On July 11th, we had the opportunity to sit down with one of our partners, Kinesis Integrated, for a Facebook live session to dive into their expertise and answer your questions! In case you missed it or want a refresher on the info, we put together this overview for you.
Each month, we will host a Facebook Live session in our Run The Year Facebook group for Run The Year participants, so stay tuned for the next one!
About Kinesis Integrated
Kinesis Integrated is located in Boulder, CO. They offer 1-on-1 coaching sessions, remote coaching, and training plans, focusing on strength and performance for endurance athletes. From olympians to high school athletes, they provide gold medal service all around. Kinesis has recently partnered with Run The Edge to provide strength, mobility, and prehab resources to participants year round. During this panel, we were joined by Chris Lee, Chris Fitz, Evan Price, and Ashley Mateo. They all have slightly different fields of expertise, so if you have specific questions, learn a bit more about them so you know who to reach out to!
Chris Lee is mainly a strength and conditioning coach. He is a former triathlete and collegiate swimmer and holds a degree in physical education and exercise science.
Chris Fitz is a former D1 Head Run Coach and is currently coaching runners with performance goals and coaching a handful of people just getting into running as well.
Evan Price focuses on physical therapy and recovery during training. He supports athletes training for triathalons, multisport athletes, ultrarunners, track and field athletes, and overall, a wide range of athletes. If you have questions about physical therapy, Evan does offer consultations!
Ashley Mateo works with people who are newer, haven't done certain distances or just looking to improve. She has run 10 marathons in her running career, and she's consulted and written about almost every running topic, writing multiple pieces for Runner's World! If you have a question she's your girl!
Questions from the audience
We opened the panel up for questions from Run The Year participants. Here's what we covered:
What is the best way to increase my mileage?
The average rule is to increase but 8% to 10% a week; if you already run regularly, you can increase faster, by 8-10% is the general rule. Also, we look at age range when it comes to telling people how many days they should be running versus how many days they should use to recover. People up to 23 years old can generally run 6 days a week. Once someone is over 25, they should focus on an active recovery as tendons may need more time. People north of 40 may need even longer periods of plateaus to tolerate the increase in mileage. While the 10% rule is the common rule for increased mileage, the golden rule is to listen to your body.
How important is cross-training when you’re running?
We start everyone in the same place when it comes to cross-training and weights. We start with using body weight and exercises like glute bridges, calf raises, and lunges. Keep it simple; no need to get fancy. We want to find out how stable your core is, how much mobility you have, how well you can control your movements. Can you balance on one foot? Start as basic as you can and progress from there. Cross training is important because if your goal is to stay healthy, you need to give your body variable movements. There are lots of options outside of just the gym, like other sports that aren’t just giving you forward motion, like dunking a basketball. When we run, we are breaking down our bodies with high volume training. On the flip side, low reps with high rest, like weight lifting, generate hormones that build you back up. This will offset the breaking down and provide a good balance that can be really effective. Also, adding in lateral or backwards warmups will help injuries.
It's a common idea to split up your strength workouts and your cardio workouts, so do them on different days, but we like to encourage doing your strength workouts on hard run days for a full day of recovery. This would fall under the one cup theory - you have one cup for all of your stress, like stress on your body from exercise, stress from work, etc. If you have a really stressful day at work you make decide to take it easy with your workout and save your hard run for the next day. However, when you do this, you aren't fully emptying your cup because you don’t have a full recovery day.
How many miles can you run or walk in your shoes?
The shoe brands will tell you about 300 miles, but in reality, you can get 700 to 800 miles out of good training shoes. If you can, have a few different shoes you can rotate between; one for trail running, one for road running, and one for recovery runs, if that's available to you. If you can switch between just 2 pairs of shoes, you’ll be at less of a risk for running injury. If you can’t change your shoe, update your surface! Don’t just stick to one type of path; like movement, add some variable surfaces into your training. Overall, listen to your body. That will tell you when a shoe needs to be replaced. Some shoe brands do wear out quicker than others, so it is important to monitor your body and the shoe itself. If you notice the tread has worn off, the shoe is done. Finally, whatever you do, do not put them in the washing machine. You can soak them in a tub to clean them, but washing machines will break them down.
What are the best wireless headphones for running?
This one was pretty unanimous with the top three: Jawbones, Beats by dre, or Shocks Open Run Pro.
Most of us, even the Run The Edge team, have used these throughout the years, and we would tend to agree.