One of the many reasons a lot of us run is to feel that “giving it out all”, heart-pumping, endorphin-releasing feeling.

An increased heart rate during any type of exercise is completely normal and completely necessary.

Going out too hard is common… and not necessary. This happens especially with recreational runners and sometimes the problem isn’t pace but your heart rate… 

Let’s have a look at the warning signs you should be watching out for…

What Happens When You Run At a High Heart Rate?

An elevated heart rate is a cause for doing some investigating… but may not be a big concern…

The thing to look out for, particularly when you’ve got a high heart rate is irregularities in your heartbeat.

Irregularities like big fluctuations, (really high heart rate and then stabilizing)

If your heart rate goes up quite quickly…  stays high and you’re still feeling quite comfortable and can hold a conversation with the runners around you then… You’re running easy enough and shouldn’t worry.

If your heart rate is for example 20 beats higher than runners around you then it’s not a reflection that you are running harder than them, this is just an indication that you are pushing yourself a little harder than them. 

However, keep in mind that you may naturally have a higher heart rate than other runners so it is key to not compare your HR with anyone else.

What If You’ve Got A Higher Than Normal Heart Beat 

If you’ve got a high resting heart rate and a higher exercising heart rate and it goes up by 40 beats per minute … this will indicate that your heart rate is higher than normal… and if it does become irregular then you should get yourself to a doctor.

Running To Heart Rate Simplified: THIS Is Why Heart Rate Zones ACTUALLY Matter:

How To Determine The Correct Heart Rate To Run At?

If you’re going to use heart rate to control your intensity then you must make sure that your heart rate has been measured accurately. 

For me, that means getting yourself a well-reviewed chest strap. – I’m becoming less and less of a fan of wrist-based heart rate monitors. 

This is key because it will show an accurate measurement. Once this is done correctly then using your heart rate is a fantastic way to control your running intensity. (It’s even better than pace!)

The one limitation that you do have from training to heart rate is that if you live in a hilly area, you need to know how to compensate early on in the hill because it does take 45 seconds or longer for your heart rate to adjust to a new intensity. 

When you hit a hill, you can easily be 30 – 45 seconds in before you realize… Whoa, hang on my heart rate is going up. 

How To Find The Correct Heart Rate For You:

If you’re starting, it’s a little bit more difficult… because we don’t like to put people into a very physiologically compromised state very early on in a training plan. 

In the beginning, you could use one of the age-related formulas, just keep in mind that these are more of a guideline. But once you’ve been training consistently for four to six weeks, then I’d encourage people to do a test to try and figure out either maximum heart rate, which is probably the riskier of the two tests, or a test to try and calculate threshold heart rate. 

For maximum heart rate: you should aim to find yourself a hill that will take you at least three minutes or four minutes to run at a close to an all-out effort.  And then have a full recovery with a long, easy walk back down the hill. 

If you repeat that three to four times, you will get pretty close to your maximum heart rate.

For estimated threshold heart rate: You should go out and run for between 30 and 40 minutes, as hard as you can sustain for that length of time… That will give you a good estimate of your threshold heart rate.

To use that information. From maximum heart rate you want to run between 70% and 75% of maximum on your easy days, or 75% to 80% on of threshold on your easy days.

Over time, you will hopefully see that you are slowly getting faster at that heart rate. 

Using Your Running Heart Rate To Build a Sensible & Solid Fitness Base

When you are training and laying your training foundations – you must run at a low enough intensity.

Your running heart rate is always too high when you start running. Do keep in mind that heart rate can be affected by several factors such as weather conditions, stress, lack of sleep, fatigue, and alcohol. These things need to be considered if you see your heart rate is off.

Most people and especially people who are starting running will always train at too high an intensity – Just because of the nature of the eccentric load and the poor condition of their cardiovascular system. This means that they cannot do much aerobically before they start going into needing energy pathways that provide energy without oxygen or in the absence of oxygen or as we term anaerobic conditioning.

In the beginning, it is very important to be able to run easily enough. 

There are lots of formulas you can use to work out a percentage of your maximum running heart rate. (You can calculate your maximum heart rate by 220 minus age.)

All you want to know is if you are in an aerobic zone when you are running easily. 

Dr. Philip Maffetone wrote a book called The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing. 

It simplifies this well by stating: 180 beats per minute minus age unless you are a very young person (between 15 and 19) which is going to ensure that you are going to train well into your aerobic zone.

He takes it one step further: any illness or if you haven’t trained for a long period of time or if you’ve had an injury, for each one of those cases you take off five. 

So basically,  if you are a 30-year-old male and you haven’t exercised before plus you’ve recently been ill, or you’ve tried to start exercising but you fall ill, then you would be 180 – 30 = 150 beats per minute minus five because you haven’t exercised regularly in the past minus five because you’ve been ill.

