449: Your Running Foundation: The 3 Essentials That You Can't Ignore, Especially After 40

If running has started to feel harder after 40—more aches and pains, lingering tightness, slower paces, low energy, or frustrating injuries—you’re not alone. In this episode, I’m breaking down the 3 essential pieces of a strong running foundation and why so many runners skip them (even the ones who are “doing all the right things”).

You’ll learn why running alone doesn’t build the foundation you need, why stretching isn’t the answer most runners think it is, and how to train in a way that helps your body feel better, move better, and run stronger—without burning out.

In this episode, we cover:

• The 3 biggest reasons runners over 40 start feeling stuck or injury-prone
• Why tightness is often a strength + control issue (not a flexibility issue)
• The 3 foundation pillars: mobility, motor control, and easy running
• Why most runners run too hard too often (and how that impacts recovery + hormones)
• The Training Pyramid: foundation first, then strength/speed, then power/intensity
• How to fit this into your week without adding “more” to your plate

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Transcript

0:01

What's up runners? Welcome back to the Real Life Runners podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about your running foundation because unfortunately, this is one of the things that I see with so many runners that just gets neglected. People do not have the proper running foundation built, and they end up. Running and then getting injured and not feeling good. And all of this is even more exacerbated after we hit 40. So if you wanna learn the three essential pieces in your running foundation and why people neglect these things, stay tuned. What's up runners? Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking all about strength and mobility for runners. So if you've been feeling stuck, maybe your pace is slowing, maybe you're feeling more tired after your runs, or your body just isn't responding the way that it used to. This is going to be a great episode for you because one of the things that I have noticed in my 20 years as a physical therapist, al, almost 20 years or or on nine year number 19 now, which is crazy and over a decade as a running coach, is that most people do not actually have the proper running foundation. They tend to jump into things way ahead of where. We should be starting, and that's mostly because we don't know any better. You know, it seems easy. Running seems like one of those easy things. You put some shoes on and you run out the door. You can almost literally do it anywhere. But that, while that's such a wonderful thing about running, that can also get us into a lot of trouble because a strong running foundation is necessary if you want to build in any way. So if you wanna become a better runner, if you wanna run faster or run longer, improve your endurance, start training for races, whatever it is that you want to start improving in your running, you have to make sure that you have a strong running foundation. So if you have noticed that. It's being, it's harder to maintain your paces or you're feeling more exhausted after your runs. If you're experiencing more injuries, more tightness, or that lingering soreness that just doesn't seem to go away. Maybe you're feeling more exhausted on your runs and you, you notice that your endurance isn't what it used to be. Maybe you're someone that is training hard. But not getting results. Or maybe you're someone also that you're noticing that your motivation is practically nonexistent. Every run feels like you're forcing yourself out the door. You're missing things. You're having a hard time with consistency. I just ran a workshop this week and I was chatting with people all around the world. It was super fun, and so many people had. Some of them, all five of these problems, some of them had three, some of them had four. But most people that came to that workshop and really I, I've been running this workshop now for a while, making various tweaks to it, of course. But these are some of the most common complaints that I hear from people. And the good news is. You, there's plenty of things that you can do about it. And today I really wanna talk about the number one thing that I think that we need to focus on as runners, which is rebuilding that running foundation. And I'm gonna give you the three movement foundations that runners over 40 have to train. If you wanna move better, run better, and get outta pain. Each of these things are absolutely essential and will make a huge difference in how you feel as a runner. Even if you're a runner that's been running for decades, most likely you can do some work in these three areas. So today I really wanna kind of get down to the nitty gritty and help you understand, you know, what maybe what mistakes you might be making, or what areas you might be neglecting so that you can start to fix that, because that's the whole point of this workshop. You know, so many people think that. They're experiencing some of these problems because they're getting older. But it's not just because of aging. It's things that we can actually control. And that's really what I wanna help you with today. So one of the reasons, there's, there's three main reasons that we start to experience these issues. The first problem is that most runners just run. They haven't actually been taught how to train and they don't realize the necessary foundation to avoid injury, and that's why 80%, y'all, over 80% of runners get. Injured. It's crazy because what you might not realize is that running is a repetitive high impact sport that is actually breaking your body down, especially if you're pushing to that medium to hard level on all of your runs, and running alone does not make you stronger. I know. I know. That is a very controversial sentence to say. Probably because running can make you stronger in a lot of ways. It definitely makes us stronger mentally. And when you're a new runner. When