YOU AND YOUR MUSCLES, TENDING TO YOUR POWER PLANT
By Bernard L. Gladieux, Jr.

Nearly all training athletes experience some post workout muscle soreness. Non athletes and newcomers to physical exercise may wonder if it is even worth the agony. To people who are unaccustomed to the transient pain that often follows high intensity effort, and those with low pain thresholds, it may not be. To the committed veteran, elite athlete however, garden variety muscle stiffness, soreness and other soft tissue aches and pains are just an acceptable feature of the sport – like thorns amongst the roses. Moreover, a certain level of pain goes with the territory, and veteran athletes come to accept the post workout mix of fatigue and soreness as a sign that in the recovery, the body is assimilating, repairing and restoring to come back stronger, tomorrow or next week.

Macho stoicism can help you cope with such pain to a certain point, but even the toughest athlete performs better and is happier when the recovery passes rapidly and the sore, stiff feeling doesn’t linger. Here are some simple techniques for handling, managing and minimizing the distracting, if benign muscle pain virtually all athletes come to know in due course.

Distinguish:
Learn first how to tell the difference between pain that will go away promptly after a few ibuprofen and some rest and pain that has decided to take up long term residence in your body. If pain has taken a long time to build, slowly increasing in severity over time even though you’ve tried to ignore it, chances are, it will take just as long or longer to go away – assuming you will give it the proper care and rest. The worst that you can do is to try to banish the pain as an act of will. You will not recover from a chronic injury if you continuously repeat the trauma, whatever it may be and however subtle. You would think the idea is too, too obvious. Unfortunately, many athletes, especially those hooked on endurance training all too often allow the triumph of blind hope over experience and common sense.

Prevention:
Simple muscle soreness that fades after a day or so does indicate that your soft tissues are going through a training cycle in which, all else being equal, they will be stronger when they feel better. Trick is to train just hard or long enough so that the soreness does go away after a reasonable recovery, say, 24 to 48 hours. To enhance your recovery, always be sure you have plenty of water in your gut before, during and after every training session. The hotter the outside temperature and the more intense the training, the more important good hydration is. Especially when it is hot and humid and the effort is going to last more than an hour or so, do consider adding specific electrolytes before, during and after. They can keep you from cramping, bonking and just feeling crummy.

Warm ups:
Failure to ease into hard effort may be the most frequent cause of lingering muscle pain. Muscle fibers flex and stretch against one another in an infinite number of interfaces underneath those ripples. To work efficiently, they need to be thoroughly lubricated. When you warm up, that is what goes on inside your muscles and explains why you can make some muscle soreness go away by easing into a workout with a long warmup. Almost as important is a gradual cool down that keeps your heart rate up at a fairly high, albeit sub-aerobic level for at least a few minutes at the end of the session. That permitsthe blood to carry away the accumulated lactic acid in the muscle tissues, a biochemical cause of muscle soreness.

Stretching:
Although there are still doubters around, the general consensus among trainers and rehab specialists on the efficacy of stretching for athletes is in favor of it. If you stretch deliberately and regularly when the muscles are well warmed, it will enhance your flexibility and will probably reduce a lot of exercise related pain.

Drugs:
Non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin are favored by many trainers and athletes for sore muscles and do seem to provide genuine, if temporary, relief. As a general rule, however, prudent athletes try to take these apparently benign, over-the-counter drugs only when they are really needed.

Massage:
firm, deep manipulation of your muscles before and after exercise will almost always make sore muscles feel better, and some times, under skilled hands the results are dramatic. If you are a serious, training athlete, seek out a good, regular massage therapist on whom you can call both before and after important races and training sessions.

In Good Health,
Bernard L. Gladieux, Jr.
President
The Pressure Positive Company®

By Bernard L. Gladieux, Jr.

Overuse injuries, although they often seem quite straight forward, can be, in fact, quite complicated in that they are often caused by a combination of factors that vary widely from person to person. So, whether you are a weekend jogger and spend your work days at a desk or a bench or you are an elite, daily training, competitive athlete, there are some ways you can safely navigate around and through the many risk factors that will threaten your continued mobility, fitness, good health and longevity in the short or the long run.

So, as you make choices about your exercise, how often, how intensely and at what activities, here are some things to think about:

Form and style:
Much athletic coaching and training concentrates on the details of movement. If you are fortunate to have been taught by a skilled and experienced athletic instructor as a young person in, say, junior high or high school, you will have learned all about how to run, how to breathe, how to pace yourself. Now, as you may be contemplating your athletic renaissance, remember all that good advice and put it to use.

