Think again of the Africans. They are doing aerobic training all the time as kids – and lots and lots of it. It’s the main reason why they’re beating most people when they become mature runners.
Kids have been running through the centuries. They mostly run barefooted so their feet develop properly and naturally. They’re not, in most cases, getting into these stupid running shoes with all the gimmicks wich lead to problems. Their bones aren’t set, of course, until they’re mature but as long as they’re running easily, no problems arise.
They’re not going to hurt themselves because running, as part of whatever they’re doing, is natural.
CHAPTER 4
DEVELOPING FITNESS
If we next want to add speed to our endurance, we move from basic running because we now need to use muscle groups against fast resistance, such as in isotonic exercises. We must also give them good rest periods, because the white fibres, the fast-twitch fibres which dictate our speed, lack myoglobin, a red pigment chemically related to the haemoglobin of the blood and probably important as a reserve store of oxygen and iron within the fibre or in the transport of oxygen and iron between cells. This pigment gives its name to the red fibres, which produce slow, powerful contractions and are not easily fatigued. Morehouse and Miller discovered that if the tendon of a red muscle was cut and then sewn to the tendon stump of a white muscle, forcing the red muscle to take over the white muscle’s function, its myoglobin content and resistance to fatigue gradually diminished, indicating that the appearance and endurance of a muscle are largely the results of the type of work it must perform.
If we’re going to develop muscle bulk through the red fibres, we can use weights and resistance exercises, progressively increasing the periods of exercise and the weights and resistance employed. The balance depends on the sporting activity in which we are involved and how we want to go about developing muscular efficiency, strength and power. But it must all be built on that solid foundation of endurance and stamina.
A lot of people sign on at gyms, pay the annual subscription and think, “Now, I’m going to be fit.“ Certainly, some of them are going to sweat a great deal and they will improve their muscular efficiency and strength and physique, but, unless they improve blood vascular efficiency, unless they raise their oxygen uptake levels, they are really not going to be as fit and healthy as they would be if they had climbed into a pair of shorts and running shoes or on to a bicycle, gone out into the fresh air and spent their time on steady aerobic exercise. It is a mistake to think that working out in a gym with weights and other activities is going to give you good cardiac efficiency.
During the 1974 Commonwealth Games in New Zealand, Drs McDonald and McLauchlan, who had a physiological testing laboratory in Wanganui, tested various athletes and came across an Asian weightlifter, who had a huge body and was extremely powerful but an oxygen uptake level that was less than one litre a minute. He was getting barely enough oxygen into his body to keep him alive, let alone healthy, despite his ability to momentarily lift huge weights. He faced the prospect that, unless he did something about it, he could be an early cardiac patient.
A properly fit high school boy or girl would have an uptake level of around four litres a minute, and it is common for top athletes in endurance sports to have an uptake level of around seven litres. Cross-country skiers would be highest because they use all their upper-body muscles as well as their legs against hard resistance.
The use of cyclo-ergometers, treadmills and running machines is becoming popular as a testing ground, but we would make the point here that they don’t always produce accurate results in the individual. Even some very good athletes, once they are wired up and wearing oxygen masks, perform poorly on these machines; they find themselves in an unnatural and uncomfortable environment and can be affected by claustrophobia. The air they are breathing is very dry because the humidity is low, the throat constricts, and the uppermost thought in the runner’s mind is to get the darn mask off, instead of concentrating on running with freedom, particularly when the technician is demanding faster and faster responses.
The researchers, allowing for margins of error, can get significant information from testing programmes but, for the individual, the best way to test for personal fitness levels, quite simply, is to run. Cover a measured distance on a fairly regular basis and you soon will establish a pattern of time and effort that gives a good indication of progress. After-run pulse checks at, say, 30-second or minute intervals will quickly chart whether your recovery rate is improving.
Heart monitors which record as you run are also enjoying a vogue in this age of gimmickry but there is an inherent risk in setting yourself to run consistently at a certain heart rate. Your condition changes day by day, so do the climatic factors, so you could force yourself too much in following the dictates of a piece of equipment. How you run should be governed by how you feel on the day and by the simple catch phrase I invented years ago, “Train, don’t strain.“
We all know during conditioning when we are going too fast and getting beyond our limitations and that’s when we should ease back. For instance, if you are recovering from a previous run and then go out on an extremely hot day or in severely cold or windy conditions and try to keep pace with the inflexible requirements of a monitoring system, you could find yourself straining – and not training. You could push yourself into anaerobic running and that is undesirable on top of a previous day’s hard work, particularly when you are in a conditioning stage of your development.
The Americans work to a different catch-phrase which is totally wrong – “No gain without pain“ or “No pain, no gain.“ That is not the way to train for steady improvement and it’s one of the reasons why a nation like America, 250 million people capable of producing millions of runners, doesn’t succeed particularly well in Olympic and other international endurance events. They could dominate if they stopped applying so much pressure on their athletes from school age onwards.
Some years after jogging began in New Zealand and William J. Bowerman, the University of Oregon track coach, took it home from here, the American physiologist Dr Kenneth Cooper set up an aerobic testing system in which you ran for twelve minutes and then, according to your age, were given a certain fitness grading. But age doesn’t enter into it. Many fit people in their sixties and seventies would leave a majority of university students behind in a running race. And plenty of evidence exists of people in their twenties and thirties who have collapsed and died, while running, from undetected cardiac disorders.
You cannot classify anyone by age. The fit and the unfit are there in all age groups.
Other factors must be considered when fitness testing. Fat-free body weight is an important one because running requires about 1.7 ml of oxygen per metre for every kilogram of fat-free body weight. So, when we run a mixed bag of people for twelve minutes, without taking that factor into consideration, a lot of the light, skinny runners are going to run farther yet, fundamentally, they may be no fitter then the heavier runners they are leaving behind. They could even be considerably less fit.
So the Cooper test wasn’t accurate in that context, and I believe he deleted the age factor later and used other parameters.
Psychological reaction is another factor. The big runners in fun runs, particularly those over hilly courses, where you have to use more calories and need more oxygen than in level road running, will be mentally deflated when they are beaten by lighter runners, not appreciating that it isn’t an indication that they’re not as fit.
The most valuable way to test your fitness level initially is against yourself, by checking your progress
