You know the part of the race when you feel you’ve hit the wall? Maybe you are on a hill or the flattest section of the course. Your mind is telling your legs and arms to drive, but your muscles are crying out for mercy. We are demanding them to perform at a rate at which they are not conditioned. Our body cannot supply the blood and oxygen that our hip flexors (in particular) are requiring to meet the demands of our heads.

Hip flexor muscles or iliopsoas consist of iliacus and psoas major muscles. These enable you to move your thighs towards the stomach area and are also some of the most important muscles for cyclists, recruited during the pulling up phase.

At least you’ve done your mental homework. But have you neglected working regular hill drills into your routine? Perhaps you do them but don’t know why. Do you vary the type of workouts?

One of the best ways to strengthen those hip flexors and in turn improve the power of our swing phase is to do hill repeats. As we gain strength, our chances of getting injured are diminished. Not only will we finesse our charges on inclines and finish line kicks on flats, but hill repeats also increase our mental confidence. Once you’ve done 15 X 2:00 of a tough hill, one minute of climbing a similar incline in a race will feel easy. It often surprises people that running hills improves speed.

Actually, running hills is speed work in disguise. Your effort will increase as you run up a hill, even if you reduce your pace. Moving your body up the hill requires more work than moving it along a flat surface. Hill running is equivalent to throwing in a surge on the flats. So, in a race, the best way to run a hill is to maintain effort and forget about pace while on the hill. Steady effort is the surest route to a faster time. Trying to maintain pace on the hill is like surging and varying the body’s perceived effort, which will only tire you prematurely.

Those of us who race need to recognize the importance of strengthening our hip flexor muscles. Strong flexors help us maintain a grueling pace, attack a hill, kick with speed on the flats, and protect our bodies from injury. They are an integral piece of training year round that, with variation, can make us more efficient runners and cyclists.

Take to those hills, happy running!!!

Your resting metabolic rate (RMR) is the number of calories your body burns if you did absolutley nothing all day, i.e. lie down for 24 hours. It’s basically the energy used to keep your essential body functions ticking over and accounts to 60-75% of your total daily energy expenditure!

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Your Health

The idea of health is something black and white, you are either ill or well, is an out dated notion. Most people nowadays know that there are times when they feel ‘just fine’ and there are days when they feel ‘really well’. The difference usually has nothing to do with a doctor and far more to do with how they look after themselves, whether they are well rested, eating well and so on.

The concept of all of us being responsible for looking after our health on an ongoing basis makes a lot of sense. Wearing ourselves out with too much of this, to little of that, work, relaxation, food, exercise and the rest and then rushing off to the doctor to sort us out, is, to some extent , shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. We can all be much fitter and healthier if we take a proactive approach to our own health by leading healthier lifestyles, getting regular check ups and taking part in health assessment programmes designed to detect health problems at an early stage, before they are serious and when there’s still time to do something about them.

Taking care of yourself doesn’t mean never seeing a doctor, or seeking the advice of other health professionals. It is important to report any physical illness to your GP for treatment. Before starting on any exercise or weight loss programme it is suggested that you discuss this with him/her and ensure that there are no particular health reasons that would put you at risk.

Heart Disease

Heart disease is a major cause of disability in this country and is the single most common cause of death in men and women.

What is it?
The heart is a powerful muscular pump and the action of the heart muscle depends on its own supply of blood from the coronary arteries. The left and right coronary arteries provide essential oxygen to the heart muscle. The lining of these arteries is perfectly smooth at birth, but the development of the disease process called atheroma, which initially takes the form of a fatty streak on the lining of the coronary artery, leads to the development of symptoms of heart disease, either angina or heart attack.

As the coronary arteries get narrower with atheroma so the blood supply to the heart muscle is gradually reduced. When people exert themselves physically under these circumstances the heart’s muscle’s demand for oxygen cannot be met and this produces pain in the chest, the classical symptom of angina pectoris. There are now effective treatments for angina including drugs and surgery, which can relieve symptoms and increase life expectancy.

When someone has a heart attack the atheroma lining in the blood vessel wall ruptures and releases fat into the coronary artery, which can result in a blood clot completely blocking the blood supply to one part of the heart muscle. This causes severe chest pain and is a medical emergency requiring urgent admission to hospital.

This next section concentrates on the factors known to be associated with heart attacks. It tells you what these are, why you should take heart disease seriously, how it is detected and what you can do to change these risk factors.

Who is at risk?
Coronary heart disease causes approximately one in four deaths in men and one in five deaths in women. In women cardiovascular disease causes twice as many deaths as cancer.

What causes heart disease?
The way we live, the way our body works (which is partly the result of our lifestyle) and our family inheritance are the most important causes of this disease.

Lifestyle risk factors include:

• Smoking
Smoking dramatically increases your risk of developing heart disease. The greater the number of cigarettes smoked and the more years you have smoked, the greater the risk of developing heart disease.

• Diet
Eating too many foods rich in saturated fats, too few foods high in un-saturated fats, and too little fresh vegetables and fruit, increases your risk of developing heart disease.