you're first starting out, running can make you stronger. But there comes to a point, especially if been, if you've been running for a while, where running alone does not make you stronger. And if you even continue to take it one step further, running can actually break your body down and actually start breaking down some of that muscle that you've been working hard to achieve and running more. And just pushing harder is actually increasing the stress on your body and breaking that body down. So if you don't have the strength. To support your body, your joints and your tendons take the hit, and this often makes you feel more tired, more sore, and more tight, which then leads people to do the second thing, which is stretching. So many people, like when I start talking to runners, y'all, I can't tell you how many people are like, yeah, you know, I'm experiencing this ache or this pain. I know I just need to stretch more. And they, you, you should see some of the deer in the headlights faces that I get when people, when I reply and I say. Actually you, you might probably not. And they're like, wait, what? What are you talking about? Because like, especially if they know I'm a physical therapist, they're like, yeah, yeah, I know I just need to stretch more. And I'm like, no, probably not. You probably need to strength train. And they are very confused because when you feel tight or you start experiencing more soreness, most people think that they need to stretch. And that makes sense because that's how our body is expressing that we feel tight. But tight muscles are often a sign that the body is compensating for something else like weakness or lack of control. So your body is actually trying to protect you, which is such a beautiful thing. So the way that the body protects you is that it time. Ends up, especially if you're, if you have an area that is kind of undergoing a lot of wear and tear or, you know, there's not enough strength or stability in that area, your body's going to tighten the muscles to try to protect that area. So stretching alone is definitely not the answer because oftentimes most people have enough flexibility to, to run. You don't really don't need that much flexibility to be a good runner. You do need mobility. You need to be able to control your movement. You need the right muscle activation because when you move better, you run better. And so that takes us to the third group, which is people that, or runners that actually do try to strength train and. I, if you've been listening to this podcast, please tell me that's you raise your hand. You're like, yes, Angie. I'm finally strength training. Fantastic. But the biggest mistake that I often see in this group is that people just try to add strength to what they're already doing. So. You're already running. You're running four days a week, you're doing some speed work, you've got a long run. You've got all these things going on, and now you find out, oh, I'm supposed to be strength training too. So you just add strength training on top of that without adjusting your overall load. Things like random hit classes or circuits or videos that you find on YouTube or bootcamp types of classes, or maybe even follow, find, some sort of strength training plan, but now you're following a strength training plan and a running plan that are separate from each other. And often what I see is that that just leads people to be even more tired and more sore because I can just wear you down more without effectively building muscle, which is what we want for strength training, right? Strength training is supposed to help us build muscle, but if we're not incorporating it with our running plan in the right way. It can lead to more fatigue, more soreness, or even worse injury. And unfortunately, that's where I just, that's where I see so many runners. And honestly, this is one of the things that brought me into this world was this is what happened to Kevin. You know, Kevin, as those of you guys know, Kevin was a standout runner in high school and he walked onto the team at Notre Dame, but he had to leave the team junior year because of knee pain. That just wouldn't go away and. After he left the team, he started running again. But he's, that pain came back, you know, he was still having that pain that was limiting him. And that's, you know, when we were dating and we were down in Miami and he was kind of running and here I was as, as this fresh face physical therapy student, you know, that I wanted to like heal the world. I still do. So that's not, nothing much has changed there, but. I put Kevin under all these tests and you know, in my mind Kevin was this strong runner. He was obviously very fast. he was on a division one team in college. He, his first marathon that he barely trained for, he ran like a 3 0 5 in Chicago. So Kevin was a fantastic runner. So when I started to do some of these muscle tests on him, I started finding some major areas of weakness and lack of mobility, specifically in his hips. And he, he, I think he's told this story on the podcast before of like the first time I asked him to do a clamshell and he didn't even know how to activate the right muscles, which was wild to me. So. Because he couldn't activate those muscles. Other areas of his body were picking up the slack and that was causing overuse and pain. And honestly, I was shocked the first time that this happened. You know, if you, I forget what episode it was on, but we've talked about this, in the past. But to see Kevin, this amazing runner that is so muscular, not be able to do a clamshell. Was one of those things that was shocking to me, especially as a new PT student. How was it possible that he was that limited? And I think that, you know, we use. Often assume that running is enough, and that if you're a good runner, then all your muscles probably are working properly because you wouldn't be a good runner. You wouldn't be a fast runner, you wouldn't be able to run a half marathon or a marathon or 5K, whatever distance you are running if your muscles