Podcast Episode #17: Eating Before Workouts, Recovery & Endurance Secrets

Ben Greenfield (0:00)

Podcast episode number 17 from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Welcome to the bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast. This is your weekly free audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, diet, and wellness news. Hey, whether you're an Ironman triathlete, or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, this podcast is going to present you with the latest exercise and nutrition content from the nation's top experts. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, certified nutritionist and exercise, diet, and wellness guru. Each week, I'm going to be bringing you cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and wellness advice. Stay tuned for this week's podcast from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield, and I am coming to you today from Kona, Hawaii, where I am in town for the week to compete in the Hawaii Ironman World Championship of Triathlon.

And while I'm here, I'm also attending the Hawaii Ironman Medical Conference, which is a large conglomerate of fitness professionals who are devoted to inspecting the latest methods in nutrition, performance, medicine as it pertains to exercise and recovery. Primarily, in today's podcast, I'm going to be bringing you some of the top tips that I've learned during the Hawaii Ironman Medical Conference. Now, I actually helped present this conference on bike fitting and the biomechanics of decreasing injury potential on the bicycle, but the actual conference went into far more detail. And the primary elements that I want to discuss today include research on how you can get way, way more bang for your buck out of your cardio. If you're currently spending a long time doing cardio, or you find that you don't have that much time to devote to cardio, but you want to get the highest amount of benefit possible out of your cardio sessions, I have some great research to bring to you on that. I'll be talking a little bit about eating before exercise and research that goes into what you should eat, how close to the exercise you should eat it, and we'll also be looking at how to reduce gut discomfort during exercise, proprietary methods to enhance recovery from exercise, and then finally a brand new newsletter that I have decided to start putting out on a separate website that you may be interested in if you currently subscribe to and benefit from the bengreenfieldfitness.com newsletter. So, without any further ado, let's delve right into today's topics on bengreenfieldfitness.com. And oh yeah, before I forget, I am going to answer one listener Q&A on AquaJogging. So stay tuned.

Listener Q&A. Listener Craig asks, You say running posture should be lean forward, while other sites say posture should be straight and avoid leaning. Which is the right way and which is more effective? Now, this particular question from Craig was in response to my post on AquaJogging that I put up last week at bengreenfieldfitness.com. And so I'm assuming that when Craig asks whether you should lean forward or whether your posture should be straight up and down, he is referring to AquaJogging indeed and not actual running gait.

Now, when you're AquaJogging, let's make the assumption that you're doing it so that you can become a better runner. And the reason I'm making that assumption is because typically AquaJogging is used as a non-weight-bearing method to allow someone to train, for instance, through an injury. And bicycling also is a non-weight-bearing method that is often used hand in hand with AquaJogging. So I'm assuming that you're using the AquaJogging to rehabilitate a running injury or to stay fit through a running injury. Now, when you are running out on the road, if you have a straight up-and-down posture, a couple of things happen. Biomechanically, in your body, you tend to tilt your pelvis backwards, or what's called a posterior pelvic tilt, when you are running in a straight up-and-down posture. And what this does is it actually shortens your hamstrings, which attach to your pelvis, and it shortens your hip extensors, the muscles that are responsible for pushing you off the ground. By shortening those muscles, you're putting yourself in a state where you're not able to actually produce an optimal contraction, or produce basically a ground reaction force for the push-off phase of running. Now, that's one problem with being straight or slightly leaning back when you're running outdoors, not in an aqua jog pool. The other problem is that when you lean back, the ground reaction force that pushes up against you when your foot strikes the ground is going to end up coming up and at you at a backwards direction when you lean back or when you're straight up and down. And what this does is it applies a breaking effect to your body so that every time your shoe hits the ground, the ground is basically pushing you back. So essentially, it returns to one of the laws of physics, which is that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Well, for every action that your foot strikes into the ground for you leaning back, there's an equal and opposite reaction pushing back from the ground the other way. So imagine that there's an arrow coming from your shoe into the ground. Whichever direction that arrow is facing when your shoe hits the ground is the direction that the ground is going to push back on you. So if your shoe strikes the ground and your body is over your shoe or you're leaning forward, the ground is going to push you forward. If your body is behind your shoe or you're leaning back or even straight up and down, the ground is going to tend to push you back.