METABOLIC FITNESS Avoid the numbers on your bathroom scale and pay attention, instead, to the numbers that mean the most: your cholesterol, your blood pressure and your insulin sensitivity. Those numbers reflect metabolic fitness. Metabolism includes all of your body’s energy activities, the chemical reactions and processes that occur every second of your life to…

You Can Be Fat AND Fit   ARE YOU A GREYHOUND OR A ST. BERNARD? If you have always been a little fat, yet you’ve cared for the three basic aspects of your health – physical, emotional/mental, and metabolic – then consider your specific biological makeup, your inherited genetics, and your individual physiology. Our genetic…

You don’t have to be thin to be healthy. You don’t have to be thin to be fit. You don’t have to be thin. If your genetic heritage, body type, and metabolism make you susceptible to gaining weight very easily, don’t feel bad. You could be one of evolution’s triumphs, successes. In prehistoric times, the…

Recovery period is one of the least understood and appreciated parts of the training tree, yet it is a critical part of your training phases or periods. The recovery period does not consist of “junk workouts” or time just spent in a low zone. Rather, it is a period in your annual training schedule when it is…

Racing is a very tenacious branch. It’s as much psychological as it is physical. The demands are arduous because it requires constant testing, usually against other athletes as well as against your own goals and that great truth-teller – the clock. It requires constant recuperation and resting, too. I’ve been asked more times than I can…

This period of training is a favorite for many athletes. The peaking phase is the time when you put all of the other branches together into one: endurance, strength, and intervals. It is the variety branch. It is the time when you are incredibly fit and loving it. It’s the time when you get to…

If you want to race fast, train fast and train strong. This is the phase that builds upon the lower three branches by adding your first Red Line workouts with short or endurance intervals. It’s the branch where you start time trials at specific heart rate points to test improvement. It’s the period of seeing…