I had been away from the trails for close to a year, because of plantar fasciitis. I seriously used that time for swimming, biking, and strength-training. Both activities are tremendously helpful to increase your cardio-vascular strengths.

For swimming, it increases cardio-vascular strength, endurance, posture, and flexibility all at the same time.

“Unlike high-impact sports such as running, which stresses your joints, swimming is a no-impact sport unlikely to cause or aggravate joint injuries.”

For biking, it strengthens your lungs, improves core, and definitely creates stronger legs.

Since last 4 months, I have been regularly hitting the gym, doing some serious weight training. I always do circuit training for an hour to hour-and a half. All most all sports have strength training as part of training regime.

Strength training is quite different from weight training. Weight training focusses on the amount of weight you can lift, while strength training focusses on body strengthening while lifting weights.

Strength training, helps you condition your body, improve the posture, with various lifts involving kettle balls, barbell, dumb-bells. What I do is-

Barbell: pick and lift it up the shoulder

1. Place a 2 ft table, and jump on-off the table, doing 10-12 reps. Increases the heart rate. [total 8 sets]
2. Go for pull-ups, do 10 reps. In subsequent sets, the reps go down :(. [Total 3 sets]
3. Go for push-ups, all variations, totaling 60-65, in sets of 25/20/15/10.
4. Start with barbell, do a snatch lift. 5-7 reps, in total 6 sets with weights of 90/80 Kgs. This strengthens my legs, hamstrings, back, core, and complete upper body. A very powerful exercise.
5. I also add kettle ball, swings, lifts, shrugs as variation to my strengthening.
6. In addition to the above I focus on the shoulders, and chest workouts, by using the resistance band and machines.

By using weights, I am able to burn the fat, even when I am sitting in the office. Weights add muscle mass to your body and burn fat on a regular basis, even when the body is idle.

Now when I have started running, I see a great change in my running. Surprisingly, I am not that tired as I used to be, while running the uphills.

Look out for my next blogpost, on the change in my diet.