hands over the nuances

• 9:09Speaker 01

  of one second here, three seconds there on pace, when frankly, maybe you don't have enough experience yet. You don't, you don't maybe have enough of a, shall we say, dialed in this yet on exactly what your capabilities are to put that kind of pressure on yourself. So let's take the pressure off. Let's maybe start with a fart leg workout. And once again, I'm using a term that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a term of art. It's a trade term. Fart leg is a Swedish word for speed play. Speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, slowing down. So maybe we start out with eight times a minute, quick tempo, and then one, one or two minutes jog and just run on feel rather than going, well, what, what pace should I run for that one minute?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  This is what I tell people. 10 being running almost all out, one being fast walking. Just run up to an effort level of about a six or a seven on a scale of one to 10. Okay. And just feel that to where you're not running to where you have blood squirting out the corners of your eyes. You're in control. Your respirations are in control. You're not gasping for air and begging for a mercy killing at the end of every, let's say, one minute section, but you can even do eight by 30 seconds, eight by a minute and a half, six by a minute and a half. There's really no rules to this. And then what you do is, is you create a situation where you learn how to manage your effort.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  You create a situation where you learn how to meet out your resources in an effective way. And you might screw it up the first time, but you want to know what? Is it really screwing up? You're out there, you're doing the thing. Screwing up might be never challenging yourself, never getting the, shall we say, the chutzpah to actually get started. So you'll figure your way through it. You go out there, maybe you go out a little hot, maybe die a little bit toward the end and say, "Okay, I felt that effort. Next week I'm gonna come back and I might do something similar to this. Now I know what that effort feels like and I can just, like, I can just hold on to those reins a little tighter and sort of pull, pull, keep that horse from running."

• 11:19Speaker 01

  And then you figure it out. And so then, Nick, after, let's say you do that for maybe six weeks, you can start looking at data on your Garmin or whatever. You could go out and do that workout on a flat trail, a flat street in your neighborhood, in a local park, or you could go to a track, but you can look at your data and go, "Huh, this is interesting. I've noticed now that I've gotten into this a bit. Maybe I did eight by three minutes or nine by two minute little quicker reps with some easy jogs and I'm noticing there's trends on pace. Typically, I'm running maybe about an eight and a half minute mile speed, eight minute mile speed on the fast sections and maybe a 10 or 11 minute mile speed on my recoveries.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Now I can go to the track. Now I can say, "Okay, now I can go and run some half mile repeats because I have an idea on what pace feels like and what pace is in the empiric sense by looking at some Garmin or Coros data, right? Then you can assign yourself paces. But until you do some workouts like that on feel and you just feel your way through it, you can hardly expect to go from jogging three miles a day to suddenly going down to the track and go, "Okay, today's the day I start hard repeat work. I'm gonna assign myself X pace." How in the world could you do that? That you're not being fair to yourself.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  You have no idea what to assign for repeat work, whether it's 400 reps, 600 meter repeats, half mile repeats, whatever it is you decide. That's how I do it. That's how I learn from my runners. I actually give them fart like workouts. Then they'll say, "Coach, how could you possibly know what to assign me on 400 meter repeats or 800 meter repeats?" And I says, "It's funny, you didn't realize that for the last six weeks, I've just been collecting data on you. I go into your Garmin data that I have access to remotely and I start looking at your pace trends and I know exactly what you can hit for half mile repeats based on looking at

• 13:28Speaker 01

  what you hit on your fart like workouts and then laying it next to your heart rate and I have a pretty good idea of what you can handle. That's how I do it."

• 13:37Nick Bare?

  Can you go into a little bit detail of what a fart like workout would look like?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 13:41Nick Bare?

  Like from warm up to cool down?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So for some runners who are relatively new to getting into sort of the space where they decide, "I'm gonna do more than just jog." I might assign a workout where I say, "Okay, let's go run nice and easy for about a mile." Sometimes if they're really beginner runners, their warm up may only be a half a mile of easy running because that might, that might be five or six minutes of running for a half mile. And in a warm climate, that's enough to get warmed up enough, especially if we're trying to keep your volume low. And then I might say, "Okay, let's run six by 30 seconds, quick tempo, up tempo, fast." They're all kind of synonyms for something that's faster than easy but easier than running all out. Okay?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  So I might give six by 30 seconds up tempo with a minute and a half nice easy jog and then a one mile cool down. So you do a mile easy, six rounds of 30 seconds fast, one minute easy, and then go do a one mile cool down. That might be a sort of a beginner or a novice or an introductory level little fart like workout to start introducing speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, slowing down. And here's what I tell everybody. Let's divorce ourselves from our relationship with sport that might have come from running. You played high school baseball. You remember when the coach got mad because y'all were out there grabbing ass around at practices, y'all had to run foul pole to foul pole and you're vomiting?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Or doing air raids in football or running gassers in basketball? So a lot of people come from that background in scholastic sports experiences typically where running was used as punishment and it was go harder, go home, blood squirting out the corners of your eyes, beating your head on a locker sort of efforts. I tell everybody, "Let's not do that." That in a fart like workout would be sprint, die, sprint, die, sprint, die, six times. This is what I tell people. It's speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. Kind of like taking your car out on I-35, right here in Round Rock, and going between 50 and 70 and 50 and 70, not going from 20 miles an hour to 90 miles an hour. 20, 90, 20, 90 is sprint, die, right?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  50, 70, 50, 70 is a well-executed fart like workout where it's speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. That's how I would describe it.

• 16:00Nick Bare?

