RunnerDude's Weekly Exericse: Prone Cobra

The core is the power source of your running. Within the core is the spine, the hub of life for the central nervous system. The prone cobra exercise below helps improve your ability to stabilize your spine. Spine stabilization is essential to any sport and running is no different. Not only does this simple but awesome exercise help with spine stabilization, it also works the entire core, including the lower back, your abdominal muscles and hip muscles. The upper-back between the shoulders also gets some action.

To do the exercise, lie facedown on a mat with your arms by your sides and your legs straight behind you. Next engage your glutes and lower back muscles to lift your legs off the floor while simultaneously lifting your head, chest, and both arms up off the mat toward the ceiling. Hold this position for a 3-count. Then relax as you return your legs, arms, chest, and head back to the mat. That's one rep. Continue 3-count lifts for 30 seconds.

For more exercises for runners, check out RunnerDude's new book 

Full-Body Fitness for Runners.

RunnerDude's Weekly Exercise: Med Ball Hamstring Leg Lifts

Hamstrings and Quads should be the "yin yang" of the body working together in harmony. The quads a little stronger than their posterior friend then hamstring. Hammies, however, give many a runner trouble, particularly on long runs.  Hamstrings aren't supposed to be as strong as quads, but many times runners, especially distance runners, have overy dominant quads. This is often the case in runners who heel strike. They're constantly loading the quad ready to pull their bodies forward due to the wider stride. This constant activation strengthens the quad but weakens the hamstrings. Sometimes the quad can get so out of balance that it can pull on the hamstrings causing them to become tight setting the runner up for injury. Or the hamstrings become weak, so when they are needed on a run, the may pull or cramp.

The best recommendation I have is to reign in the stride so the foot lands more under your center of mass. This decreases the quad activation, keeping everything in better alignment and letting the body work more like a shock absorber. You can also work to strengthen the hamstrings. The exercise below is a great one to do just that. This take on a simple hamstring leg lift uses a med ball as the base for the working leg. The med ball adds a balance element causing you to focus more on using the hamstring to lift the torso into a bridge. It's also a great core exercise.

To do the exercise, lie on a mat. Place your left foot on top of a medicine ball. Raise your right leg while keeping the left foot on the ball. Use the left leg to raise your body off the mat until your body is a straight line from your left knee to your shoulder, then lower your body until it almost touches the floor. That's one rep. Do 8-10 or 12-15 reps. Repeat the process with the right foot on the step and the left leg in the air.

RunnerDude's Weekly Exercise: Standing Dumbbell T-Raise

Muscular endurance in the upper back and deltoids is key to maintaining good upper-body running posture especially during a distance run like a half or full marathon.

To complete the exercise, stand tall while holding light dumbbells in front of your thighs, palms facing your thighs. Keeping your elbows locked, raise your arms in front of you until they're parallel with the floor. Keeping the dumbbells at this same level and your elbows locked, move your arms laterally until you've formed a T with your body. Next, bring the dumbbells back to the front of your torso, and slowly lower them back to the starting position. That's one rep.

Do 10-12 reps. Increase the intensity by doing 12-15 reps. Standing on a balance element such as a BOSU or balance disc also increases the intensity as well as recruits core and lower-body stabilizer muscles.

RunnerDude's Full-Body Fitness for Runners

It's a Bouncing Baby Book!

Writing a book, I've discovered, in many ways is not too unlike giving birth. There are months of anxiety, weight gain, moodiness, second-guessing. Your brain is rolling with questions like, "How am I going to afford this child?", "How will I know how to take care of this living being?", "Will I be a good parent?" Biggest difference was my gestation period was about 24 months instead of eight.

In the beginning stages of creating this book, I had similar thoughts. "What makes me think I can write a book?" "Will anyone want to read it.", "How am I going to publish it?" But like having a child, if you wait until you're ready, you'll never have it. So, I took the plunge and began the process a little over two years ago.

