376: The Key for Sustainable Progress

Balancing Training and Sustainability: Episode 376 of Real Life Runners

In episode 376 of the Real Life Runners podcast, we discuss the challenges of balancing all the advice on training, eating, and living healthier lives for optimal performance, especially for real-life runners with busy schedules. We delve into the science and practicalities behind different training philosophies, including the benefits and pitfalls of sprint training and high-intensity interval training (HIIT), as well as the importance of sustainable progress through creating habits one step at a time. Highlighting our experiences with high school cross country runners, we emphasize how proper distribution of training load, adjustments based on real-time conditions, and gradual habit changes can lead to sustainable success and avoid injury and burnout.

01:35 Balancing Training and Life

07:07 The Importance of Nutrition and Recovery

11:53 Adapting Training for Different Populations

17:04 Exploring Sprint Training

21:52 Understanding Sustainable Progress

22:53 Sprint Workouts: Different Perspectives

25:28 Maximum Velocity vs. Maximum Effort

27:45 High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

28:55 Building Sustainable Habits

30:07 Strength Training: Where to Start

30:52 Adjusting Effort Levels in Running

31:13 Sustainable Nutrition Changes

36:11 The Importance of Habit Stacking

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 376. Today, we're talking about all of the information that is constantly being thrown at us about the right ways to train and all the things that we need to be eating and doing, if we want to maximize our health, our performance, our longevity, like all the things and how in the world are we as Real Life Runners supposed to fit all of that in. So if you're interested, stay tuned. What's up runners. Welcome to the podcast today. We are going to have a bit of a interesting discussion today. Like all of our discussions here on the podcast are, I would say, I mean, I sure as heck hope that you find them interesting. That's why you listen to us. You're probably not still tuning in at episode 376 if you don't find us at all interesting. Unless you just found us and you decide to start here. And if so, hi and welcome. I'm Angie, this is Kevin, and we are a husband and wife team that loves to run and coach other runners and coach high school cross country and do all the things and really just help people live stronger, healthier lives. For those of you who, you know, can't see us because this is a podcast, uh, she pointed at me when she said, this is Kevin. And I kind of sort of waved at the microphone because that's, that's what we're working with here. Yeah. So today we were kind of talking and this episode was inspired by several things. Um, some recent. Workouts in the beginning of the cross country season and some of the things that we're seeing with our high school runners. Also, some of the things that I've been testing out, like with my perimenopausal self and also all the runners in my new program for running. Runners in perimenopause and some of the things that we're trying out and um, new training plans and new training Philosophies that we are starting to implement. I shouldn't say new just slightly modified I guess we've also always been training our runners in this way We're just I've been personally testing some some slight variations on some things I mean, we've always suggested that we need to make sure that we're hitting all of our different effort levels. It's just a matter of how much we're putting into the different buckets, I think is sort of the zone where we're. That's what we're testing. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very good point. Like we've always talked about making sure that we're running easy, running some moderate, running some high, intensities. Um, but yes, we have based on some of the recent research that I've been doing, um, have been starting to think about the distribution of. Yes, distribution. That's the word we're going for. Yeah, that'd be what we're doing. So today, let's, let's start off with a story. Okay. A cross country story. So why don't you go ahead since this is really what kind of inspired this episode. All right. So last week we're trying to figure out, we've got a race on Saturday. Okay. Yeah. And you know, you've got five school days to work with to try and figure out how do we put in workouts throughout the week? Because you can't just have the kids come to practice and be like, all right, go off on an easy run and now go off on another easy run. Like one, it's boring. And two, they're not going to get in that good of shape. So it's like, we have to put in, Some speed workouts, but we also want to make sure that we've get some strength in for one, increasing their power and making sure they don't get hurt during the year. Yeah. And it's, it's always an interesting thing to try to figure out like how to lay out a cross country schedule. And I've had plenty of cross country coaches throughout the years, send me either emails or DMs on Instagram, asking me if they can buy our practice plan, or if that, if we can make, help them make a plan for their team. And I. Um, just nicely try to help them understand it's not that simple if you want it done, right? Like, yes, I could make just a training plan and say, here you go, here's the perfect training plan to follow. And would it be better than just having the kids go out and run