Therefore your maximum running heart rate that you’re allowed to reach is 140 beats per minute. That means if you get to 140 and you’re on a hill then you walk. 

If you train like that, you’re disciplined and you do it over 12 weeks your speed at that heart rate will get faster and faster. 

The thought of “mobility training” is often thought of as a real waste of a good run day…

If for example, you struggle to just stand on one foot, these minuscule imbalances can accumulate during the thousands of repetitions on a normal run and increase your likelihood of getting those tight quads, hamstrings, and those niggly problem areas as well as increase your chances of gaining a serious injury and decrease your energy efficiency.

Usually, to counteract this, we add stretching and strength training to our routines – fantastic! But many of us still end up with aches and pains. 

If this sounds familiar, we’re about to transform your running forever… with just two words… MOBILITY WORK.

Mobility Defined

Mobility is a term used to describe something’s ability to move and refers to the way your joints move inside their socket. 

In essence, it is the ability to move your joints freely with the surrounding tissues allowing the movement to happen smoothly.

Mobility isn’t the same as flexibility, though it is close. Mobility incorporates flexibility and strength training.

A good way of understanding the difference between mobility and flexibility is to do this…

Make slow windmills/circles with any of your arms, and think about the way your shoulder is moving. Flexibility refers to the ability to lengthen a muscle in a stretch. Mobility refers to the range of motion of your joints, in this case, in your shoulder.

Why We All Need Mobility

According to the National Insitute on Aging (NIA), maintaining mobility and preventing disability are key to living independently as we age.

When people become less active, their muscles tighten, flexibility diminishes, and range of motion decreases.

Some joints are meant to be stable, while other joints in the body are meant to be more mobile. 

A lack of adequate mobility in those joints can create imbalances that will probably result in compensated movements and increased risk of injury… for everyone and anyone not practicing mobility work.

Why Mobility Is SO Important For Runners

Mobility is absolutely vital to how well you run. 

If you have tightness and poor mobility rather around your joints, it affects the quality of your stride, it also affects the power that you’re able to put into each of those strides. 

By having a mobility limitation you are risking: How well you run & how fast you run. 

By not doing mobility work you are increasing your risk of injury and it becomes more crucial as you age.

It’s very important for us ALL to be doing regular mobility work to keep ourselves in our stride and our running performance as optimal as possible.

Does Mobility Make You Run Faster?

Yes!

Including mobility work in your training plan will improve your running performance and decrease your risk for injuries, resulting in the possibility of improving your running speed.

Think about it, If your muscles and joints are able to move through the entire range of motion required with each stride, you will run efficiently, you’ll run fast and you’ll decrease your risk of injury. (I know we keep on repeating this, but it’s just incredible!)

All you need to do is have good mobility through your feet and ankles, knees, hips, and spine.

Now that you know why mobility is so important, let’s dive into how often you should be doing the mobility work…

How Often You Should Include Mobility In Your Training

We always hear runners saying…” I’m not stretching after my run” or “ I’m not getting my flexibility in every day.”

This is where mobility and flexibility are probably the same…Mobility every day would be so beneficial to your running. 

Here at Coach Parry, we are massive advocates of strength training, and two to three strength sessions a week is probably ideal depending on your age and your ability. 

With mobility, it’s not a case where less is more… it’s a case of more is more!

A lot of people often go … okay, well, this is yet another thing I now have to fit into my schedule… How on earth am I going to fit this in too?

Mobility work is something you can do as you wake up first thing in the morning, it’s quite a nice way to get yourself going for the day or before your run.

Let’s look at some of the areas that we should be focusing on from a mobility perspective.

Where Runners Should Be Focusing

Two of the main problem areas we tend to find in runners are poor ankle mobility, as well as poor hip mobility. 

That’s not to neglect any upper body work. A really big focus that we like to incorporate is upper body or shoulder mobility rather, which will also have an effect on your running posture and how you keep yourself upright. 

More often than not, we all work jobs that are stuck behind a desk, we might be slouched over quite a lot, and that all transfers into how tight we are and how immobile we are in our running posture.

If we look at lower limb and hip mobility as an example: You may have experienced a bit of knee pain in the past and what surprises people to find out is that more often than not… that pain is a referred pain from higher up in the chain. 

The biggest problem experienced is poor hip mobility. If your hip flexors are tight, if your hips are immobile, what that’s doing is it creates a misalignment in how your muscles are contracting or pulling in one direction, and how your patella or your kneecap tracks in its groove.

So all of those aspects often come from one simple problem… hip mobility. If you can solve your hip mobility problems, you can get rid of your knee pain, unless it’s more of a trauma-focused type of knee pain. 

Now that you know that mobility is one of those things that are going to impact your running. 

