The Healthy Athlete.

The Broader your Health Base, the Better you will be able to Train. Healthy Athletes do well.

After coaching hundreds of athletes and looking after thousands of injured athletes, two truths have become apparent regarding athletes that are able to advance and get fitter and thus faster. Athletes that get sick and injured less often perform well. It’s a simple but obvious truth. However, to get to the point of enjoying good health and a robust body can be difficult.

People have mistakenly thought that elite athletes cannot be considered healthy. An elite athlete will train somewhere between 16 to 25 hours per week. These athletes willingly place themselves in constant danger of a small injury or a tired body that could lead to an infection. Add those two together and you can mistakenly think that they are therefore not healthy. The opposite is true. Those that consistently turn out great performances are in fact very healthy, and it’s this that leads them to heights of athletic performance. Studies done with retired elite Kenyan long distance athletes show that they often end up living long and healthy lives post their intense running careers.

All coaches will note that there are two distinct types of athletes that they look after. Those who either get ill or injured as soon as you up their program, and those whose bodies are strong and who don’t get ill or injured that often. There will be a number of car illustrations coming up so please brace yourself.

With that in mind, how does one go about developing a stronger and healthier body?

Let’s break this up a bit and look at how athletes recover from training.

A training session is going to do two things. It is going to deplete the working muscles of fuel and it will put strain on the working parts of the body. If you think of this in car terms, a long drive will empty the fuel tank and there will be a bit of wear and tear on the working parts such as the bearings, tires etc.

We need to refill the fuel tank.
The bodies primary source of fuel will be carbs/sugars.
Exercise for an hour and you will have burnt through some carbs/sugars and some fat. Your body has a way of opening so called ‘gateways’ so that the muscles can get replenished. Eat, and insulin is released. Insulin opens the gateways to the depleted muscles for them to restock on their preferred fuel, carbohydrates.

One of the key things to get right after a training session is to refuel as soon as possible. However, there are two incredibly important points here, fuel too much or too little you run into danger.

Too little fuel and you run the risk of going into RED-S. That stands for Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport. I have written about that here. Think bone, tendon, Liver, Kidney, anxiety issues. Read more here -> https://sbrsport.co.za/2019/10/05/reds-relative-energy-deficiency-in-sport/
Too much fuel and you will also get into trouble. You eat a carb filled meal. Sugar enters the blood stream, and the body responds by releasing Insulin. That’s the hormone that opens the gates so that sugar can enter depleted muscles. The insulin opens a gate so that sugar can enter the muscle and notices that the muscle is already full. The insulin molecule tries again and again to find a hungry muscle and eventually feels rejected. Do this often enough and the body enters an insulin resistance mode. That can become a prequel to Type 2 Diabetes.

Think of insulin as the parking valet who waits outside a club to park your car. If the driver does that in a parking place that is too small for all the cars he is meant to park, he will eventually get despondent and resign. That’s exactly what happens with Type 2 Diabetes and Insulin resistance. Insulin tries to park your fuel, can’t find an open slot, converts it to fat and ultimately quits due to frustration.

Part of the healthy athlete equation is to understand how important carbs are and to get the timing right. Reward yourself with carbs post a workout and your muscles will get reloaded and ready to serve you as you go into your next training session. Overdo it with the food reward and you will end up with greater health issues.

Get your bloods checked from time to time and look at purchasing a glucometer. You need to know what is happening with your glucose/insulin levels. Visceral fat, the fat that coats your organs, also known as a beer belly, is a sign that you are putting too much fuel in at the wrong time.

Carbs should be seen as a reward for training. 

The danger that a lot of athletes face is that they are fairly driven people and thus move from training hard into stressful work environments. Work stress can get interpreted by the body as another bout of physical exercise which can drive up their hunger for sugar.  One Bar-One later (You remember their ad campaign that told you how good Bar-Ones were if you had a 25 hour day) and they feel a bit more energetic only to be followed by the eventual sugar drop and the ‘need’ for a second Bar-One. Try and avoid stressful & toxic situations as if your life depends on it, because it does.

One of the reasons why we work toward a large aerobic base via low HR training is that this gives the body a chance to learn how to burn fat more effectively. This will leave the athlete less desperate for sugars after most of their sessions. These sessions are less stressful (Think of your TSS score on Training Peaks) and so don’t drive the sugar/stress response through the roof.

In summary – you need to get the sugar issue sorted. Use carbs to replenish your muscles after training.
Cut down on carbs during the day when you are not training.
Realize the role that stress plays on your system and that it mimics training stresses and can drive you to take on too much sugar as the day goes on.

The second element of a healthy athlete is their bodies ability to resist mechanical breakdown.

There are four tissue types that we want to be aware of here: bones, tendons, muscles and ligaments.
All of these need time to adapt to training loads.

Imagine that you have bought 4 rulers. Not the shatter proof ones, just the ordinary ones that can snap.
Bend the one up and down so that it doesn’t snap. That is what a beginner athlete looks like. Now add a second ruler into the mix and bend that up and down, you need twice the force, or in other words, the structure has become more resistant to damage. Add a third ruler and eventually the fourth and see how much work you need to put in to bend it.

This is a nice way of illustrating your bodies tissues resilience to training. As you add mileage responsibly you add a layer of resilience. Place too much force through your body  and something will break. With that in mind, how do we become more injury resistant?

1. Build slowly. Get a large aerobic base via lots of slow and patient training. I have written several articles on HR based training. You can read the first one here.  https://sbrsport.co.za/2016/01/23/heart-rate-training-part-1/

2. Do regular strength work. Foot muscles, the calf complex, quads, hamstrings, adductors, glutes, your core all want to be trained.

3. Make sure that you are in the right running shoes and that the shoes are not too old.

4. Make sure that you warm up sufficiently for the workout ahead.

5. Get sufficient protein in so that you can rebuild damaged structures.

6. Get enough sleep. While you sleep your body is hard at work repairing itself.

7. Think joint mobilization vs stretching. Think of all the angles that your leg can turn from your hip joint. The more you mobilize the better. Now think of a hamstring stretch. That’s just one angle and your hips deserve more than that.

8. Get tight muscles/structures released and attend to troubled areas sooner rather than later.

The goal is to recover quickly from training through wise nutrition and the right amount of rest while allowing your bodies tissues to adapt to the different training loads that you put it through. Get to that place and you will find that your body is able to absorb lots of training not just for a week or month, but year by year.

Yours in fitness and good health.

Mike Roscoe.
Kinesiologist and Coach.