easy on every single run? Yes, it would. However, when we are trying to actually fit this stuff in, in real time, there's things that we are dealing with like lightning and thunderstorms and heat indexes that. Prevent what we're supposed to be doing at practice or what we have planned for that day So then we find ourselves kind of adjusting and trying to figure out Relatively on the fly. Like we know what we want to get done. It's like, okay, well, how can we fit all of that in, in a way that's going to benefit these kids and not just run them into the ground, right? And that whole running them into a ground is, is a problem because then you end up with kids that, Aren't enjoying it and they're hurt and they're just sore all the time. And they're not going to race. Well, lots of issues. So in, so we also have to be like weather forecasters. So it also depends on your meat schedule too. Of course. Yeah. Like how many times per week are you racing? How, like how close are your meats? All these things. And how often are you eating meat? You know, it's all these things. Um, that, that was not as good as my first joke of the episode, but we'll keep trying. I got a little chuckle. Thank you. All right. So, um, So last week we had a workout early in the week and then we had another day and the way the weather was looking like it was going to go on that day and the next day we decided to combo a strength workout and then take the kids out to the track and had them do hard 200 meter push ups. Not full blown sprints, but they were moving pretty fast. They were hard. And this is very aligned with a lot of training philosophies out there, right? Making your hard days hard and your easy days easy. There's lots of people. If you follow researchers, if you follow exercise physiologists, if you follow people on social media that actually know what they're talking about, there are a lot of people that promote this type of. training schedule, making your hard days hard and your easy days easy. So combining a weight workout and a sprint workout makes sense. Um, theoretically, theoretically, that's the word I'm looking on paper. It sounded like a great idea. And then the next day I've got, I don't know, eight, 10 kids. I had a good chunk of our team come in. They're like, I'm just, I'm really not feeling good. I can't make it to practice or the ones that did make it to practice. Then. I sent them off on a certain, you know, say five miles and they came back one, two, or I sent them on four and they came back and they're like, I did like a mile and a half. Like everybody was cutting the run or they were, they just were feeling so bad that they went home. I had a migraine. I had to go home. I just, I feel sick at so much problems. The next day on paper, it seemed like a great idea. The problem is. Is that we're dealing with a lot of kids who are relatively new runners. Not only that, but we're dealing with kids. We're dealing with teenagers. And I think that this is a big piece of it too. And there's, there are so many factors that play here too. And that's what, one of the things that makes this population a little interesting, more interesting to work with in some ways, but I think that this also spills over into the population that we work with, with our runners over 40 is. There's a lot of kids in this, like when you're a teenager, you care about what your body looks like and there's a lot of People on our team, especially on the girls team that are not eating enough because they don't want to gain weight. If you're not eating enough, it's going to be hard for us to give you a hard workout and to have you actually reap the benefits from that hard workout. And it doesn't matter. I mean, we talk to our kids all the time about nutrition. We talk to them about making sure that they're eating enough food, making sure that they're eating proteins and carbohydrates and that, you know, there's no quote unquote bad foods that they could be eating. And truly trying to help break down some of that diet culture and diet mentality that a lot of them have and helping them to understand that they're athletes that need to fuel. If you're curious, um, about more of that, that's what we talked about on last week's episode. So go back and listen to episode 375 about how important it is for us as runners to be eating more. But this is part of the thing that we. Try to work through as cross country coaches to is like, Yes, in theory, that was a great idea to keep that hard day hard and to combine strength and speed. But there were so many negative effects of that the next day, right? The only kids that were really able to come back and actually get in a good workout the next day were the ones that have been training all summer, the ones that have been training with us for a few years. These are the ones that had the background, the bigger foundation, not like the last month foundation, but the last couple of years of foundation that they could actually go through that workout and then show up and be productive the next day. So it just made me think, did we overload them too much? Was the hard day too hard? And if so, like, was I supposed to split it? Should we have done? Strength one day and then speed the next day or do they ever get an easy day? What's the appropriate way to lay this out? And that's kind of what led into this episode Yeah, and you know, we've been doing this for over a decade Kevin's been coaching high school Across country and track now for 17 years. I've been doing this