No time to exercise? Why not organise a Running School Bus at your school?
It’s national Walk Safely to School Day today, so the kids and I decided to run to school, and we picked up a few of their friends along the way.
For a simple version of a Running School Bus, here’s what we did.
Organised for the kids to take their homework to school yesterday – yes, the thought of getting to run to school actually encouraged them to have their homework finished by Thursday, a whole day early
Organised a lunch order from the canteen-another good carrot
This meant we didn’t have to carry much with us this morning
Emailed parents of children in my kids’ classes yesterday, with where we were leaving from, the route we were taking, and approximately what time we’d be at certain land marks
Set out a few simple safety rules for the kids to follow
It was that simple.
This morning we had pockets full of mandarins, handballs and lunch orders, and I had to carry some soccer boots unexpectedly. I wasn’t really expecting to pick up anyone along the way as my email went out so last minute, but we ended up having seven kids running to school. They all loved it. I loved it, and I got in an 9km run before work. (and before you gasp at how mean I was making the children run that far, it was only 4.5k for them – I had to run back as well. )
Starting a Running Bus at Your School
My suggestion is to start off in a very informal manner, as I did today. You can always formalise it if interest grows
Plan to have the bus one day a month to start with, then you can increase the frequency if there’s demand. You want to make running to school a cool and exciting thing to do. Not something your kids dread every Friday!
Have a wet weather arrangement
Organinse for your kids to have everything at school they will need on the day of the Running Bus. You want to carry as little as possible
Check list for things to leave at school the day before the Running Bus
school bag
hat
lunch – order from the canteen
recess and fruit break-pack an extra piece of fruit and/or muesli bar in their bag the day before the run, or stuff them in their pockets on the day. Muesli bars are another exciting thing about running to school for my kids-they rarely darken my door!
any homework that’s due
any sports gear needed for that day. Carrying a smelly old pair of soccer boots whilst you’re running isn’t great!
Supervision
Ideally, you’ll have a bus driver and a “sweeper”. Someone at the front of the group and someone coming up behind the last kid. I managed on my own, but there were only seven sensible kids.
Set some simple rules for the kids to follow to keep them safe, and make sure the parents know it’s their responsibility to ensure the kids are aware of the rules. The rules I set out were:
No roads to be crossed unless an adult is present. This means the faster kids either have to wait on the corner of any cross streets, or (my preference) they run back towards the group and loop around the last kid on the bus. That way you can keep track of them a bit better.
No balls to be played with along the way – it’s too likely it will go on the road and they will chase after them.
Leave room on the footpath for other people.
Don’t exhaust the driver.
If the Running Bus becomes more formalised, and it’s promoted throughout the wider school community as a school activity, there will be lots of health and safety, duty of care and insurance issues to deal with, as well as working with children checks.
An official eight page Australian Government document has been put together by TravelSmart Australia, and can be found here. It’s covers every thing you could possibly want to know about organising a School Walking Bus, and would you believe it, the term School Walking Bus is actually trademarked?
Whatever happened to the good old days when pretty much everyone walked to school, with a good dose of running thrown in, and no parental supervision. Your mum asked the neighbour if their kids walked to school, the neighbour said yes, and they organised a time for you all to leave together!
If your kids love running, or you think they could if they were just given some expert encouragement, we’d love you to book them in for a FREE TRIAL at one of our sessions in Forestville, Frenchs Forest, or Lindfield.
We all know we need calcium for strong teeth and bones, but did you know that calcium is also needed for the life preserving functions of muscle contraction, (including the heart) blood clotting, nerve function and the release of certain hormones and enzymes?
Because calcium is necessary for the maintenance of life, it is leached from the bones if the amount in the blood in insufficient for these life preserving functions. You can still live without brittle bones, but you can’t live without a heart beat, so the body very cleverly prioritises the function that calcium is directed to. If there’s insufficient calcium circulating in the blood, the body takes it from it’s storage cells, the bones and teeth.
Calcium and Cola Drinks
As an aside, a highly acidic diet can cause calcium to be leached from the bones. Your body will act to maintain a blood pH of 7.4. If you have a highly acid diet, your body will draw down on stored mineral salts, including calcium, which act as a buffer to the acid and work to restore blood to a pH of 7.4. Lots of things can cause a drop in blood pH (ie a rise in acidity) including cola drinks. Therefore chronic use of cola (and to a lesser extent other soft drinks) can lead to brittle bones. And that includes the diet varieties as well! You can flush the acid away with water, but for every can of cola you drink, you’d need to take in 15-25 times that amount in water. (Then spend an awful lot of time in the loo).
Calcium and Muscle Function
Here’s the interesting bit for we exercise types. You should be sure to have enough calcium in your diet, and good gut health, to be able to contract your muscles.Below is a very abridged and simplified version of how calcium acts in skeletal muscle contraction.