I spent several months creating the workouts and brainstorming the other sections of the book. If your luck is anything like mine, you're probably familiar with the the "Suck-it-Away-Syndrome. You know whenever you have extra money, something breaks down sucking up every bit of that money. Bonus Money! Woohoo! Air conditioner breaks down. Refund check! Woohoo! Transmission goes out. Never fails. So, a couple of years ago, when I ended up with some extra money, I decided to go ahead and do a photo shoot for all the exercises in the book, even though the book was yet to be written. I hooked up with an awesome photographer, Daniel Rice of Allez Photography. We spent an entire day shooting the exercise photos with two of my clients (Matthew Halip and Kristen Bowles) who graciously agreed to be my exercise models. Now, when looking through the book, it's hard to believe that those 100+ exercise photos were all taken in my (at the time) little 400sq.ft. studio—a testament to Daniel's talent. (The cover photography was done by another talented photographer Deno Kontoulas of 48 Layers Photography.)

After the photo shoot, business at RunnerDude's Fitness began to grow and so did my need for space. I remodeled a larger space in the complex where the original RunnerDude's Fitness Studio was located. Great for the business, but not great for having time to work on the book. So, it was shelved for a while. During this time, I was working with a pretty big publisher who was very interested in the book. An insider told me it was at the final executive-level of approval. Then I was informed that the publishing company had cleared house and the new head editor wasn't interested in publishing my book. I was disheartened to say the least. I submitted my proposal to several other big publishing houses who all liked the concept, but all declined. I talked with some of my author friends who all encouraged me to self-publish. The upside is I have more control of the book. The downside, I have to do all the hoofing to publicize the book.

I took the plunge and investigated all the self-publishing options and found CreateSpace to be the best option for my needs. Ironically around this same time, I got a press release from the publisher that was originally interested in my book announcing their new fitness book for runners. Looked very familiar. For a short time, I was livid. How dare they!  But after looking through their version, I realized that my book still had so much more to offer. So, I forged ahead.

One of the many things that Full-Body Fitness for Runners offers that "the other" book does not is contributions from some of running's greatest. Olympian Jeff Galloway provides great before-, during-, and after-running nutrition tips. Endurance runner Dean Karnazes, ChiRunning Founder Danny Dreyer, and international yoga expert Sage Rountree (among others) provide recipes for some of their favorite fueling and/or refueling snacks. Author, illustrator, and creator of the nationally syndicated comic Frazz and author of Trizophrenia: Inside the Minds of a Triathlete, Jef Mallett also wrote the foreword for the book. Their insight is an awesome addition to the book.

Another thing this book has is the behind-the-scene input of an  awesome editor, Iris Sutcliffe. Not only did she do a great job in the editing of the book, she was a wealth of valuable advice on many other aspects of the book. She provided a sounding board, another eye, a fresh focus. We worked our way through some formatting and document issues, but we prevailed. When it was time to approve the final proof for CreateSpace, I was a nervous wreck. The finality of it was a bit overwhelming. Not only because of the worry of missing a mistake, but also just the shear fact that all the work had come to an end. That feeling however was short-lived and soon replaced with the panic that now I have to sell the book. LOL! That's where you come in. I hope you'll take some time to check out the book at www.fullbodyfitness4runners.com. And, if you like it, tell your running buddies about it.

Providing over 90 exercises for runners, nutrition tips from Olympian Jeff Galloway, fueling recipes from experts such as endurance runner Dean Karnazes and ChiRunning founder Danny Dreyer, good running form tips, and more, Full-Body Fitness for Runners is a must-have resource for every runner. Three levels of workouts (Novice, Intermediate, Advanced) are divided into lower-body/core and upper-body/core circuits. Each circuit consists of 12 exercises designed to build muscular endurance to support your running helping you run longer, strong, faster, and with less injury.

Inside Full-Body Fitness for Runners you’ll find:

• Jeff Galloway’s before-, during-, and after-running nutrition tips
• Anatomy of a runner
• Five steps for getting started
• Acclimation and what to expect
• 10 tips for new runners
• Stretching
• How to complete the workouts
• Lower-Body/Core Workouts (Novice, Intermediate, Advanced)
• Upper-Body/Core Workouts (Novice, Intermediate, Advanced)
• Full-body exercises
• Additional core exercises
• Partner exercises
• How to fit the workouts into your week
• Good running form
• “Wise Choice” foods for runners
• Pre-, during-, and post-run snack ideas
• Recipes from the experts

I'm pretty sure that as in the case of our family when "maternity amnesia" kicked in paving the way for a second and third child, I too will have "book-creating amnesia" paving the way for another RunnerDude book for runners. Stay tuned.