Periods of rest are highly active phases for body build-up You probably urge yourself as often as your coach does to take a rest? You can hardly stand the breaks and tend to carry on training again much too early, and you have a bad conscience when you are not training? How are we supposed to judge our needs of the own period of recovery in a reliable way? Or put it another way: which criteria should you choose in order to make the decision to take a rest both rationally and with a good conscience? Even though science has tried to define parameters or body conditions such as heavy legs syndrome or heart rate the decision to get on is in the end primarily made by feel.

Spring is in full swing on the Northern hemisphere, and so is allergy. From LA to Frankfurt thousands of people suffer from the various symptoms connected with allergies. For this reason I would like to say a few words about the relation between allergies, the immune system and stress. In many ways I got the impression over the years that there are lots of misleading views about the cause and effect relation of allergies out there. The condition of your immune system determines the course of your allergy What about the scientific thought model, that it is not the pollen that causes the allergy, but that it is the immune system that's not able to deal with the pollen?

In March a study has been published by Playford at al.* about the the leaky gut syndrome in endurance athletes, and the efficiency of biestmilch/colostrum protecting stomach and gut exposed to strenuous workouts. In medicine the leaky gut is a problem physicians are quite familiar with. In sports in my opinion the problem has been neglected, even though stomach and gut are organs of minor resistance in many athletes. The survey is closed.

Stomach and gut issues are common among high-end performance athletes and endurance athletes in general. A few weeks ago a very interesting study has been published* that underscores the properties of biestmilch as a substance stabilizing the mucosal lining of the stomach and the gut. This makes me very happy, as I have been stressing the respective effects to athletes many times.
The gastro-intestinal tract's role is not only digestion, its mucosal lining also acts as a selective communicator between the external and internal micro-environments. In endurance performance you are walking the line between absorbing nutrients and keeping compounds on the outside that may jeopardizing your body's balance.

Or about the art of finding out what it means to really feel good Just recently I spoke to Chris McCormack about this topic. He puts it like this:” My body is my work place. To release a really great performance, I have to feel really good.” It sounds simple, but is not. All of you who train regularly I am sure, can confirm this statement. It is not easy to find out what it means to feel great. Most of the time you don’t know until afterwards when you can put the delivered performance into relation with the perceived condition you were in.

The muscles' energy supplies are not the bottleneck that's cutting you off from increasing your endurance The Energy Supply– Energy Deficiency Training Model This model is another scientific effort to explain performance limits. In this model the goal of each training is considered to be the adaptation of the energy supplying systems in the body to the demands of the sport. The better our body is trained, the more economically energy is converted into muscle movements, performance is thus optimized. The carbohydrate metabolism which is independent from oxygen and the carbohydrate and fat metabolism that depend on the oxygen, all belong to the metabolic paths which must be trained to increase the yield of high energy phosphate compounds.

Endurance sports are very trendy and, so is triathlon for example. But how do we all who are busy all day long achieve the training volumes of 12 to 14 hours per week, a minimum that is assumed necessary to race a long distance triathlon race or a marathon? There are different approaches to what is considered efficient training. Some of the elite athletes are convinced that long training cycles are necessary to get into good form, while others favor qualitatively high-intensity training sessions. The proof of concept is still missing, because there are athletes in either group who are successful, as there are those who are not.