5 Ways To Crush Your Race This Year?

The other week I made a video about, 5 things to work on to excel at your 5k or Spartan race/obstacle race.

Basically here it is in word, so you can swipe this, use it to guide your training this summer. If your signed up for one of these events, let dig in and train.

1. Strength- Getting strong is super important to excel at these things. Although endurance, we don’t think strength. Endurance is a display of ones strength. It is just using a low percentage of strength and doing it for a longer time. If I get stronger and use smaller and smaller amount of my strength. A few things can happen; you do something for longer or do something faster. Plus, muscle mass can protect the impact your joints will take.

I’m not saying don’t do cardio or endurance training. Strength is foundation element as well.

How to- Lift 2-3 x week between 8-15 reps. Stick with sets 0f 2-4. Make sure you include all these movements.

Squat

Single leg

Hip hinge

Upper push

Upper pull

Core

2.Mobilty/flexible- This might be a boring one but its totally important to avoid injuries and increase your performance. Make sure you have good amount of mobility in ankle, hips upper and shoulder. The big reason for this, if not your joints will take most the abuse instead of your muscle. That is asking for an injury. Also when your tight in places your muscle don’t fire, the way they should. This will decrease your performance.

How to- Get foam roller, lax ball and go you tube and search mobility wod. This is a great starting point.

3.Base cardio- High intensity training is huge and can be wicked effective. But, its way more effective when you have a solid foundation of cardio. Like you can go out jog at least a couple miles without stopping. Btu, if you don’t have this you might get good intervals but your recovery will always be subpar. Something people don’t know is our cardiovascular system is responsible for your body ability to recover in between sets, workout and after you do an obstacles . So, don’t neglect it.

How to-Walk, hike, jog for 20-60 minutes keeping your hr 130-150/160.

4.Interval- Here is the fun stuff at least I think so. Do intense sprints or circuits, to high end conditioning. Meaning you’re doing a lot work in a little amount time. Or tour do something really intense and recovering and repeating. If you’re going be doing an obstacle race I might stick to sprints and bw/kb exercises.

How to it- Sprint as fast you can for 15 sec, perform two body weight exercises. Rest for 1 min-2 min and repeat 9x.

5. Specific- This is important, we can train in gym all we want and build a solid foundation. But, we want to be training for the actual event with things that will mimics what you will do. If you’re doing 5k, your cardio should be jogging. If you’re doing an obstacle course, you should try get some where you practice those.

How to- Check out gym like Vitality gym in Fall River or even play ground that might similar obstacle like monkey bars.