Ansku Kangas - Skill based Running Coaching

If you aren’t training on single leg, you aren’t improving single leg strength.

While bilateral strength is not directly transferable to unilateral strength, it does work the other way around.
If you only work on single leg strength for a while, you are also very likely to improve your bilateral strength BUT also be able to narrow down some side differences and strength deficits !!

While the bilateral BIG lifts definately do have their place f.ex. just because the amount of core work you get by just placing a heavy barbell on your shoulders is something you don’t get from any other movements (Yes, that’s the main role of our core = to stabilize our spine and keeping our middsection rigid while f.ex. running, not crunching), it should not end there if your sport requires you to perform on single leg. (Or if you just want to be a healthy human who’s hips don’t wobble while walking 😙).

I do loads of different single leg movements and I program loads of them for my athletes. There is no one ”best movement for runners” or for a practitioner of different sports. If there was a ”best”, that would be best for a certain body, with ability level x and with needs x. So I am not going to say that ”This is the best single leg exercise that all runners should do! Because no, I would propably not make many people start here, but this is an Excellent exercise if you want to challenge you single leg ability a little further
AND ‼️
Work on hip adduction strength a.k.a your adductors (inside leg stuff) that rarely get the attention they would deserve!

Adductors or beeing strong in hip adduction plays a role in stabilizing the hips. So if your hips wobble, it would make sense to not only focus on the outer hips, but also the inner hips or legs.

You might think that these elevated courtseys hit the outer hips, but I can ensure you that it is your groin area that will feel this the day after 😁

Try it out or share with another runner! 🙌☺️

What is your super power?

Mine is that I know how to control my breath 🙌😤

💠Through controlling my breath I can control my mind.
💠When my mind tells me that I can’t, I can calm it down and get to believe that I can.
💠 When I am stressed out, I can bring myself back to the state of calmness.
💠 When I am holding unneccessary tension in my body, I can shake it off through breath.
💠 While training, I can postpone fatigue by just focusing on my breath.
💠 I don’t need to run more in order to get better, because I can make a better use of my training hours by every single training teaching my body something new;
🔹 To better tolerate the lactic acid build up in my body and to take a better use of the oxygen I inhale.
These things can be taught and they will have a far bigger impact on your performance than the hours you spend doing the same stuff.

The funniest things about it is that it’s free and still no one is buying it. They buy expensive heart rate monitors instead.

But the difference between those two is that my breath is fully under my control but my heart rate is only just the end result of the things that are going on in my body.
And even funnier; knowing how to control my breath, I would learn how to control those Numbers on the monitor. But it would never work the other way around.

The things that would have the biggest impact on our Health are cheap and simple, but no one is buying them because we like to think that our Health can be outsourced;
• By buying the best heart rate monitor on the market
• By buying a massage so that we could de-stress
• By going to the doctor when we have a headache, so that she would make it go away
• By buying a better chair, so that we could sit all day without our backs getting sore

The list could go on, but the point is that you already have the super powers that could make you feel better, it’s just a matter of starting to use them 😊

Are you breathing? I mean reeaally BREATHING? 😤

Research shows that 80% of people only use 30% of their lung capacity. Many people only use the top of their lungs through chest breathing without realizing.
The lower part of the lungs has almost ten times more blood vessels than the upper part. The ability of the body to absorb oxygen from the air is therefore much larger if, through abdominal breathing, the entire lung is used.

Next time you think: ” I could have gone longer, but my muscles fatigued” or ”My performance was bad because I hadn’t eaten enough” think again. Your muscles fatigue when your lungs don’t pump enough oxygenated blood into your system, they don’t have anything to run on, you feel this as a fatigue.

Learning how to control your breathe is in such a significant role what it comes to improving your sport performance that it’s quite shocking how little people pay attention to it! 😳

Today I played with one of my favorite breath controlled intervals: 400m laps with the focus on going as fast as I possibly could with nasal breathing only. I did a total of 10 laps and the only lap where I didn’t feel in total control of my run was the one where I didn’t focus on breathing at my full capacity. My legs started feeling tired, my mind started playing tricks with me: ”I don’t know if I can do the last laps.” There is nasal breathing and then there is 😤- breathing 😝

As soon as I took back control over my breathing, I wasn’t just breathing, but BREATHING 🌬🌬 I gained back control of my body and my selftalk. Invest in learning more about your breathing and you will wonder ”why did you not know all that from kindergarten?”

Following up on my yesterday’s post over Hip Extension:
For your hips to be able to extend, they need to rotate first!

In running, you see legs swinging back and forth, but you don’t see rotation. This might lead you into thinking that I need to stretch the hip flexors and the hamstrings, those ranges I can see...that’s the traditional way how recreational runners are taught to do, right?

But underneath that all is the fact that if your hip joint cannot rotate, you will run out of space for hip extension and flexion. It is kind of as if the joint was screwed on so tightly that it couldn’t move freely.

