186: How to Start Running From Zero (Beginner Runner's Plan) | Jeff Cunningham

28:49Nick Bare:Yes. And when you do that too much, too frequently, too often, running itself is high cortisol producing. It can be. Your body, if you spend too much time in that gray area and you're not doing enough aerobic work, you're going to see negative consequences to metabolic health, aerobic health, the endocrine hormone system. There's this syndrome called REDS, relative energy deficiency syndrome. And it's when athletes push too hard too often for too long. That's right. And then often accompanied by caloric restriction. So you're overall in depletion of energy. Yeah. And you start digging yourself this hole.

29:41Nick Bare:Now it takes time. It takes months and months and months to truly get yourself into reds. But once you have reds, you can't just recover overnight. It takes months to dig back out of it. It's like crawling out of the Grand Canyon. Yeah. So for new runners, when you take your easy days truly take them easy so when you have your hard days you can go hard but try to avoid that gray area in the middle yeah you know um i guess you catholics can appreciate this i call it pace purgatory right you are somewhere in the middle and um you're not heading north you ain't necessarily heading south at least in the moment you're just sort of in a really non-productive zone.

30:32Here's what I would tell people too. Arthur Lyddiard, who is widely accepted as the father of running, okay? Arthur Lyddiard had a theory that I think is backed up by some pretty solid science. Now his exact number, I mean, we can dispute it, but he says, listen, you can get anywhere 95 to 98 % of max fitness, basically just doing a lot of easy running without obsessing over the details of pace and repeat sessions and things like that. What I would tell people is this, and of course, you know, sort of a funny name, but a giant in the running world in the United States is Dr. Jack Daniels. God rest his soul, passed away recently.

31:18Dr. Daniels said, listen, for a new runner, you go from zero miles a week to 20 miles a week doing nothing but easy running. You are going to get exponentially better fairly quickly by just simply going out and running 20 miles a week compared to when you were running zero miles a week. A runner that runs 20 miles a week is gonna be way faster than a person that runs zero miles a week. A person who runs 30 to 40 miles a week is not gonna be the same amount faster than the 20 mile a week guy, than the 20 mile a week guy was, than the zero mile a week guy. So what Dr. Daniels was saying is there is a law of diminishing returns.

31:52You're not going to get a one-for-one improvement. You're not going to get a nice linear improvement curve that literally tracks the exact number of miles you run. So here's what I would tell people. For beginning runners, the most important thing is that you're out the door and you're running. Let's not overcomplicate it. And as you get better, and as you get better at self-regulation and effort regulation and pace regulation and heart rate regulation, then you can start going into all the nuanced details of was this lactate threshold was this aerobic threshold was this critical velocity was this 100 of my mvo2 right that's not that important when you're new to running hey man let's get out the door let's complete runs let's check boxes you are going to get exponentially better really quickly and then we can start inserting a lot more of the nuance, right?

32:47Think about it. From the first time you went into a weight room and banged some weights to where you are right now, think about how much more you know and how much more nuanced it can be for you, right? A confidence of a progressive overload and all this other stuff that you know. Man, I tell you what, if you never lifted a weight, just go in, hit a modest session that makes some sense.

33:12Nick Bare:You don't have to get all crazy with it. I'm so aligned with that. Yeah. I think that we oftentimes overcomplicate all of this stuff. Right. And what works is stimulus. You know, I wake up 5 a.m. every morning. I'm running by 5.30. And whether I feel great or feel horrible, if it's a day after I hit lower body strength, I know it's going to feel horrible. My legs are going to be heavy. But for me, it's the commitment to that consistency, but also knowing that that stimulus, whether fast or slow or far in duration or shorter in duration, that stimulus has an impact, a positive influence on my performance over time.

33:57Nick Bare:And it kind of leads me to my next question I had. I know this is very specific to the individual, but how important, how necessary is speed work to getting faster? Like what incremental benefit does it make for a runner to incorporate speed work? You say that the additional nuances is diminishing. The returns are diminishing over time. It's not purely linear. But what can we expect from speed work versus not incorporating any speed work? Speed work will make you faster. Plain and simple. Plain and simple. Running faster than easy will make you faster at racing the mile, at racing 5Ks, racing 10Ks, right?