• Physical exercise
Taking little or no physical exercise increases your risk of developing heart disease.

• Stress
Although it is more difficult to assess, too much stress in your life may increase your risk of developing coronary heart disease.

Other risk factors include:

• Family history
A family history of premature (before the age of 55 years) in a blood relative (e.g. a parent, brother or sister) increases your own risk of developing this disease. Whilst this may partly reflect the genetic inheritance, it can also be due to the social environment of families where a common lifestyle can pre-dispose to coronary disease.

• Blood pressure, blood cholesterol and blood glucose
These factors are all essential to the normal working of our bodies but the higher your blood pressure, the higher your blood cholesterol and the higher your blood glucose, so the risk of developing heart disease increases. Our diet and the amount of physical exercise we take can influence blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels.

Preventing heart disease
Reducing your risk of heart disease can mean making quite radical lifestyle changes and it may not be possible for you to attempt to make too many changes all at once. Work out a strategy for yourself which allows you to take in one step at a time and gradually introduce other changes as you feel confident to do so.

• Stop smoking cigarettes
Stopping smoking reduces the risk of coronary heart disease and other disease as well, and this benefit is quickly apparent. It is possible to return to the risk level of a life long non-smoker, although it may take several years. There are numerous tapes, books and videos available to help you quit. Try stopping with a friend or join a group.

• Take up regular exercise
Including exercise into your daily routine will not only reduce the risk of developing coronary heart disease, you will start to feel less tired, less stressed and more energised. It will take your mind off smoking if you are trying to stop and help you to shed pounds if you need to lose weight.

• Avoid diabetes
A high blood glucose increases your risk of heart disease. Risk factors for diabetes include family history and being overweight. Try to keep your weight under control.

• Learn to de-stress
Important for your well-being generally, de-stressing should be an important part of your daily routine and may help in the prevention of coronary heart disease. Again there are numerous books, tapes and videos available on how to deal with stress which you can use at home.

• Blood cholesterol
Your GP will advise whether you blood cholesterol should be lowered and if this cannot be achieved by lifestyle changes (losing weight, reducing saturated fat and increasing the consumption of polyunsaturated fats) then drug therapy may be required.

• Keep your blood pressure down
In susceptible people, salt, excessive alcohol consumption and being overweight can make your blood pressure go up. Some people just develop high blood pressure for other reasons.

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Post exercise stretching is something we all mean to do when we ‘remember’ and ‘have the time’. The trouble is, many of us only find the time once every few months.

There are three very good reasons why you should stretch, and they are;

1. Tight muscles, tendons and ligaments restrict motion, particularly in the ankle and hip. Regular stretching will counter act that improving running efficiency and cadence technique.

2. It’s quite obvious that regular post exercise stretching can be linked to a reduced chance of injury, particularly in the knees, hips and ankles.

3. Research indicates that stretching stimulates the passage of amino acids into muscles and speeds up repair. So stretching after training will help your muscles repair themselves quicker.

In recent years one particular type of stretching has been hailed as very effective, yet it’s one many people have never heard of . Proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) has been shown to improve flexibility by 10-15% more than normal stretching and despite its complex name, PNF stretching is simple to do. In fact, PNF stretching is made even easier to do because its best done with a partner.

Your four step guide to performing a PNF stretch
1. Relax and let you partner gently push you into a stretch as far as is comfortable.
2. Stay in this position for 10-20 seconds – don’t bounce or tense up.
3. Push back gently (approx 10-15% effort) against the pressure of your partners weight for 10 seconds.
4. Relax again and let you partner re-apply the stretch for 30 seconds (and increase it if you feel comfortable).

An example PNF stretch on the Hamstrings.
Stretcher – Lie on your back with your arms by your sides. Lift one leg off the floor as far as you can, keeping the knee as is comfortable.

Partner – Kneel behind your partners raised leg with the back of their calf against your shoulder. Place one hand on the thigh, above the knee. Gently lean forward so your weight increases the stretch on the hamstring. Perform the PNF sequence as above, then repeat on the other leg. Try to complete three full rounds of the stretch.

How not to stretch.
1. Don’t stretch cold muscles. Stretching before a run has been shown to increase the risk of injury. Perform a few functional movements such as gentle ‘walking lunges’ or ease into every run with about 5-10 minutes of walking/jogging.
2. Don’t over-stretch. Extreme flexibility is no real use to triathletes, so there’s no need to force a stretch. Over doing a stretch to the point of pain, shaking or extreme tension can cause injury just as easily as twisting your ankle.
3. Don’t bounce. It might be what you see certain professional footballers do, but trust me, it’s a sure route to damaged muscles.
4. Don’t just stretch. If you hurt yourself whilst out training, stretching will not make a bad muscle good. It’s a preventative measure not a quick cure.

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Have you ever really thought about what effect the foods you eat have on your blood sugar levels? Do you ever remember feeling sleepy after your lunchtime baguette, or feeling like your tank is empty whilst training? Looking at what you eat and when you eat it could help prevent such issues. Ever heard of the Glycaemic Index (GI) and wondered what it’s all about? Well, here’s the lowdown.