  And what is that teaching the body? If so, the body or is it the mind? Is it getting someone comfortable, running at faster paces? Or is there an actual physiological response that is helping your muscles become faster?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  I so love that question. The answer is it's teaching you emotional control. It's teaching you emotional stability rather than bust it, die, bust it, die, right? It's, "I'm gonna be controlled in my efforts because I'm thinking about tomorrow and the next week and the next month." It teaches sustainability. It teaches reproducibility, okay? It teaches discipline, but then the physiologic responses are even more nuanced but even perhaps more important.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  When you go sprint, die, sprint, die, sprint, die, you, one, increase your risk of injury because you're ripping and tearing at connective tissue and fascia that may not have been stressed in that level for that amount of volume in your recent history. But then also from a physiologic standpoint, we know that you get better aerobic adaptations. Aerobic adaptations basically is your body's ability to continue to deliver oxygenated blood to working muscles, which is the hallmark, which is the, which is the fulcrum and the focus for all endurance sports, okay? You actually increase your aerobic capacity more effectively by building out a mitochondrial density.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Mitochondria is just the engine that makes cells go. It delivers for long, better way, probably the best way of putting it, delivers oxygen to your muscles. It converts oxygen into energy. You're better going speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. Your body actually makes better adaptations than it does sprint, die, sprint, die. Because if you're sprinting, you're running anaerobically. Anaerobically means the opposite of aerobically. In other words, not aerobically. So really what you're doing is, is you're really just working your sprint fibers when you start running really, really fast and then dying, right? And your body's gonna make better aerobic adaptations, make more aerobic adaptations,

• 18:26Speaker 01

  and you're gonna stay more injury free. And psychologically, you are not gonna have this sort of self, sort of loathing and this sort of trepidation when it comes to running hard because you're not gonna be creating negative experiences. Because honestly, when you're dying on a workout, you're out there, you're just dying. It's really, it, you're quote, "embracing the suck." I mean, that's a popular thing to say, but how long, especially when you're new to something, if it just absolutely empirically sucks? Think about it, Nick. If it just sucks, are you really gonna be building in longevity? Are you really gonna be building in sustainability? Would you loathe something? Nah.

• 19:09Nick Bare?

  The key term there is sustainable. Sustainable effort.

• 19:14Nick Bare?

  What's so unique about running is as you try to get faster at running, you're trying to get faster, but in endurance sports, trying to get faster for sustainable, longer periods of time. So it's not getting to this finish line that is 400 meters away. It's getting to this finish line that in some cases is 25 miles away. So how do I run as fast as possible in a sustained effort?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:41Nick Bare?

  You know, part of these speed workouts, the intent for me at least, what I take away from it, it's learning pacing.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:48Nick Bare?

  And one of the things you told me once that has always been at the forefront of my mind when I'm doing a speed workout is controlled discomfort. When I go into a threshold workout or a critical velocity workout, I expect it to be uncomfortable, but it's a level of controlled discomfort. It's a pace and a speed in which I can hold for a sustainable effort, but I'm still pushing. It's still hard. It's still challenging. Now, we touched on speed right out of the gates, which should and is not the foundation of running. So I do want to go back a little bit.

• 20:29Nick Bare?

  What is the foundation of running is these easy aerobic base building runs.

• 20:38Nick Bare?

  I want to talk about zone two running.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 20:42Nick Bare?

  What are your, what are your thoughts and feelings around zone two? Because zone two has become such a popular buzzword these last couple of years. But I would argue that most people, when they go for their easy aerobic base building runs, their everyday casual run, they're probably really not in a true zone two. True zone two is pretty low heart rate.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:07Nick Bare?

  And if you look at someone's, you know, zones of heart rate based off their pace and effort. And you tell someone, go, go stay in zone two for this one hour run. That might be like a 12 minute mile for them. And some of the responses I get all the time are, dude, I'm trying to stay in zone two, but it is so slow that it is annoying and I don't want to do it and it's painful.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:34Nick Bare?

  So when a new runner comes to you and they know that, say, 80% of their running has to be easy and aerobic. What does easy and aerobic mean?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:47Nick Bare?

  And how do you address the questions of, coach, I can't stay in zone two. It's just too slow.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 21:54Nick Bare?

  I'd love to hear your thoughts around all of that.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  I love it because it's, it's, um, it's actually, it's actually relatively nuanced, but it's actually not that complicated. Um, we like to put things in boxes. We like to have, um, formulaic approaches to things that we can reach out and touch and hold and point to. And one of the things that we like to do is look at either, um, maybe an arm or maybe chest wrap, um, heart rate data that's relatively reliable and be able to sort of, um, um, hang our hat on it and say, and point to it and say, zone two is where I have to be. Here's what I would tell people. When you are a new runner, running is going to be harder for you than running is on a

• 22:38Speaker 01

  day to day basis, when you're out running quote unquote, easy than it is for somebody who has run 10 marathons, who runs 60, 70 miles a week and is a seasoned veteran. Okay. I'm here to tell you right now that there is a chance that your heart rate might technically be in the bottom end of what would be zone three, based on the calculations for, you know, if we use like the math tone method, right? Here's what I would tell people is, so what? I mean, so what? Right? If you are in control, if you are able to talk at least sporadically in full sentences, um, when you're new to running, that's probably good enough.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  It's probably easy enough. Let's go out, let's get the runs in and let's not be so adherent to zone two to where we actually are almost paralyzed and actually maybe fail to progress because running is just not going to be that easy for somebody who's brand new to running. Somebody, um, to elucidate this point, who may have never gotten really much exercise in our whole life and they wake up one day and they say, I'm going to start running. Even three, four weeks into it, they might be squarely in zone three, uh, moving at a pace faster than walking. Well, just go ahead and just do your run in zone three. It's going to be okay.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  And what I would tell people is as you get more fit, your heart rate naturally is going to become lower at faster paces. And just like not assigning yourself repeat work at a track and picking numbers out of thin air for splits, the first time you ever try to run faster than jogging, I would tell you that when you first start running, also don't be so married to numbers instead of split times, heart rate numbers on a wearable. Just go run, make sure that you're doing your best to not strain. Don't purposefully hit the gas, but whatever you have to do to keep moving, just accept what that heart rate is. And then as the weeks and the months go by, that heart rate is going to come down, you're going to get faster.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  And then when you get really more in tune with how you feel, when you really get more in tune with sort of what it is to be a runner, rather than somebody who got up off of a couch who runs, two very different things, then suddenly let's, you can start looking at heart rate and really, uh, engaging in sort of the, uh, self criticism and the self analysis, which did I really run easy on that run or was I pressing? Then we can start looking at heart rate. For beginners, guys, just run easy. Be able to fire off some sentences from, um, beginning to end with a period at it while you're running, if you're running with a buddy or, uh, or, or talking to a friend or whatever, if you're doing that, you're probably running, you're probably running easy enough.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Don't worry about zone two that much.

• 25:35Nick Bare?