We have put together a mobility flow series just for you!

Click Here For FREE Mobility Flow Series

10 Benefits Of Mobility Training

1. Improved joint range of motion.
2. Improved circulation.
3. Decreased risk of injury.
4. These exercises can actually be a warm-up for your regular workout routine.
5. Reduced muscle tension and soreness.
6. They will add variety and change to your regular workout routine and help keep you motivated.
7. Improved posture.
8. Improved movement efficiency.
9. These exercises tend to have a calming feeling & can help you release stress.
10. Mobility training can help keep problems like back ache and knee pain away.

Spring or fall normally wins the honor of being everyone’s favorite season to train in… but trust us when we say that summer does have a lot going for it.

Research shows that running in the heat can help us prepare for races that take place in hot weather, even better, running in high temperatures can lead to improved overall fitness.

The key is to know how to train safely in the heat, which is exactly what we’re going to teach you in this article.

Is It Ok To Run In Hot Weather?

There is the possibility of serious health consequences to exercising in the heat and humidity, such as heat exhaustion and heat stroke. But these can be avoided if you listen to your body and take sensible precautions…

Yes, running in hot weather does present several risks but it is okay to run in hot weather if you drink enough fluids to stay hydrated, avoid running at the hottest times in the day (between 11 am and 3 pm), wear breathable clothing, and by slowing down your normal pace.

Let’s have a look at how you can run in the heat and not get too affected by the hot conditions…

How To Run In Hot Weather

We’ve all had that situation where we’ve been training for a race or an event and we’ve been training at home or wherever we live, and then arrive at the event and it’s a good a few degrees hotter than what we’re used to…

For example, say it’s a bit more humid, and you end up struggling on race day. The good news is there is a way to mitigate that.

What makes running in hot conditions so challenging?

Very simply, our bodies struggle once they get too hot to function, because the proteins that we rely heavily on in terms of the integrity and structure of our cells, and some of the functioning of our cells, start to degrade when it gets too hot.

Temperature and altitude are the two biggest hindrances to performance.

Once you get into a very hot environment, your body starts to struggle to get rid of the heat… 

Remember when we are exercising, we are like little engines. So think of yourself as a steam train. The more energy you need, the hotter that furnace is going to burn. Then you need to get rid of that heat.

If you cannot get rid of the heat, we call it down-regulating your body will force you to, it sends out a signal and you will start to feel bad, this is because your body is trying to slow down the intensity so it can ‘turn the stove down.

If your body doesn’t ‘turn the stove down’, you stand the chance of experiencing physiological stress, which is very dangerous.

You want to be able to manage this process…

We can do several things to regulate our temperature while running in hot environments:

1. The first part and the easiest part is to immediately do things to ourselves to keep cool. 

We do lose a lot of heat from our forehead and of course, when you’re exercising in a hot, humid environment, the first thing you should be doing is putting on a hat.

That hat protects you from the sun, right? 

The sun of course does its damage. So we would not suggest running without a hat, but you’re now blocking one of the very efficient places for your body to lose heat…

We recommend keeping your hat wet and cool so that it can still act as a conductor and you can lose heat at the top of your head.

2. Keep your skin wet and cool.

If you do keep your skin wet with water and cold water, in particular, that is a really good way for your body to release heat.

If you’re exercising in a very hot but dry environment. It’s not nearly as severe because you could lose loads of heat from evaporative cooling.

This is when you need to run in very light clothing.

The best type of clothing for running in the heat is made from moisture-wicking material that quickly takes stuff to the surface and evaporates and when it evaporates there’s a lot of cooling that takes place.

In very hot, humid environments that doesn’t happen. This is when using cool fluids becomes very important to regularly douse yourself with.

There are some garments on the market at the moment. The one that I’ve personally experimented with is E-Cooline, but there are a couple.

What they have done with those garments, is they have bandanas, caps, arm sleeves and a T-shirt, they are like shirts essentially but they are a little bit thicker and they have a substance that when it becomes wet, a chemical reaction forms, which causes that suit to cool down.

3. Losing heat through your neck is also an extremely effective way.

If you have a buff on you, you can keep it wet and cold. 

If you’re in extremely hot conditions, you can take a pair of stockings, and put blocks of ice inside the stockings to hang around your neck. It will slowly melt and drip down your t-shirt.

4. We can also prepare our bodies to cope better with the heat.

In two ways essentially:

1. Exercise in heat.

This will cause adaptations that teach our body to cool much more efficiently in those types of conditions.

You can do this by running in the middle of the day or during the hottest part of the day.

Please use suntan lotion, and wear a cap and sunglasses to protect yourself from the sun.

Or, you can hop on a treadmill and train in a very heated room.