If you are just now starting from scratch, find a trainer or an experienced mentor coach or friend to help you get it right.Very often a local club is a good place to start with club runs or rides among contemporaries. Keep your eyes and ears open for tips on how to move smoothly and efficiently. In running especially, economy of movement follows form and style very closely and will minimize early fatigue that will in turn help to forestall injury from inefficient form.

Frequency in balance
One of the earliest decisions you may have to make is how often you are going to challenge your body in the activity you select.Be aware that one of the most serious risks in the early stages of most quality exercise programs results from an early excess of enthusiasm. It doesn’t take long for the beginner jogger or cyclist or walker or weightlifter to start feeling the uplifting effects of physical activity. You will know it by the giddy feeling of exhilaration and invincibility that recent converts often demonstrate while in the “honeymoon phase.” It is typically a happy time, but, as rewarding as regular exercise can be, it is not without its hazards. So it pays to be aware that injury can sneak up on you. Your best defense is to listen to signals from your body and to schedule your program so that you allow an appropriate amount of time for recovery after every effort. For a normal workout that may be only a day or for something extraordinary like a marathon, it might require a month before you are back to a normal.

Learning curve:
In time you will accumulate knowledge about your own limits and what works for you and what doesn’t.Always be open to learning more – more about yourself and more about everything that bears on your well being from diet to rest, stretching to cross training. Although exercise is not like neurosurgery in its intellectual demands, it greatly benefits from a basic academic knowledge of anatomy, physiology, nutrition and any sports medicine you can absorb. These days extensive research information is widely available on the Internet.

Taking your time:
Look first at your carefully structured plan to become permanently more fit and strong in the longer term. Consider the stepping stones towards whatever goal you decide to aim for. It may simply be to remain upright and moving for the next twenty or forty years.If you are aiming for something more dramatic and shorter term, your accelerated schedule will demand more intensity as well as more discipline and caution. In terms of your daily activities, try to get in the habit of easing into your training mode of choice with deliberate restraint. One technique that you may soon discover on your own will increase your endurance significantly: Simply warm up slowly for twenty minutes to half an hour before starting any demanding activity.

Muscle balance:
Every experienced athlete knows that the exercised muscle inevitably becomes stronger, and the unexercised muscle does not. Accordingly a sport in which only a limited number of specific muscles are engaged may leave you with neglected, relatively weaker muscles.That difference between opposing muscles can easily result in an imbalance that often leads to acute muscle strains and other injuries that are entirely preventable by a regular, balanced strength training regimen. Maintaining a basic muscle balance is not difficult and does not necessarily involve an extraordinary time commitment. At the outset, however you may have to alter your habitual routine in order, for example, to begin a twice a week weight training program.

With the help of a trained exercise therapist or athletic trainer, you can create a sequence of exercises appropriately tailored to your own, specific needs and goals.

Become an adventurer; mix it up:
Once you are in the habit of training regularly, you can start experimenting with new ways to add variety to your exercise that will enhance your enjoyment. Increase your resistance to overuse related injuries and improve the efficiency of your form. This approach is often referred to as “cross training.” In concept, cross training is simplicity itself: you exercise your primary muscles and allow plenty of time between workouts to allow your muscles to recover and repair; but instead of taking a nap, you go workout at something entirely different. Of course cross trainers can wear down, become plagued by chronic fatigue, reduce their resistance to colds and other infections, but by spreading the stress around your own, more vulnerable trouble spots, you reduce the risk that any one will break down.

Outlook and simple pleasures:
Always keep in mind that whatever you do to attain and protect your health and fitness, it should be something that yields you intrinsic rewards.That is pleasure from the sheer pleasure of the experience. Never let that thought go.Everything else is gravy.

In Good Health
(Bun) Bernard L. Gladieux, Jr.
President
The Pressure Positive Company

Taking it To the Limit
by Bernard L. Gladieux Jr.

Within each of us is an explorer, and within every explorer are visions of new frontiers.

In a very real sense, exploring the limits of our own, individual capacity and capabilities gives every one of us a great, ever-new territory to discover.  For the action oriented and outdoor athletes the options can be deeply rewarding, occasionally life changing.

Whatever your vehicle in, say, endurance sports like running, cycling or swimming or  adventure sports like hiking, climbing, kayaking or wilderness travel, just what you choose to do is less important than that you take to the journey with all your heart and make it your own.

Here are some thoughts on the inner exploration that will be the precursor to whatever path you take:

Try Something New: 
You needn’t do anything foolhardy or truly dangerous, but be bold; be adventurous.  It will help to ease your thinking into new channels.  Start by preparing yourself mentally and physically.  Read something entirely new to your experience – a book or a magazine even something as prosaic as the travel section of your Sunday newspaper.  Dare to dream, and then allow your dreams to grow and develop into preliminary planning.  It may be a rafting adventure, a safari, back packing, ocean kayaking, ballooning or skiing.  Adventure can be as exotic or as taxing as you decide to make it.  Just choose intelligent, gradual changes in your preparations like physical and technical training, as necessary, to move toward your goals.