  What are the consequences and downfalls if you are running your easy days a little too hard?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Now, if you start purposely pressing and you're purposely going, uh, um, into what I like to jokingly refer to is, is the American mindset, which is equal rules, equal application of the law for everybody else, special privileges for me. And in the running context, what I mean by that is, well, I know everybody says everybody needs to run easy, but the rules are going to apply differently for me. I'm going to press a little bit and I'm going to, I'm going to try to get better every single day because I got to catch all these dudes and I got to pass them on the performance charts in the local gym or whatever. Here's the dangers of it. You create, um, massive, uh, uh, it's, it's insidious. It creeps in, neuromuscular fatigue. Okay.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  And there's two kinds of, of fatigue. You can have, um, central nervous system on, and then you can have peripheral nervous system fatigue. And what I'm talking about is sort of this peripheral fatigue where neurologically you're just, you're just starting to strip the casing off of the wires. You're just getting a diffuse, um, electrical signal to your extremities, your arms and your legs. And over time, you're just tired. You're just tired and you actually stunt your growth as a runner if you try to press every day. And it is, um, it's tantalizing. It's this sort of sexy shiny thing when you go, I'm still going to press, I'm still going to press. Why? Because my baseball coach told me to do it. My high school basketball coach told me to do it.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  My high school football coach that hikes those hideous gray coaching shorts up a little too high, right? And those guys in the neighboring town are getting better today and you, you wimps ain't doing nothing out here. Get out there, get on the line. I mean, that, all of that, there's a lot to that. And I think there's some good that comes from that on some level. But let's try to divorce ourselves from that because once again, you're going to get tired, you're going to stunt your growth, you're actually going to shut down or you're going to truncate or be sort of obstructionist to the, um, um, the building of this aerobic process. And also, you know what? You're just not going to enjoy it.

• 27:51Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  You're going to start loathing it and then you're going to quit and your ass is going to be right back on that couch because you tried to cheat mother nature and you tried to accelerate a process that takes time and patience.

• 28:03Nick Bare?

  Yeah, there's this gray area where you have your easy aerobic base building, running.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:12Nick Bare?

  And then you have, I mean, that's, that's one side of the spectrum. The other side of the spectrum is your threshold running, critical velocity, speed work.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:21Nick Bare?

  And they both are intentionally designed to create a stimulus in the body.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 28:29Nick Bare?

  When you're in the middle in that gray area, you're not getting the benefits from the low end.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:36Nick Bare?

  Low effort aerobic, easy running. You're also not getting the benefit from that top end threshold work.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:45Nick Bare?

  So you're right in the middle in this gray area where you're really not getting the benefits of either side.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:50Nick Bare?

  And when you do that too much, too frequently, too often, running itself is high cortisol producing. And

• 29:00Speaker 01

  It can be.

• 29:01Nick Bare?

  Your body, if you spend too much time in that gray area and you're not doing enough aerobic work, you're going to see negative consequences to metabolic health, aerobic health, the endocrine hormone system.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 29:17Nick Bare?

  There's this, um, syndrome called REDS, relative energy deficiency syndrome. And it's when athletes push too hard, too often, for too long.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:30Nick Bare?

  And then often accompanied by, uh, caloric restriction.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 29:35Nick Bare?

  So you're overall in, uh, depletion of energy.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:40Nick Bare?

  And you start digging yourself this hole. Now, it takes time. It takes months and months and months to truly get yourself into REDS.

• 29:50Nick Bare?

  But once you, you have REDS, you can't just recover overnight. It takes months to dig back out of it.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like crawling out of the Grand Canyon.

• 29:56Nick Bare?

  Yeah. So for new runners, when you take your easy days, truly take them easy.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 30:06Nick Bare?

  So when you have your hard days, you can go hard, but try to avoid that gray area in the middle.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, um, I guess you Catholics can appreciate this. I call it pace purgatory. Right?

• 30:18Nick Bare?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  You are somewhere in the middle and, um, you're not heading north.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I ain't necessarily heading south, at least in the moment. You're just sort of in a really non-productive zone. Here's what I would tell people too. Um, Arthur Liddard, who is widely accepted as the father of running. Okay, Arthur Liddard, uh, had a theory that I think is backed up by some pretty solid science. Now, his exact number, I mean, we can dispute it. Uh, but he says, listen, you can get anywhere 95 to 98% of max fitness. Basically, just doing, um, a lot of easy running without obsessing over the details of pace and repeat sessions and things like that. What I would tell people is this, and of course, you know, uh, uh, sort of, um, a funny name,

• 31:10Speaker 01

  uh, but a giant in the running world of the United States is Dr. Jack Daniels. Um, God rest his soul, passed away recently. Uh, Dr. Daniels said, listen, for a new runner, you go from zero miles a week to 20 miles a week, doing nothing but easy running. You are going to get exponentially better fairly quickly by just simply going out and running 20 miles a week compared to when you were running zero miles a week. A runner that runs 20 miles a week is going to be way faster than a person that runs zero miles a week. A person who runs 30 to 40 miles a week is not going to be the same amount faster than the 20 mile a week guy than the 20 mile a week guy was than the zero mile a week guy. So what Dr. Daniels was saying is, is there is a law of diminishing returns.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  You're not going to get a one for one, um, um, improvement. You're not going to get a nice linear improvement curve that literally tracks the exact number of miles you run. So here's what I would tell people for beginning runners. The most important thing is that you're out the door and you're running. Let's not overcomplicate it. And as you get better and as you get better at self-regulation and effort regulation and pace regulation and heart rate regulation, then you can start going into all the nuanced details of was this lactate threshold, was this aerobic threshold, was this critical velocity, was this a hundred percent of my MVO2, right? That's not that important. When you're new to running, hey, man, let's get out the door. Let's complete runs.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Let's check boxes. You are going to get exponentially better really quickly. And then we can start inserting a lot more of the nuance, right? Think about it, the, from the first time you went into a weight room and banged some weights to where you are right now, think about how much more you know and a lot, uh, and how much more nuanced it can be for you, right? Uh, uh, conscious of, you know, uh, a progressive overload and, and all this other stuff that you know. Man, I'll tell you what, if you never lifted a weight, just go in, hit a modest session that makes some sense. You don't have to get all crazy with it.

• 33:14Nick Bare?

  I'm, I'm so aligned with that.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:16Nick Bare?

  I think that we oftentimes overcomplicate all of this stuff.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Right?

• 33:21Nick Bare?

  And what works is stimulus. You know, I, I wake up 5:00 AM every morning. I'm running by 5:30 and whether I feel great or feel horrible.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:32Nick Bare?

  If it's a day after I hit lower body strength, I know it's going to feel horrible. My legs are going to be heavy. But for me, it's the commitment to that consistency, but also knowing that that stimulus, whether fast or slow or far in duration or shorter in duration, that stimulus has an impact, a positive influence on my performance over time. And it kind of leads me to my, my next question I had. I know this is very specific to the individual.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:06Nick Bare?

