Listening to your body

Most coaches and sage advisors will tell you to ‘listen to your body’.  It seems, on the surface, like good advice.  Is it really? How do you listen to your body?  How do you listen to the things that are important and use them to make changes that you will benefit from?  How do you sort the signal from the noise?

Like so much of the advice old-timers like me dish out the ‘listen to your body’ trope is vague enough to mean almost anything.  It’s very nonspecific.  Specifically, what we mean is that you need to pay attention to all the signals you can get from your body.  Your brain is the control tower.

Think of it as a big room filled with PhD’s pouring over big, blinking monitors with data streaming past.  That’s your role as CEO of this body.  You are going to watch the data feeds and then perform analytics on them to see if you need to take corrective actions.

There are two main categories of ‘listening’ that we are referring to, active listening, which is during the act of training or racing.  And passive listening which is when you’re not actively working out or racing.

When you are actively training, ‘listening to your body’ means paying attention to how you feel.  What are your energy levels?  What is your mental energy and mental state?  When you hit a hard workout what fails first?  Your legs?  Your breathing?  Or your mental energy?

This is a mental check list.  As you enter and perform that workout you want to periodically, mentally note down the answers to these questions.  Especially at the failure points.  What is failing first?  Because this first thing to fail is going to be your weak link and that is an opportunity for focusing your training.

You have a mental checklist for racing as well.  How do I feel right now?  How is my breathing?  How are my legs.  Does anything feel like it’s close to the edge?  This will allow you to compensate mid-race and adjust to the feedback.

In between races and training you are still monitoring the data that your body is sending.  What aches or hurts from yesterday’s workout?  How tired do I feel today?  Are there any pains or hot spots I need to look into?  Are my legs fatigued when I climb the stairs?

These days you have actual, hard, captured physiological data to work with.  Your running watch or app will give you pace, time, elevation and hopefully heart rate.  If you are disciplined, you can add to this with basic nutritional and health data.  Try to capture and log your weight, body fat %, number hours of sleep and resting pulse every morning when you get up.

All of these things over time will give you a baseline.  This is your starting point, or reference point that you can then compare the data you capture to.  Without any data, without any baseline, you are essentially guessing.  Without data you will have a hard time attributing to cause.

Let’s imagine you go out for a run one day.  You feel terrible and have to walk back to the barn in shame.  What happened?  Unless you have some data you won’t know.  Why do you care?  Because if you can diagnose the problem you can take corrective action.

In our example you might say “Gee, that run sucked, but I’ll just run harder tomorrow to make up for it.”  There’s no way to know if that is a good or bad idea.  Instead, let’s say I didn’t get enough sleep and woke up with a high heart rate.  I would be on the lookout that I might be getting sick.  Resting heart rate is a great indicator for when you’ve got a cold coming on. Then we might decide that hitting it hard the next day is a bad idea.

Some of this data isn’t directly measurable.  For softer things, like how much energy do you have, you can create a 1-5 or 1-10 scale to track relative measurements.  What you’re looking for is difference.  What’s changed?  Is something better or worse.  Then you can backtrack to see what you did differently that might have caused that.

For example, just last week my knees were achy.  My knees have never been achy.  What had I been doing differently?  I had been doing a very aggressive quad stretch every day.  Problem solved.

You also have to be on the watch for phantom pain.  It takes some experience to be able to tease out what ache might be a potential injury or just a phantom ache.  Especially during taper weeks or unplanned down time.  One of the advantages of being a good listener, practicing listening is it gives you the ability to separate the signal from the noise.

That’s the tactical bit when we tell you to listen to your body.  We mean collect as much relevant data as you can, so you have a baseline, do basic cause and effect analytics and potentially influence the actions you take as a result.  Measure – Analyze – Act.

That’s not all that we mean.  The deeper meaning of listening to your body is not about measuring it is about cultivating the ability to listen.

Ohhh – now we’re getting deep.

One of the most powerful things you can do as an athlete is develop a deep mind-body connection.  This comes with practice.  This requires some focus.  And the focus requires silence.

As much fun as it is to have a podcast playing while you’re working out that extra noise in your head, especially when added to the noise already in your head, makes it hard to pay attention to what your body is telling you.

Part of your training should be to spend some time really focused on how your body feels during workout and racing.  Don’t try to avoid the effort, become an observer of the effort.

That takes a similar but different mental checklist.  What I would recommend is similar to a mediation technique where you simply and mindfully take inventory.  Start with the toes and work your way up through the head.  Pausing to listen and feel what your body is saying.

Then listen to your breathing. Feel your heart working in your chest.  Feel your feet grabbing the trail.  Don’t just listen, immerse yourself in the sensory wash of your workout.

What you’ll find is you stop fighting it.  You integrate your mind and your body into one process. You can observe the cause and the effect of your efforts.  You become comfortable with the feedback.

By the way, if you’ve ever experienced ‘flow state’ or ‘the runner’s high’, or want to, this type of practice will help you get there.

So, my friends, go find a quiet trail.  Ditch all the electronics.  And spend some time listening to your body and celebrating the mind-body connection.