Push to Your Limits:
But don’t break your physical budget.  In time everyone begins to wear out parts and gradually to slow down.  Some quickly use up their physical capital in fast living and bad lifestyle choices, age fast, fade and retire from life.  Beware of these traps.  A couple of years ago Joe Henderson, a prodigious endurance runner and sensitive, talented writer noted that the three questions he was asked the most often were: “How to run faster, how to run longer and how to get over the injury caused by running faster and longer.”

Seek:  
In endurance athletics, as in other areas of human endeavor, generally the best information comes from those who have been at it the longest.  They are the ones who seem to have run smartest, kept their balance about it and survived.  You don’t have to believe everything you hear from these old-timers, but listen well.

Take Your Rest:
Rest should be a part of every phase of your physical training.  Take it whenever your instincts tell you that you require it. Long term success and happiness from
Activities requiring physical endurance and strength depends a great deal on self-knowledge which includes knowing when to ease up and when to lay off.  Rest is the critical flip side of effort.  If you are in the daily, hard, training habit or use the high-powered training program developed for a world class, elite runner, there is a good chance your improvement will be frustratingly slow or that you will find yourself on the edge of overuse injury.  The problems you experience may not be due at all to your own, inherent limitations, but could be just the result of a training routine that is unremittingly and inappropriately intense for you.

Play: 
Injury, fatigue, boredom, tension, depression and a variety of other early signs of burnout will invariably cut short any voyage of self discovery and exotic exploration.  The best remedy, happily, is the most pleasant and the easiest to carry out.  Simply let go, and play as if you were a child, and the world were your playground – which it can be if you make it so.

In Good Health,
Bernard (Bun) Gladieux

To many, perhaps most, of the under-achieving observers out there, it may seem that competitive athletes are an unfortunate lot.

To outsiders, the serious runner, cyclist or other high intensity athlete must appear continuously sore, aching, injured, misguided and masochistic, a driven, monomaniac, doomed to a short, miserable, lonely life. Maybe, but what cynics forget, cannot grasp or simply ignore is that, for the seriously competitive athlete, routine encounters with the physical realities of weather, the demands of training and racing, managing within personal physical and psychological limits offers, in return for the effort, incomparable resilience and mental balance.
Some might mistake such aplomb as smug contentment (a state easier to take from the inside, than from without, I am told.) But in fact, if you race or train for very long at any of the truly demanding, physical sports, you eventually develop what we might call coping skills as surely as you build up your wind or your quads.

Here are some ideas on managing and coping to think about as you slog along on your own journey.

SERIOUSNESS:
This is serious business. It is, after all, living, and, as far as we know, this is your only shot at it. So you should really try harder than just to make do. On the other hand, though serious, life need not be grave. Make yourself take your training seriously. Stay with it as long as it enhances and strengthens. If you start questioning your own sanity because you have begun to feel you are taking it all too seriously, you probably are. Stop, step back and reorient yourself. This process can take the form of a vacation, a new approach to cross training or just a few days off.

EXPECTATIONS:
Make them great ones. Aim for as high as you can see, but make sure your feet are planted firmly on earth when you look. Some of the most self-destructive behavior grows out of illogical, unrealistic self delusions of grandeur. Beware of pipe dreams.

WIND DOWN OR BURN OUT: For most athletes at this latitude (the Mid Atlantic states,)
the racing season in many sports starts in the spring, glides through the summer and ends or quickens again in the fall before the race schedule finally dries up before winter sets in. For competitors who stay with it for nine months or longer, the danger of burnout becomes ever more real as the season grinds on. Race it if you must and can stay healthy and happy. But if you are beginning to feel the strain either in your working mechanisms or in your head, take the message to heart and ease up to recover your energy and enthusiasm.

HARVEST:
If you have trained well and have stayed out of trouble – meaning injury free – you are certainly entitled to have some pure fun beyond just hammering yourself to numbness.

TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT:
Take some long hikes in the woods, start going on some club rides, break out your ATB and attack a mountain. This can be a beautiful time to reap the fruit of your athletic labors over the past few months.

TRIUMPH VS P.R.: Winning in endurance sports is a great deal more than coming in first. Most athletes come to understand that fact early in their careers. Sometimes just finishing a race can give you the heady experience of high achievement every bit as much as taking a gold medal. Nothing is so uplifting as going back on the road after a long and painful recovery from a seemingly intractable injury. But take it easy, and don’t let yourself be seduced into over-stepping your deconditioned state.