34:50But with speed work, with doing structured workouts, comes responsibility. and that responsibility and the ability to do those effectively also needs to come from a background of experience. What does that experience need to be? Well, running a fair amount, right? Before you can really effectively do speed work and sort of earn the right to then go and do speed work. If you've been running for two weeks, there's absolutely no world in which I would recommend anybody do anything other than just go jog. There's not a world where I would recommend sending somebody to do a track, right? But there comes a point, going back to what Dr.

35:43Daniel said, there comes a point where just going from zero miles a week to 20 miles a week, that's going to take you pretty far pretty quick on the front end, right? It's like throwing darts. I mean, if you've never thrown darts, right? The victory is going to be hitting the board at all versus missing the board entirely and hitting the wall, right? And then once you consistently can hit that dart board, then you can start doing speed work so that you can figure out how to actually do placement of where the dart hits the board. And you can be a little bit more exacting. When I have a runner who has completed their first race, a 5K, a 10K or whatever.

36:27They're just beaming. They're like, I did it. I ran a race.

36:30Nick Bare:The first question is, okay, I enjoy that. How do I get faster? Okay, let's get a little bit sexier with the work. Let's get a little bit more detailed because now I have a bevy of data. I have a massive data on you or you, if you're self-coach, have a massive data on yourself. And so then you know that if I just go and jog, I'm probably not going to continue to get a whole lot better. I need to really make sure that I'm doing something to actually start going for these nuanced improvements. I went from never having a 5K time to running a 30-minute 5K. Well, how do I get to 27 minutes? Well, that three minutes is actually going to take a lot more planning and a lot more work relative to what it took you to go from zero minutes to never having a time to a 30 minute 5K.

37:19It's like when you told me flat out the amount of extra work it took for you to go from 248 to 239 was wildly massive, wildly more than what it took from you to go from 259 to 248. right and so you get more exacting with it but yes speed work will and here's why we know that your body um has i'm gonna get too sciency here your body has um two kinds of fibers but it's really three you have type a fibers right and then you have type b fibers or type one fibers type two it doesn't really matter two big buckets but that second bucket is your speed fibers and those are divided into two um sub buckets you have the fibers that can go from being only explosive sprint fibers to fibers that work more in more of an endurance capacity.

38:14Okay. And so what you do is, is we know that when you start doing far leg work and then you start doing well-orchestrated, accelerated runnings, tempo runs, threshold running, interval running, we know that you take those type 2A fibers and make them start working more from an endurance standpoint. And in short, all you're doing is increasing your ability to run farther at a faster pace without falling apart. And at the end of the day, every single coach from a junior high track coach with a shitty whistle, you know, from the sporting goods store to your best professional coach in the world, they're all trying to do things.

38:54How do we get you to that finish line running faster than you ever have without falling apart? That's all we're trying to do as runners. That's what we know that well-crafted, quote-unquote, speed sessions can do for us. But you got to be careful. You have to earn the right to start doing those workouts. When you get off your couch, just go run, man. You will already start getting some aerobic adaptations. Your mitochondrial density will double, will triple, simply by going from never stressing your aerobic system at all, other than maybe walking to the refrigerator, to suddenly you're out running three, four miles a day, four days a week, trust me, your mitochondrial density will double or triple in the first few months by just doing that.

39:39It's similar to strength and resistance training.

39:42Nick Bare:It's almost identical. Yeah. Where if I go from being untrained to going to the gym and I'm training moderate weight, higher reps, hypertrophy focused, like these bodybuilding style splits, I'm going to put on muscle and I'm also naturally going to get stronger alongside of just lifting the weights is a byproduct of getting stronger, just like running. If I go from being untrained to just starting to run, I'm going to get faster as a byproduct of just doing the thing more. There you go. When it comes to running, to truly get faster and refine, we have to add in speed work to work a specific type of system in muscle fiber.

40:33Nick Bare:Same thing goes for strength training. You are going to get significantly stronger in the gym by training for strength. This is heavier loads, lower reps. And the byproduct is not just building muscle. It stimulates the central nervous system where the whole body now is trained for these neurons to sync simultaneously to move heavier loads. So it's very similar. It is the same type of system stimulus between strength and resistance

41:08Nick Bare:and speed and endurance. Now, one question I get all the time, daily, is, and I'd love to hear your take on this, especially from the experience of the runners you've coached. What pre-run, warmup, or mobility routine do most of your runners perform before a training session? Now, I know this is going to look different from an easy run in the morning and a workout, a hard workout. For me personally, right now, Monday through Friday, I'm running six miles, six easy miles in the morning. I get a lot of my threshold work during my high rock sessions during the week. Ah, okay. And then I have my long run on Saturdays.

