If you enjoy running long distances, including marathon running, hitting the wall can be a very real and difficult part of running to overcome. Learning how to properly manage your food sources and your energy can help you to become a better, healthier runner.
Once of the first things you must learn to manage is your diet. Upon entering your stomach, carbohydrates are broken down for transfer to the small intestine, where these sugars change into their blood-traveling form known as glucose.
They then moved into your liver, which extracts all of the glucose possible. When it reaches about one hundred grams, it can feed your brain for up to four hours.
This leaves us with red blood cells-the remaining glucose molecules travel on through the bloodstream. Your muscles now use this to burn as fuel, so that you can be the best runner possible.
This is enough fuel for a couple hours of hard running, given the way the body eventually begins to burn primarily fat. When your liver and muscle stores max out at a combined five hundred grams of carbs, this extra will cause your hormones and your insulin levels to spike, causing all that leftover sugar to turn into fat-exactly what you are trying to avoid.
Research in the past has proved that carbs are a great energy source for those wishing to avoid hitting the wall. It does not matter how much training you do on your treadmill before the big race-if you are not fueled properly, you will run into a problem.
In the past, the most popular method of carbo-loading included a seven-day pre-event cycle. You went on a low-carbohydrate diet during the first three days to deplete glycogen stores, and during the final four, you got seventy percent of your food from carbohydrates.
This previous method increased muscle glycogen by as much as one hundred and fifty percent-this helps you to improve your endurance. Researchers eventually refined this method by eliminating the initial draining phase.
If you load up your body on carbs, you will avoid the muscle glycogen problem that comes from hitting the wall. Carbs are broken down and used very quickly, whereas fat is very difficult to break down and turn to fuel quickly enough.
In the past, professionals told runners to eat slow-burning carbs before racing. Fast-burning ones which are milled to a particulate size is the biggest reason that people gain weigh-if you are not running consistently, your insulin will spike, and your blood sugar will crash.
Sports beverages are another way to get what you need when it comes to avoiding hitting the wall. Sports drinks are essentially water with salts and electrolytes, which keep up osmotic pressure in your cells so that you do not become dehydrated.
They also include fructose and sucrose in as concentrated a form as the blood-depleted stomach can handle. Load up muscle glycogen the week before a race, load up liver glycogen the morning of, reload to spare muscle glycogen during the race.
When it comes time for the big day, one of the biggest rookie mistakes in racing is going out too fast in the beginning of the race. The quicker you burst out in the beginning, the more likely you are to crash later on.
If you go out too fast, you will burn through your stored energy too quickly and your muscles will fatigue faster, leaving you feeling tired and depleted toward the end of your race. Learn to pace yourself in your training, so that you can pace yourself better during your important race.
If you are running for longer than ninety minutes, the sugar in your blood and liver glycogen become more important, because your stored muscle glycogen gets depleted. Fueling with carbs during your marathon will prevent you from running out of energy and hitting the wall, while also boosting your performance.
If you are very careful to eat the right sources of carbs and protein before you begin, and you are very careful to maintain those levels while you eat, you will be much more likely to run a consistent race without feeling the pain and discomfort that comes from hitting the wall. You can become the best runner possible by learning to master these rules.
Author Resource:-
Jack Landry has authored hundreds of articles relating to in-home and continual fitness. He recommends thisTreadmill Review for reliable treadmill reviews.
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