So never forget to work on your hip rotation Mobility! The faster you want to go, the more freedom of movement you need to have in your hips! 😊👍

Warming up with hip rotations before my sprints here...the bench was an inch too High though 😅 (This is not how you expand ranges though. If you need help in that, let me know!)

”Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

- Albert Einstein

Running at its best is a rhytmic movement that connects your mind to each step through your breath. But why is it not practiced as such?

Running training at the top level takes into consideration all aspects that make up a good runner whereas at the ground level that’s usually not the case. At the ground level running is simplified to heart rate zones and gradual distance increase, but rarely include all of the tools that would actually allow us to get there. Adding some akward speed work and hip bridges at the end of the run is not good programming to me 🤷‍♀️😔

Good running is made from elastic steps, quick ground contact times, rhytmic movement that allows the body to find a good rhytm where moments of muscle contraction and relaxation alternate. It’s dynamic and elastic and you are in full control of your breath at each speed.

These things are in the Center of how I program for myself and for my athletes. These things don’t need to be boring, you can practice them in a playful way.

These are the cornerstones of how I program running:
1️⃣ Muscle elasticity, quick ground contact times, dynamic running stride
✔️hops and jumps
✔️cadence work
✔️quick pulls
2️⃣ All training is based on breathing not heart rate zones
🔻Connecting your breathing with your running helps your body and mind to stay relaxed no matter at what speed. That’s a physiological fact. When you are in control of your breath, you are in control of your run. When we allow ourselves to become distracted by trying to match our running effort to a pace we’ve defined with numbers on a watch, we break that mind/body connection.
✔️ All training is defined with your breathing in mind and then you match your speed to your breath. Heart rate monitoring does not teach you how to control your breath, but controlling your breath allows you to learn how to control your ”zones”.

Playing with some hops and pulls in my warmup today before my breath controlled speed work. Fun, playfull and meaningfull. Just the way I like my running training 👍😊

Beeing strong is one of the best feelings in the world, so why would Anybody choose to not want to feel that way 🤷‍♀️😊

BUT.....Running is not a good sport to start your fitness journey with, you should first make sure that you are strong enough to run.

Building a base level of strength especially around the hips is one of the key ingredients towards starting your running carreer in a healthy way. If you haven’t been exercising for ages, spend atleast 3 months first building good base level of strength around your hips and lower body! If you do that with a coach who also teaches you a little bit of understanding over your body; what things should happen when you run and what are signs that you should propably already stop your run, then you will stand with an even better chance of NOT OVERDOING IT!

I hate to see programs built for beginners that are only just based on a gradual volume increas 🙈 Please stop that madness! What are you building with those kind of programs?
Running is so much more complex than that! Or our bodies are so much more complex than that!

What beginner runners should do instead:
1️⃣ Build a base level of strength and body awareness before hitting the pavement
2️⃣ Learning the basics of a good running technique to have something to build towards, but also to know when the technique breaks down so much that it would be better to stop and walk/ rest/ or come back to it on another day.
3️⃣ Base their training more on their own breathing rather than heart rate zones -> heart rate zones only just tell you the end result, controlling your breathing allows you to understand how to get control over your ”zones”.
4️⃣ Run max 3 times a week with varied speeds and distances. Anything more than this will propably just be time away from doing other stuff that would actually make you a better runner like strength train.

I don’t want to spoil the fun for Anybody, but just be honest about the fact that we should not be so suprised by why 70-80% out of all recreational runners get injured every year 🤷‍♀️

TECHNIQUE - what is it and what is it not?

First of all, technique in any movement should be based on; BIOMECHANICS. How muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments work together to produce movement.
•
Technique is not, or should not be based on someone’s perception of how a movement should look like.

There are really two sides of the story and why it is important:
1️⃣ INJURY PREVENTION - Good Technique allows you put your body in the most optimal position to ABSORB THE FORCES PLACED ON YOUR BODY.
Running can be a very violent form of exercise when done poorly. So technique allows you to put your body in the best possible position so that it can handle the impact forces placed on it every single time your foot hits the ground.
2️⃣ EFFICIENCY - this is not any less important, but somehow does not get spoken out as much what it comes to running. But I like to compare running to Olympic lifting; the better your technique, the more efficiently you get the weight up. It is not only based on ”beeing strong”. Same thing applies to running; the better your technique, the more efficiently you move. So you move faster and waste less energy if you want to go longer.

ELASTIC RECOIL - when your technique is sound (your hips are as close above your foot when it lands and your ground contact time is short) your body is able to momentarily store energy into the tendons and fascia of your lower legs. This happens in the eccentric portion of the movement (foot lands). Then in the concentric portion of the movement, when your foot prepares to leave the planet earth again, this energy gets released.

This energy is free energy! It does not require any extra effort from you and can make up to 50% of the propulsive force that moves your body forward!
BUT! You get none of that if your technique is bad and your muscles are weak and stiff 😢

I train my technique because it makes running feel like flying! Don’t believe it? Look at what happens at the very end of this video: I almost fly out from the frame because of the free energy that got released from my legs. I did not jump, I was waiting for to land so I could sprint off 😂