Movement Prep

This past weekend I attended the Perform Better Summit in Long Beach where my husband was one of the speakers. Also among the speakers were two people talking about strength training for endurance- Gary Lavin and Mark Verstegan. Both of them discussed how important it is to do some form of movement prep before you head out the door for a workout. Mark said that your performance will improve by 18% by spending 2-5 minutes switching on the right muscles and actively stretching the tight muscles. Instead of warming up on your first 2 miles of running, get everything warm and ready to go first and you'll get more out of your first two miles of running because the quality of movement will be better.

This movement prep focused on switching on the glutes which tend not to fire on most endurance athletes and lengthening the hip flexors. If the hip flexors are tight, the glutes can't work- it's a compensatory relationship. One can't be more dominant than the other or the less dominant one will shut down. Most endurance athletes are very quad dominant. Doing some exericises to switch on your derriere before starting your run or bike will improve your performance, decrease your risk of injury and you'll get more out of the time spent running or biking.

Good stuff and I had heard it before but I still have not been doing a good job of doing it before I run or bike. I do it before my weight training. So, I am going to start incorporating it in every single time I am working out.

Overall it was an awesome seminar! Some excellent speakers!

And I got all of my training in...Saturday morning I got up and ran along the beach on the bike path for 11 miles in Long Beach and Sunday after attending the morning seminars I met up with a friend of mine and we rode to Oceanside, 115 miles total round trip.

This weekend coming up I am headed to Vegas to speak at the ISSN conference.