weren't. Weren't working properly. Right. And I think this is one of those things that, you know, I'm gonna go off on a little side tangent here for a second. When I, I scroll through social media sometimes and I see different rants that different physical therapists go on about, you know,'cause. For a while, people have been talking about activating your glutes and there is a lot of PTs that say we have to activate your glutes. And then there's other PTs that say, well, if your glutes weren't active, then you wouldn't even be able to stand up for our own chair. You wouldn't be able to take a step, like you would just be a, a blob on the floor. You know? So it's not that these muscles aren't activating, but we do have to look at. The order of activation, the amount of activation, like the timing of the muscle activation. So there's a lot of other things that we're gonna be talk that I'm gonna talk about, in this episode as well that go into motor control. But anyway, side tangent, going back to Kevin, you know, so here he was in front of me, unable to do a simple clamshell and it was so wild. And that's really when I realized that, you know, the missing link. To becoming a better runner and to improving running injuries. It's, it's not more mileage. It's not just. Getting stronger. It's not just doing knee exercises, it's improving your movement quality and your strength in specific muscles. And that was important for Kevin as a 25-year-old male runner. And it becomes even more important for all of us after 40 because of the hormonal and physical changes that your body's going through. So back then, you know, I created this very simple program to help him move better and build strength. That's, that really led me into this world and down the path of like tons of research on the science of training and figuring out how to combine strength, mobility and running in a way that works. And that's really what helped me to develop, you know, our signature coaching method, which is a kind of a take on hybrid training. You know, a hybrid training has been getting a little bit more. attention, I guess in social media, but hybrid training really is the proper way to combine and integrate strength, mobility, and endurance in a way that compliments and not competes with each other. Because like I said, so many people kind of treat these things all as separate and. We've been, I've been, I mean, we've been training our athletes for over a decade now using a hybrid training method because that is the most effective way to improve strength and speed and endurance, especially after 40 because. Hybrid training also includes looking at your life as a whole and incorporating proper recovery and nutrition so that your body adapts properly to training so that that gives you the strength and the stability and the power to run faster and longer without injury and burnout. So you don't need more mileage, most likely. I mean, some, some people might, depending on what your goal is. But we all, no matter what your goal is, no matter what your experience level is. We all should be focusing on how to move better and how to rebuild your movement foundation, because maybe you had your movement foundation built. Maybe when you started, you were doing the right things, but we all know that sometimes we get a little lazy Over time. We stopped doing our warmups or we stopped doing our cool downs, or we stopped doing our running drills, even though they're on the. Plan. Right. I'm gonna go ahead and raise my hand here because I know that I've fallen into this trap before, right? Because it's not like once you build your movement foundation, it's then it's just built and it's done forever. This is something that we have to keep revisiting. We have to keep coming back to this movement foundation, to this running foundation and making sure that our foundation is still strong. Because if our foundation is not strong, that is going to lead to problems, especially after 40, because our body just doesn't have the same level of resilience that it did when we were 20 or even 30. So this movement foundation becomes even more critical. So when I talk about hybrid training. Like I mentioned, it is not just adding strength training to what you're already doing. It is not lifting on your rest days. It is not following two separate plans that compete for your body's resources, and it is not strength training in the off season only. We need to be incorporating running and strength and mobility. All year long, no matter what you're training for, we just have to adjust what we're focusing on. And that's really what training cycles are for. And I, I'm not really gonna get into that in today's episode, but. That's, you know, during different training cycles, depending on if you are in a strength building cycle or if you are in a race training cycle, we kind of turn up the dial or turn down the dial on these various elements, but we're still incorporating all of the different elements. So hybrid training really is. A strategic integration of strength, mobility, and running so that they work together and not against each other. And when you learn how to do this, it's going to help create balance in your body and improved overall fitness. So you're training your body, your body to build muscle, move better and run stronger all at the same time, which is super cool. It also includes knowing how to balance intensity and recovery. Across both systems, across your endurance system and across your musculo, your muscular system and hybrid training is so great because it's a way to also support your hormones, your nervous system, and your long-term health because all systems of your body work together. It's not like we're training our endurance system over here and our muscular skeletal system over here, like all systems are working together, and I can tell you from my 19 year physical therapy career. That most people, unfortunately, are not doing this right, and when you get this right, you're gonna see improved overall fitness. You're gonna see