for 10 years Together and like every team is different. We have similar philosophies from year to year but again we have to Kind of modify things based on who the kids are on the team. What exactly is happening with them. Their stress levels that we have to take into account. There's again the eating piece. Like this is a huge piece of what is really hindering us. If like we can't, if, if the kids aren't, Fueling their bodies. If the kids aren't getting enough sleep because their academic loads are so much or because they have so much so many other things going on outside of practice. If cross country is not their priority like we are very aware that for many of the kids on our team cross country is not their number one priority and nor do we expect it to be. So we have to take all of that into account while still getting them into the best shape that they can possibly get into. Thank you. Without hurting them and without burning them out. And that's really one of the big things that we're seeing with not, not cross country, because I would say, Oh, in general, I think that we do a really good job. Like we don't really have a lot of kids get injured or quit the team from burnout every year. I'd say, you know, I could probably count on one hand how many times that's happened in the last few years, but. Unlike there's a lot of other schools out there and this doesn't, you know, I'm not trying to like compare us to other coaches out there in any way, but there's a lot of coaches out there that will just throw all the mileage and all the speed and all the theoretical things at the kids and whoever survives survives. Like, it's just Survival of the fittest, essentially. And in that case, that kid is in fact the fittest and they can go out and win all sorts of things. But if you throw a dozen eggs at the wall, the one that is still surviving, well, that might be a great athlete. You got a lot of scrambled eggs and we're dealing with the lives of freshmen. They've got other stuff going on. Like these are high school kids, homecomings coming up. They are not super worried about what the workout looks like on a Thursday. They're trying to figure out what they're going to wear. to the, the dance on the weekend, or if anybody's going to ask them to the dance, there are some things going. We had talked about this, like we're a month into the school year, suddenly all of the tests are coming. The first big project is coming and the, the comparison to, you know, listeners who are over 40, maybe you're looking at your own kids in that ball, in that, in that ball. age group. And you're like, yeah, and that's also affecting me. Like I'm hearing my kids talk about this, or I've got two kids. One's going this direction. One's going that direction. Where am I supposed to be able to take care of myself? I've got a job and I'm trying to transport multiple kids around. How do I fit all this in? The stress levels are so high. Where is, where am I supposed to add in the stress of physical exercise? Yeah. And I think that this is really, you know, kind of bringing it back to. To all of you that are not high school runners, like, When we are looking at very full lives and very busy schedules and even if you have adult children that are no longer living with you, you know your kids still affect you. You know that it's, if your kids are stressed out or if they're struggling, that's still affecting you, even if they live across the country, right? So it's not like they, if you're a parent, it's not that you just stop being a parent and you can just like do whatever you want just because your kids move out of the house, right? Um, with all of this being said, we all live very full lives. So when we then decide we want to improve our running, we want to become a better runner. We want to become a faster runner, a stronger runner, whatever it is. Maybe you start listening to podcasts like this one. Maybe you start researching things on the internet. You start looking at social media accounts that are run by running coaches or professional runners or run influencers or whatever it might be. It can start to get. Very overwhelming, very quickly, right? You can be looking at all the things that everyone is telling you that you quote unquote should be doing. And. End up trying to start to do all of those things. And it leads a lot of people to doing too much, too soon, which can lead to injury and burnout, just like with the cross country kids, right? So not saying that our kids are injured or burnt out yet, but that's because we have to start to recognize those things after, you know, certain workouts or certain things that we do, it starts to, it's important for us to start to recognize those things and start to make adjustments because we need to be Looking at things in a sustainable fashion, right? I mean, it's really hard to get burnt out on one workout, but you can feel more tired than you think you should after that one workout. And it's hard to then motivate yourself to go out again. And if you do, if you're like, well, if I just keep doing it, I'm going to feel better. You might, but if you overdo it day after day after day, that's a good path to injury and burnout. If you push really hard one day and the next year you're like, Ooh, that was a lot, maybe I pushed. Too much. It's good to push, but it's not good to continuously push too much all the time. That's your pathway to disaster. So that's what we did. Like literally we'll look at the kids. We're like, all right, a bunch of them