Clearly, anybody who has raced a 24 hour, 48 hour or expedition event will attest to the dramatic effect sleep deprivation has on performance and recovery.  The devastating effect that poor sleep has on health and well being was recently bought to the fore by the meltdown of players and coaches in the AFL who routinely take a plethora of legal uppers to get ready for night games and then prescription sedatives afterward to try and grasp somesleep. Getting the balance seems elusive.

Events to one side, quite often the juggling of exhaustive training loads with work, study and family comes at the cost of regular sleep.

Research over the past decade has looked to understand exactly what the metabolic and performance downsides are of disrupted and truncated sleep patterns.

Eve Van Cauter, Ph.D., (University of Chicago Medical School) in 1999, studied the effects of three different durations of sleep in 11 men ages 18 to 27. For the first three nights of the study, the men slept eight hours per night; for the next six nights, they slept four hours per night; for the last seven nights, they slept 12 hours per night.

Results showed that after four hours of sleep per night (the sleep deprivation period), they metabolized glucose least efficiently. Levels of the stress hormone cortisol (a by product also in abundance post heavy resistance exercise) were also higher during sleep deprivation periods.

This has been linked to memory impairment, age-related insulin resistance, and impaired recovery in athletes.

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The VIBRAM 5 Fingers range has been a headline grabber for a few years now. Shoes that look like feet have turned out to be anything but a gimmick. Certainly, the sports science and in field ( and in water and on trail ) experiences support the claims of VIBRAM. This is a product that demands attention and delivers comfort, performance and good leg health.

VIBRAM chose to mimic or enable a protected barefoot experience for a number of reasons:

It is more efficient as the neuro-musculature in your feet receive the necessary sensory feedback at impact, without obfuscation.

Improved local blood circulation results from the changed foot-strike pattern and its need to engage a greater number of muscles.

Barefoot runners land mid-foot, increasing the work of the foot’s soft tissue support structures, increasing foot strength and possibly reducing the risk of injuries such as shin splints and ITB strains.

Enhance proprioception - your feet are able to sense and relay data back to the brain as they are meant to, without impedence. This is of particular relevance to trail runners where agility across randomly changing terrain is the norm and balance is essential to safety.

Stronger foot muscles - if you don’t use it you lose it. Wearing FiveFingers engages and strengthens foot muscles.

An excellent article on the fundamentals biomechanics of gait and the damage wrought by decades of motion control propoganda can be found HERE

So much for the biomechanics and science; how are they on?

In short they are amzingly comfortable and naturally glove-like. Having used INOV-8 shoes for some time now, the change over has not been mind blowing in the least. INOV-8 in their own way do what they can to have the feet work for themselves in their products. VIBRAM just happen to do it more effectively particularly for parcours, road running (not an INOV-8 focus) trail running and wet surface sports. Seriously, I can’t imagine a valid technical reason for free runners not to be racing across the urban jungle in 5 fingers.

The model I am using, the TREK is a purpose-built off-road product that weigh a fraction ( on avg 50% less ) of the usual conventional equivalents.

The soft, supple kangaroo-leather upper moulds to your feet allowing them to breathe naturally and offer reasonable protection below ankle. This upper is very strong and is highly water vapour permeable; allowing sweat out.  It is also machine (cold water cycle) washable. After some serious late winter hit-outs in boggy conditions - I’d love to see the suppleness and style of the kangaroo leather with the insulative and complete water proofness of the VIBRAM FLOW upper.  NB Since writing this FF have informed me they are shipping exactly this hybrid product early 2011.

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I have tried all sorts of shoes for multisports racing and training, be it a specific trail shoe for the coast to coast or a general road shoe for laps round the park. Most of these race shoes last a couple of hard mountain runs while the more durable lack the feel for technical running and white road shoes say “I’m a triathlete” a little much for style points in the off-road scene. The Salomon XT Wings seem to fit the bill, they are durable, perform well in technical situations and look uber cool with some jeans for your après MTB at the local.

After extensive testing in the Port Hills, the streets of Sao Paolo and numerous jungle trails in Brazil my verdict is on the Wings; piece by piece:

Uppers

Quick drying mesh and sensibly integrated textile parts. Practically, there is nothing more annoying than the uppers of a new shoe shredding quickly because the mesh is as weak as tissue paper and lets out water while letting in gravel. The XT Wings upper design obviates this.