improved running performance, decreased running injuries, more efficient use of time, and improved body composition, which I know especially, you know, if you're a woman in perimenopause or post menopause, you notice that body composition is kind of changing. It's not what it used to be. That that's one of the benefits of training this way to help build muscle. Is that you are gonna notice that your, your body composition is improving.'cause we're building lean muscle, not just running all the time, right? So it's not about choosing either or, it's about doing both in a way that is going to support you, your body, your lifestyle, and your goals. So I want you to think of your body. Like a high performance luxury car. So a car has to have a strong body, like the body of the car to protect what's inside and stay intact. And also you, you have to have wheels that move smoothly and properly. So when those wheels spin easier when you've got, I don't know all the parts of a car, but you know. The bearings and when everything is nice, working all nice and smooth together, there's less wear and tear on the car. So that's like your strength and your, your mobility. But the car also has to have a powerful engine. And that creates your speed, your power, and your endurance. And that's your cardio and your strength, right? It's both.'cause you, you need strong muscles to improve your speed, power, and endurance as well. So these two things compliment each other. You can't have a car without an engine and you can't have a car without a body. You need both. So these two things have to work together. That's the foundation. So. If we go back to Kevin and Kevin's high performance engine, right? That's what I helped develop for him. Like I helped him. Find a str a way to strength train it. And keep in mind, Kevin will tell you he doesn't love strength training, right? So it has to be something that would, he'd actually do that would benefit him and keep him doing what he loves, which is running. So that's what we did. We figured out a way. To incorporate strength training with his running so that he could run as much as he want to, as he wanted to and not get injured. And you guys know that he's since gone on, you know, this was back when he was 25 years old and he's now almost 45. So 20 years. So in the past 20 years, he's gone on to run, you know, half marathons, full marathons. He's won a half and won a full, and now he's doing. 100 mile Ultras, which is insane. Like he just finished his third 100 mile race last month at the age of 44. You know, so. He's getting better and stronger with age, and he's able to run all of those miles without injury, and that's a beautiful thing. That's what I want for you because I know that this is possible for you because not only have I done it with Kevin, I've done it with myself, and we've done this with hundreds of runners all around the world. You know, helping them to set new prs in their forties, fifties, sixties, even seventies. I mean, you know, one of my clients, you know, she was. I think 71 when she ran her first half marathon. And I am still waiting. So if you are out there and you have an 80 something year old person that wants to start running, I would love to be that person's coach because I truly believe that age is a number. And while it's an important number that we have to take, that we have to factor in,'cause you know there are some age related things we have to look at. It's definitely not a limiting factor. And as long as you are training in a way that is right for you. So how does this actually work? What is included in this movement foundation? What do I need to to focus on? The first thing that I want you to just remember and keep in mind is that it's not about how much you do, it's about how you do it. So we really have to start shifting our mindset to focus on quality over quantity, especially after 40. So you might need to actually decrease the quantity or the overall volume of your workout. In order to improve the quality of it. And that's a beautiful thing.'cause that means you're gonna get better results with less effort and with less time. And that's a beautiful thing because you're just gonna be able to optimize the way that your body is responding to exercise. So what does this actually look like? What are the three things that we really need to focus on when it comes to our movement and our running foundation? So the first piece is mobility. Mobility is the way that your body moves and the. Quality of your movement. So it's your body's ability to access the positions that your body needs to run efficiently or get up off the floor or do the various, various activities of your daily life. So it's not just stretching for flexibility's sake, but it's restoring usable range of motion. And loss of mobility is one of the biggest reasons that running is starting to feel harder than it used to. You know, so many people after 40 are noticing that. Running doesn't feel the way that it used to. And I always like to remind them, like I already mentioned, it's not just aging. It's a result of these three. There's three main things that I'm gonna be talking about today, and those are kind of all the pieces of your running foundation and those are the pieces that we need to address. And once we start to address those, running's going to start feeling a lot better. Okay. So it's not just that you're getting older, it's that. Your hormones are shifting. Your recovery is changing. We're losing strength. Our, our stress tolerance is decreasing, so we're kind of putting in that same training and we're getting a different response. So the first major thing that we have to look at is mobility. Because as kids, if you think about it, we used to naturally move in and outta positions quickly, easily, freely. But as adults, our movement world gets smaller. We often are sitting most of our day, we drive a lot. We move in one main direction, which is forward. Especially as runners like we're always moving in that forward direction and movement, mobility in our