- Morning Trainiacs.
Slightly large day today.
As I'm getting into the meat of challenge Roth training,
apparently full Iron Man distance training
is pretty sizable.
I've got like two hours 45 minutes,
on a weekday of training.
Good thing I barely even have a job.
Now early on, for probably the first three years
of doing triathlon, I battled cramps,
really, really hard cramps in the front of my quads,
in my stomach, in my calves, everywhere.
It was tough.
A lot of people, a lot of you,
as you start racing will experience the same thing.
Now here's the thing with this,
almost all of you are going to be told at some point
that it's a nutritional issue.
It is, but mostly it isn't.
So I am going to talk about the true reasons for cramping
in a race and training and how to overcome it today.
If I make it through the training.
(intense electronic music)
(jazzy electronic music)
Ermagerd.
When I first wrote that workout on the board I was like,
36 hundred meters, that ain't much.
Well, 36 hundred meters of one chamber filled
in the Eney Buoy pullboy and two chambers filled
in the Eney Buoy pullboy and vertical kick.
My legs hurt.
I can see why it was so short.
That was like, two minutes per hundred average.
But fortunately I didn't cramp
because I know the secret sauce to not cramping.
Let's talk about it.
So historically, we've all been told that cramps are due
to either dehydration or a lack of electrolytes.
That's not really the case.
If you can go and just accomplish a basic proficiency
of triathlon nutrition,
for which I would just recommend going
to triathlontaren.com/triathlonnutritionguide,
check, you're done.
It isn't that much more complicated than that.
I mean, sure there are like, find tuning,
final five or 10% little bits.
But that alone is going
to avoid almost all major causes of nutritional cramps.
But here's the strange thing, you might just accomplish
that solid nutrition plan and still get cramps.
So if it's not dehydration and it's not electrolytes,
what is the real serious cause of cramps
and how do you avoid it?
We gotta get into the pain cave to show you that.
You know, I once had a dream,
Taren if you ever own a company here are some rules for
that company, and number one on
that was only drink coffee or other drinks out of fun mugs.
That's a pretty fun mug.
Mission accomplished.
So if it's not the traditionally known lack
of electrolytes or fluids that cause cramps,
well what is it?
What they believe it is now, with current science,
is that it's your body's way of basically slowing you down.
So what's happening is you are getting yourself
into a intensity or duration of working out that is new
for your body, it's challenging for your body,
and your body is saying holy smokes, if he keeps going
or she keeps going, I'm gonna get injured here.
So cramping is your body's way of saying time
to shut down or I might get hurt.
But you're a long way away from getting hurt
so you've gotta get over those cramps
and get through it because you gotta get
to a finish line of a race.
So how you deal with that is one of two ways.
First, most straight forward, traditional way
that I would recommend is you gotta train for it.
This is not rocket science here.
If your body is not used to going race pace
or race duration, you gotta start training it
to go race pace and race duration.
So that's why you see me in here on days going really,
really intense with the shorter workouts.
That's why you see me in here doing three hour bike rides
with a bunch of race intensity
and then hoping onto the treadmill.
I'm doing this basically to get myself
into that final five to 10% of a workout
where it's like really fatiguing
and simulates the experiences, the sensations,
the fatigue that I'm going to have in a race.
You can't just kind of namby pamby your way around training
and then show up to race day and all of a sudden decide,
bam, I'm gonna hit it real hard here
because we race the way that we train.
So that's just not gonna happen.
You're gonna cramp, you're not gonna have a good experience.
However, there is one trick that I've found
that is kind of scientifically proven
to snap people out of cramps, if they start.
So how this idea that the lack of electrolytes
is the cause of cramping is due to the fact
that often people would do something like,
I don't have it here, but they would fill up a tube
of either their electrolyte powder or just straight salt,
take that tube, shake it, and lick their thumb,
get some of that salt on their thumb,
lick that, and it would solve the cramp.
So people were like, oh well,
it must be due to a lack of electrolytes.
But here, we end up having pickle juice come out
or things like organic Ginger Zinger
or something like a Hot Shot
or what I used fairly successfully in Puerto Rico, CrampFix.
Now these are all very, very salty
but they're all really, really strong tastes
and that is more what the secret sauce is.
It's not necessarily that you need to take in vinegar
or a bunch of salt or a bunch of electrolytes
or anything that like that that you've really messed up on.
What this is actually accomplishing is
it's resetting your neuromuscular system in the brain,
which basically just kind of gets itself into a lull of,
I'm in pain, I'm in pain, I'm in pain,
I'm in pain, I'm in pain.
And it starts going down this track of,
I gotta start shutting down, I gotta start shutting down.
This theory is that it reawakens the body
and when you have something like CrampFix,
that also adds in a whole bunch of electrolytes,
which we do actually sweat out, it replenishes some of that.
So what you wanna do to avoid cramps is first,
get your basics right
and go to triathlontaren.com/triathlonnutritionguide
to alleviate a lot of the nutritional deficiencies
that you might build up that might cause cramps.
Second, you wanna train pretty hard
in the last six to eight weeks.
In the last six to eight weeks before the race,
you wanna do a lot of race simulations.
You wanna do probably six or so race simulation days
where you're going as long, if not longer,
than your bike with a fair bit of race intensity
and running off of it at race intensity as well.
And then next, if you really wanna step it up
and give yourself like a lifeline,
if you start feeling cramps come in,
if you've tried something like CrampFix
in those race simulation days and you know that
it sits okay in your stomach,
maybe put this in your jersey pocket
and if you feel a cramp coming on in the race,
maybe towards the end of the bike or in the run,
pop one of these.
If you know that it works in training,
it's gonna work okay in the race.
Alright Trainiacs, go do all of that and avoid cramps.
Oh Petie's just so excited, oh boy.
Alright, later Trainiacs.