Re: Sit and reach and Running

Prisoner at War said:

Quoted message said:

I have a police physical fitness test coming up in January. I'm
fairly well off with the benchpress, situps, and pushups. The only
problems I have are with the running and sit and reach.

Quoted message said:

I have been running for about a year now and can run the 1.5 mi run in
about 12 min 30 sec. I need to get that down to around 11. As for
sit and reach, I can just reach my toes before I feel the tightness of
the muscles under my knees/thighs stopping me. I thought sit and
reach was supposed to be a measure of lower back muscle flexibility?
My legs seem to be stopping me from going any further.

Quoted message said:

Any ideas to speed up my run and improve my sit and reach? I just
started stretching recently as I didn't know it was a part of the
test. As for running, I'm not sure how to improve that - I seem to be
at some kind of plateau where I can't go any faster without running
out of breath.

Quoted message said:

Thanks.

Do sprints up moderate inclines; it's a proven technique of elite
athletes, helping them improve their best times. The key is to do
them on moderate inclines, but to give it your all for those ten or
fifteen seconds. Do a few reps (do runners call them "reps," too?),
with like a three minutes' rest in-between each. Incorporate them
into a weekly jogging routine. Assuming you have no other issues,
like morbid obesity, you should be able to shave off a whole minute,
if not more, off your time. Hopefully, you have a few months' time to
spare until the test!

Improving flexibility should be even easier. You should see results
within a month, no more than two months, of due diligence. Stretch
every day, and force yourself just a few centimeters more every other
day, and to hold for a few seconds more...as a bonus, improving
flexibility should also help with your run.

My suspicion is that you either haven't been trying hard enough, or
you have a health issue preventing your making more progress...are you
obese, for example, like most cops? While obesity in itself doesn't
mean you can't be flexible (look at Samo Hung) or fast (there was a
big old fat guy who used to post good results in the Death Valley
Marathon), it's often a factor in limited progress and performance
plateaus....

I'm not obese, but I was before I started training. I guess that
probably slowed down my progress. Thanks everyone for the very
informative tips - I'll give them a try.

PaW has some pretty good suggestions.

Regarding running, if you are a heel striker, meaning landing on the
heel and rolling to the forefoot, then you are overstriding. If you
check out www.chirunning.com or www.posetech.com you'll see that if you
march in place you land ball then heel. If you continue to march in
place and lean from the ankle, everytime you place a foot down you are a
few inches ahead as you are now using gravity to help you run.

I talk a little about heel strike is due to our fear of falling after an
early fall in childhood caused us to walk differently and that impacts
the way we run after that initial fall:
http://www.mindfulness.com/blog/mindful-running/?p=26

Both Pose and Chi talk about running at 180 steps/minute. You can
check out http://www.mindfulness.com/blog/mindful-running/?p=16 How to
make 180 steps/minute feel really slow.

PaW's training using slight uphill can also be used in reverse. To get
a faster leg turnover without tiring yourself too quickly you can use a
gradual downhill to learn to run faster using the downhill as a way of
coasting. The idea is to start down the hill slowly keeping your
cadence steady. The idea is you have only to put your feet down as the
hill is falling away. Keeping the same lean as you do on level ground,
you'll find that the added slope of the hill increases your speed. If
you keep the same cadence, every step is slightly longer due to the
diagonal being longer than the base of a rectangle.

The trick is to go down the hill slowly first keeping the same cadence.
That way you feel the power of the hill in helping you go down. If you
don't place your foot down quickly enough, you'll overstride and land on
the back of the heel of the shoe.

After several of these coasting runs down the gradual slope, you can
lean from the ankle a half degree more and you begin to use the slope of
the hill and the increased lean of the body to find that you can coast
down the hill faster.

Regarding the stretch and reach, the idea is that if you keep the body
erect or straight as you lean forward from the hips, what will be
stopping you from reaching further will be your hamstrings.

The best exercise for stretching the hamstrings will be to stop
slouching when you sit. The backward tilt of the pelvis not only
shortens the hamstrings, it also shortens the psoas. Sitting erect
while driving your car and sitting erect during your working day has a
great impact on your hamstrings. I talk about Improper Stretching :
http://www.mindfulness.com/mindful_running/articles/oi_article1.php

When you do a stretch think of your body as a jackknife and not a
U-bolt. As you lean forward and you hunch forward from the waist, the
pelvis tilt backwards and doesn't give the hamstring a good stretch when
you keep the body erect and lean forward as if the upper body is the
blade of a jack knife closing.

In health and on the run,

Ozzie Gontang
[email hidden]
Maintainer - rec.running FAQ
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/by-newsgroup/rec/rec.running.html
Director, San Diego Marathon Clinic, est. 1975

Mindful Running http://www.mindfulness.com/mr.html

Quoted message said:

I'm not obese, but I was before I started training. I guess that
probably slowed down my progress. Thanks everyone for the very
informative tips - I'll give them a try.