  But how important, how necessary is speed work to getting faster? Like what, what incremental benefit does it make for a runner to incorporate speed work? You say that the additional nuances is diminishing, the returns are diminishing over time. It's not purely linear. But what can we expect from speed work versus not incorporating any speed work?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Speed work will make you faster.

• 34:38Nick Bare?

  Plain and simple.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Plain and simple. Running faster than easy will make you faster at racing the mile, at racing a 5Ks, racing 10Ks, right? But with, uh, uh, speed work, with doing structured workouts, um, um, comes responsibility. And that responsibility and the ability to do those effectively also needs to come from a background of experience. What does that experience need to be? Well, running a fair amount, right? Before you can really effectively do, um, speed work and sort of earn the right to then

• 35:24Speaker 01

  go and do speed work. Um, if you've been running for two weeks, there's absolutely no world in which I would recommend anybody do anything other than just go jog. There's not a world where I would recommend sending somebody to a track, right? But there comes a point, going back to what Dr. Daniel said, there comes a point where just going from zero miles a week to 20 miles a week, that's going to take you pretty far pretty quick on the front end, right? It's like throwing darts. I mean, if you've never thrown darts, right? The victory is going to be hitting the board at all versus missing the board and top, board entirely and hitting the wall, right? And then, once you consistently can hit that dartboard, then you can start doing speed

• 36:09Speaker 01

  work so that you can figure out how to actually do placement of where the dart hits the board and you can be a little bit more exacting. When I have a runner who has, uh, completed their first race, a 5K, a 10K or whatever, they're just beaming. They're like, I did it. I ran a race. The first question is, okay, I enjoy that. How do I get faster? Okay, let's get, let's get a little bit sexier with the work. Let's get a little bit more detailed because now I have a bevy of data. I have a massive data on you or you, if you're a self-coach, have a massive data on yourself. And so then you know that if I just go and jog, I'm probably not going to continue to

• 36:54Speaker 01

  get a whole lot better. I need to really make sure that I'm doing something to actually start going for these nuanced improvements. I went from never having a 5K time to running a 30 minute 5K. Well, how do I get to 27 minutes? Well, that three minutes is actually going to take a lot more planning and a lot more work relative to what it took you to go from zero minutes to never having a time to a 30 minute 5K. It's like when you told me flat out, the amount of extra work it took for you to go from 248 to 239 was wildly massive, wildly more than what it took from you to go from 259 to 248, right?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  And so you get more exacting with it. But yes, speed work will, and here's why. We know that your body, um, has, uh, I'm going to get too sciency here. Your body has, um, two kinds of fibers, but it's really three. You have type A fibers, right? And then you have type B fibers or type one fibers, type two. It doesn't really matter, two big buckets. But that second bucket is your speed fibers and those are divided into two, uh, um, sub-buckets. You have the fibers that can go from being only explosive sprint fibers to fibers that work more, um, in more of an endurance capacity. Okay? And so what you do is, is we know that when you start doing fart leg work and then you

• 38:19Speaker 01

  start doing, um, well orchestrated, um, accelerated running, tempo runs, threshold running, interval running, we know that you take those, those type two A fibers and make them start working more from an endurance standpoint. And in short, all you're doing is, is increasing your ability to run farther at a faster pace without falling apart. And at the end of the day, every single coach from a, a junior high, uh, track coach with a shitty whistle, you know, from the sporting goods store to your best professional coach in the world, they're all trying to do things. How do we get you to that finish line, running faster than you ever have without falling apart? That's all we're trying to do as runners.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  That's what we know that well crafted, quote unquote, speed sessions can do for us, but you got to be careful. You have to earn the right to start doing those workouts. When you get off your couch, just go run, man. You will already start getting some aerobic adaptations. Your mitochondrial density will double, will triple simply by going from never stressing your aerobic system at all, other than maybe walking to the refrigerator, to suddenly you're out running three, four miles a day, four days a week. Trust me, your mitochondrial density will double or triple in the first few months by just doing that.

• 39:39Nick Bare?

  It's similar to strength and resistance training.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  It's, it's almost identical.

• 39:44Nick Bare?

  Yeah, where if I go from being untrained to going to the gym and I'm training.

• 39:54Nick Bare?

  Moderate weight, higher reps, hypertrophy focused.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:58Nick Bare?

  Like these, these bodybuilding style splits.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:01Nick Bare?

  I'm going to put on muscle and I'm also naturally going to get stronger alongside of just lifting the weights is a byproduct of getting

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 40:10Nick Bare?

  Stronger, just like running. If I go from being untrained to just starting to run, I'm going to get faster as a byproduct of just doing the thing more.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 40:22Nick Bare?

  When it comes to running, to truly get faster and refine, we have to add in speed work to work a specific type of system and muscle fiber. Same thing goes for strength training. You are going to get significantly stronger than gym by training for strength. This is heavier loads, lower reps. And the byproduct is not just building muscle. It stimulates the central nervous system where the whole body now is trained for these neurons to sync simultaneously to move heavier loads. So it's very similar. It is the same type of system stimulus between strength and resistance

• 41:06Nick Bare?

  and, and speed and endurance.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 41:12Nick Bare?

  Now, one question I get all the time, daily is, and I'd love to hear your take on this, especially from the experience of the runners you've coached. What pre-run, warm-up or mobility routine do most of your runners perform before a training session? Now, I know this is going to look different from an easy run in the morning and a workout, a hard workout. For me personally, right now, Monday through Friday, I'm running six miles, six easy miles in the morning. I get a lot of my threshold work during my high rock sessions during the week.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 41:55Nick Bare?

  And then I have my long run on Saturdays.

• 41:59Nick Bare?

  Before those easy runs in the morning, I'm rolling out my ankles. I'm using the, the percussive massage gun on my legs.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 42:12Nick Bare?

