185: Answering Your Nutrition and Training Questions

**Nick Bare** (0:06)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today is a question and answer that I opened up on Instagram, all around nutrition, training, habits, consistency, and hundreds of questions came in through the Instagram option of submitting what you want to know. And I've chosen a few that were asked multiple times by multiple different people. So I'm going to make my way through some of these training and nutrition questions in this episode. Diving into the first one. This is one that I get all the time. The first two that I'm going to answer all the time, every single day. How to balance high volume running in a consistent lower body strength training routine. So a few things, a few notes to share. One, plan appropriately. Allow yourself time between training lower body strength, resistance training, and your quality run workouts and or your long runs. So for me right now, the way that I'm structuring this, and I have in the past, Wednesday is my lower body strength training heavy day. This is when I'm coming into the gym, and I'm barbell squatting, I'm belt squatting, I'm walking barbell lunge, I'm doing stiff leg deadlifts, split squats, Bulgarian squats, all of the heavy compound movements. And this day doesn't just tax me muscularly, but also nervous system wise, CNS, Central Nervous System, gets taxed on this day as well.
I do my high rocks training workouts Tuesdays and Fridays. And I have my long run on Saturday. So that's kind of the way I have some of my lower body stimulus training sessions scheduled for now. I'm running every morning, Monday through Saturday. Sunday is off from training completely. Monday to Friday, it's six miles every morning. Easy runs. And when I say easy runs, this is a comfortable pace. It's conversational. High zone two, zone three. It's something that I can sustain. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, even Saturday. I'm not doing much structured workout training runs right now outside of my high rock sessions. Again, my high rock sessions, more interval running. Tuesdays and Fridays. Saturday is my long run. So this is anywhere from eight to ten to twelve miles. Eight plus miles right now. So with all that being said, I know Wednesday I'm coming into the gym and taxing my lower body. I'm throwing down resistance training, weights. And based off my experience and knowing my body at this point, I will wake up Thursday morning and I will feel that workout. I will feel my muscles, but I will also feel it in my central nervous system. Just a little drained and fatigued. Waking up Thursdays is a little harder than waking up really any of the other days throughout the week because of the stimulus of what that workout does to my body on Wednesdays. When I'm hitting legs, I'm hitting legs hard.
Thursday, I know my central nervous system is going to be pretty taxed when I wake up. But Friday, when I wake up, my central nervous system is recovering. My muscles feel it the most. My legs, my lower body. And then by the afternoon, Friday, I'm feeling a little bit better. That's DOMS. D-O-M-S, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. If you've been training for any extent of time, you probably have experienced DOMS before. Where there's a delayed muscle soreness, maybe not 24 hours after the workout, maybe it's 48 hours after the workout. I know Friday is going to be pretty uncomfortable running in the morning. So my first tip on how to balance high-volume running and consistent lower body strength training is to plan appropriately. Space out your quality runs, whether this is a tempo workout, intervals, a track workout, far enough away from that lower body strength day, so you can still get the quality from that quality session. And then space your long run out as far as possible from your lower body strength day. And that's why I have my lower body strength resistance workout Wednesday, long run Saturday. I find that that spacing works really well for me. Come Saturday, my central nervous system is recovered. My lower body muscles are recovered. And just having a plan in place that spaces these big workouts and then your easier workouts in between appropriately makes the biggest difference. But if you hit, you know, lower body strength Friday afternoon, and then Saturday morning, you're going for your long run, your long run might be a little trash. And for me, I only get a lot out of that long run. I want to enjoy the long run. So I space my lower body strength day away from my long run appropriately. My second tip is to have realistic expectations. You know, if you still want to hit the gym hard, and you still want to run a significant amount of miles, some of those runs are just going to be uncomfortable. And if you have those realistic expectations, I think when you wake up and you realize your legs don't feel as fresh as they have days prior, that's okay. That's just part of it. Maybe those are the days where you take your easy runs a little easier, pull back pace a little bit, pull back effort a little bit, maybe even pull back mileage and distance a little bit to allow yourself to recover. So I like to have realistic expectations knowing that the two days after my lower body strength day, that run is probably going to be a little uncomfortable. And I just know that at this point. And the third tip is to train smart.