The brain sends an electrical impulse to the muscle. A lot of biomechanical reactions need to take place for the message to get to the muscle safely, but, amazingly, in most cases it does.
After receiving the message, the muscle shortens. This action is explained by what is know as the sliding filament theory.
Within a muscle fibre, there are two different types of filaments, actin and myosin. These filaments are layered one on top of the other, as in the picture below.
When the right biochemical reactions take place, cross bridges form between the actin and myosin filamines, and the actin gets pulled by the myosin, so the two filaments are pulled closer together and the muscle shortens.
For all of this to happen, calcium is needed to “unlock” the active sites on the actin filament which the myosin attaches to. The myosin heads continue to reattach further and further along the actin, causing a more forceful contraction of the muscle.
The muscle stops contracting when the release of calcium ions stop. You need adequate magnesium for this, but that’s a biochemistry lesson for another day.
Suffice is to say, if you want to run fast, make sure you have enough calcium in your diet.
Use this scale to help your kids figure out their running pace.
We use this modified Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) at our Kids Running groups, to help kids run at a pace suited to their fitness level and the distance they’re covering.
If your kids are not used to running, they should start off at an “I can run like this all day” pace, and work up from there.
More experienced runners can use the scale to assess how they feel when they run, and how long they can last at each level. Then on race day, they’ll be able to keep to a realistic pace amongst all the excitement.
Download this printable graphic to help your kids run a great cross country race.
Running training which gets you breathing as hard as you can is what the scientists call VO2 max training. If you run fast, you breathe hard. If you run fast enough for long enough, you will be breathing as hard as you can.
Training at or above your VO2 max speed is hard work, but hugely beneficial if you want to get faster. In fact, I’d go so far as to say if you’re not including this type of training in your program at least once a fortnight (though better once a week), you’re not reaching your full potential (with the caveat that injury or current fitness level could prevent you from performing this type of training at various times throughout your running career).
VO2 max is the maximum rate at which your body can consume oxygen. It can be measured accurately in a gruelling laboratory test, and it can also be approximated by using submaximal tests.
VO2 max accounts for about 70% of the difference in performance between individual runners. The major contributing factors to a high VO2 max are:
1) the body’s ability to get oxygen pumping around the body- you need to be good at getting oxygen to where it needs to go, so having a strong heart, a high blood volume, lots of haemoglobin, and lots of capillaries and mitochondria in the muscles will help.
2) Speed – the ability to contract lots of muscle fibres at the same time – the more fibres contracting at the same time, the more oxygen is demanded
Both of these factors are determined largely by genetic makeup, but are also trainable. To be effective in increasing VO2 max, and therefore increasing your ability to run faster for longer, you need to breathe hard in training. Very hard.
When it comes to VO2 max training, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. That’s because oxygen consumption will climb at pretty much any intensity, the longer that consumption is sustained. Think about an interval training session where you run a series of 800’s and an intensity level of 6/10. Unless you are allowing yourself full recovery between each interval, your last few intervals will feel a hell of a lot harder than your first few.
So, there is a range of intensities you can train at to boost your VO2 max. The main thing to remember is the aim is to be breathing as hard as you can.
Because there is a range of intensities at which you can train your VO2 max, you don’t need to be super fit to train like this. Exercise physiologist Veronique Billat suggests 30/30 and 60/60 workouts for runners of low-medium fitness levels.
The Session
Warm up At least 10 minutes of easy jogging.
3-6 stride outs over about 100 meters, increasing your intensity up to about 6/10 for the last 20 metres
Body of Session Run 30 seconds hard. This should be the pace you could hold for about six minutes or racing. Then slow down to an easy jog for 30 seconds.
Continue to alternate the fast and slow 30 second intervals until you’ve done at least 12 of each (so a total of 12 minutes of running).
Build up your sessions so that you can sustain this for 20 minutes, ie 10 * 30 seconds hard, 10* 30 seconds easy.
You should be able to cover a similar distance on your last interval as you do on your first, if you’ve judged your pace well.
Once you can complete 10 of these 30/30 intervals, you can switch to 60/60.
Start with 6 * 60/60, and build up to 10 – so again, it will be 20 minutes of running in total.
Cool Down Finish up with at least a 10 minute slow jog, and stretching
At some time in their primary school career, your child will be expected to enter their school cross country. It can be a traumatic event for some kids, whilst others can’t wait till they’re old enough to get amongst it!
Make sure the experience is a great one for your kids, which will leave them wanting to do more. Use these tips on how to prepare for your school cross country.
Start to talk to them about the cross country in very general terms. Simply looking over the school calendar for the term and happening to notice when the cross country is on, is enough just to plant the seed initially.
Do some exercise yourself. Make exercise just something that your family does, not a big deal
Get your child familiar with the course of their school cross country. If you don’t know where they run, ask the school, or ask us. We know a lot of the courses used by local schools. Walk over the course with your child so that they know what to expect.