didn't even come to practice because they were too sore. They, they were like, I don't feel good. I think I don't feel good was code for I'm exhausted. I'm sore. And I don't know what you're going to send me to go run, but I can't physically do it. And so they kind of gave themselves an off day and the kids that were there. I'm listening to them talk before practice, even the ones that were, they were not doing great. It was like, this is a lot. And so at the first sign of this was too much, this was a big, big day. Now we got to pull back because we had a race a couple of days later on the weekend. And I think we pulled back nicely so that the kids could actually get to the race and be successful. Yeah. And that's why you just need to be able to adjust. So bringing it back to us, it's important for us to recognize that sustainable success. It's built one habit at a time, and it's not a good idea to just jump into arbitrary recommendations that you read in a book or that you saw on social media or that you heard on this podcast or any other podcast out there. Like a couple of episodes ago, we talked about the myths of zone two and sprint training. Sprint training is fantastic. The research is showing right, but if you just jump from not running like from just kind of running all of your runs at the same pace and you're like, Oh, you know what? I need to be doing sprint training and you try to just jump into sprint training. You could be in for a rude awakening and that could be An injury that could be a strained muscle or a strained ligament, strained tendons. Like we are, if we're over 40 listening to this podcast, even if you're in your thirties, like your body doesn't respond the same way as it did when you were a teenager or even in your twenties, we have to be able to ramp ourselves up in a way that. Is sustainable and that is going to help minimize our risk of injury because consistency with anything is the best path for success and is the best path to improvement. So if you're jumping into something too soon and you're trying to do too much, it's going to be quickly, you know, you're not going to be consistent with it because it's going to feel really awful, feel really terrible. And you're going to be like, well, that's it. Sucks. I don't want to do that anymore. Right. As soon as it starts being awful, the level of like motivation that you need, like the immediate motivation to be like, get out the door becomes so high. It's like such a high barrier of entry to start the exercise that day, because every workout needs to be huge. This, this giant thing that you're going to be able to like make massive gains. And you're like, no, no, no. Some of these can be easy days. And when you do something new and something different, it's. You need to start fairly small so that it doesn't become so overwhelming that you can't even have an easy day the next day. Yeah, and I think that, you know, I don't want to talk about anything specific, um, or call out any one person or one influencer or anything like that. But I will say that when I started to research this this year and started to look into, you know, Different, um, distributions of my training load and starting to incorporate more sprint training because I'm seeing the benefits of that and the research of that. Uh, I did, I was reading a book from a very well respected author and some of the recommendations in that book. I was like, all right, let me try this out because this is what she's recommending. I'm going to go ahead and try this out because I know a lot of people are using this book as reference. So I want to see what these workouts feel like for me. I am, I would say a pretty well trained athlete. I've been running for, uh, Long, a very, very long time. I have not knock on wood had any sort of like extended period of time with any injury. I don't, I can't even tell you the last time that I was injured enough that I had to take a break from anything, right? Like, of course I've had aches and pains and different things that kind of pop up. I handle them, I deal with them and I keep training. So. I'm curious how I was going to respond to this. And I, and some of these workouts, some of the, here's how you get started with sprint training workouts were really hard and the intervals that, um, you know, Kevin and I were talking about this and I want to talk to him a little bit about this so he can explain to you his thoughts on this were very, very challenging and had, had me doing like, uh, Longer sprint session with a very short recovery, right? Like if you look at some of the recommendations out there for high intensity interval training. One of the classic workouts is a Tabata workout where you go really hard for 20 seconds and you take a 10 second break, you repeat that 4 to 6 times and then you take like a 4 to 5 minute rest and then you do another set. That would be like a typical Tabata workout. And when Kevin and I were talking about this and I was kind of telling him about this different research and he's like, That sounds like a terrible idea. You know, that's not, that's not how I would, uh, organize a sprint workout at all. Yeah. I mean, from like the, the track coaching perspective, I was like, that's one, that's not even a sprint workout. Because if you look at the workout from my perspective, as, as someone with track coaching history, I was like, That's not what a sprinter would ever do. A sprinter would spend, would, if they're doing a 20 second interval, they're going to recover