41:59Nick Bare:Before those easy runs in the morning, I'm rolling out my ankles. I'm using the percussive massage gun on my legs. I'm doing some light stretching. And then I just take off my run and I start really low and slow. And if I want to, I speed up a little bit. That is pretty much the extent of my warmup. When it comes to a speed session, I'm dedicating 10, 15 minutes, a longer warmup to dynamic stretching, some static stretching, not much more dynamic, some movements opening up my hips, my ankles, hip flexors. What do you see most of your athletes do in terms of pre-run, pre-training warmup? Really good question.

42:51What we know is that basically any movement that you do from a physical exercise standpoint, one of the best things to warm up is to do the thing that you're going to do slower and easier. Right? There's a reason. I don't know why I'm talking about baseball so much. There's a reason why we have bullpens at every baseball stadium in America for the most part. Why? because you go down there, pitcher's starting to fall apart, you're starting pitcher, and you need your middle reliever to come in, and what do they do? Then the pros, they'll radio out to the bullpen, right? And they'll say, get up, get moving.

43:38What do they do? Start with some soft toss, right? And then they'll run it up there, maybe 50 miles an hour, and they'll run it up there at 60 miles an hour, and then slowly they'll warm up into being able to run in out of the bullpen, you know, and then they might need to be able to run it up there 95 miles an hour in their first pitch and hope they don't groove it waist high, right? So that's my first thing is a lot of people don't understand that sometimes one of the most important things to do is go jog. I mean, really, really slowly, right? To start your warmup. if you say have some sort of a repeat session or some faster running.

44:22And then after you've jogged for eight, 10, sometimes 15 minutes and you jog progressively faster, then you're done. Go get a sip of water. You can do some dynamic movements. Then at that point, A skips, B skips, butt kicks, high knees, right? things that really activate the muscle fibers and neurologically create the connection or sort of rekindle the connection between the brain and your legs where you're telling them, all right, we got to get snappy here, right? And then maybe do three to four times anywhere from 80 to 100 meter fast runs. We call them strides. Once again, it's so interesting.

45:08I'll have a new runner and sometimes I'll forget myself and I start doing the 1 % stuff and I'll say, you know, So, you know, warm up plus drill plus strides. And they'll be like, what is that? I'm like, oh, okay. What it is is 80 to 100 meters at a crisp pace, probably maybe 80 to 90 % of full out, okay? Or maybe do four of those to really, really activate everything neurologically. But you do that after jogging, after doing some dynamic movements, whether it's butt kicks, high knees, A skips, B skips, Just some stuff where you're activating, quote unquote, everything. Static stretching has mostly, mostly fallen out of favor as a useful part of most warm-up routines.

46:00Why is that? Have you ever taken a rubber band, maybe that you rubber banded around, maybe a Ziploc bag that you had maybe some meat in or something that you put in the freezer, right? Have you ever taken a rubber band out of a freezer and try to stretch it? Guess what happens? It just snaps. It's not pliable. What we also know is that there is a 15 to 20 % reduction in the explosiveness of a statically stretched muscle, okay, for 10 to 20 minutes after you statically stretch that muscle. In other words, you actually reduce the strength in the explosiveness of your muscles before you have to engage in actual explosive activity if you statically stretch that muscle.

46:49It actually does much better if you dynamically warm it up through leg swings. There's another really good one that I like to use. Hold on to the fence and you could do leg swings, side to side right leg, side to side left leg. That's my go-to. Right? And then stand with your hips perpendicular to the fence, forward, backwards, that's dynamic. It stretches the muscle without you just ripping and going from static to ripping at it. So that's my recommendation before a repeat workout. Before an easy run, I like what you do. Foam roll, maybe if you got a little bit of a tight calf and you felt it the other night walking around, walking down the hall to put the kids to bed.