  I'm doing some light stretching and then I just take off my run and I start really low and slow and if I want to, I speed up a little bit. That is pretty much the extent of my warm-up. When it comes to a speed session, I'm dedicating 10, 15 minutes, a longer warm-up to dynamic stretching, some static stretching, not much more dynamic, some movements, opening up my hips, my ankles, hip flexors. What do you see most of your athletes do in terms of pre-run, pre-training warm-up?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Really good question. What we know is that basically any movement that you do, from a physical exercise standpoint, one of the best things to warm up is to do the thing that you're going to do slower and easier. Right? There's a reason. I don't know why I'm talking about baseball so much. There's a reason why we have bullpens at every baseball stadium in America for the most part. Why? Cause you go down there, pitcher's starting to fall apart, you're starting pitcher and you need your middle reliever to come

• 43:28Speaker 01

  in. And what do they do? They, in the pros, they'll radio out to the bullpen, right? And they'll say, get up, get moving. What do they do? Start with some soft toss, right? And then they'll run it up there, maybe 50 miles an hour and they'll run it up there at 60 miles an hour. And then slowly they'll, they'll, they'll warm up into being able to run in out of the bullpen, you know? And then they might need to be able to run it up there 95 miles an hour in their first pitch and hope they don't groove it waist high, right? Um, so that's my first thing is a lot of people don't understand that sometimes the, one of the most important things to do is go jog. I mean, really, really

• 44:12Speaker 01

  slowly, right? To start your warm-up if you say have some sort of a repeat session or some faster running. And then after you've jogged for eight, 10, sometimes 15 minutes and you jog progressively faster, then you're done. Go get a sip of water. You can do some dynamic movements then at that point. A skips, B skips, butt kicks, high knees, right? Things that really activate the muscle fibers and neurologically create the connection or, or, or sort of rekindle the connection between the brain and your legs where you're

• 44:55Speaker 01

  telling them, all right, we, we gotta get snappy here, right? And then maybe do three to four times anywhere from 80 to 100 meter fast runs. We call them strides. Once again, it's so interesting. I'll have a new runner and sometimes I'll forget myself and I start doing the 1% stuff and I'll say, you know, uh, you know, warm-up plus drill plus strides. And they'll be like, what, what is that? I'm like, oh, okay. What it is, is 80 to 100 meters at a crisp pace, probably maybe 80 to 90% of full out. Okay. Or maybe do four of those to really, really activate everything neurologically. But you do that after jogging,

• 45:38Speaker 01

  after doing some dynamic movements, whether it's butt kicks, high knees, A skips, B skips, just some stuff where you're, where you're activating quote unquote, everything. Static stretching has mostly, mostly fallen out of favor as a, a, a useful part of most warm-up routines. Why is that? Uh, have you ever taken a, a rubber band, maybe that you rubber banded around, maybe a Ziploc bag that you had maybe some meat in or something that you put in the freezer, right? If you've ever taken a rubber band out of a freezer and

• 46:19Speaker 01

  tried to stretch it, guess what happens? It just snaps. It's not pliable. What we also know is that there is a 15 to 20% reduction in the explosiveness of a statically stretched muscle. Okay. For 10 to 20 minutes after you statically stretched that muscle. In other words, you actually reduce the strength in the explosiveness of your muscles before you have to engage in actual explosive activity if you statically stretch that muscle. It actually does much better if you dynamically warm it up through, uh, um, leg, leg swings is another really good one that I like to use. Hold on to the fence and you know, you could do leg swings, side to side, right leg, side to side, left leg.

• 47:03Nick Bare?

  That's my go-to.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Right? And then stand with your hips perpendicular to the fence, forward, backwards. That's dynamic. It stretches the muscle without you just ripping and going from static to ripping at it. So that's my recommendation before a repeat workout. Before an easy run, I like what you do. Foam roll, maybe if you got a little bit of a tight calf and you felt it the other night, walking around, walking down the hall to put the kids to bed, um, foam roll a little bit, uh, uh, go and use a, a theragun, um, for maybe, you know, three, four minutes, you know, on each leg and then get out the door. And then frankly, on an easy run, you warm up into your run by warming up into it by running really slowly. You might start your run at 11 minute pace and you might finish your run at eight minute

• 47:49Speaker 01

  pace. That's fine. That's fine. And if anything is your heart rate will be basically the same at nine minute pace as it is at, um, 11 minutes pace. The problem is if you try to start your runs really fast at the pace you want to quote unquote, average or, um, because you're married to a pace on your easy run, which you should never be, is that you actually feel worse because what happens is you shock your body into this mild, it's a very, very mild, but I would say this sort of akin to a mildly induced fight or flight response, right? Let your body warm up into it, right? You don't want to jump out of bed like a fire alarm just went off, you know? Let's ease out of bed. Let's get both feet

• 48:32Speaker 01

  on the floor, wiggle our toes, make sure that the blood's flowing, get up, stretch, yawn, put your clothes on. Let's just be progressive with everything. We're probably going to be okay.

• 48:42Nick Bare?

  It makes me think of one of my favorite speed workouts to do, tempo workouts, is a negative split tempo.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:50Nick Bare?

  So say I have an eight mile run and I want to get some tempo work in. I'll do a two mile warm-up, two mile cooldown. That leaves for four miles in the middle of tempo. And I'll start that first mile, that four mile segment. You know moderately faster than my warm up. And then mile two gets a little faster, then mile three gets a little faster. And then by mile four, my last mile, it is the fastest of that segment.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:19Nick Bare?

  And I'll do it, you know, that two mile cooldown. That's one of my favorite speed workouts to do. Cause I feel like it warms you up really well. You reduce risk of injury by going too fast, too early.

• 49:32Nick Bare?

  And I get a really great workout from it.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And it tracks everything in the world. And people may be asking Cunningham, what are you talking about? Guys, the Rivian, the Tesla did not exist before the Model T Ford. Right? Everything is progressive. Think about it, we talk progressive overload, right? We talk about advancement or revolutions or evolution. Everything is progressive. We go from simple to complex. We go from easier to harder. We go from less advanced to more advanced. Right? Everything works really, really well progressively in the course of human history.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  We had to have the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk before we got to being able to build, you know, an F-16 fighter jet. Right? And so my take is, is everything in the micro is progressive and everything in our world in the macro is also progressive. So treat our bodies the same way, even on an individual session. Like you said, we do really, really well going from slightly slower to faster. Right? We know that our aerobic system and our neurologic system functions that way as well. Because if it didn't, we would never have to warm up before a workout. If it didn't, then we could literally go all out from the gun in a race.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Well, we know that that's not what happens. If you let your body slowly warm up into a race, it will continue to function aerobically much longer. Because if you start performing anaerobic work, meaning sprint work, really hard work, and you dump a bunch of lactate into your system early, that's just like those hilarious cartoons with it we used to watch when we were kids. Would you see Wile E. Coyote and all that? And they would run over the cliff and their eyes would get big as hell. And they would have that, oh crap moment. And then you fall straight down. Once you go off the aerobic cliff, once you go off the performance cliff by starting anything too hard, within that session, you are not going to be able to climb back onto

• 51:42Speaker 01

  the cliff without going and basically sitting out for 15 minutes, 20 minutes to let your body come back down. That's not the way to get better.

