I did body weight muscle training and high intensity cardio in the early afternoon as part of my ongoing effort to manage my weight as a long-distance runner.
When it comes to long-distance running, the lighter you weigh, the better. Therefore weight management is an important part of my commitment to long-distance training. My weight control is achieved mainly by five means:
1) Diet
2) Muscle training
3) High Intensity Cardio
4) Running itself
5) Sleep
1) You are what you eat. Nothing is as important as food you eat. If you eat clean, you look clean. If you eat garbage, you feel like garbage, you look like garbage, and eventually you become garbage. My diet centers around fresh food that's rich in minerals, vitamins, and fiber, and that has a good balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrate. I make my utmost effort to stay away from processed food. It seems parsimonious in terms of nutritional value, and dangerous even because of many chemicals added to it for the purpose of preservation.
2) Muscle training is a double-edged sword in that the more muscular you become, the heavier you get. And additional weight is a disadvantage in long-distance running. Then why do I do muscle training? It is because weight control becomes easier. When you have large muscle mass, your basic metabolism is high. You can burn many calories simply by "being". It also significantly increases exercise metabolism. The amount of calories burned when I do a certain exercise is larger when I am more muscular than when I am less so. Thus, by maintaining a decent amount of muscle mass in my body, I can easily burn off calories taken from food.
3) High intensity cardio helps me manage my weight in two ways. First, I can directly burn many calories quickly. I can especially consume a large amount of glycogen by doing it. What does it mean in the overall picture of weight management? Well, once you have used up all of your glycogen, you must tap your body's fat reserves. This allows you to reduce your body fat. And less body fat means less weight.
4) Running itself is a good way of controlling your weight if you run regularly, and run long distances every now and then. When I run a half-marathon, I burn 1,323 kcal, for example. That's many calories.
5) Sleep is as important as exercise, because it is during sleep that your muscle tissues that were damaged through hard training are re-built. It is during sleep that growth hormone is secreted to support this process. The longer your sleep is, the better this job is done.
Today I have introduced you to the muscle training and cardio workout that I do to manage my weight, and why they are important to me.
Tonight, I am going to do one other thing that is important for me to run a long-distance faster: distance-focused running training. Tonight I am planning to run 30 K. It has never been an easy distance for me. Every single effort in the past required a significant amount of perseverance. But nonetheless it's something that I cannot do without to run a full marathon in October with confidence. So I'll muster up all of my motivation to get it done.
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