ADVENTURE VS DRUDGERY: Even when grinding through the last phases of training for a marathon or a century ride or another heroic effort, your daily routine can still hold a sense of mystery and adventure for you. Pick a new venue, a new time of the day, a new training partner, new gear. If you should ever suffer from feelings of despair or of being a powerless, innocent victim, turn your thinking around. Practice taking on the mind set of an explorer in which you see the world around you as if for the first time. Think of how you would describe it to a complete stranger.

STICK TO THE POINT: Skeptics have asked, “what’s the point of doing what you do?” To a degree, one supposes, if they have to ask, they may not comprehend the answer. The fact is that just being here is the point – to live, to experience life, to be there when the future happens. Where better a place to be than on the journey, aware and ready for anything?

In Good Health,
By Bernard L. Gladieux, Jr.
President,
The Pressure Positive Company®

Aging With Grace
By Bernard L. Gladieux, Jr.

To just about everyone who reaches a self defined ripe age, growing older is not nearly as much fun as, say, growing up or blossoming or hitting your stride at 35 or 40. Growing old brings with it new aches and pains, disappointments and continuing discoveries of crummy little surprises. Aging, at best, is not usually one of life’s most joyous passages, least of all for sissies or whiners.

But for those up to the challenge and for those prepared to do it gracefully, aging, even getting old, need not be the dreary, depressing experience some make it out to be. Here are a few thoughts about making it through by making the best of it.

Use it:
Use everything you’ve got, or it will just slip away while you are not paying attention. Exercise physically or train at anything and everything you can do and enjoy. Build as much variety into your physical fitness program as you can, both to condition as much of your anatomy as you can reach as well as to spread the stress of training and to lengthen your recovery periods without going cold turkey. Run, bowl, hike, bicycle, ski, swim, climb – whatever – just do it more or less every day or two and more or less all year round.

Learn to take it easy:
The most important lesson any hard driving, competitive person can internalize is understanding the importance of backing off, resting and gathering strength, knowing when and how to do it. Rest and recovery are at the heart of all athletic training and contain the secret of both the long run and the long, long run.

Know your stress:
That is, know what kind of stress works for you. Stress has gotten a mostly bad rap in the popular press. We achieve; we create; we survive and thrive on stress. Stress is inherent in quality athletic training as it is in fitness exercise, and no one can perform, improve or endure without quality training. That fact holds for the world class athlete as it does for the most modest, middle aged, neophyte jogger starting out in the neighborhood. Stress is not inherently bad for you, but unrelieved, unmanaged, debilitating stress ages you as fast as any other abuse. Handle your stress and learn when and how to back off.

Sleep:
Get all that you need. Remember that your sleep requirements can change somewhat depending on your training, age and excess stress levels. Be sensitive to your own needs and don’t cut your sack time short.

Eat:
Go for the best. Aim for natural, green and yellow vegetables and ripe fruits, nuts, grains, fish, and plenty of water. Stay away from fat, sugary, greasy, fake, doughy, heavy and highly manufactured and refined foods. Three square meals a day that include a good variety of wholesome, honest ingredients as close to their natural state as possible remains the best advice for the prudent athlete or anyone who wants to keep going for as long as possible.

Give:
Do something for others. Anything you do that actually contributes to the general welfare will make you feel better and can act like an energizing tonic on your outlook and sense of accomplishment. Simple things like volunteering to time a local race or something big like writing a newsletter for area runners are there for the doing. If you have trouble inventing a do-good project all by yourself, there are plenty of organizations right in your home town that would be delighted to give you some ideas. All you have to do is ask.

Enjoy:
Take your enjoyment just for its own sake. People train or exercise for a wide variety of reasons. But the one that will stay with you and the one that will give you the most profound benefits is your own personal pleasure that you derive from whatever you do, whether it is a two mile walk or a jog or serious training for yet another marathon.

Beware:
Know the warning signs of rapid aging. Some negative feelings are a sure tip-off of rough times ahead. Recognize them when they come at you and grapple with them then and there. Don’t let them ferment in your head. These signals include anxiety, (free floating or other) anger, jealousy, melancholia and indifference, to name a few. Sometimes the best way to start to deal with them is to go out for an endurance exercise session – a long run or hike or ride – to put them in perspective.

Solve:
Fix your problems. Once you’ve gotten a handle on the negative downers, break them into manageable “chunks” and chip away at the first ones first.

Move:
Above all, keep moving. There has never been a way discovered that will keep you youthful forever, but keeping actively engaged in regular exercise on a day to day basis is as likely as you will come to finding a fountain of youth. It is also a lot more fun than vegetating and waiting to begin feeling your age.