47:27Foam roll a little bit. Go and use a Theragun for maybe three, four minutes on each leg and then get out the door. And then frankly, on an easy run, you warm up into your run by warming up into it, by running really slowly. You might start your run at 11 minute pace and you might finish your run at eight minute pace. That's fine. That's fine. And if anything is your heart rate, it'll be basically the same at nine minute pace as it is at 11 minutes pace. The problem is you try to start your runs really fast at the pace you want to quote unquote average or because you're married to a pace on your easy run, which you should never be, is that you actually feel worse because what happens is you shock your body into this mild, it's a very, very mild, but I would say this sort of akin to a mildly induced fight or flight response, right?

48:23Let your body warm up into it, right? You don't wanna jump out of bed like a fire alarm just went off. Let's ease out of bed. Let's get both feet on the floor, wiggle our toes, make sure that the blood's flowing, get up, stretch, yawn, put your clothes on. Let's just be progressive with everything. We're probably going to be okay.

48:42Nick Bare:And it makes me think of one of my favorite speed workouts to do, tempo workouts, is a negative split tempo. Oh, yeah. So say I have an eight mile run and I want to get some tempo work in. I'll do a two mile warmup, two mile cool down. That leaves for four miles in the middle of tempo. And I'll start that first mile, that four mile segment, you know, moderately faster than my warmup. And then mile two gets a little faster. Then mile three gets a little faster. And then by mile four, my last mile, it is the fastest of that segment. Yes. And I'll do it, you know, that two mile cool down. That's one of my favorite speed workouts to do.

49:23Nick Bare:Because I feel like it warms you up really well. You reduce risk of injury by going too fast too early. and I get a really great workout from it. A hundred percent. And it tracks everything in the world. And people may be asking, Cunningham, what are you talking about? Guys, the Rivian, the Tesla did not exist before the Model T Ford, right? Everything is progressive. Think about it. We talk progressive overload, right? We talk about advancement or revolutions or evolution, everything is progressive. We go from simple to complex. We go from easier to harder. We go from less advanced to more advanced, right?

50:11Everything works really, really well progressively in the course of human history. We had to have the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk before we got to being able to build an F-16 fighter jet, right? And so my take is, is everything in the micro is progressive and everything in our world in the macro is also progressive. So treat our bodies the same way, even on an individual session, like you said, we do really, really well going from slightly slower to faster, right? We know that our aerobic system and our neurologic system functions that way as well. Because if it didn't, we would never have to warm up before a workout.

50:56If it didn't, then we could literally go all out from the gun in a race. Well, we know that that's not what happens. If you let your body slowly warm up into a race, it will continue to function aerobically much longer because if you start performing anaerobic work, meaning sprint work, really hard work, and you dump a bunch of lactate into your system early, that's just like those hilarious cartoons that we used to watch when we were kids. We'd see Wile E. Coyote and all that deal, and they would run over the cliff and their eyes would get big as hell and they would have that oh crap moment and then you fall straight down.

51:31Once you go off the aerobic cliff, once you go off the performance cliff by starting anything too hard, within that session, you are not going to be able to climb back onto the cliff without going and basically sitting out for 15 minutes, 20 minutes to let your body come back down. That's not the way to get better. So just don't go over the cliff.

51:53Nick Bare:Start progressively. One of the things you brought up with strides. Yeah. I want to touch on that again briefly. Similar to the fartlek, where if you go from no speed work to wanting to incorporate speed work, I think both strides and the fartlek, very similar. Very. Are a great way to start turning the legs back on. I know from just historical experience, I'm always running. I run year round. But when I go into a prep for a marathon or a higher ox or something that requires speed, and I start incorporating speed workout again, I can tell my legs just aren't turning on like they used to. It takes a period of time to turn my legs back on, to get comfortable with that turnover once again.

52:47Nick Bare:So I go from my easy morning runs every day to going into prep. I find that priming the body in preparation for bigger speed workouts, fart licks and strides. So maybe at the end of my six mile run, I'll do a few 30 minute strides, which are completed at a pace faster than your easy runs, just like the fartlek. You increase speed intensity a little bit, drop back off. Increase speed intensity, drop back off. I find incorporating both strides and fartleks to prime my body as I transition from just easy running to bigger speed workouts turns those legs on a little bit easier. Absolutely. And it's something that we refer to as neuromuscular stimulus.