body, abides by the move it or lose it principle. So you. Often, it's not that you're losing mobility because you're getting older, you lose it because you stop using it. And I always like to say, this is fantastic news, right? Because it means that you can actually do something about it. If I told you that you just lose mobility as you get older. That's kind of a defeatist way of looking at it, right? That's terrible news because it means there's nothing I can do because we're all gonna get older. Like there's nothing we can do about that. But if I tell you that you're losing mobility because you're not using it, you're like, sweet, I, I know I can do something about that. I just have to start using it again. I have to start doing the right thing. And that's really where mobility training comes in. So mobility, like I said, is getting into certain positions and learning how to access tho and restore your range of motion. Okay, so motion is one of the big pieces of mobility. The second piece that we need to look at and the second piece of our running foundation that we have to address. Is motor control. Now, what is motor control? Motor control is teaching your nervous system how to coordinate movement. So it's a co, a combination of stability, balance, and the brain body connection. Some you want, if you want a fancy term for it, it's that neuromuscular connection so that strength can actually transfer because. There is the strength of your muscle, and then there's your brain's message to certain muscles. Like when you are doing various activities, your brain has to like tell your muscles what to do and your brain and your nervous system. Some, some of it's the brain, some of it's the spinal cord. But for, for all our intents and purposes, we'll just call it the nervous system. Your nervous system has to help your muscles coordinate movement, and that includes activation patterns, like what I was talking about earlier with Kevin, of when the muscles are turning on and turning off and what. Order. They're turning on and turning off and how they're acting. So that's what motor control is and that's, you know, some people like to kind of group mobility and muscle con motor control together. I like to keep them separate because I think that there's, you know, we have our accessible range of motion and mobility and then we have our ability to control that. That movement. And one of the reasons that our motor control decreases over time is that our muscles actually decrease over time. We are actually losing muscle. We start losing muscle. Starting at age 30, and we can lose up to 8% of our muscle lean muscle mass per decade unless we're doing something about it. And muscle makes your body stronger. It protects your joints, it makes your runs feel easier. So oftentimes, it's not that you're losing your ability to run, you're just losing the muscle that used to support your body during your running because muscle. Is the organ of longevity and performance. Muscle protects your joints and helps to prevent injury. When your muscles are weaker, there's much more, stress and strain and wear and tear that are going through your joints, your tendons, all of your ligaments. And so having stronger muscles and not just having them, but knowing how to control them is going to really help running feel better and help decrease your risk of injury. More muscle also improves your power, your speed, your metabolic health. And when you have more lean muscle, it's also going to improve your insulin sensitivity, that body composition that we're talking about. But like we mentioned before, running does not effectively build muscle. That's why we need to be strength training, but we can't start, you know, building strength and starting adding on weights until we understand how to control. The movement, and that's really where part two of our movement foundation or our running foundation comes in with motor control. The third piece of our running foundation that we have to look at is our, our running. And the problem that I see most people, experience here has to do with stress. So. Think about when you experience stress, you know, when you are nervous or when you're anxious, where do you feel it in your body? Do you feel it in your shoulders, your neck, your stomach? Right? I think we can all agree that stress causes a physical response in the body. We, we've all felt, you know, physically stressed before. And what you might not realize, the, the thing that I like to think of the way that I like to look at this is we all have one stress bucket. So imagine you have a bucket and all of your stress is going into that bucket. So regardless of what kind of stress it is, if it's physical stress, psychological, financial, emotional, mental stress, family stress, social stress, all the things that are going on in the world, stress, all sorts of crazy thing, all of that is going. Into the same bucket, and that bucket is your body. And stress is stress. Your body does not know the difference between physical stress and mental stress and emotional stress because it's all stress. It all has the same physiological response in the body. And running especially harder. Running is a stress on the body. I know so many people tell me, oh, running is my stress relief and running is my therapy. And while running can help alleviate some mental stress, we cannot ignore that. It is a physical stress on the body, especially if you're pushing harder on your runs. So if you're someone that is pushing hard on all of your runs. This is just adding more stress to your already overloaded system. And plus, if you're over 40, especially if you're a woman over 40, you're losing or have lost your natural stress buffer, which is estrogen because a lot of women don't realize that one of estrogen's main, I shouldn't say main, but one of the things that estrogen does is it helps to regulate cortisol levels. And cortisol is your stress hormone. So as estrogen declines. Cortisol stays more elevated, so your body is in a more chronic state of