If none of the above work for you you could even get into a sauna. This would work if you spend between 10 and 30 minutes, for two sessions a week.

Those two sessions a week will cause a lot of physiological changes that will make you far better able to cope with exercising and racing in hot and humid environments.

Let’s see how long that adaptation would take?

Imagine you were doing a goal race that was in a climate a lot hotter than you are used to. It’s very similar to trying to adapt to altitude.

Essentially, when you move to altitude, once you’ve been there for six hours you’re more adapted than you were when you arrived.

When you’ve been there 12 hours, so on and so forth until probably seven to 10 days you get full adaptation.

For the race, you should go to the location about 10 days before the race and you’ll undergo quite a lot of adaptation. That said, sauna sessions will make the same adaptations.

We understand that it’s not always practical to get to a destination race 10 days before, that is why prepping accordingly beforehand becomes that much more important.

How To Deal With The Heat During The Comrades Marathon

You want to keep your body temperature down. There are loads of water tables along the Comrades Marathon route. 

Most of the water sachets stay in big baths with ice. So I would advise you to keep your body temperature down by keeping yourself wet pretty much the whole way. Take every opportunity you can to put ice on your skin. It is your skin temperature that you want to control.

Runners from up north are at an enormous disadvantage and truthfully there is not a massive amount you can do other than doing some heat acclimatization by training in a hot, potentially humid environment. 

Most importantly though is to manage yourself on race day and of course if you keep dousing yourself with water, blistering is going to be a potential issue on your feet. So you’ll want to put some added protection around your feet like plasters or Vaseline.

Benefits Of Running In Heat & Humidity

It has been proven that training in the heat (with the correct safety precautions taken) can increase your blood plasma volume (which leads to better cardiovascular fitness), reduce your overall core temperature, reduce blood lactate, and increase your skeletal muscle force.

This will all have a massive positive impact on your training in colder conditions.

According to Santiago Lorenzo, a professor of physiology at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine and a former decathlete at the University of Oregon. Heat training not only does a better job at increasing V02 max than altitude, but it also makes athletes better at withstanding a wider range of temperatures.

Running in heat and humidity is the same as training at altitude. This is because running in hot weather puts stress on your cardiovascular system making your heart stronger. It also decreases blood flow to muscles because the blood is going to your skin instead, making training similar to that in high elevations.

Dangers Of Running In Hot Weather

Running in hot weather can pose dangers to runners…

1. Dehydration

While running, your body loses fluids through sweat. If you don’t replace those fluids by drinking water or other liquids, you can become dehydrated.

In hot conditions, we do need to add some electrolytes or even a pinch of salt to our water, to ensure we absorb that water better, otherwise, it just sweats right through us. 

Also, higher sweat rates require higher fluid intake

2. Heat Cramps

These are painful, involuntary muscle spasms that usually occur during heavy exercise in hot environments.

3. Heat Exhaustion

This is a very serious condition that can lead to heatstroke.
The symptoms of heat exhaustion are:

• Dizziness
• “Goosebumps” (particularly on the torso and arms)
• Nausea (sometimes accompanied by vomiting)
• Moderate to severe headache
• Weak legs
• Lack of coordination
• Rapid pulse

4. Heatstroke

Heat stroke is the most serious heat-related illness. It occurs when the body can no longer control its temperature. The body’s temperature rises rapidly, the sweating mechanism fails, and the body is unable to cool down.

5. Hyponatremia

This occurs when the level of sodium in the blood is too low.

With this condition, the body holds onto too much water. This dilutes the amount of sodium in the blood and causes levels to be low.

Now that we know the risks that come with running in heat and humidity, let’s see how we can avoid those risks and run safely…

Tips For Running In Heat & Humidity

• Avoid dehydration: You can lose between 6 and 12 oz. of fluid for every 20 minutes of running, especially when it’s hot.

• Prehydrate: Drink 10–15 oz. of water 10 to 15 minutes before running, and drink water every 20–30 minutes during your run. 

• Add some electrolytes or even a pinch of salt to your water, to ensure that you absorb the water better.

• Try the trails: When the temperatures rise, asphalt and concrete absorb heat and radiate it back into your face. Trail running usually offers shade from trees

• Carry water: Use water bottles, a hydration vest, or a fuel belt to carry water with you.

• Take it easy: Take the weather conditions into account. Brutal heat and humidity mean that you should scale back your goals for the day.

• Know the signs of heat illness & stroke and if you do not feel better, get home or call for help.

• Splash yourself where possible: Use water to cool yourself.

• Dress for the weather: Your running clothes, socks included, should be made of a wicking technical fiber, choose lightweight, loose-fitting clothing. Wear a hat with a significant brim to keep the sun off your face. Wear a pair of lightweight sunglasses designed for sports activities.

• Apply sunscreen.