from that one 20 second bout for four to five minutes because they're able to go so fast in that interval that you have to recover a bunch. So that was my thought. And I did some research. A track coach to make sure that I also knew what I was talking about when I was training the sprinters, because as a track coach at my school, I was training every single event simultaneously. And so I'm like, well, I can't just be making stuff up about sprinters. Let's make sure I know what I'm talking about in the recovery cycle off of sprinters was so great because sprinters are able to use so much muscle simultaneously. The problem is when I was getting these high school kids who are very novice sprinters, they weren't able to hit the same level of like power exertion as, you know, collegiate sprinters as even the seniors, even seniors that have been doing it for four years. And so, I'm saying okay, I need you to sprint a hundred meters And then I want you to take three minutes to recover. They were fully recovered after a minute They didn't need that much time to recover because they weren't able to go hard enough to exhaust their body to the level that it needed that much time to recover. So it's this weird balance of as a sprint coach You would need so much more time to actually recover from that one single rep But if you have novice athletes, they need less time because they're not actually able to recruit enough muscles and recruit enough power to Get the level of exhaustion needed Right. But then when we try to then take that information and kind of put it out into the general population of, of us as real life runners, like we are not elite sprinters in the Olympics, right? But here I am as a 43 year old woman and I'm like, okay, sprint training is really good for a, b, c, d, all these different things, right? That we talked about in our, uh, episode a couple of episodes ago. How, how do I then incorporate it? And so then it's like, Oh, well, here's the high intensity training. Like here are the intervals that you do. And so I went out and I did those things. And the first couple workouts were okay. Like the first one was pretty. I did the 2010s first and I was like, that was awful. Like as a sprint, like I've done Tabata workouts before with like burpees or like kettlebell swings or like doing something, uh, you know, with body weight type of training. And it wasn't the same thing as going out and sprinting and trying to hit those high intensities and then recover for such a short period of time. So I'm so glad that I did it because now I understand how to coach my athletes better, how to coach the ladies in my program better. And I think that that's really important is this concept of really being able to meet yourself where you are. And gradually build up one, one step at a time, because that's the way that you're going to make that sustainable progress that we all really want, you know, I, of course, we want short term progress. We want to see our progress as quickly as possible, but ultimately we don't want to get injured. And if we jump into some of these things like sprint training or heavy lifting, these things that are very important and have a lot of great benefits. If we jump into them too much too soon, we're just going to end up injured and then not actually receiving the benefits of that type of work. Right, because if you're not doing the work because you're hurt, there, there is no consistency, so there's no benefit to be gained at all. Right, but I think there's, oh, the other thing I wanted to point out that I forgot to say is that, you know, sprint workouts, For you as a track coach versus sprint workouts, maybe the way that an exercise physiologist looks at them could also be a little bit different. I don't know. We'd have to dig into that one a little bit more. Um, but I think that that's important to understand of like, you know, a sprint workout trying to train an elite sprinter is, is going to look a little bit different than trying to do a sprint workout with a 45 year old person. Completely different workouts because you're talking to all these sprint workouts and we were discussing the different things out of all the exercise protocols that you were talking. Oh, well, here's one example of workout. Here's another example. I was helping to create some of these things in our, our training programs. And I'm like, well, that's not really sprinting because the one thing was like sprint for 30 seconds and recover for 60 seconds. I'm like, well, you're not really able to all out sprint for 30 seconds. Like from a, from a sprint perspective. Coach perspective, you can all out sprint for somewhere between six and eight, and you can go near maximum velocity for about 40 seconds, 40 to 45 seconds in a very well trained sprint trained athlete. Well, there's physiological reasons for this as well, right? Like the glycolytic pathway, which is like our fastest bodies. Energy system is only up to 15 seconds, right? It's activities up to 15 seconds. That's the max. You can use that pathway for right. And there's other pathways that are shorter than that. There's one that you've burned through after two to three seconds. Like this is such super short, explosive energy. Like this is people who've trained for Olympic caliber sprinting where you're actually exploding out of the box. Out of the starting blocks, your first few steps are using one energy pathway before the next one can fully get turned on. There's so many different pathways, and they all