53:42everything is neurologic. Everything starts with the central nervous system. Everything from blinking to driving a stick shift car to being a concert pianist, frankly, to riding a bike. Everything is neurologic. And so what happens is we talk about the muscles, but we don't talk about the nerves that much. Speed is neurologic and it's completely accurate for you to talk, to use the term turning on because that's actually what you're doing. The light's off. If you wanted to go and turn on, what do you do? You flip the switch. What are those switches? Strides, fartlek work. You're flipping neurologic switches where when your brain says go fast, you're building in the neuromuscular memory for your legs to then recognize the stimulus and go, okay, I understand what my brain is telling me to do here.

54:43So you build those neurologic pathways, right? And so speed is very neurologic. That's why we call it neuromuscular stimulus. So when you're doing strides, when you're doing far leg, when you're doing just a little bit of accelerated running, you're going to get faster, not because suddenly you're changing necessarily, you know, the basic makeup of your muscles per se, but your muscles are recognizing the neurologic impulse that your brain is sending to them, right? And going, okay, yeah, it's time to go fast. Now, you have a certain number of white fibers that you're born with. The white fibers are your fast, your speed fibers.

55:27You cannot create more white fibers. You also cannot destroy white fibers. The number that you were born with is the number that you have. And when you reach late adolescence and when you're done growing, you've got what you've got, but you can recruit them, right? By neurologically stimulating your muscles to recognize the stimulus and get faster. So just little bits of speed work. And here's what's funny. It doesn't take much. And I think that's one of the biggest problems that I see from scholastic running, collegiate running to adults who are getting into it is there is this overemphasis. And Lyddiard, going back to Arthur Lyddiard, he spoke to this.

56:11There is an overemphasis. People tend to do too much speed work when we don't need that much. It's a lot like cayenne pepper and cumin. A little bit goes a long way. Too much of it is going to ruin your enchiladas, right? It's going to make your chili inedible because it's too hot to eat. And you're going to get what we refer to as neuromuscular fatigue when counterintuitively. If you do too much of it, you actually end up getting slower because you're stripping the casing off of those wires that are the nerves that are going to your legs. and you start getting what we refer to as a diffuse electric signal, a diffuse neurologic signal where it doesn't reach its intended target, right?

56:58And we know that weak electrical impulses lead to really, really dim light bulbs. And sometimes when the signal turns off, that bulb ain't coming on at all.

57:08Nick Bare:Yeah. Gotta be careful. So I get this question a lot. Okay. And it is, what advice would you give someone who wants to improve their running performance, increase mileage, fuel properly, but also lose body weight and body fat simultaneously? And I think this is, it's a really commonly asked question because it's a really hard question to answer directly because it's a very thin line that you're trying to balance between fueling enough for your performance and also in this case, being in some sort of caloric deficit to lose weight. So I'll maybe riff on it for a little bit and then hand it off to you.

58:01Nick Bare:I think the go-to answer for this has to be if you were trying to lose body weight and body fat, but also perform, running has to be paired with strength training, building muscle. Muscle, and I've talked on this many times before, muscle is more metabolically expensive. So when you have more muscle and lean tissue on your frame, your basal metabolic rate, your BMR is higher. Your body naturally burns more calories at rest when you have more muscle and lean tissue as opposed to if you did not. Now, running compared to strength training, you are going to, in most cases, burn more calories acutely in one hour of running than you would one hour of strength training.

58:57Nick Bare:But if we take the long-term approach, having more muscle, more lean tissue is going to burn more calories. It's going to improve your body composition. You're going to get leaner. You're going to look better. You're going to perform better. So I think we have to first answer this question of if losing weight, losing body fat is one of the primary goals, yes, you can run, but you also should be incorporating strength training alongside. And you should be very careful because you have to make sure you're fueling enough for that performance. But to lose weight, you have to be in a caloric deficit.

59:38Nick Bare:You can be in a caloric deficit from just nutrition alone, from just exercise alone, but it's best to be in a caloric deficit with the combination of exercise and nutrition lifestyle choices. But it's a tricky spot because oftentimes people will ramp up training volume and intensity. they'll significantly and simultaneously decrease caloric intake and they find themselves low energy, not able to perform not able to get up in the morning they have brain fog, fatigue this is where you don't want to get to agree do you have any more comments on that? this is complex it is complex it fuses societal prejudices It fuses unrealistic expectation when you look at a magazine on the rack at the grocery store checkout line, right?