To describe more accurately the effect different foods have on your blood sugar levels, scientists developed the Glycaemic Index (GI). It is a ranking of foods from 0 to 100 based on their immediate effect on blood sugar levels, a measure of the speed at which you digest food and convert it into glucose. The faster the rise in blood glucose, the higher the rating on the index. The GI of foods is very useful to know as it tells you how the body responds to them. If you need to get carbohydrates into your bloodstream and muscle cells quickly, for example immediately after exercise to kick start glycogen replacement, you would choose high GI foods.

The GI of a food is worked out by the amount of food containing 50g of carbohydrate. For example, to test baked potatoes you would eat 250g potatoes, which contain 50g carbohydrate. Over the next couple of hours a sample of blood is taken every 15 minutes and the blood sugar level measured. These figures are then plotted on a graph via a PC programme and compared with the reference food (glucose)and a GI figure for the food is then given. The GI of baked potatoes is 85, which means that eating baked potatoes produces a rise in blood sugar which is 85% as great as that produced after eating an equivalent amount of glucose.

The GI of more than 600 foods is known so for me to list them all would take forever, however I have listed a few below. Even the GI values of the food may differ slightly on the various GI tables available, but the food type should still be within the same GI category (low, medium or high).

Most values lie somewhere between 20 and 100 and most people find it more useful to classify foods as High GI (60-100), medium GI (40-59) and low GI (less than 40). This simply makes it easier to select the appropriate food before, during and after exercise.

In a nutshell, the higher the GI the higher the blood sugar levels after eating that food. In general, refined starchy foods including potatoes, white rice and white bread, as well as sugary foods such as soft drinks and biscuits are high on the glycaemic index. For example, baked potatoes (GI 85) and white rice (GI 87) produce a rise in blood sugar almost the same as eating pure glucose!! Less refined starchy foods like porridge, beans, lentils, muesli, as well as fruit and dairy products are lower on the glycaemic index. They produce a much smaller rise in blood sugar compared with glucose.

The effect on blood glucose from a high versus low glycemic index carbohydrate

Foods only appear on the GI index if they contain carbohydrate. This explains why you won’t find foods like fresh meat, chicken, fish, eggs and cheese in GI lists. However, you may find some processed foods like sausages or chicken nuggets in a GI list because they contain flour!

Low Glycaemic Index foods (55 or less)
Include some of these foods in each meal or snack, but go for low-fat choices where possible, such as skimmed milk. If you want to lose weight, you’ll also need to watch your portion sizes. That means sticking to small servings of pasta and noodles, limiting yourself to two slices of bread with a meal, and having only a couple of squares of chocolate or a small handful of peanuts!

Low GI Foods

Roasted and salted peanuts-14
Low-fat yoghurt with sweetener-14
Cherries-22
Grapefruit-25
Pearl barley-25
Red lentils-26
Whole milk-27
Dried apricots-31
Butter beans-31
Fettucine pasta-32
Skimmed milk-32
Low-fat fruit yoghurt-33
Wholemeal spaghetti-37
Apples-38
Pears-38
Tomato soup, canned-38
Apple juice, unsweetened-40
Noodles-40
White spaghetti-41
All Bran-42
Chick peas, canned-42
Peaches-42
Porridge made with water-42
Lentil soup-44
Oranges-44
Macaroni-45
Green grapes-46
Orange juice-46
Peas-48
Baked beans in tomato sauce-48
Carrots, boiled-49
Milk chocolate-49
Kiwi fruit-52
Stoneground wholemeal bread-53
Crisps-54
Special K-54
Banana-55
Raw oatbran-55
Sweetcorn-55

Medium Glycaemic Index foods (56 to 69)
You may include a few of these foods each day, but again limit portion sizes if you want to lose weight.
Moderate GI Foods

Muesli, non toasted-56
Boiled potatoes-56
Sultanas-56
Pitta bread-57
Basmati Rice-58
Honey-58
Digestive biscuit-59
Cheese and tomato pizza-60
Ice cream-61
New potatoes-62
Coca cola-63
Apricots, canned in syrup-64
Raisins-64
Shortbread biscuit-64
Couscous-65
Rye bread-65
Pineapple, fresh-66
Cantaloupe melon-67
Croissant-67
Shredded wheat-67
Mars bar-68
Ryvita-69
Crumpet, toasted-69
Weetabix-69
Wholemeal bread-69

High Glycaemic Index foods (70 or more)
Swap these foods for those with a low GI value or eat them together with a low GI food. Having a jacket potato with baked beans, for example, will lower the GI value of that whole meal.

High GI Foods

Mashed potato-70
White bread-70
Watermelon-72
Swede-72
Bagel-72
Branflakes-74
Cheerios-74
French fries-75
Coco Pops-77
Jelly beans-80
Rice cakes-82
Rice Krispies-82
Cornflakes-82
Jacket potato-85
Puffed wheat-89
Baguette-95
Parsnips, boiled-97
White rice, steamed-98

Next time we’ll have a look at how the GI can help your performance.

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