Protection

The rubber belt offers an ideal blend of flexibility and protection. Shoes with super tough protection plates sound great but typically render the shoe hopeless for technical trails, further more they restrict the foots natural movement. When you lack feel for the trail, efficiency of movement is compromised.

The rubber toe cap provides enough protection for all but the biggest hits without adding excessive weight. (more…)

It’s a well established fact that runners with reduced ground contact time produce better results. Faster top running speeds come about mainly by the runner’s ability to apply greater ground forces and reduce contact time; bearing in mind that research indicates aerial time remains essentially unchanged as speed increases.

How do you achieve improvement in contact time? There is a lot of work going on in various quarters to determine practical protocols that may provide assistance from increasing muscle and tendon elasticity with specified stretching and activation routines to optimal toe dorsiflexion.

More to the point how can you determine your force, acceleration and contact time simply, quickly, conveniently and cost effectively? Until recently you really needed to book yourself into an exercise physiology lab that has a set of wired-up force plates ( preferably integrated into a treadmill ); an exercise that is not simple, convenient or cheap.

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Agility is basically the ability to change direction without the loss of speed, strength, balance, or body control. It is, arguably one of the most misunderstood and under-trained attribute in our sports. Certainly highly visible and measurable attributes such as strength, speed and endurance are easily measured and improvements prescribed. Agility, on the other hand, is much harder to measure. Yet everyone knows agility when they see it and can benefit from working on their agility.

To improve agility, it is important that gains are made in strength, balance, coordination, and reaction times.
By incorporating an element of agility training into you program you stand to gain better control of essential fast movements, making them more efficient, accurate, and reliable.

Specificity

Any activity you choose to practise must be specific to an intended skill in order for maximum improvement, or transfer to occur. This means when selecting various drills for your agility program, you should ensure the movement patterns precisely mimic the essential movement patterns of your discipline. For example sand running in preparation for a Gobi desert crossing rather than intervals around the Tan in Melbourne.

Goals

Remember to work out exactly what you are trying to achieve and why before investing time and effort.You need to set goals to more clearly define the drills; e.g. to run steep inclines without falling. When setting these drills goals, you must have an understanding of the purpose of performing a particular agility drill, how to properly execute the drill, and what to specifically focus on when doing the new drill.

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I have not had a decent pair of off-road race ‘flats’ for around 3 years; the last good pair being La Sportiva which suited my narrow feet. Finding a semi-intelligent, courteous, and efficient distributor ( of any training or racing shoes ) willing to SELL the shoes at wholesale for review has been as elusive a challenge as finding a worthwhile replacement for the La Sportiva.

Courtesy of the awesome crew at TRAILRUNNERS in Switzerland we can now assess the alluring Inov-8 Roclite 285 and investigate the impressive science behind these thoroughbreds.

Inov-8 themselves are an interesting crew, not necessarily cast from the same mould that has spawned the plethora of me-too outdoorsy shoes that dominate the market. The company has focused much of its research and development on applied biomechanics and shaping footwear that more naturally assists and encourages the feet and their supporting structures to do the work of running; to improve trail feel and strengthen muscles and joints. There are no hip-hop over-blown cushioning systems here but rather solid science.

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The people at NathanSports are honest to goodness FREAKS. To say they are obsessed with the detail of trail running performance would be a massive understatement. When testing their range it’s hard to find an angle, option, feature, or function they have not considered and tested. I have used and enjoyed their hydration belts in previous years but until now had no experience of their RACE VESTS. Although there is an excellent array of models I settled on the HPL 020 to get familiar with the systems.

Before I get onto the features and performance; the BIG stand-out on opening the pack was picking the unit up; it weighed close to nothing; no heavy old school cordura here!

The product is aimed squarely at the serious trail runner who is hitting up mountain marathons and tackling 50km plus trail races. It’s function is to not only meet the hydration necessity but to provide additional storage in an ergonomically sensible way. It achieves all these goals effortlessly. I’ll explain how and why.

Forget those impinging narrow cordura straps that irritate and maim; the HPL020 uses a breathable, lightweight mesh

woven in broad bands for support; straps - so 1990’s! Rather than obsessing about the pack digging into your shoulders and constantly, restlessly shifting your load under strain; the webbing allows you to load up, run and forget.

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