stress. And when your nervous system is constantly in stress mode, your body prioritizes survival over performance. So that is going to lead to slower recovery. More fatigue, increased belly fat, storage and muscle breakdown. And this is why the training that may have worked in your thirties or your 40 or your twenties or thirties stops working is the same way in your forties, fifties, and sixties, because your body just doesn't have the same stress buffer. And that's really where the third piece of our running foundation comes in. So the third piece is your. Easy running. Okay. It's not just running, it's easy running. And what do I mean by easy running? When I talk about easy running, we like to teach our clients here, what's called effort based training using the RPE Scale. RPE stands for rating of perceived exertion. So basically what that means is on a scale of one to 10, how hard does it feel? And I know that a lot of people. You know, don't like this question. They're like, I don't get it. This is so subjective. You know, I don't understand how we can quantify this, but actually this scale has been used since 1982 in all areas of research and has been shown in so many different research studies to have good reliability. And validity. So research studies have compared, you know, heart rate to RPE and they found that RPE is a very good way to measure training intensity. So even if you're like unsure, which a lot of people are like, I don't really know what to rate it. You're probably pretty darn close and you're the, you know, you're usually consistent within yourself. It's hard to compare RPE between people, but within one person. It's a very consistent measure, and it does give us a really good measure of training intensity. So ask yourself this question on a scale of one to 10. How hard is your normal run? And when I ask that question, both in yesterday's workshop and every time I've ever asked this question in any workshop or in any time I've ever talked to runners, the majority of the responses that I get, the vast majority of the responses that I get, can you guess somewhere between five and seven Outta 10, right? On a scale of one to 10, how hard is your normal, like an average run? Most runners say somewhere between five and seven. So that's telling me that's in that medium, like somewhat hard to hard ratio. And I get it because I used to believe this too. Like when I used to go out and run, I used to believe that if I was, you know, the harder I worked, the more calories I burned and the more effective my, my run must have been. I didn't even understand that there was a concept. Of easy running. I didn't know that slow running was a good thing because I always saw slow running as a bad thing. I always wanted to be faster because I identified as a slow runner. I didn't think I was good at running, so I just pushed myself on every single run trying to get better. And what I didn't realize then that I do realize now is that that is a terrible way to train because the majority of our running needs to be easy. So that means on a scale of one to 10, not a five to seven, we need to be more like a two or three because when we run easy, that helps our body to build aerobic capacity and it helps to create durability. Give us these benefits without overwhelming our system. It also supports recovery and nervous system regulation. So we're getting the benefits, the aerobic benefits of running without completely adding tons of more stress to our stress bucket. And that's a beautiful thing because it's not that you know running, if you're running at like a five or a seven. That's obviously building aerobic capacity for you, but the problem is that it's also adding a ton of stress into your stress bucket. So easy running, making that part of our foundation is going to give you the aerobic benefits and help you build aerobic capacity, which is going to help improve your endurance and your speed and your power and all the things, because what you're doing is building a stronger engine. With that, right? Going back to our car metaphor, you're building a stronger engine, so that's going to benefit you in all of the ways, but we're not adding more stress into our stress bucket. Okay. And that is why, those are really the three pieces that I like to put into our foundation. So as a review, mobility, your body's ability to move, control your, your muscles, ability to actually control the movement and, and create balance and stability in the body. And then number three is easy running, performing most of your runs at a level two to three out of 10, the majority. And then that we have to have that guys like those three things are super essential because without those, without the base, we're not going to make the progress that you want. Because the higher I want you to think of, I have a visual. That I teach my clients that I call the training pyramid, and there are three levels of your training pyramid. So if you just wanna, visualize a triangle in your head that's broken up into three sections, that that base, that foundation that we just talked about is level one. So the widest part of the triangle at the base is mobility, motor control, and easy running. Level two, once we build, you know, a strong enough foundation, level two is strength and speed. Now so many people are jumping into level two without a strong base because especially if you're someone that said, yep, I'm guilty. I run most of my runs at like a level five or level six. That that's, that's level two already. That's getting into speed training. So the higher you go in the pyramid, the more stress the body experiences and the more important that foundation becomes. Because if you are trying, if you're adding more stress into your system and you don't have a strong foundation, you can understand why you're feeling more tired, why you're more sore, why you're getting injured all the time, right? Because you don't have that foundation built. So. When you build a strong foundation, this layer tells your body that strength and speed are