Welcome to Week Two!
Week Two: Improving Your Running Performance
Now that you have the basics locked in, we focus on key aspects to improve your overall performance! You will go through a focused warm-up, exercising your lower body, and to ensure you are strong where it counts, with key core activations to create strength where you need it. Then you will move onto a proper cool-down stretch session, so that your muscles recover optimally, and you are ready to start your next run strong.
An Introduction to the Week
An Introduction to the Week
Day One: Warm Up - Improve Your Performance.
As previously mentioned, in the past a lot of emphasis has been put on warm ups mainly being about injury prevention, but more recently sports professionals have focused on the importance of warm ups improving athletes performance.
Week 2 is all about improving your performance, again we have chosen a dynamic warm up which includes dynamic stretching and involves continuous movement patterns that extend the range of motion around a joint to stretch the muscles and increases blood flow to the tissues to help warm up muscles prior to running. When everything is warm the body is much more ready to perform than when it is cold.
Day Two: Workout to Improve Your Performance
In the week 2 workout we focused a little bit on the lower body strengthening for knees and hips but also on core strengthening with emphasis on rotational exercises to improve your performance.
Training rotational and diagonal movements will balance your strength and flexibility on both sides. Think of your body as an X, with your hips falling in the center of that X. As your left leg swings backward, so does your right arm. The two opposing ends of that X (left leg and right arm) create a twist in your torso. With each stride, the twist shifts in the other direction. Athletes who are strong through that X-shaped line of tension in the torso will put forth less effort with each stride than those athletes who have weaknesses along that chain. Since this slingshot movement happens literally with each step, it is imperative that athletes train this connective chain. Hence this week 2 focusing on rotational exercises to improve your performance.
Day Three: Cool Down and Stretch
Cooling down after your workout allows for a gradual recovery of preexercise heart rate and blood pressure. Cooling down may be most important for competitive endurance athletes, such as marathoners, because it helps regulate blood flow.
Stretching helps to bring down your heart rate, and lower your body temperature gradually – which in is a great way to prevent light-head and headaches and manage DOMS(delayed onset muscle soreness). Stretches can be both dynamic and static. The major difference between the two is that dynamic stretching involves muscle movement, while the Static involves holding the movement for a period of anywhere between 30-60 seconds. Usually, a combination of both is best. A cool-down is equally important.
You will see that in Week 2’s cool down, we have made use of both dynamic cool down and stretching to help you improve your overall performance.