just turn on at slightly different rates. They all turn on simultaneously, but some of them turn on with a dimmer switch that just slowly cranks up, and some of them start full blast and then peter out super, super quickly. So, You're giving me these different sprint protocols and I'm like, well, that you can't really sprint, especially an untrained athlete is not really going to be able to sprint for 30 seconds. And so then we had this discussion of, well, is it sprinting or is it maximum effort? And I think that's something that I, we could kind of get into that one. Well, it's terminology, I think. Right. And that's kind of what I'm, what I think we. Ultimately came to is that when you say sprint, you like, well, why don't you just explain like, what do you mean when you say the word sprint? When I say sprint, I mean, you're actually touching your maximum velocity. Yeah. So maximum velocity versus maximum effort. Yes. Yeah. And I think that's the biggest thing. Right. Right. That distinction right there is you're looking at the actual velocity, which is like meters per second. Right versus maximum effort. Like this feels like a 10 out of 10, an 11 out of 10 on my RPE on my effort scale and that, you know, when you're doing a high intensity interval workout or a sit workout, the way that a lot of people are talking about it, Out in the media right now, we're talking about maximal effort, and that could mean, and for a lot of people, it does mean that as you go through that workout, your times will get slower because you are fatiguing, you're getting tired, and so it's hard to maintain that maximum power output if you're If especially if you have a short recovery time, so if you're doing like a 2010 or like a 40 20 or a 30 60 where your recovery time is shorter, it's going to be harder to hit that maximum velocity and your maximum effort is going to feel like it's going to feel like, okay, this is my max, even though. That repetition wasn't as fast as maybe the first or second one. Right. You're also going to fry yourself mentally because that short recovery after off of moving really, really hard, you're using a lot of like neuromuscular connection. And so. You're not just going to feel like muscularly fatigued at the end of that workout. You're going to feel just wiped. And you're like, how come I'm in this like odd brain fog for a little bit afterwards. And it's because it's taken so much focus for you to try to reach maximum effort because you've got, you got a lot of chemicals that are blocking the pathways. I don't think we need to get into the details of this, but it's literally getting. chemically more difficult for your muscles to continue firing. And that's part of why you're slowing down is you don't have enough time for your body to reset and go back to the level that you can actually go, in my opinion, all out, all out speed. You have the ability to go all out effort. It's just that that effort's going to be a whole lot slower than it was at the start of the workout. Right. So I think that that's where, I mean, and that's really, if we talk about. High intensity interval training. Like that's what hit stands for. It stands for intensity, not velocity. Right. And then there's sprint interval training, which is sit, which is a form of hit. But if we go back to just what hit stands for, it's high intensity, right? Like your. effort level feels really hard. And I think that that's where, um, I think that when you and I were talking about sprint interval training, where there was kind of that mix up is that I was talking about intensity and you were talking about velocity. Yeah. As soon as we got the, the whole idea that sit is a subcategory of hit, I'm, I was on board. I'm like, okay, we're just dealing with high intensity and sure. That's going to be great. All right. So bringing this all around to. Like, I feel like that was a really long discussion on this, but I, I hope that you guys found a lot of value in that so that you can really start to decipher what it is that people that you're listening to or things that you're reading, what exactly are they talking about? Right? Like, are we actually on the same page? Are we actually talking about the same thing? Make sure that that's really important. And that's so much of what I do inside of Press Play, my perimenopause program is helping people understand what the heck. You know, these recommendations even are or what they what they mean. So Now we understand that sustainable success is built one habit at a time And it's really important for us to meet ourselves where we are meet yourself where you're at and not to just jump into some arbitrary recommendations, so So when we think about, okay, what's one thing that we're doing, like when we kind of go back to where we started this episode is like, I've got all these things that I should be doing now. I need to be incorporating more sprint work, I need to be heavy lifting, I need to be eating more protein, I need to be doing all these things. Start with one, right? So say you're not strength training yet. Add in a 15 minute strength routine until that becomes normal. 