Nicholas Garcia's List: Running Workouts

• This process is known as the degeneration-regeneration cycle.
• The next step in the degeneration-regeneration cycle may be the most important. This is known as the proliferative phase. During this phase, skeletal muscle satellite cells begin to appear along the periphery of damaged muscle fibers. These satellite cells represent a muscle population of stem cells that will eventually differentiate into new muscle tissue.
• What makes these cells unique is that their proliferation is brought about specifically by muscle trauma
• When looking at muscle-cell regrowth in sedentary muscles, the muscle fibers seem to regenerate in a random orientation and remain relatively immature.
• if the muscle fibers are cyclically exposed to various loads of stress and tension, they become well aligned, take up greater amounts of amino acids and synthesize more proteins. Other physiological benefits to training include an increase in intracellular mitochondria (the powerhouses of the cell), the number of capillaries, total blood flow and total oxygen-consumption capacity, leading to a profound rise in muscle metabolic activity. These increases yield a more well-developed and fatigue-resistant muscle.
• Hard/easy Law: Avoid performing hard run-training sessions on successive days. If you run long or fast one day, take a rest or recovery day the next. For recovery days, it is recommended you add 2:30 per mile to your 5K race pace.
• 36-hour Recovery Clock: If you're used to running three times a week (e.g. Monday-Wednesday-Friday), try giving yourself 36 hours between workouts. For example, run Monday morning, Tuesday evening and Thursday morning. This routine offers you the opportunity to use Friday as a rest day as you approach the weekend, which normally includes your long run.

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• In short, recovery runs do not enhance recovery. Nevertheless, recovery runs are almost universally practiced by top runners. That wouldn't be the case if this type of workout weren't beneficial. <!--insertad-->So what is the real benefit of recovery runs? The real benefit of recovery runs is that they increase your fitness--perhaps almost as much as longer, faster runs do--by challenging you to run in a pre-fatigued state (i.e. a state of lingering fatigue from previous training.)
• There is evidence that fitness adaptations occur not so much in proportion to how much time you spend exercising but rather in proportion to how much time you spend exercising beyond the point of initial fatigue in workouts. So-called key workouts (runs that are challenging in their pace or duration) boost fitness by taking your body well beyond the point of initial fatigue.
• Recovery workouts, on the other hand, are performed entirely in a fatigued state, and therefore also boost fitness despite being shorter and/or slower than key workouts.
• • Whenever you run again within 24 hours of completing a key workout (or any run that has left you severely fatigued or exhausted), the follow-up run should usually be a recovery run.
• If you run four times a week, your first three runs should be key workouts and your fourth run only needs to be a recovery run if it is done the day after a key workout instead of the day after a rest day.
• it's seldom advisable to do two consecutive hard runs within 24 hours.
• Recovery runs are largely unnecessary during base training, when most of your workouts are moderate in both intensity and duration. When you begin doing formal high-intensity workouts and exhaustive long runs, it's time to begin doing recovery runs in roughly a 1:1 ratio with these key workouts.
• • • In most cases, however, recovery runs cannot be particularly long or fast without sabotaging recovery from the previous key workout or sabotaging performance in your next one.
    
     
    • A little experimentation is needed to find the recovery run formula that works best for each individual runner.
     
     
  
   
  • Don't be too proud to run very slowly in your recovery runs, as Kenya's runners are famous for doing. Even very slow running counts as pre-fatigued running practice that will yield improvements in your running economy, and running very slowly allows you to run longer without sabotaging your next key workout.

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