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Showing posts from March, 2015

Stress, Sleep, and Training

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Add Training To This Sign! Do you have a busy training and race schedule and have a job that requires long hours with lots of stress?   If you answered yes then you are not alone because many other people are in the same boat.   If you are driven to succeed then you probably work long hours and really hate to miss any of your scheduled workouts.   Most highly driven people are very driven to succeed with their training as well. Many times they overload their schedules with races that are probably more than they should take on given their work and family lifestyle. Let’s talk about how stress and lack of sleep can negatively affect your body.   Stress can cause many problems and each problem can in turn cause another problem.   Everything can pile up and at some point the body can’t handle it anymore and it begins to breakdown.   Stress causes an increase in a hormone in the body called cortisol.   Cortisol is a hormone that you need in small amounts, but in excess it can

Drink Up For A Longer Life

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Without water we would die and our body is made up of water more than anything else.   Sometimes I feel like a broken record telling my clients to drink more water.   I can’t stress the importance of drinking more water.   It is such a simple concept that has huge benefits!   I am going to name just some of the benefits of drinking more water.   Some of them are well known but I will also talk about some of the benefits that you probably didn’t know about. Some benefits of drinking water that are well known to most people are: Keeps skin looking healthy   Improves energy   Improve bowl function Improve kidney function Control appetite Prevent headaches Helps with fat loss Helps with weight loss Improve metabolism Some less known benefits:   Energize and build muscles - when muscle cells don’t have enough fluids they can become fatigued. If you are well hydrated it will take longer for them to become fatigued and you can work harder to build muscle. B

Master The Swim

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Often times people come to be a few months before a race and want help with their swim.  Sadly at this point in many cases its too late.  Once you become a more efficient swimming in the pool you still need to learn to swim in open water.  All of this takes time and depending on what level you are starting at this could take a significant amount of time.  Many times I have people who can't swim ask me how many lessons it will take before they can swim.  I cringe when I hear that question because there is no right answer and everyone learns at different rates.  It also depends on how much practice they want to do on their own.  The more you can get in the water the faster you will learn and the more comfortable you will become in the water.  Even at an elite level this holds true.  I recently added one more day of swimming each week to my schedule and I had my best performance in an Ironman swim.  I went from swimming 3 days a week to 4 days a week adding about 4000 meters each wee