A Part of Hearst Digital Media. You've earned this sweat. Allow yourself this moment to revel in the completion of a long hard day, but remember your workout isn't over. Though a trackside nap may seem inviting, you take a swig of your drink, put on your sweats and trot off on a 20-minute cool-down.
My hat's off to you. You're doing a heck of a job. And yet, if that jog is all you do after a race or hard workout, you're not cooling down sufficiently.
"A jog certainly satisfies the general flushing of the body," says Justin Whittaker, D.C., therapist of choice to Shalane Flanagan, Paula Radcliffe, Kara Goucher and others. "But after certain workouts you'll end up with residuals that a jog can't necessarily clear out. And they will spill into the next day and the next day, until you have layers and layers of adhesions and muscles that can't recover, and that's when you get an injury cycle."
Your old routine isn't a bad one. It just needs tweaking.
HIGH KNEE SKIPS?
During a hard effort your system completely reprioritizes, directing nearly all available resources toward getting you wherever you need to go. Your body is well equipped for the job and, with a little warning in the way of a warm-up, a host of adaptive mechanisms and hormones help send oxygen-rich blood cells to fuel the muscles that need them and to whisk away metabolic by-products that threaten to flood the whole system.
Just as your warm-up ideally initiates a continuum of effort from inactivity to a high level of work, the purpose of the cool-down is to bring your body back to a resting state as efficiently as possible. Doing so prompts quick and complete recovery in preparation for the next hard effort. Slowing your heart rate gently and continuously gives your veins time to constrict and your blood pressure time to drop, preventing "pooling" of blood in the extremities. While your cool-down should be easy enough that you won't create much additional waste, your heart rate will stay sufficiently raised to send the healing and recovering effect of your circulatory system into double time. Blood clears out metabolic waste and hormones while proteins and white blood cells begin healing microtears in the muscles.
WHAT'S A GOOD COOL-DOWN?
Sally Kipyego was a nine-time NCAA champion while at Texas Tech and the Kenyan indoor 5,000m record-holder. Before she came to the U.S., she nurtured her talent at the Kapcherop training camp in Kenya's Rift Valley. She describes a typical hard training session at the camp this way: "Before we ran, yes, we did little stretches, but just informally. Then we set off so slow, so you could walk with us, and got faster and faster until the end, when we were really breathing. Maybe it was 40 minutes all together, maybe more." She bats a hand, used to my typically American questions of how much and how far and how fast.
"Then we waited for everyone to finish and we made a big circle," she continues. "The coaches would be watching and they chose one girl to call things out for everyone to do together. It was hopping and pushing off your toes and bouncing quickly off the ground." Kipyego demonstrates, letting her thin arms fall where they may. "We had to stay on our toes the whole time, moving from one exercise to the next with no stopping. For 20 minutes, never stopping. It was not so technical, like here. It was just doing it. Twenty minutes of moving, and then 20 minutes of stretching, from our necks to our ankles." She rolls her neck from shoulder to shoulder. "I know it was always 40 minutes."
Kipyego doesn't know why they did them, or whether she did them quite right, or where they came from in the first place. She does know that every day, after her 10 a.m. practice, she circled up with 60 of the fastest girls in Kenya and did 20 minutes of hopping and 20 minutes of stretching.
While Kipyego may have tapped into an ideal training regimen, it's unlikely you'll be able to tack on 40 minutes a day to your runs. You also probably won't be running three times a day, or spending every moment between runs asleep on the couch. You can still learn a thing or two from her, though.
Thankfully, we have Whittaker here to tell us just what that is. The typical American cool-down is lacking, he says, because it relies so heavily on a single small-ranging movement. While our workouts stress a variety of muscles and joints, our cool-downs flush only the muscles that are stimulated at a jog.
"Running a cool-down helps, but your range of motion in running is not generally going to be big enough to knock down the tension," he says. "Invariably, if you don't flush out the areas that aren't worked on a jog by targeting them through specific drills, they inherently adhere together. Then, you come to your next workout without access to the whole muscle, and you can leave the workout injured, and not know why. In doing specific drills for a muscle group, you're moving in such a way as to pull the fibers apart. You're combing though them."