• 51:51Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  So just don't go over the cliff. Start progressively.

• 51:56Nick Bare?

  One of the things you brought up with strides.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:58Nick Bare?

  I want to touch on that again briefly. Similar to the fart lick. Where if you go from no speed work to wanting to incorporate speed work. I think both strides and the fart lick, very similar.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Very.

• 52:13Nick Bare?

  Are a great way to start turning the legs back on. I know from just historical experience, I'm always running. Like I run year round. But when I go into a prep for a marathon or a high rocks, something that requires speed, and I start incorporating speed work on again, I can tell my legs just aren't turning on like they used to. It takes a period of time to turn my legs back on.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:44Nick Bare?

  To get comfortable with that turnover.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:46Nick Bare?

  Once again. So I go from, you know, my easy morning runs every day to going into prep. I find that priming the body in preparation for bigger speed workouts, fart licks and strides. So maybe at the end of my six mile run, I'll do a few 30 minute strides, which are completed at a pace faster than your easy runs. Just like the fart lick, you increase speed intensity a little bit, drop back off. Increase speed intensity, drop back off. I find incorporating both strides and fart licks to prime my body as I transition from

• 53:28Nick Bare?

  just easy running to bigger speed workouts, turns those legs on a little bit easier.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it's something that we refer to as neuromuscular stimulus. Everything is neurologic. Everything starts with the central nervous system. Everything from blinking to driving a stick shift car, to being a concert pianist, frankly, to riding a bike. Everything is neurologic. And so what happens is, we talk about the muscles, but we don't talk about the nerves that much. Speed is neurologic. And it's completely accurate for you to talk, to use the term turning on, because that's actually what you're doing.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Lights off, if you wanted to go and turn on, what do you do? You flip the switch. What are those switches? Strides, fart like work? You're flipping neurologic switches where when your brain says go fast, you're building in the neuromuscular memory for your legs to then recognize the stimulus and go, okay, I understand what my brain is telling me to do here. So you build those neurologic pathways. Right? And so, um, speed is very neurologic. That's why we call it neuromuscular stimulus. So when you're doing strides, when you're doing fart lick, when you're doing just a little bit of accelerated running, you're going to get faster, not because suddenly

• 55:03Speaker 01

  you're changing necessarily, you know, the basic makeup of your muscles per se, but your muscles are recognizing the neurologic impulse that your brain is sending to them. Right? And going, okay, yeah, it's time to go fast. Now, you have a certain number of white fibers that you're born with. The white fibers are your fast, your speed fibers. You cannot create more white fibers. You also cannot destroy white fibers. The number that you were, that you were born with is the number that you have. And when you reach late adolescence and when you, you know, and when you're done growing, you, you're, you've got what you've got. But you can recruit them, right?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  By neurologically stimulating your muscles to recognize the stimulus and get faster. So just little bits of speed work. And here's what's funny, it doesn't take much. And I think that's one of the biggest problems that I see from scholastic running, collegiate running, to adults who are getting into it, is there is this overemphasis. And Littier, going back to Arthur Littier, he spoke to this. There is an overemphasis. People tend to do too much speed work when we don't need that much. It's a lot like cayenne pepper and cumin. A little bit goes a long way. Too much of it is going to ruin your enchiladas. Right? It's going to make your chili inedible because it's too hot to eat.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And you're going to get what we refer to as neuromuscular fatigue. When counterintuitively, if you do too much of it, you actually end up getting slower because you're stripping the casing off of those wires that are the nerves that are going to your legs. And you start getting what we refer to as a diffuse electric signal, a diffuse neurologic signal, where it doesn't reach its intended target. Right? And we know that weak electrical impulses lead to really, really dim light bulbs. And sometimes when the, uh, when the signal turns off, that bulb ain't coming on at all.

• 57:08Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Got to be careful.

• 57:10Nick Bare?

  So I get this question a lot.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:13Nick Bare?

  And it is, what advice would you give someone who wants to improve their running performance, increase mileage, fuel properly, but also lose body weight and body fat simultaneously? And I think this is, it's a really commonly asked question because it's a really hard question to answer directly. Because it's a, it's a very thin line that you're trying to, to balance between fueling enough for your performance and also in this case, being in some sort of caloric deficit to lose weight.

• 57:58Nick Bare?

  So I'll maybe riff on it for a little bit and then hand it off to you. I think the go-to answer for this has to be, if you were trying to lose body weight and body fat, but also perform, running has to be paired with strength training, building muscle. Muscle, and I've, I've talked on this many times before, muscle is more metabolically expensive. So when you have more muscle and lean tissue on your frame, your basal metabolic rate, your BMR is higher. Your body naturally burns more calories at rest when you have more muscle and lean tissue as opposed to if you did not.

• 58:45Nick Bare?

  Now, running compared to strength training, you are going to, in most cases, burn more calories acutely in one hour of running than you would one hour of strength training. But if we take the long-term approach, having more muscle, more lean tissue is going to burn more calories. It's going to improve your body composition. You're going to get leaner, you're going to look better, you're going to perform better. So I think we have to first answer this question of if losing weight, losing body fat is one of the primary goals, yes, you can run, but you also should be incorporating strength training alongside.

• 59:28Nick Bare?

  And you should be very careful because you have to make sure you're fueling enough for that performance.

• 59:36Nick Bare?

  But to lose weight, you have to be in a caloric deficit. You can be in a caloric deficit from just nutrition alone, from just exercise alone, but it's best to be in a, a caloric deficit with the combination of exercise and nutrition lifestyle choices.

• 59:54Nick Bare?

  But it's a tricky spot because oftentimes people will ramp up training volume intensity. They'll significantly and simultaneously decrease caloric intake. And they find themselves low energy, not able to perform, not able to get up in the morning. They have brain fog, fatigue. This is where you don't want to get to.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Agree.

• 1:00:17Nick Bare?

  Do you have any more comments on that?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  This is complex.

• 1:00:21Nick Bare?

