Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 62, September 2014 | Page 34

Images: iStock Ma training Higher Pain Tolerance, Teaching your body and mind to go through the pain barrier is part of the secret to running success, if you are chasing faster times. – BY RAY ORCHISON * A Tim Noakes refers to the ‘Central Governor,’ which keeps an eye on all the systems and functions of the body and protects us from physically harming ourselves, using a built-in early warning system to stop us long before we reach our breaking point. Signals of pain are sent to our brain to slow us down or stop us, so that our bodies can return to what I call the comfort zone. Unfortunately, there are no PB’s to be found in the comfort zone… Therefore, in order to achieve our best, we have go beyond the comfort zone in progressive, planned training, because the human body has an amazing capacity to adapt to gradual increases in physiological stress, which teaches both the mind and body to handle pain. At first I thought it was just a spasm, but after two stops to try and massage the spasm out, I began to wonder how I would get back to the start without any cash and surrounded by people who spoke only German. At that point I decided that I had not done all the training and flown halfway across the world to quit, so I pushed the pain out of my mind and eventually finished in 2:57. However, the instant I finished, my body and mind were flooded with unbearable pain, making it near impossible for me to walk! VENTURING BEYOND few years back I entered and trained for my first international marathon and arrived in Munich feeling confident that I could run a 2:48 PB. Unfortunately, after five days of doing the tourist thing, I lined up at the start with extremely fatigued calves, but I still set out at my initially planned race pace. Everything felt surprisingly good… until the 8km mark, when the fatigued caused by exercise I was not used to resulted in me tearing my soleus muscle. ALL IN THE MIND I learnt an invaluable lesson during that marathon: We can endure far more pain then we think – and I’m not talking about doing stupid things like pushing through a marathon with a torn soleus, I’m talking about the familiar pain when we are pushing our own personal boundaries. Athletes who want that PB badly enough and are willing to push themselves through the pain of lactic acid and other metabolic waste build-up, are the ones who will ultimately achieve that PB. Ma crossfit One of the best ways to deal with pain is to start with the mind. I’m amazed at how I can give a client 10x400m repeats, which is done without so much as batting an eyelid, but when I give the same client 20x200m repeats, I get panic-filled e-mails questioning whether I sent the correct training, despite both sessions totalling 4000m. Of course, once the session has been completed, the athlete realises that they are more than capable of handling the session. However, I do not believe that teaching your body and mind to deal with pain requires only hard, muscle-breaking workouts. The sessions that have had the biggest impact in my own training are the ones I’ve stuck to as planned. Just getting through a 6x800m or 4x1200m session after a long hard day, when I’ve just wanted to collapse on the couch in front of the TV, has gone a long way to help me push through moments of doubt and hurt when that PB is slipping from my grasp. Pull Yourself Together! What most runners lack is natural upper-body strength, but introducing pull-ups into your regular strength workouts can improve not only your arm, back and shoulder strength, but help you achieve absolute power for improved running form. – BY LAUREN VAN DER VYVER T echnique is vital when you want to perform the ideal pullup, says Pierre Ferreira, owner and instructor of CrossFit Flaming Heart in Johannesburg, and it’s better to slow the tempo of the movement to build form. “Starting out, many people use bands or a friend to be assisted through the movement. If you slow the movement down, you can start by working the eccentric portion of the workout,” he explains, “so controlling your body to move down from the bar is just as important if you can’t reach all the way up in the beginning.”