okay. This is safe. It's safe for us to adapt, but without it, if we ignore the mobility and the control and the easy running. Strength doesn't stick and speed feels forced and every run feels hard, and the intensity that you're piling onto your body is breaking you down faster than it's building you up. So your body doesn't actually have time to adapt. But once your foundation is in place, then we can start to add load. Then we can start to add on some of these things that are going to show you or to, to, to give you. You know, some more gains in performance, but you can't start adding those things without a strong foundation. So level two, like I mentioned, is strength and speed. So strength is starting to, you know, use weights and resistance to help build muscle. It helps build bone density, it helps build your body's resilience, supports your joint health and movement efficiency, and helps to create the structure that you need to handle the speed and power and intensity that you wanna do. So strength training becomes the next most important thing that we wanna do. The second thing I put in layer two is speed. So speed training helps teach your body how to move efficiently at faster paces. And this can also help to improve your running economy. It can help improve your confidence if you're someone that wants to run faster, right? But this layer of strength and speed works because the foundation exists. So we can't jump into layer two without building layer one, and we can't, like, once we build, you're like, okay, fine, I'll build some layer one and then I'll just kind of live in layer two. Nope, that doesn't work either. Y'all, you know, like we still have to address all of these layers every single week of our training. It's, it's something that we just always have to pay attention to. And this is how I structure a, you know, a program, but also. A week, you know, so it's, it's the program over time, but it's also how I structure a week. When I structure a week for myself or for any of my clients. I'm making sure that we have things in here to help promote mobility control and easy running. That is gonna be the majority of what we do. And then we're also going to layer in the strength and the speed, and then layer three. The, the tip of the pyramid, if we go back to that visual is power and intensity, and this is the smallest layer, but it's the, because it's the most stressful on the body. Okay? So power and intensity place the highest demand on the nervous system. It requires strong tissues and good coordination and you know. We have to be careful because running alone is a plyometric activity, a power-based activity.'cause essentially what we're doing when we run is jumping from one foot to another over and over and over again. And so there is that element of like jumping and plyometrics and power just in. Running itself. So if we then are trying to add on more plyometrics and more speed into the system, that's where we can get into trouble. Because the faster you go, the more stress is on your body. Because you know when we run, you are actually the amount of force that is going through your tissues, like your muscles, your bones, your tendons, your joints, all of it is like two and a half to three times your body weight. So that's a lot of force that's going through your body. So if you don't have this strong foundation, it makes sense why you're feeling tired and sore and injured, right? So we don't wanna skip the foundation. We want to make sure that we build a strong foundation that is absolutely necessary no matter where you are in your training. We, if you have a strong foundation, great. Make sure you are nurturing that foundation. Make sure that this is not. Something that you build and then you just forget about. So how does this actually work into your week? Because I just mentioned a bunch of things and people are, might be sitting there thinking, okay, that sounds like a lot more things I need to add on. No, it's really not. You know, like this is just something again that we have to add in strategically. So we should be doing mobility pretty much every day because no matter, or at least every day that you're. Doing some sort of movement, or exercise because we can easily add five minutes of mobility at the beginning of a strength session to get our body warmed up or at the beginning before we run again to get our body warmed up. We can add five minutes of mobility as a part of our cool down practice. Like mobility is one of those things that is very easy to start to fit in. You could even do mobility. At home, like I do mobility, literally while brushing my teeth. I'm like doing my ankle mobility. I'm like bending my knees. I'm doing it while I'm, you know, standing at the kitchen counter. we can be doing mobility all the time. We just need to start accessing different positions in different ranges of motion. And then when you layer, you know, how, how to kind of fit all of these things in, again, you wanna make sure that mobility, motor control, like those movements, making sure that you have proper movement patterns for the exercises that you're performing. And then easy running makes up the majority of your weak. And then we layer, we start to layer in a little bit of, you know, levels two and three. We start to layer in. Some strength exercises, some resistance training. we can start adding weights after we have built a good motor control foundation. we can start to add in some speed and some power and those kinds of things. But again, that's gonna depend on you, your body, what else is going on in your life, what is the purpose of your training cycle right now? So there's a lot of different elements that we have to look at to figure out, you know, kind of what dials that. You know, I like to think of it like I mentioned before, as like dials that were, We're turning up, you know, we don't wanna turn anything up to 10, maybe one's at five and one's at a seven, one's at a three where we're kind of like playing around with how we kind of incorporate everything