  It is complex.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  It, it, it, um, it fuses, um, societal prejudices. It fuses, um,

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  unrealistic expectation. When you look at a magazine on the rack at the grocery store checkout line, right?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  I know that you're very sympathetic to this, um, because of some experiences that you've had in your life.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  We talk about, um, mental health, when we start talking about these things. And so I agree with you. It's a very, very fine line and we have to be very, very careful. But there are some truths here. In order to lose weight,

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  you got to be burning more calories or your body has to be, um, ramped up,

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  in a way where your plus minus ledger is such that, um, you're in a caloric deficit. I mean, you don't, nobody, nobody eats, um, 4,000 calories a day and burns 2,000 calories a day and loses weight. Can we agree on that?

• 1:01:35Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, um, here's what I would tell anybody. If you have a history of eating disorder, if you have a history of disordered eating, if you have a history of body dysmorphia, I would be very, very careful going into anything with the sole goal to lose weight. Here's what I would tell you. Go into exercise, go into fitness with the goal to be the best that you can be and things will naturally, you will naturally lean out. If you're lifting weights, doing resistance training and fusing that with aerobic exercise, your body's going to land at a really good spot. But I agree with you.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  The science is really good that, um, um, being, having more muscle is going to net you better results than simply alone just going out there and swimming a million laps, riding your bike a million miles, or going out and running a million miles. You're going to be better off if you fuse the two and you do resistance training, two, three days a week. Let's get in there. Let's do some strength and some mobility training. Let's get into the gym, right? Get some, you know, and if you need some help with that, there are, there are literally thousands of people who are actually qualified to help you at, at certain levels, right? And the more experienced you get, the more of an advanced strength coach you might need, or more of an advanced strength program you might need, right?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Be careful when your goal is to look in the mirror and want to see something that you saw in a magazine or something that you saw on a starting line, because that person on that starting line happened to win that race and so you've decided I have to look like them to be good at this. Well, that might not necessarily be true. You might not also know the quiet hell that that person is living in because they're, okay, hanging on for dear life and running okay right now. But they might have an eating disorder. They might have a DSM five diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. They might be bulimic. You don't know the walk that somebody's walking.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  You don't know the life that that person is leading to look the way you think you want to look.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Be kind to yourself. Engage in healthy habits. Um, have responsible coaches, responsible mentors and get advice from responsible, um, science and evidence-based sources so that you can be as fit as you can be. Your body will lean out. Listen, you, you, you, you are not going to go and sit there from eating hot Cheetos and licking your fingers and watching I Love Lucy reruns and sitting on your couch all day. You are not going to go from that and not change the way your body looks. And more importantly, I would say the way you feel in your body. If you just get up off your couch, go get some running shoes, go down to the gym, do some lightweight work,

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  go and, go and jog three or four days a week, I guarantee you, you're going to look better and you're going to feel a lot better than you were when you watched I Love Lucy reruns and licking your orange fingers and not moving a finger for years on end. Oh yeah, you're going to look better and you're going to feel better.

• 1:04:51Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  That's my speech.

• 1:04:53Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I think sometimes what happens with newer runners, especially if they had, uh, a background in some sort of exercise.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:03Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I, I can use myself as an example. I lifted weights seriously. I did bodybuilding style training, strength training for about 10 years before I started seriously running. And then when I started running, I had this false assumption that running just burned exponential amount of calories. It burns a lot of calories, but I used to overestimate. I remember my first 10 mile run ever. It was downtown Austin. I finished that 10 mile run and I told myself, dude, you earned yourself whatever you won today.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  12 double cheeseburgers.

• 1:05:40Nick Bare?

  You probably burned like 12,000 calories. And that was, that, that was really, I remember I went to Whole Foods afterwards. I got a smoothie. I went to the hot bar. I got myself dessert. So I find with a lot of new runners, they overestimate how much they're actually burning in some of these runs. And for one, their appetite is stimulated. Like I know on days where I run versus days where I don't run, my appetite is much more ravenous on days where I run than when I don't. So you start running, your appetite increases.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Nick Bare?

  You think you're burning more calories than you actually are. You increase your caloric intake significantly in, uh, a greater margin than what you're actually burning.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Nick Bare?

  So I often hear from new runners, dude, I actually started gaining some weight. What's going on? Well, you might be over consuming based off of your improper estimate of how much you're actually expending in this exercise. Your appetite is now stimulated. You're eating more and more often. So you still have to be conscious of, you know, what you're consuming, how much. But just because you start running, doesn't mean you have this like, this fire within your belly that just burns anything you give it.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  And what's wild is you can actually gain two or three pounds and actually be exponentially fitter than you were when you were two pounds lighter.

• 1:07:13Nick Bare?

  For sure.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  And completely, and completely almost sedentary.

• 1:07:16Nick Bare?

  It might be muscle. It might be muscle.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, we know that muscle weighs more than fat. I mean, let's just call it what it is. So let's get in there and let's lift some weights. Let's go run. Um, but you know, people say, well, you know, the calorie counter and all this. I say, listen, man, we can get into all the nuance and all this. The reality is, is, I mean, I think the round number you can land on is about a hundred, about a hundred calories a mile. I mean, that's sort of a round number, uh, being for some people it might be 105, for some other people it might be 90. But that's probably about right, right? But, um, you know, there's some new science and there's some new discussions about, uh, um,

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  sort of within either a, a week or a, a few days time of sort of periodizing your carbohydrate intake, right? Your carbohydrate needs for fast burning fuel, um, because your bodies, um, when you're running hard, need instant energy that goes straight to carbohydrate, right? You're going to need more carbohydrates, okay, before a hard tempo run, an intense long run or a hard interval session. Then you are to just go out and just do an easy five, six, eight mile run where the intense, instant need for energy isn't there because you're running easier and your body can rely, um, a little bit more on fat stores, right, for energy in that. So there have been some discussions.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  As a coach, I can tell you that I'm really, really careful. If not training toward reluctant, to have these conversations with a whole lot of people who may, uh, have an ambivalent relationship with food, who may have a disordered relationship with food, to start talking to them about how, well, you can get away with eating less bread, less sweet rolls, less rice, less potato, things like that on your easy days. And you really only need to eat enough on your hard days. Listen, it's nuanced. And I understand that, you know, guys like Josh Kerr, who just broke the world record a couple of weeks ago in the mile. Listen, that's very advanced. He's got, uh, multiple team physicians, physios.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  He's got therapists and chiropractors and massage therapists. I mean, he's got a whole team that are looking at everything because this guy is trying to figure out how to take the world record, which he did from, you know, 343.1 to 342.6. That's five tenths of a second. We refer that, to that is obliterating, shattering the world record. Listen, when it's that nuanced and you're needing to be so exact in every way, we can start talking about periodizing your, your carbohydrate intake and all that. Listen, just like we were talking about for your beginning runner, let's not overcomplicate this. Carbohydrates are fuel. Generally speaking, we can get into the scientific nuances of it, but generally speaking, protein's not fuel.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Can be, but for the purpose of discussion, right? Eat enough carbs, eat plenty of protein for, uh, uh, muscle repair, right? And, uh, in building muscle, eat some, uh, creatine's great. Go lift, go run. Your body will generally settle out in a spot where you're going to look good. You're going to feel good and you're going to perform really, really good.

