In The Long Run

I'm dead chuffed to have joined road.cc as a contributor on heath, fitness and training. First offering is, naturally for a cycling site, about running. You can read it right here...

If it inspires you and you want to know how utterly empty and stupefied you might look like after running 100km, here's a photo I prepared earlier. Let's just say I had to walk sideways for three days.

Put down your bike and move slowly towards the door

For road.cc

If you’ve read enough articles on training, you’ll know that specificity is not only hard to say, but it’s one of the core principles of training. Meaning that you should make the training specific to the demands of the goal activity. 

http://road.cc/content/feature/134734-put-down-your-bike-and-move-slowly-towards-door

Resting Heart Rate - retail distribution

Get a few endurance athletes together and at some stage they'll start comparing.

'How low is yours?'

'It was 36 once.'

'Mine's 55 but I'm faster than you.'

Resting heart rate, oh if it was an indicator of performance we'd have no need to race each other! However it is an indicator of sorts. So what does it all mean?

When you're at rest your body still needs to function. Muscle, digestive system and brain need blood because they need oxygen. So your heart keeps on beating. The rate at which it beats per minute is your heart rate. This figure is affected by numerous variables such as your sleep levels, illness, training state, nutritional status and so on. It also varies from one individual to the next. So is it a pointless measure?

Not really. On an individual level it indicates the state of our cardiovascular system.

Consider a restaurant that needs to be supplied with fresh ingredients. The restaurant is the end user of oxygen, the road system the blood supply, the truck is the heart. A large truck needs to make fewer journeys. An efficient restaurant wastes less food, therefore needs fewer supply trips. A wide and fast flowing road network allows the movement of supplies to be unimpeded, meaning fewer trips required. 

With us, a large left ventricle in the heart, which increases in volume through training, means more oxygen is pumped per beat. Endurance trained cells are more efficient at unloading oxygen and endurance trained blood vessels are wider and more elastic. The net effect is that endurance training will lower your resting heart rate, but won't necessarily mean you're better than someone with a higher resting heart rate. The lowest I've seen was 31, then I panicked and it went up! Generally low 40's is common with endurance athletes, but I've known some to be in the high 50 and low 60s.

Ultimately, it's a way of tracking your improvement, but then so is the gear you use going up a certain hill :)

So, what's happened to ffflow, and what was ffflow with 3 'f's?

ffflow remains as my twitter name, just because.

When I coached elite athletes we were aiming to create being 'in the zone' during performances, when everything is instinctual. The sports psychyatrist who concieved the concept of being in the zone originally called it a state of 'flow'. I thought it was a great name for a sports performance business that combined physical training with mental skills training. However someone had beaten me to 'flow.com' - so I added 2 extra 'f's. It's that simple, and boring :)

Over the past year I realised that what I'm doing is making people faster and healthier, so ffflow has become Velocity and Vitality.

Hope you like it.

It's a chuffin' new website!

Faster and leaner - that's what Velocity and Vitality is about.

Helping clients become faster on the bike, healthier all round, though less 'round'.

In the blog section you'll find all sorts of random guff, from images to thoughts, theory on training, and recipes for wonky effective food. 

Some of it will be downright weird too. Bear with me.=

To kick off with, someone else's blog(s).

Dave at road.cc bought a Velocity and Vitality programme - paid for himself, not a freebie to reflect his famousness. He wanted to get less heavy and more faster.

Here are his first three blogs about the plan and progress.

Part 1: http://road.cc/content/blog/129784-enough

Part 2: http://road.cc/content/blog/133190-it-looks-lot-progress

Part 3: http://road.cc/content/blog/134532-halfway-house