15 minutes with either no weights, light weights, moderate weights, right? Don't just jump right into heavy lifting and trying to max out your, um, the amount of weight that you're lifting. because that's going to lead to injury, start where you're at. Start with 15 minutes, start with 20 minutes. You don't have to go to the gym for an hour to start because that becomes very quickly unsustainable. Start with something that you know, you can incorporate into your weekly routine. And then once that becomes normal, then look at adding something else in. Yeah, I mean, that's that's such a key is if you're seeing all these things, it says, Oh, well, you need to be lifting heavy weights. You can't be lifting heavy weights if you can't do the motion. So that's why so many strength routines that you've put out there over the years start with body weights, because if you can't support your body weight in like Just a body weight squat. There's no reason to start putting weight onto a bar and being like, you know, what would be a great idea is just load a bar and stick it across my back. Like something is going to go very wrong. And you're very likely to get hurt much, much less likely. If you get the motion down, you figure out the coordination to do the exercise before you start adding extra load on top of it. All right. So that's the strength training, but there's a whole bunch of other things that we've got here. You could also be looking at, you know, Are all of your runs feeling like they're going the same effort? Start by just changing the effort up. Make some of the runs a little bit slower and make one or two of the runs during the week a little bit faster. You don't have to go from every run feels like medium efforts to start. Sprint training twice a week, right? Or if you're someone that like wants to work on your nutrition, you don't need to jump on a diet plan and try to follow strict rules that are unsustainable. This is why people go on and off diets and why people say, Oh, well, no, like this diet, it worked for me when I did it. And it's like, well, yeah, but then did it actually work for you? The answer is no, because it wasn't sustainable. Like it doesn't actually work. If it's not sustainable because if it's not working in the long term, we're honestly, what good is it? Unless you're like really training for something very short term. Like, I know that when I, um, when I was in PT school, one of my classmates was a bodybuilder. And he would train for bodybuilding competitions. And so he would go through, you know, his loading phase where he would gain a bunch of weight. And then he would go through his cut phase where he would basically eat chicken and broccoli and maybe a little bit of rice. And he had the worst gas and I sat behind him in class and it was just like, It's the worst, but you know, it is what it is, but those were all short term things that had a start and an end for a very specific goal. And I think that that's one of the big things is that a lot of people see those things like the diet and say, Oh, well that worked for that person. And it's like, yeah, it did in that very short term thing for that very specific goal, but that's not a lifestyle. Even he recognized that even he knew, well, this, this is only how I'm eating for this, you know, six week period or whatever, however long his. cycles were. Right. Cause there was an end in, there was a goal. There was a finish line to that. And so you can sustain a lot when there's a finish line. It's a lot more difficult to sustain a restrictive diet. If the finish line is end of life, like that is a suddenly it's not sustainable. It just simply isn't. You can't. Right. Because you've put restrictions on top of it. So very, very difficult. I don't, I wouldn't say it's impossible because someone who has, you know, severe allergies to something, you can. Take that out of the diet. It is possible to have small restrictions on you. Well, yeah, but then there's a there's a reason, right? Like not dying is a good reason to not eat nuts. Okay, fair enough, right? Or like kidney stones like a friend of ours had some like really really severe kidney stones And so he just like decided or he found out that nuts were a big trigger for him And so he loves nuts loves like would just eat handfuls of nuts every day. And he decided that it wasn't worth that pain of the kidney. So, because he had that pain for weeks, it was not worth it. So he's decided to stop eating nuts. If your reason is big enough, then absolutely. You can definitely sustain that. Like it's the same thing for people that give up alcohol, right? They, a lot of them have a reason they don't like the way they feel. They don't like what that leads to. There is a reason for those things. If the reason is big enough, then, then whatever it is, is sustainable. I mean, cause it seems small in comparison. Yes. It, and I mean, that's so much of what a lot of this is, is what's, what's the comparison is, you know, that, that is the meet yourself where you are. You want to compare, you know, Where you're going to be three days from now to where you currently are. Don't compare yourself to something in a book, something that you saw online, some workout protocol that might be based off of somebody who's already at step like M, if you're at step B. If you're at step A, don't look at somebody else's step Z. It's just not gonna go very well for you. Yeah, I mean I love when I see those posts on social media that are much more real that's like, don't Compare your day three to my day, you know, 873. Yeah, exactly. Because they're, they're not the same. You have to actually make sure that you're comparing your, your day three. You know what that can get compared to? Your day two. That's a, that's a solid comparison. Yeah. Or day zero or day one, you know, whatever that might be. And understanding that like, sometimes, like, sometimes