listen to your body

Training and listening to your body.

As a coach I sometimes have to tell my athletes I work with to take time off or hold back for varies reasons. The reasons could risk of injury or going too hard early in a workout to prevent a terrible workout.  It can be very hard for a runner to look at a long term health when trying to reach those short term goals and it takes a second person to realize what is the best options are (unless you plan to give up running for a while due to injury).

“I have to push through the pain!”- No good runner every said…

There are different ways you can listen to your running/body. Using a heart rate monitor can pre determine how a workout is going to fair and typically a high heart rate will be due to stress and lack of sleep. This will put a runner in a higher heart zone and make the running workout more difficult.

What is hurting? Aches and pains can lead to bigger injuries and some pains you shouldn’t “just run through it”. Pain is also a way that the body communicates to the brain that something is wrong.  I commonly see runners overcompensating for an injury that is already have by changing the way they run and hurting others parts of their body. When just taking a few days off or cross training for a week can fix everything and still be at tip top health (and shape) on race day.

Milton Lyons

Personal Running Coach

runmiltonrun@hotmail.com