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Full Video Transcript

Introduction to Muscle Tension

race day is here you’re ready to go you’re tapered and then all the sudden you feel flat you feel sluggish and you just can’t perform to your best your legs feel dead what’s going on here we’ve all experienced it the common explanation is you’re fatigued you didn’t taper enough but the real explanation is often something different

The Concept of Muscle Tension

today I’m going to introduce you to the concept of muscle tension and explain how that explains underperformance in running so first I

Tracking Muscle Tension in Athletes

want to take you back to when I was coaching College athletes and I was tracking all of this data they were inputting a questionnaire after every run after every workout after every race and we tracked all of these different items and metrics and then I tried to correlate them with race day or workout performance and nothing correlated well except for one factor and that was what we called pop if their legs felt poppy meaning they felt like they had some good bounce and energy in them they performed better so the higher the pop the better they raced now taking that information into hand what I realized is that what in the world is pop well it comes down down to

Understanding Resting Muscle Tension

this idea of muscle tension so muscle tension is this is in our muscles we have a resting state of tension they’re never fully relaxed right there’s always some crossover between the muscle fibers where they’re in a relatively tense State that’s done so that we can quickly contract the muscle and move into action instead of being fully stretched or fully relaxed so that we can’t do that now that resting muscle tension differs for everybody and differs based on the situation so it changes throughout the day and where that resting muscle tension lies determines kind of how poppy or you know explosive we feel think of it like an elastic band or R uh or rubber band right a rubber band with lots of resting tension you can pull it a little bit stretch it and it’ll fling back with no resting tension it’s kind of like a worn out rubber band you pull it doesn’t spring back much or it breaks it doesn’t work well okay the other way to think of this is you probably experienced this if you’ve gone on a long car ride or a long flight on an airplane you get up what happens after sitting down for several hours you feel tight if you’ve ever tried to go for a run run or exercise right after you feel tight and sluggish and lacking pop why because when you’re sitting you generally your your tension adjusts to be in kind of a shortened uh position for that long and that adjusts the resting tension and then you don’t feel very responsive when you get off the plane or get out of the car it’s hard well the same thing occurs from the day to day our brain and muscle adjust that tension to make us feel more or less poppy or responsive and when you show up on rate and you feel sluggish or flat like there’s no reactivity what’s happened is often it’s not your taper it’s that you have low resting muscle tension now how in the world did that happen well here’s a a a a couple examples or a couple ways it does is in General there are things that we do in

Impact of Training on Muscle Tension

training that decrease tension and that’s not necessarily a bad thing as former Elite uh athlete Elite Runner and now doctor Mary’s backin once told me is that the key is to find ways to lower muscle tension on easy days because that helps with recovery because we’re not tight and wound up but then raise muscle tension on important workouts or race days because we need that responsiveness okay so low on easy days when we want to recover higher when we need to perform the problem is that our training impacts whether we go high or low in terms of increasing or decreasing muscle tension so for example longer runs or long slow easy runs tend to decrease tension why you don’t need to be responsive you kind of sink into the ground your foot stays on the ground a little bit longer the contractions are not fast you’re activating more slow twitch fibers since fast twitch fibers you’re not reactive especially if you’re a faster runner going easy it tends to decrease tension other things that decrease tension um most kinds of massage longer duration workouts a lot of times uh Tempo or threshold workouts hard workouts with inadequate recovery okay when we don’t give our body enough time to bounce back we tend to feel a little bit flat because we haven’t allowed the tension to restore warm baths that actually decrease the tension and then running on super soft surfaces or soft surfaces why the softer the surface the less reactive you have to be in fact the less energy you’re getting returned from the ground and instead that tends to decrease our tension now think about those things leading up to important race sometimes we do those things right we just go easy we just jog around we go slower we do it on soft surfaces to protect our body okay sometimes we’ have some massage or warm baths as well to recover all of those things decrease tension so sometimes we self-sabotage it’s not to say you don’t need to do easy runs or run slower or get massage it’s that if those things are part of your repertoire then we need to do things that counterbalance that to raise tension going into the days leading up to a race now it’s important here there’s individual variation the shorter and faster the race the we tend to need higher levels of tension going into it right for a 400 or 800 we need more responsiveness and reactivity than for a marathon where we need to be a little bit more efficient a little bit less reactive from the get-go okay so what in the world