If you can’t go over the actual course, get your child to at least walk over the distance of the race. Don’t say something like, “it’s like running from here to the shops and back”. That can seem an awfully long way to kids. Much better to travel over the distance on foot with them.
If they are happy to do some training, go for a run with them, or get them running with friends. Try to get them to run slowly with you. Most kids will take off at the rate of knots and be puffed out after a couple of hundred metres. You don’t want this to happen on the day of the event. They will definitely go too fast at the start of their school cross country if they don’t practice running slowly before hand. Try to teach them ‘Jogging’ pace, or ‘No Puffing’ pace. They’ll still go too hard, but it should pull them back a bit.
Practice racing. Nothing makes you better at something than practice. Even if they don’t practice in a formal situation, get them racing against you or against their brothers and sisters, or friends. Remind them to slow down at the start so they have enough puff left at the end.
Whilst your child will feel great about themselves if they run the whole distance without stopping, try not to let them get so worked up about the event that they see themselves as a failure if they don’t make the distance.
Prepare them for what to do if they do feel too puffed to continue. Walking for even 20 metres can be just enough time to recover and pick up to a jogging pace again. Make sure they know this is ok.
Some kids take naturally to distance running, and absolutely love it from the start. If your kid’s one of those, here’s a few tips.
Go in fun runs with them
Time them doing laps around the local oval
Emphasise the fun aspect of running
Let them decide how much running they want to do. Don’t force them to train if they don’t want to, but do use gentle reminders and encouragement.
Practice cross country racing, even if in an informal setting.
Do some running with them, or organise for them to train with friends
Encourage your child not to be too outcome focused. Placing well in a cross country race is awesome, and your child should be proud of themselves. Remember to acknowledge the effort as well as the achievement though. At some point, every child, no matter how good they are, will be beaten, and if it’s been all about performance from the start, it can be terribly deflating, especially for those who are a bit fragile. Looking in the mirror and honestly being able to say you’ve done your best can go a long way to easing the disappointment
Awesome Kids Running Training Groups run on weekday afternoons on Sydney’s North Shore and Northern Beaches. Find out more
Cross Country Races run on Sundays in February and March. More info
Imagine if you could exercise for only 4 minutes, and receive the same health benefits as you would from spending hours in the gym, on a bike, running, swimming, jumping….Every few months there seems to be another headline promising health benefits from very short periods of exercise, so what’s it all about?
The exercise protocol is called High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), where you do short bursts of very intense exercise from anywhere between 1 and 4 times a week. HIIT increases insulin sensitivity and VO2 max (an indicator of cardiovascular health), and it really doesn’t take much time to do it at all. With HIIT your cardiovascular health will be better, your insulin sensitivity will improve reducing the risk of diabetes, so you’re likely to live longer.
Is it just me, or is there something weird about wanting to improve your health to live longer, so that you can sit around on your bum doing nothing?
Before we look at HIIT more closely, let’s take a look at some of the benefits of exercise.
Exercise can:
Improve your mental health by reducing anxiety and alleviating depression
Improve your balance (important as you age, if you can stay upright, you’re far less likely to facture a hip!)
Improve or maintain bone strength (after a certain age, you stop laying down bone, but exercising can help you keep more of what you have)
Improve insulin sensitivity, reducing the risk of diabetes
Improve your posture
Improve the range of movement of your joints, keeping you supple
Improve your musculo-skeletal strength
Improve you VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen you can take up in a minute, considered to be a good indicator of cardiovascular health
Satisfy a need for making and achieving goals
Improve self esteem
Be an outlet for letting off steam in a socially acceptable manner
Satisfy our desire for competition
Increase insulin sensitivity
Make you more able to perform your daily tasks such as hanging out the washing and carrying the shopping
The list is looking pretty long, and it’s certainly not exhaustive. Any three minute exercise regime which can cover all that lot has got to be something pretty special!
High Intensity Interval Training Protocols
HIIT is nothing new, however recent research on this type of exercise is showing some very interesting results, namely, it can improve cardiovascular fitness and increase insulin sensitivity more than some other forms of exercise can.
The Tabata Method
Japanese scientist Dr Izumi Tabata observed the Japanese speed skating team in the early nineties, and noticed that short bursts of brutally hard exercise seemed to be at least as effective as hours of moderate training.
Having spent some time myself in a sport which required this type of training, I certainly agree it was the shorter, harder interval training we did in the latter part of our season, which really sharpened our fitness, and cut down our body fat. We looked forward each year to reaping the benefits of this kind of training, but we didn’t relish having to leave our hearts in the bottom of a surfboat!
