Keep your brain connected to your body..

One thing I have been practicing this past year is learning how to listen to my body.  Truly knowing the signs and signals of your body can be an incredible asset to any athlete.

As a personal trainer I am one-on-one with clients, always hands on, observing and communicating.  Most of the time I can recognize visual cues of when a skill or set is too easy or too difficult for a client and sometimes it may come verbally from the participant.  There are many things I do as a trainer and coach; I instruct, motivate, educate, demand and correct to name a few, but one thing I am not capeable of doing is knowing exactly how an exercise feels to another person.  For example, I can do a swim set of 10 x 100 on 1:20 and have an athlete do 10 x 100 on 1:20 but that doesn’t mean we experience the same thing.  Same yardage, same stroke, same interval, but I can almost guarantee that it did not feel exactly the same for both of us even if we were the same caliber athlete.

What is my point?

Try to keep your brain connected to your body during a workout.  Know what it feels like when you are pushing on a tempo run, and how different it feels when you are doing a longer endurance run.  Each different workout should have a distinctive feel and it is important to be aware of these diversities during training.  Most likely your mind will be racing with questions and analyzing your performance during a race so if you know your limitations, weaknesses, and strengths during training it may help calm the anxious mind while racing.

Using a heart rate monitor can also be a great way to keep your mind connected to your workout.   Knowing your target heart rate ranges and using heart rate based training is great for optimizing your workouts, and I also think it is good to know how your body feels at certain heart rates.

I think one of the most important things I have learned from my body’s signals recently has been about injury.  After running the Columbus Marathon I spent a lot of time thinking about what went wrong.  One thing I kept coming back to was that I was too stubborn to listen to my body and give it what it needed.  Unfortunately I think this is a very common occurance among athletes.  How many times have you felt a twinge somewhere, ignored it, and a few weeks later been sidelined by injury?  Did you find yourself thinking, what if I had paid more attention to this earlier?  I know I have.  Assess yourself head to toe.  What do your muscles, and joints feel like?  If there is something that doesn’t feel right do something about it right away.  Prevention is the best medicine.  Hamstrings will not stretch out on their own.  Weak shoulders will not magically strengthen overnight.  Know when to back off, or rest more when you are exhausted.

Coaches can do many things, but one thing we cannot do is get inside your mind.  Open communication with your coach is also key.  He or she will tell you how you should feel during a certain workout but you are the only one who actually knows how it does feel.

A word of warning:  I do think it is entirely possible to be too analytical when trying to listen to the body.  There are definitely times to listen and times to relax and enjoy.  Part of what I love about endurance sport is the escape I get while training.  If I were constantly analyzing and questioning I don’t think I would enjoy it as much.  My advice?  Try to find a happy medium between the blissful unawareness and the obsessive mind body actualization.

Nikki Ditsch