Welcome to pushing the limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati brought to you by LisaTamati.com.
Well, hi everybody Lisa Tamati here, pushing the limits here with my wing man. Neil Wagstaff Neil how are you're doing.
I'm good. Thank you. I'm good.
We've got another great episode already for you guys today. I hope you're all excited. Now today we are going to be talking about how to tell if you are under or over-training. And this might be very counter intuitive for a lot of the people who are just saying go hard, go harder or go home. But we want to talk to you a little bit about finding balance in, in actually how to, how to work out whether your body is actually trying to tell you that it's time to pull back, have a bit of recovery time and what to do there. So Neil, take it away.
Take it away. It's although as you, some of you may seen out there that moment, we've got a great guide and one of ebooks which were put in the show notes afterwards on how to work out if you're under or over on the training so that I'll have all the content and for you guys at the end. But we use with our athletes and ourselves as well by Felicia and I, we use our, the running hot coaching wellness check and that wellness wellness check it take you through a series of serious different things to look at. Very subjective. And all you're going to do is write yourself on a scale of one to ten one being that you are feeling like you're in the toilet, 10 being that you are rock and roll in, you are all, all guns blazing. you're on fire.
Okay. So you are going to do this and rate yourself on a simple one to 10 scale with your sleep, your nutrition, hydration, movement, any injuries or niggles you've got your energy levels and then your stress levels as well. So seven things you're gonna check in on each of those. As I say, you right for one. So if you're scoring a one on everything and you base it in the toilet, does that equal going out and doing a high intensity interval training? No heel repeats? Probably not. So likewise, if you're up at a 10 and you've got all this energy in the tank, you should be able to go out and do a do a tough session. I just want to dig a little bit deeper into it because what you're gonna find as you collect this information each day, and we can send you out the spreadsheet we used to do this afterwards as well, is it will start to develop a picture for you.
You simply get up in the morning, have a look through, doesn't take any time at all, and you just go, right, where am I at? Scale of one to 10. Just go through your, your check, see where your schools are at and you'll start see a pattern developing side. Personally. Also a pattern developing with my sleep. My sleep was where my scores were low. And do you niggles coming in as well? So very quickly identified to me that the area I needed to be working on was my, was my sleep. Whereas in hindsight, years gone by, if I wanted to get better in my running, I would have done nine times or 10 times out of 10 I would have gone out and done another info session. We'll go on out and then another hill session or run my longer run would've had half an hour added to it because in my head many years ago, to be a better runner, you need to run more than an exit.
We used to have this same conversation as well when I started coaching with you, Lisa. But it's what we've learned now is that now by me addressing my sleep, guess what? That's making me a better runner. So dropping a session each week. So going from five day run days a week to full run days a week and getting my sleep from six and a half hours to seven and a half, eight hours, I've become a better runner and we're finding exactly the same thing's happening with all the people using it with often the things that are popping up will be hydration issues is that, imagine again the same thing you will get. You're going out and doing your running with people that we're talking to are going out and doing. They're running, they're doing more running cause I think that's gonna make them a better runner, higher intensity, more volume and they're doing it in a day hydrated state.
So all they're doing by adding more load and volume and intensity is the becoming a worse runner, more injured runner and more unhealthy runner folks on the hydration instead because you've identified that as the area you need to work on, all of a sudden it starts, it starts improving thing that we want to point out as well as chatting to one of our clients over in the states yesterday. Lovely lady we worked with over there and in some of the time is fine understanding it and you and I have been here, Lisa, we've been at many times. It's fine when you understand all this, all this makes perfect sense from a science point of view and a theory point of view, application is the hardest bit. So I've programmed her to have a, she was on a five day run, we were starting to go into a taper program that I started dropping it down into four days and she understood why but it was now what am I going to do with Wednesday?
Yeah. I'm psychologically not coping.
Yeah. Well I haven't been Wednesday. Wednesdays are run day. What happens with Wednesday? So it's also, if you are playing with it and your schools are telling you you needs to meet an easy day, replace it with something that you can go and have fun with. So get 'em replace it with a yoga class for example. Or go for a walk instead of a run going, do something you enjoy but enjoy that day. Yeah. It's been given to you to fill your tank a little bit more, fill your cup a little bit more, give you a little bit more energy, which is gonna make you a better runner,
Okay? She does not mean that you're a lazy ass. Not mean that you are useless, that you are not tough enough.
Listen, somebody songs and we had that conversation
Very, very many times and we still have it though. We knew it because you know, psychologically is athletes. We are often very much Taipei crews to the, all of these. We'd go get us. We want to, we want to work hard, we want to fight hard, we want to play hard. But which is fine and this is obviously, it's really fun when you're a 20 year old and you don't have a lot of other things on your plate, okay? And you get away with a heck of a lot more. Just like you could get away with partying and then going running a marathon the next day when you were 20. Not so great when you're 50. And in things you have to change as you get older. With each, with each decade, you need to look at things differently. That does not mean that you get weaker, that you get lazier, that you use ages and excuse.
It just means you was up to the way that your body needs a definitely different stimulus in different stages of your life. And this is part of what we're trying to teach you is to understand your own body so that you know when it's time to push and when it's time to back off. And I'm obviously, I am, you know, preaching to the, the worst person on the planet. You know, like I will still go out when I've got an injury and I'll still try and when I'll got a cold and I shouldn't be. And I know, and it's a real battle inside my head. So I get this, this is a battle. But when I, you know, as I get wiser and I do start to pull back and this is where we actually have the gains because when we blow ourselves out and we over train, when we're not in a state for really strong training, this is when we start to break down emotionally.
We start at district breakdown with the stress levels in our lives and stress is the number one most dangerous thing that we can do to our bodies. Stress is what causes us to get disease. Stress is what causes most of our problems in life. If we can lower our stress levels, then we can know of the chance that we'll get sick, we will help our immune system rebuild and all of these sort of things that we don't think about when we think just go hard or go home, you know, and like, you know, I'm a hard-ass athlete. I have been my entire life and so as new we're not, we're not softly, softly changeable when B types. Okay. But we are wiser than we were and we were 20 years ago. And we understand the need that we're not, we are not robots and you are not bullet proof and I don't care whether you're dean kinesis or you're David Goggins, you still need to recover in between these bouts of really hard ass life, you know?
Well if you hit the nail on the head there as well, it's a, it's often a, I'll say to a lot of people that we're, we're working with and a lot of people we coach one on one lease. Is that, is that use your experiences to your advantage to part of the training plan is, is and should be. What's your history and what's your experience? If you've got experience with doing marathons, half marathons, ultramarathons you can use that to, your advantage has gotten, as you were just saying, so you've now got experience in doing things. You now know what works and what doesn't. So actually go through this daily checklist of subjects you're looking at where you're at. You can really start to create your own rulebook this, you can start to see and go, right. I know that historically that's what I've done well or that's what I've not done so well.
I can now really start to focus on certain areas. If someone is coming in to do their first marathon with us at first half marathon and their first ultra marathon, if it's their first one, I want them to hurt a little bit more in training. I'll want to push them a little bit further because we need to not just train them physiologically. We need to train them psychologically as well and prepared them for that. If you're coming off the bat, which a lot of our athletes are multiple events, then a lot of that is already trained so we can, we can now get wise with the training because it doesn't need to hurt so much because that that is already ingrained.
Fight through pain. Yeah,
Exactly, and then especially that was a fine example is with when with the coaching that I was doing and continue to do with you is is that's there. You've got to remember what you already know because that