There’s no way we could have done this type of training without doing a lot of work to get our bodies ready to handle this. It was the long, less intense rows over winter which allowed us to do the high intensity interval training. Without the build up, the risk of injury would have been too high. Nor could we have had the boat moving as fast. You simply can’t develop efficiency in a sport (including running and speed skating) without spending a fair amount of time focusing on how you do it. So HIIT is great, but as a stand alone training regime, I don’t think it stacks up.
The experiment Tabata conducted took a group of moderately trained students who performed and hour of steady cardiovascular exercise on a stationary bike five times a week. Another group did a 10 minute warm up on the bike and followed with 4 minutes of 20 secs of really hard cycling and 10 seconds rest, four times a week, plus one 30 minute session of steady exercise with two minute intervals.
The results showed large differences in the anaerobic capacity and VO2 max of the two groups. (VO2 max is considered to be an indicator of cardiovascular health) The high intensity group increased their anaerobic capacity by 28%, and their VO2 max by 15%, whilst the control group, who trained for 5 hours each week improved their VO2 max by only 10%, and saw no increase in their anaerobic capacity.
The thing is, you wouldn’t actually expect the steady state group to improve their VO2 max much as they weren’t doing VO2 max specific training, nor training aimed at increasing their anaerobic capacity. It would have been interesting to compare the HIT group with a group who were doing traditional VO2 max training rather than an hour of slower paced riding.
Michael Mosley’s “The Truth About Exercise”
You may have seen the BBC documentary, “The Truth About Exercise”, which had presenter Michael Mosley doing one exercise session a week, within which he did 3 bouts of “all out, leave nothing in the tank” pedalling on a stationary bike for 20 secs, followed by a couple of mins recovery. Add to this, a warm up and a cool down. You can see a good description of the experiment here.
The most interesting result of Mosley’s training was that it greatly increased his insulin sensitivity. Another point made by the program was that his VO2 max, did not improve at all. The researchers said they could predict that as his genes showed that no matter how much exercise he did his “aerobic exercise was unlikely to improve to the same extent as someone whose genes resemble those of an Olympic gold medalist” (you’re kidding me).
Again, you wouldn’t expect this type of training to improve his VO2 max. I’d like to see them put Mosley through a program of specific VO2 max training, and see if he would respond.
So are the claims in the popular media too good to be true?
In a word, YES.
For a start, it’s not just four minutes of exercise, or three minutes, or whatever protocol it is that you’re following. You definitely need to spend some time warming up and cooling down and stretching, so your four minutes will stretch out to 15 -20 minutes pretty quickly.
For this type of exercise to be as effective as the research would suggest, you need to go hard, I mean really hard. Even though your total high intensity time is less than three minutes, it’s going to hurt, and a lot of people simply aren’t up for that. I could see myself doing it again if I was competing at a high level in a sport, but I’m not sure I’d like to do it again just for the fun of it.
You risk injury if you go hard at this type of training too soon. For maximum benefit you need to do some longer less intense stuff to build your body to a point where you can go very very hard.
You will get some benefits from HIIT by performing a less intense protocol such as that which Michael Mosley followed, and that has to be a good thing .
So what is the best type of exercise?
The best type of exercise is the exercise you will do, and I guess that’s what a lot of the hype surrounding HIT is about. From the point of view of public health, if people are attracted to exercising because they know that about 10 minutes a week can dramatically improve some aspects of their health, then that’s a good thing. If the alternative is sitting on a couch, for that ten minutes, then HIT is better than nothing. I just don’t get why you’d want to do that.
It gets back to finding something that you like. Could we start from the premise that people will like exercising, if only they find something they like, rather than assuming people don’t like to exercise? (and just quietly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that someone who leads a sedentary lifestyle doesn’t particularly like high intensity interval training, whether it be for four mins or four seconds-it’s not for everyone)
I love intense interval training, (though not extreme interval training any more) and I think that most people should be including some kind of more intense interval training in their overall weekly exercise program, but that won’t have you covered for all aspects of your fitness.
If you like to get out and run on your own to clear your head, do it.
If you like to swim, swim.
If you like to work out with other people, join a group.
If you’re training for a particular event and want to get the best out of your body, include a variety of different training methods, including interval training. Research the best types of training to achieve the results you want, or ask an expert.
Try something new, dancing, walking –and once a week find a hill and really go hard up and down it five or six times-, pole dancing, take up surfing. Think about the sorts of exercise you did as a kid. Find something that has similar aspects to the exercise you liked doing then.
To me, exercise is about enjoyment. Enjoying the process, the journey, not just the outcome. So, I’ll stick to my long slow runs, my long runs with a kick thrown in at the end, my resistance training, my high intensity training, my tempo runs.
No, I DON’T enjoy each and every bit of exercise I do, but I never fail to like how it makes me feel afterwards. How about you?
Train to breathe as hard as you can
Almond Lamb and Pumpkin Couscous