Increasing Muscle Tension for Performance

increases tension if you want to improve your mental game to boost your performance I got you covered my new book win the inside game does just that I take on choking in sport underperformance and getting in our own way in business and life and tell you all the science and psychology and the Practical tips on how to get the most out of yourself this is a book about unlocking your potential check it out now if you order today you get a bonus ebook which is 120 pages of my elements of coaching where I take you through my essentially cheat sheet guide to performing from the workouts that I use to how to design programs to how to coach covers it all plus of course on mental performance check out the links you’re not going to regret it two bucks for the price of one okay so what in the world increases tension well if we look at it from a small change to big change in terms of increasing tension there’s a bunch of things strides there’s a reason strides are done in the days leading up to race or even pre-race right fast strides increase tension if you do those fast strides in a spike or more reactive shoe it will increase tension as as well even more things like jumping rope or easy simple plios reactive hops right Cut Down workouts so things where we’re going faster and faster as we go something like 200 150 100 where we’re increasing the speed various power exercises like box jumps or bounds sprinting sprinting uphill will increase the mus muscle tension okay so if we look at those things what we’re doing is some of them come with risks and those wrists are often big think sprinting right if we do some Sprints it will increase tension but we also might get some fatigue both from muscle damage and neurological fatigue so maybe we don’t do sprinting but then some come with maybe not as big of a change in tension maybe like some hops or pios or jump ropes or some relatively hard strides but with lots of rest those we tend to get increases in ttention without the fatigue that comes with it so what we’re trying to do here in the days leading up to a race is get that tension to the appropriate level on race day how do we know what’s appropriate level as I said it’s going of different for your event in your individual nature if you’re more fast witch orientated need higher tension levels so low tge not as high the the thing I’ll tell you to do is experiment and pay attention when do you feel best in hard workouts or workouts that simulate racing and on race day what do you need your muscles to feel like how responsive do you need that gives you that indicator and then what you need to do is in the couple days or week leading into the race think okay what are the things I’m going to do to slowly probably increase my tension because generally we stay at a kind of lower rate when we’re in heavy training because that heavy training knocks down our tension even if we bring it up for workouts how do we increase that tension to feel that good pop on race day for very different people they’re going to use different things what I would say is we look at big changes further out so using things like Hill Sprints uphill Sprints power exercises as we get closer to race day we use smaller changes that are less risky the Hops reactivity jump ropes strides Cut Down workouts Etc and you just play around with it to get that tension up on

Practical Tips for Race Day

Race date now if you’re going into your warm-up for the big race and you still feel a little bit that’s where you modify the workout this is where you add some more reactive drills maybe some skips of various times that’s when you add maybe a harder stride than you would normally do or even something that isn’t quite a Sprint but pretty dang close this is why some research shows that doing um a 200 at 800 pce or a little bit faster before a race actually can improve performance a it primes the Aerobic System a little bit bit especially if you give yourself enough time to recover afterwards you know don’t do this a couple minutes before you race but maybe 10 minutes before the race 7 8 minutes before the race but it also increases the tension because you’re doing something sustained and longer right so keep this in mind as you get to race day same thing when you’re looking at the recovery things when you’re doing things that decrease tension like the massage or even maintenance tempo run going into race week maybe on Race week you’re doing a Tempo on Wednesday of a Saturday race make sure you’re doing something to lift that tension back up so after that Tempo maybe end with some 150 M strides or hundreds or a cut down 200 150 100 to lift the tension after the tempo workout okay it’s just simple modifications there is no exact science to this but as a coach and then as athlete you want to pay attention as you get to race day how much of a change in my tension do I need do my legs feel sluggish or do they feel good reactive and Poppy that tells you do I just need to do some maintenance with some strides or does that tell you I need a big

Case Study: Adjusting Muscle Tension

change give you one story before we end way back in the day when I was coaching high school athletes I remember we had a at the state championship in Cross Country a top athlete had a rough performance was supposed to be in the contention to win the thing and finished I don’t know like 10th place we ended up second as a team and we all could have run a little bit better we weren’t supposed to win but got second but if our lead Runner was first or second we would have been within a couple handful of points of pulling off the victory we talk it over what went wrong his Regional race was perfect killed it you know won it State meat were thinking same thing he felt flat you look into the days into it we did some maintenance kind of tempo aerobic work we didn’t do enough things to raise his tension so he felt flat so next week we had the qualifier for the national championships and he felt really flat so what do we do on Monday we do a mile relatively hard maybe at 5K pace and then we take a long jog and then we do Hill Sprints I think this was on Monday or Tuesday I forgot but we do Hill Sprints why I’m saying screw it we need a big raise in our tension we still got you know four or five days out from the race we’ll recover from the fatigue we need to jack that attention up guess what we increased it then in the days that follow we just did some easy runs plus some strides I think a cut down simple workout of 200s a couple days so before going feel good to feel fast and good without fatigue came to the National qualifier he won it a couple weeks later at Nationals ended up I think top 10 in the nation or somewhere around that for high school the point is as a coach sometimes we get it wrong but it’s our job to manipulate or pay attention to the muscle tension of how much pop they feel in their legs this is why as a coach coming back to that survey I did years ago that’s why we track tension I thought it mattered the data showed it mattered a lot and the simplest way to do it was just ask athletes every day rate how much pop you have in your legs and when you start after you start your warmup on one to five scale and that gave me the feedbacks for every day of understanding how to adjust it and also gave me information on what tended to adjust or increase that tension for the athlete accordingly so there you go if

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

you find yourself sluggish or underperforming on race day think about it through the lens of muscle tension