day three doesn't look as good as day two. Like, especially when you're in like, uh, You know, day 14 and day 13. Like when you're like that one to two weeks in and like you have that day where it's like things are starting to trend upward and then you just kind of have that day where you go backwards for no apparent reason. Sometimes that happens and that's totally okay. But like, as long as you're making that progress, that's really what, um, what matters and really just. Where do you start? How do I fit it all in? The answer is one step at a time. You know, the journey, what is it? The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Or like, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right? Like that's how you do it. And this is the same thing for us. I think it was Confucius. Yeah, I think it was. Or Einstein. Could it, maybe Lincoln? No elephants. That's definitely Confucius. Like they're elephants in Asia. Yeah. Or Lincoln. Or not. So. Creating habits are really your key to success and creating habits one, one at a time, um, a really great resource that we would recommend to anyone that wants to learn more about habit change is the book Atomic Habits. Um, James Clear is fantastic. It's just one of the greatest books on habits in general and habit change. If you want to start making, um, different changes in your life. One of the things that Kevin loves to talk about is habit stacking. It's one of the things that we teach our clients as well. Um, Which is connecting a new habit that you want to create with a habit that you already do on a daily basis, right? Which I think like I want to talk about one of the downfalls of habit stacking relative to to this topic if you're like Oh, well, I need to add in strength training. I need to add in sprint training and I need you to add in to like change my nutrition a little bit. So after I do my sprint workout, then I'm going to take this protein to make sure that I've increased my, my protein after my sprint workout. Then I'm gonna have a big protein based breakfast. It's like, well, that's great. Except have you established either of those habits? Cause the key to habit stacking is to connect the new habit to something that you already currently do without any challenge. So if you're like, Oh, after I brush my teeth, then I'm going to do my sprint workout. Like, this is a habit that you already do, and now you're going to stick something else on top of it. Yeah, and you know, I'm glad that you used that as an example because it is important to understand that some of these things do create, or do require, multiple, multiple Habits to be formed, right? Like when you do start doing heavy lifting, when you start doing sprint training and harder workouts, refueling, especially refueling with protein after a workout is extremely important. But like Kevin just mentioned, if those are two brand new things, it's going to be sometimes hard to sustain that or to figure that out for some people can totally do it without a problem. You know, this is just because what they can do is they can. Uh, group them into one habit. Yes. Right? So instead of seeing them as two separate habits of like, a heavy lift and then protein shake, it's like, oh no, the protein shake, and that's all just one new habit. That's my new habit. Right? It's a lift protein shake. Right. Or, and this is one of the reasons why, The order with which you do things also matters. Like, can you, what can you start with that you can make into a sustainable habit, like fueling yourself after a workout. And then after you have made that a habit of like, after every single workout, I come home and I have food. Okay. Now is the time that we can start to add in some of these higher intensity things, because we've already established this. Habit of refueling after a workout. Oh, you like backed out. Like you built the second part of the routine and then enhanced to the first part of the habit. Correct. That was really nice. That's my ninja hack. So like that, these are the things that I do inside, like my higher level group coaching programs is I teach them these ninja hacks of ways to, you don't have to always go in linear order. Yeah, no, that was really nice. Like you, you. Enhanced step one by, uh, you already had the link there. You're like, I like, I, I get in a workout, but I haven't fueled appropriately. And I, and I would like to change my fueling and my workout. You did the second one. I, that is sneaky, sneaky, ninja level. So yeah, atomic habits, great book. And I'm pretty sure you can catch him at James clear on like everything. Yes. I think I'm pretty sure that's his website. Somehow he got at James clear on Instagram. Well, yeah. He's a great, great resource. Um, but we are going to wrap this up for today because we have a daughter that needs some help studying for a test tomorrow and, uh, 39 minutes in is enough, enough of this. So, um, if you don't already come follow us over on Instagram at real life runners. If you haven't left us a review yet. Over on Apple podcast or Spotify. We would love for you to leave us a review, um, and help us reach more listeners. And just also, it's a great way to say thank you for all of the free content that we put out for you guys every single week. If, if it's something that you look forward to and that you enjoy and that you gain value from. So as always, thanks for joining us. This has been the Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 376. Now get out there and run your life.