1:00:45I know that you're very sympathetic to this because of some experiences that you've had in your life. We talk about mental health when we start talking about these things. And so I agree with you. It's a very, very fine line and we have to be very, very careful.

1:01:02Nick Bare:But there are some truths here. In order to lose weight, you got to be burning more calories or your body has to be ramped up in a way where your plus minus ledger is such that you're in a caloric deficit. I mean, nobody eats 4 ,000 calories a day and burns 2 ,000 calories a day and loses weight. Can we agree on that? Yeah. Yeah. But here's what I would tell anybody. If you have a history of eating disorder, if you have a history of disordered eating, if you have a history of body dysmorphia, I would be very, very careful going into anything with the sole goal to lose weight. Here's what I would tell you.

1:02:00Go into exercise, go into fitness with the goal to be the best that you can be. And things will naturally, you will naturally lean out. If you're lifting weights, doing resistance training, infusing that with aerobic exercise, your body's going to land at a really good spot. But I agree with you. The science is really good that having more muscle is going to net you better results than simply alone just going out there and swimming a million laps, riding your bike a million miles, or going out and running a million miles. You're going to be better off if you fuse the two and you do resistance training two, three days a week.

1:02:42Let's get in there. Let's do some strength and some mobility training. Let's get into the gym. right get some you know and if you need some help with that there are there are literally thousands of people who are actually qualified to help you at certain levels right and the more experienced you get the more of an advanced strength coach you might need or more of an advanced strength program you might need right be careful when your goal is to look in the mirror and want to see something that you saw on a magazine or something that you saw on a starting line because that person on that starting line happened to win that race.

1:03:19And so you've decided I have to look like them to be good at this. Well, that might not necessarily be true. You might not also know the quiet hell that that person is living in because they're okay, hanging on for dear life and running okay right now, but they might have an eating disorder. They might have a DSM-5 diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. They might be bulimic. You don't know the walk that somebody's walking. You don't know the life that that person is leading to look the way you think you want to look. Be kind to yourself. Engage in healthy habits. Have responsible coaches, responsible mentors, and get advice from responsible science and evidence-based sources so that you can be as fit as you can be.

1:04:09Your body will lean out. Listen, you are not going to go and sit there from eating hot Cheetos and licking your fingers and watching I Love Lucy reruns and sitting on your couch all day. You are not going to go from that and not change the way your body looks. And more importantly, I would say, the way you feel in your body, if you just get up off your couch, go get some running shoes, go down to the gym, do some lightweight work, going job three or four days a week, I guarantee you, you're going to look better and you're going to feel a lot better than you were when you watched and I love Lucy reruns and licking your orange fingers and not moving a finger for years on end.

1:04:48Oh yeah, you're going to look better and you're going to feel better.

1:04:51Nick Bare:Yeah. That's my speech. I think sometimes what happens with newer runners, especially if they had, a background in some sort of exercise. I can use myself as an example. I lifted weights seriously. I did bodybuilding style training, strength training for about 10 years before I started seriously running. And then when I started running, I had this false assumption that running just burned exponential amount of calories. It burns a lot of calories, but I used to overestimate. I remember my first 10 mile run ever. It was downtown Austin. I finished that 10 mile run and I told myself, dude, you earned yourself whatever you want today.

1:05:39Nick Bare:12 double cheeseburgers. You probably burned like 12 ,000 calories. And that was a rally. I remember I went to Whole Foods afterwards. I got a smoothie. I went to the hot bar. I got myself dessert. So I find with a lot of new runners, they overestimate how much they're actually burning in some of these runs. And for one, their appetite is stimulated. Like I know on days where I run versus days where I don't run, my appetite is much more ravenous on days where I run than when I don't. So you start running, your appetite increases. You think you're burning more calories than you actually are. You increase your caloric intake significantly in a greater margin than what you're actually burning.