In Kipyego's Kenyan program, she and her compatriots were taken through such a range of dynamic and wide movements that none of those typically neglected muscles were untouched. Not only were those sessions workouts in their own right, and a flexibility routine, but they were an incredibly effective exercise in self-therapy.
Now that she's training with the Oregon Track Club, her routine is different, but the objectives are similar. "It's more specific," she says. "It's shorter and harder. Coach [Mark Rowland] will be watching me and reminding me and showing me whatever is wrong when I start to get tired." Kipyego and her teammates meet twice a week with Rowland for an intensive session of drills. The runners take turns, moving two at a time down the track as Rowland shouts out corrections and occasionally pulls an athlete to the side for a demonstration. "It works," says Kipyego. "It is not pleasant, not pleasant at all, but after a while you can feel it working."
"You can accomplish so much in a fraction of the time you invest in your actual run," says Whittaker. "You can break up a compensatory shuffle, create a little more kinesthetic awareness. You can wake up those muscles and reset muscular firing patterns. And there's research that a positive stress to a muscle promotes recovery as well as tissue building.
"You can either learn the hard way, wait for someone to physically flush out your legs, or you can do a few little drills post-workout to separate them. It's such an easy 10 minutes to spend to set yourself up for success. Why wouldn't you?"
THE KENYAN COOL-DOWN
Sally Kipyego's description of her post-workout routine at the Kapcherop Training Camp in Kenya.
Do each exercise from 10-30 seconds, varying the length of time and order as you go. Cycle through continuously for 20 minutes. (Start with something more reasonable, like five minutes.) Concentrate on keeping light, active feet, a tight core and loose limbs.
JUMPING JACKS: Your old routine isnt a bad one. It just needs tweaking.
HIGH KNEE HILL SPRINTS: Running in the Cold.
Spend as little time on the ground as possible: Keep your knees locked and shuffle forward in a scissor kick.
HIGH KNEE SKIPS: Try to bring your knee close to your chest.
WHY COOL DOWN: Concentrate on your leg turnover rather than your speed up the hill.
BUTT KICKS: Raise your heel to your butt while bringing your thighs in front of you, parallel to the ground.
QUICK FEET: Cycle your feet as though on tiny wheels, aiming for minimal ground contact.
THE OREGON TRACK CLUB COOL-DOWN
Here's one example of Sally Kipyego's post-workout routine with the Oregon Track Club
Do each drill for 30 meters and walk back to the start between them. Cycle through the set twice. As you advance, try combining two drills at a time, continuing from one to the other for a total of 60 meters, or moving directly from drill to stride. Aim to land on the ball of your foot and dorsiflex between contacts.
PSOAS STRETCH: Stand tall with your hands on your hips and your tailbone tucked. Take a wide lunge step, maintaining a tight core and hold for a second. Keeping your hips facing forward, twist at the waist to the right and then to the left, and then step forward. Alternate legs continuously.
HIGH KNEE HILL SPRINTS: Standing tall, lift your right knee toward your chest as you go up on the toe of your left foot. Use your hands to pull your knee in a few extra degrees, being careful to keep the knee in line with your shoulder, angling it neither in nor out. Release the knee and step forward. Alternate legs continuously.
Ask the Coaches: Foamy Sweat: Jog forward slowly with an energetic bounce and exaggerated knee lift. Take very small steps and aim for quick ground contact.
HIGH SKIPS: Skip forward forcefully, aiming for height, a high knee, and a straight back leg. Use your arms and be sure to direct most of your movement up, rather than forward.
Raise your heel to your butt while bringing your thighs in front of you, parallel to the ground: Keep your core tight and your legs straight, scissoring them forward in a quick shuffle. Aim for strong feet and quick ground contact.
Nutrition - Weight Loss.
Julia Lucas is a retired professional runner with a personal 5,000 meter best of 15:08, and she’s writer and a coach in New York City, currently at work on her first book.
