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Stuff About Feeling Yucky Before a Workout...

Thursday, 05 November 2015 00:10

By Brad Sulberg (triathlon.competitor.com)

Have you ever felt like crap prior to—and perhaps even during the warm-up of—a big workout or race only to have an incredible performance? If so, you’re in good company.

“I’ve undergone this many times,” says Dr. Michael Joyner, a world-renowned physician and physiologist at the Mayo Clinic who ran a 2:25 marathon during his prime. “Sometimes you start off feeling like wood and by the end of the workout you feel great.” Joyner speculates the occasional disconnect between how a runner feels before and during a workout is related to muscle temperature and the time it takes various energy systems to ramp up. However, there is no real data on the phenomenon and nothing explains its “completely unpredictable nature,” he says. “It’s a really mysterious thing.”...

If how we are feeling before a workout or race does not consistently correlate with performance, what we are thinking almost always does. “You can definitely limit yourself by thinking, ‘I’m not going to do well,’ or ‘today just isn’t my day,’” says Dr. Michael Sachs, a professor of exercise and sports psychology at the University of Temple and author of The Psychology of Running. With these negative thoughts swirling around in our mind, “we are less likely to take constructive risks and we subconsciously hold ourselves back.”

Therein lies a common trap for runners: you don’t feel so great before a workout or race, so you tell yourself you aren’t going to do well and sure enough, you don’t do well. You blame your body and search for physiological issues when in fact all your body needed was a little more time to warm up. The real problem was your mind. READ MORE