1:06:27Nick Bare:Yeah. So I often hear from new runners, dude, I actually started gaining some weight. What's going on? Well, you might be over-consuming based off of your improper estimate of how much you're actually spending in this exercise. Your appetite is now stimulated. You're eating more and more often. So you still have to be conscious of what you're consuming, how much. But just because you start running doesn't mean you have this fire within your belly that just burns anything you give it. And what's wild is you can actually gain two or three pounds and actually be exponentially fitter than you were when you were two pounds lighter.

1:07:13For sure. And completely almost sedentary. It might be muscle. It might be muscle. Oh, 100%. I mean, we know that muscle weighs more than fat. I mean, let's just call it what it is. So let's get in there and let's lift some weights. Let's go run. But you know, people say, well, you know, the calorie counter and all this. I say, listen, man, we can get into all the nuance and all this. The reality is, I mean, I think the round number you can land on is about 100 calories a mile. I mean, that's sort of a round number being for some people it might be 105. For some other people, it might be 90. But that's probably about right.

1:07:48right? But, you know, there's some new science and there's some new discussions about sort of within either a week or a few days time of sort of periodizing your carbohydrate intake, right? Your carbohydrate needs for fast burning fuel because your bodies, when you're running hard, need instant energy. They go straight to carbohydrate, right? You're going to need more carbohydrates, okay, before a hard tempo run, an intense long run, or a hard interval session than you are to just go out and just do an easy five, six, eight mile run where the intense instant need for energy isn't there because you're running easier and your body can rely a little bit more on fat stores, right, for energy in that.

1:08:39So, there have been some discussions. As a coach, I can tell you that I'm really, really careful, if not training toward reluctant, to have these conversations with a whole lot of people who may have an ambivalent relationship with food, who may have a disordered relationship with food, to start talking to them about how, well, you can get away with eating less bread, less sweet rolls, less rice, less potato, things like that. on your easy days. And you really only need to eat enough on your hard days. Listen, it's nuanced. And I understand that guys like Josh Kerr, who just broke the world record a couple of weeks ago in the mile.

1:09:22Listen, that's very advanced. He's got multiple team physicians, physios. He's got therapists and chiropractors and massage therapists. I mean, he's got a whole team that are looking at everything because this guy is trying to figure out how to take the world record, which he did from 343.1 to 342.6. That's five tenths of a second. We refer to that as obliterating, shattering the world record. Listen, when it's that nuanced and you're needing to be so exact in every way, we can start talking about periodizing your carbohydrate intake and all that. Listen, just like we were talking about for your beginning runner, let's not overcomplicate this.

1:10:03Carbohydrates are fuel. Generally speaking, we can get into the scientific nuances of it, but generally speaking, protein's not fuel. Can be, but for the purpose of the discussion, right? Eat enough carbs, eat plenty of protein for muscle repair, right? And in building muscle, eat creatine's great. Go lift, go run. Your body will generally settle out in a spot where you're going to look good. you're going to feel good and you're going to perform really, really good. Yeah.

1:10:37Nick Bare:Yeah. So last question I have, what are or is some of the best practices to avoid injuries for new runners? I mean, I myself, when I first started running, I experienced every injury under the sun. knees, hips, ankles, plantar fasciitis, tendonitis, shin splints. I got hit with all of it. The longer I ran, I mean, like not distance wise, but like over time, years and years and years, less injuries, less injuries, less injuries. Now it's been years since I've had any injury. And part of that is one, my body adapting to the volume over time. But also, if you look at the videos of me running from 2017 until today, my biomechanics have just gotten so much more efficient.

1:11:39Nick Bare:So my body has adapted to becoming a runner to run longer, more frequently, more often. So what are some of your best practices to avoid injuries for these new runners? I love this question.

1:11:58One, be consistent. Be consistent. When I say consistent, what I mean is, is let's run Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, if that's what you're doing. And outside of the exigencies of life, sort of intervening, you know, you got a bar mitzvah that you got to be at. You have a christening that you got to be at and you just can't get your running. But absent that, be a creature of habit, be disciplined. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. We do really, really well with rhythm. That's why we do really well with going to bed within the same 15 to 20 minute timeframe every night.

