ACorn's Blog

ACorn,

Been a while. Hope you and your family are doing well. Very happy to see that the knee is improved. You are putting in decent mileage it seems. I don't do planks, but I saw a comment by BAM earlier in the week on your blog related to how planks can damage your core. Do you know anything about that? Are planks a bad idea? One more question: I know you have a race on 4/20/13 - Salt Lake Half Marathon...is sub 6:00/mile still your goal? It is kind of hard to believe we are soon to be entering March!! Be Well. Talk to you soon. Say Hello to Mom and Jing.

PRE - There's nothing wrong with developing your core. What most people do wrong - I was guilty of this and I knew better but still made the mistake - is that they go straight into doing planks etc without preparing the body for these exercises.

It's like going straight into speed work without having run before.

'Runners World' and similar mags have articles about core work etc, then suddenly everybody is doing planks. Months later everybody has hamstring problems. Why? It's very complicated. But here's a simplistic overview:

You need to get your muscles firing in the correct order. Think about a baby going from lying down to crawling to standing. Their muscles are learning/developing how to function in the correct order.

Then what happens is that we forget the correct order and our bodies take short cuts. We then spend hours sitting at computer screens etc. Our muscles shorten and tighten and take short cuts when we stand etc.

Then, we start doing planks and neglect many of the smaller muscles. What happens then is that our core muscles tighten - from isometric contractions - and pull our skeletal system out of balance and we get injured: big muscles - prime movers - take over the work and weaker muscles get injured. That's the simple version:)

Try this: lie on the floor, face down. Roll over once and then move to an all fours position. Then stand and raise your arms. Simple. Try it.

Do the movements slowly and tune in to your body. You'll notice some strange things going on. This is the smaller muscles waking up. This is what you need to do before hitting the planks etc. Get the small muscles working first.

Look up bears and crabs and caterpillars and rolling - these are some of the things you should be doing before moving onto stability and functional work, which you should be doing before core work.

What do you think Acorn? I know you like the kettlebell stuff, which is fantastic. The Turkish stand is my favourite move, although I think I'll be dead and burned and scattered before I'd be ready for that move:)

PRE,

Core and weight training is a great supplement to running. Bam is right on, it's something you've got to ease into. Before I started running more seriously I lifted weights 4-5 days a week and weighed 185. I only jogged to stay somewhat lean. I caught the running bug about 5 years ago and believe that the strength training I did has been beneficial to my running. I enjoy running much more than I ever enjoyed lifting weights. Ironically, I now feel that I'm too bulky in my upper body.

Now I skip the weights and do mainly pullups and pushups and kettlebell exercises like Bam mentioned.

If you've ever tried kettlebell swings, you know how brutal they are and are great for hip and core strength.

If you're going to do strength training, it's worth the time to learn proper technique to avoid injury and ease into it. Pretty common sense stuff but sadly we're not rational lots of the time. I include myself in that statement.