Sometimes, the best choice isn’t always the most obvious.
With the marathon coming up, people are considering what type of training they are going to pursue.
Nobody likes wasted time… You’d understandably like to make sure your workout is effective.
So, you decide to go for a run in order to train for the marathon. Whilst its amazing to keep your body moving and active, too much of anything, especially vigorous exercise, can be a bad thing.
Lets imagine you are burning wood in a stove. The burning wood creates smoke and this smoke clogs up the air.The same process happens when you exercise. Your body uses sugar and fat as a fuel and burns this fuel which in turn creates a by-product, something called, free radicals.
Free radicals cause chain reaction damage to other cells in a process called oxidative stress. This is a natural process and nothing to worry about because your body produces antioxidants which safely interact with free radicals and terminate the chain reaction damage! (Antioxidants are found in foods such as berries, dark chocolate and pecans)
So whats the problem? Issues occur when free radical production exceeds the bodies ability to produce antioxidants.
For example – Forest Gump is doing some intense exercise. He has had his daily intake of antioxidant rich foods and assumes that this will be enough to take him all the way to the finish line.
Forest isn’t aware that he is causing damage to his body. his internal system can’t keep up with the excessive exercising and antioxidants can no longer help him.
Forest doesn’t want to give up exercising all together! Alongside eating a balanced diet, maybe he could try out a different kind of workout. Maybe something that will strengthen his muscles so that he is more powerful when running?
Exercise is constantly evolving to improve stability, endurance and speed. Having a variety of non-running exercises is crucial to performance enhancement.
Don’t believe me? Try out our free plan below and let me know how you get on!