1:12:39That's why we do really well waking up within the same 15 to 20 minute timeframe. That's the reason why we call it jet lag. We have circadian rhythms and we get thrown off. Our bodies do not respond well to lack of rhythm. Our bodies respond really, really well to disciplined rhythm. So that's the first thing, stay in rhythm. Two, do not let your bodies fall into disuse by letting apathy, letting sort of disdain, letting boredom creep in and where you have eight weeks, 10 weeks, 13 weeks at a time every year where you literally basically don't do anything. Your chances of injury, shin splints, Achilles tendon problems, patellar tendonitis, IT band syndrome, those are the things I see a lot, okay?

1:13:32And a lot of that is because of the loss of rhythm and the loss of consistency. Be consistently doing something 50, 52 weeks a year, you're going to reduce your risk of injury because you're going to be creating reproducible and recognizable microtrauma and stimulus where your body's going to go i recognize this i'm used to this this feels good we're good okay two um one of my great friends um she uh coached olympians and many many many ncaa champions at the university of colorado said listen my rules is don't ever try to precipitously spike more than one thing at a time. In other words, you're going to increase volume.

1:14:21You're going to increase intensity, meaning how hard you're running or how hard you're lifting, right? You're going to increase the number of days. In other words, your density, in other words, how close together your hard efforts are or how close together just your runs are. If you're a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday guy, don't suddenly go from four days a week to seven days a week of running. That's a recipe for getting injured. Maybe add in one tiny, tiny little lift or tiny, tiny little running session. Add in a fifth day after you've done the same thing, maybe for three, four months straight, four days.

1:14:53Let's add in a fifth day. Well, let's make it a little wee bitty little baby day and then turn that baby day into a robust day like the other four. Do five robust days. Do that for a month or two. Then consider a sixth baby session. don't spike any two things at the same time your intensity and your volume and in other words how hard you're doing it and how much of it you're doing that's a recipe for uh for getting um entered as well the other thing we um love to say things like burning the midnight oil your university professors and you know when you remember you were in college the kids that are making the a's are the ones that are staying up all night studying yeah don't do that we've glorified wrecking ourselves.

1:15:39We've glorified never embracing rest and recovery because we associate with slovenly behavior. We associate it with lack of motivation and laziness. No, I mean, listen, there's a reason why our five-year-olds and four-year-olds have to take a nap at school. And there's a reason why once you're 15 or 16, you don't because the five or six-year-olds need more rest. They need more recovery because we know that their neurologic systems are not developed enough for them to be able to just be turned on all the time. Well, as adults, we're the same way. That's why we take vacations. That's why we love to be able to sleep.

1:16:19Think about it. If we didn't need rest, we'd just be awake 24 hours a day for 50 years straight, right? Even in our exercise, take days off. When you're running easy, really run easy. The people who run a little bit harder than easy on a day-to-day basis. They're the ones that end up with Achilles tendonitis. They end up with plantar fasciitis, right? So don't spike your volume too much. Don't spike your intensity too much. Invest in value and embrace recovery and rest, even if in other parts of our culture, corporate culture, don't get me started on that in this country where, you know, I mean, listen, corporations really, really, and BPN does a great job with it, really valuing your employees ease freedom to go on vacation, have some downtime, have some alone time and all that other stuff.

1:17:11So value your rest, value your recovery. Don't spike your intensity. Don't spike your volume all at one time. Okay. And just be patient, you know, just be patient. We're, I always like to say it, we're, you know, we're engaging in, you know, if you're lifting, if you're a bodybuilder or if you're a high rocks athlete, if you're a distance runner, those are all turkey baking endeavors in what unfortunately, we're sort of in a microwave dinner world, right? When we have self-induced ADD, where it's just go, go, go, go, go. Listen, if you go, go, go, go, go, go, all of a sudden your body's gonna go, no go, no go, no go.

1:17:53And that ain't fun.

1:17:56Nick Bare:Well, Jeff, this is extremely helpful for - I hope so. I talked a lot. For people just getting started. These are some of the commonly asked questions I get. A lot of these questions were guided by a poll and survey I put up on my Instagram. Really? Asking people, what do you struggle with as a new runner or someone aspiring to be a runner that's just getting started and what questions do you have? And this is some of those. So I appreciate your wisdom, your experience, your coaching for myself and all the people watching and listening. So it's always a pleasure. I appreciate you brother. Thank you.

1:18:35My pleasure. It was a lot of fun Can't wait to do it again. Love it. Thank you so much