into your week. So those are the three pieces of your running foundation. If you guys have questions. Please reach out to me, over on social media. You can find me over at Dr. Angie Brown on Instagram or TikTok. I'm at real life runners also, if that, if you're following us, following along over there, I would love to hear from you or you can even send, send us an email hello@realliferunners.com. I would love to answer any questions that you have, but remember also. That your training is really just one aspect that we're looking at when we're kind of looking at your body as a whole.'cause if we talk, go back to the beginning when we talked about hybrid training, it's also important for you to look at the rest of your life, right? It's important for you to look at your nutrition and your recovery and your training and everything else that's kind of going on in your life. So that you can make this work in a way that's going to actually allow your body to get stronger and to build muscle and adapt instead of just breaking you down. So the key is really learning how to put all that together effectively and then support your body through. The nutrition and the nervous system regulation, making sure you're getting enough sleep, some of the basics, you know, some of the basic unsexy things. and the way that you're thinking about yourself too, the way that you're thinking about what's possible for you. You know, if you listen to this podcast, you know, I'm all about identity and mindset because your brain, your thoughts, control everything that you do or do not do in your life. And so that's a huge piece of what we do with all of our clients as well. So it's learning how to put. All of those pieces together effectively. And once that happens, everything changes. It's amazing. I love freaking helping people with this. It's the, it's the best, you know, because when you start to implement this, you will start to see better results with less training in less time. You know, you start to get faster, you start to see fewer injuries, you start to see, you know, more consistency because you're just not burnt out all the time. And. If that's something that you want help with, then I would love to invite you to come join the team. You know, we have a membership where we put all this together for you. I created something called the Running Reconnected Method. It's a step-by-step program to help walk you through all of this in, you know, with your training, your mindset, nervous system regulation, and your nutrition, it will walk you through everything that you need to know, and you can get access to that when you become a part of the team. And the team is one of those things that is special for so many reasons. Like, yes, we will give you an exact training plan that has your running and your strength and your mobility. And all the things that I talked about here today, but it's also just an amazing community of people. There's other runners that are on this journey with you. it's an incredible group of human beings. A lot of you are listening to this hello team. but I would love to help you implement this information. And right now we are running a little membership special for the month of February because it's my birthday month. So if you want more information, head over to Running reconnected.com. and you'll be able to see, the membership special that I'm running this month. I would love to have you as part of the team, let me know if you have any questions. You can reach out, like I said, on social media. You can send me an email if you have any questions of whether or not it's a good fit for you because. I am never here to, you know, convince you to do anything that's not right for you. And that's one of the reasons that I offer a money back guarantee. You know, you can come try out the membership and if it's not the right fit, you can cancel at any time. with the, the special that I'm offering right now is like a three month special, and with that there's also a money back guarantee, so I'm not here to lock you into anything that's not working for you. So come try it out, check it out. You know, if you've been listening to this podcast for years, come see what actually being a part of the team can do for you. I know that so many of my clients have been podcast listeners for lots of years. I mean, for goodness sake. We have been doing this podcast now for over eight years, almost eight and a half years now, which is insane. And I've had people that, you know. Finally decided to join the membership and were blown away by the difference between just listening to the podcast, which you can, you know, get a ton of, of great information. So many people have changed their running and changed their lives just by listening to the podcast alone, and I just feel like that's amazing. and then. The team just takes it one more step further. You get the step-by-step system. You get an exact training plan that's customized for you because we don't believe in cookie cutter plans, so we help customize, all of our plans for you. You get coaching support. We have live weekly coaching calls. We have a, a team, a community. We've got an app, like all the things that you need to make training easier, more fun, and. More effective, essentially,'cause I want you to move better, feel better, get outta pain, run better. You know, be whoever you wanna be and do whatever you wanna be able to do, no matter your age. So that's really my mission in life. So if that sounds like something you would like some help with and help implementing, to figure out if it's, you know, how to make your body feel better. Come over to Running reconnected.com. and get yourself signed up for the team. I'd love to see you inside and if this episode was helpful, please share it with a friend. leave us a review, whatever you'd like to do to help us, you know, spread the word and get this information to more people. We appreciate it. This has been The Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 449. Now, get out there and run your life.