• 1:10:37Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Nick Bare?

  So last question I have.

• 1:10:42Nick Bare?

  What are or is some of the best practices to avoid injuries for new runners? I mean, I myself, when I first started running, I experienced every injury under the sun. Knees, hips, ankles, plantar fasciitis, tendonitis, shin splints. I got hit with all of it. The longer I ran, I mean, like not distance wise, but like over time, years and years and years, less injuries, less injuries, less injuries. Now, it's been years since I've had any injury.

• 1:11:24Nick Bare?

  And part of that is, one, my body adapting to the volume over time. But also, if you look at the videos of me running from 2017 until today, my biomechanics have just gotten so much more efficient. So my body has adapted to becoming a runner, to run longer, more frequently, more often. So what are your some, you know, some of your best practices to avoid injuries for these new runners?

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Love this question. One, be consistent. Be consistent. When I say consistent, what I mean is, is let's run Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, if that's what you're doing. And outside of the exigencies of life, sort of intervening, you know, you got a bar mitzvah that you got to be at, you have a christening that you got to be at, and you just can't get your running. But absent that, be a creature of habit, be disciplined. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. We do really, really well with rhythm. That's why we do really well with going to bed within the same 15 to 20 minute timeframe

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  every night. That's why we do really well waking up within the same 15 to 20 minute timeframe. That's the reason why we call it jet lag. We have circadian rhythms and we get thrown off. Our bodies do not respond well to lack of rhythm. Our bodies respond really, really well to disciplined rhythm. So that's the first thing, stay in rhythm. Two, do not let your bodies fall into disuse by letting apathy, letting sort of disdain, letting boredom creep in, and where you have eight weeks, 10 weeks, 13 weeks at a time every year, where you literally, basically don't do anything.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Your chances of injury, shin splints, Achilles tendon problems, patellar tendonitis, IT band syndrome, those are the things I see a lot, okay? And a lot of that is because of the loss of rhythm and a lot of loss of consistency. Be consistently doing something 50, 52 weeks a year, you're going to reduce your risk of injury because you're going to be creating reproducible and recognizable micro-trauma and stimulus where your body's going to go, I recognize this, I'm used to this, this feels good, we're good, okay?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Two, one of my great friends, she coached Olympians and many, many, many NCAA champions at the University of Colorado said, listen, my rule is don't ever try to precipitously spike more than one thing at a time. In other words, you're going to increase volume, you're going to increase intensity, meaning how hard you're running or how hard you're lifting, right? You're going to increase the number of days, in other words, your density, in other words, how close together your hard efforts are, or how close together just your runs are. If you're a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday guy, don't suddenly go from four days a week to seven days a week of running. That's a recipe for getting injured.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Maybe add in one tiny, tiny little lift or tiny, tiny little running session, add in a fifth day after you've done the same thing, maybe for three, four months straight, four days, let's add in a fifth day. Well, let's make it a little wee bitty little baby day and then turn that baby day into a robust day like the other four. Do five robust days, do that for a month or two, then consider a sixth baby session. Don't spike any two things at the same time, your intensity and your volume, in other words, how hard you're doing it and how much of it you're doing, that's a recipe for getting injured as well.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  The other thing, we love to say things like burning the midnight oil, your university professors, you know, when you remember you were in college, the kids that are making the A's are the ones that are staying up all night studying. Eh, don't do that. We've glorified wrecking ourselves, we've glorified never embracing rest and recovery because we associate with slovenly behavior, we associated with lack of motivation and laziness. No, I mean, listen, there's a reason why our five-year-olds and four-year-olds have to take a nap at school, and there's a reason why once you're 15 or 16, you don't. Because the five or six-year-olds need more rest, they need more recovery because we

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  know that their neurologic systems are not developed enough for them to be able to just be turned on all the time. Well, as adults, we're the same way. That's why we take vacations. That's why we love to be able to sleep. But think about it, if we didn't need rest, we'd just be at weight 24 hours a day for 50 years straight, right? Even in our exercise, take days off. When you're running easy, really run easy. The people who run a little bit harder than easy on a day-to-day basis, they're the ones that end up with Achilles tendonitis, they end up with plantar fasciitis, right? So don't spike your volume too much, don't spike your intensity too much.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Invest in value and embrace recovery and rest, even if in other parts of our culture, corporate culture, don't get me started on that in this country where, you know, I mean, listen, corporations really, really, and BPN does a great job with it, really valuing your employees' freedom to go on vacation, have some downtime, have some alone time and all that other stuff. So value your rest, value your recovery, don't spike your intensity, don't spike your volume all at one time, okay? And just be patient, you know, just be patient. We're, I always like to say, we're, you know, we're engaging in, you know, if you're lifting,

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  if you're a bodybuilder, or if you're a high rocks athlete, if you're a distance runner, those are all turkey baking endeavors in what unfortunately, we're sort of in a microwave dinner world, right? When we have self-induced ADD, where it's just go, go, go, go, go. Listen, if you go, go, go, go, go, all of a sudden, your body's going to go, no go, no go, no go. And that ain't fun.

• 1:17:55Nick Bare?

  Well, Jeff, this is extremely helpful for...

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  I, I hope so, I talked a lot.

• 1:18:01Nick Bare?

  For people just getting started. These are some of the commonly asked questions I get.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Nick Bare?

  A lot of these questions were guided by a poll and survey I put up on my Instagram.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:18:13Nick Bare?

  Asking people, you know, what do you struggle with as a new runner, someone aspiring to be a runner, that's just getting started, and what questions do you have? And this is some of those. So I appreciate your wisdom, your experience, your coaching for, for myself and all the people watching and listening. So it's always a pleasure. I appreciate you, brother. Thank you.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  My pleasure. It was a lot of fun. Can't wait to do it again. Love it. Thank you so much.