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The above figures are how much diabetes is costing the health services of Northern Ireland and Wales respectively. (I don’t know how the £55,000 per hour was calculated, but if you multiply that by 24 hours in a day, it comes out at well over a million pounds too). Reports by Diabetes UK, and Diabetes UK Cymru claim diabetes is one of the biggest health challenges facing the nation.

Iain Foster, Diabetes UK Northern Ireland director, said: “Diabetes…causes more deaths than breast and prostate cancer combined. But how avoidable is diabetes? Correct diet, correct activity and exercise levels are key, obviously, but how easy is it to know what constitutes ‘correct’?

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Don’t think I hate gyms - I don’t. I never fail to get slightly turned on when I step into a gym, and the lovely possibilities of all the varieties of training are displayed in front of me. One of the keys to making good fitness gains is there in that last sentence: variety. Your body is an amazing adaptive organism. It is endowed with an incredible natural intelligence, if you like, and is very quick on the uptake when it comes to things like strength exercises, and types of movement. After a while, as it gets used to an exercise, and becomes good at it, the adaptive benefit of that exercise will diminish.

Going into the gym, doing some leg presses - 3 x 10, is it? - with a certain weight - what are you on just now, 80kg? - is great…for a while. The same applies to squats in the Smith Machine (not the one used by Morrissey to create a band), the calf raise machine, the leg extension and the hamstring curl machines (although those last two are a waste of your gym fees, but that’s another blog post). Humans are creatures of habit, and a nice comforting routine of supplementing your run training with the same strength routine, week in week out, is hard to get away from. But get away from it you must, if you want to add facets to your running strength. And while we’re on the subject, it would appear that continued machine use actually reduces the functionality of muscles over time, so all the more reason to take some time to do strength work outside the gym. Here are 10 ways to get stronger pins to trot around on: I’m not even assuming you have a set of chunky dumbbells to work with - it’s just you, your body and your will to get stronger.

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Let’s talk about integration for a moment. Running coaches - and texts on how to run better, including posts in this blog - often speak from the point of view of isolation. Drills and exercises that focus on a specific aspect of running, such as hamstring strength, or stride length, or speed over 200m.

These things have their place, make no mistake, but sometimes the wood is lost among the trees: just as a human is far more than an assemblage of body parts, running is so much more than a number of isolated, sequenced movements. Running integrates the whole body. One of my great joys at the moment is watching my nearly three-year-old daughter (who is shaping up to be pretty nippy, by the looks of things) running: balanced and flowing, yes, and also carefree, uncluttered, absorbed. She almost always runs with a ‘running grin’ - the act itself is fun, pleasurable. Totally integrated, body and soul.

Which brings us in a roundabout way, pun intended, to the title of the post, and rotation. What’s the link? Well, most typical human movement involves rotation. We can’t move from one foot to the other without rotating the trunk with each step. Human movement operates through three planes, called, frontal, sagittal and transverse. Sagittal (forwards and backwards) is the obvious one, and frontal (side-to-side) is also fairly clear; transverse (spiral and rotational) is fundamental to movement, but rarely trained in a world of weights machines and exercise machines that focus almost entirely on the sagittal plane.

Your control over the muscles that work you through the transverse plane dictates the flow between upper and lower body. These muscles are mainly the obliques, working diagonally between pelvis and ribcage. Elegance of movement, smoothness, flowing strides, balance - all these attributes of good running stem from this synergy between upper and lower body.

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We are often asked about ‘threshold’. It’s a word that runners throw about carelessly and negligently, not caring whose ears it hits and sows the seeds of confusion in. (’Oxygen debt’ is another such term, often used with ‘threshold’ in the same sentence, and often just as casually). Lactate threshold, anaerobic threshold, ventilatory threshold - what use are all these names?

I came across a nice quote the other day from a sports scientist:

‘The anaerobic threshold is neither.’

If that sounds a bit mysterious, a bit obfuscatory, a little on the hermetic side, then here’s the explanation. The anaerobic threshold, the scientist is saying, is not a point beyond which you cease to be ‘aerobic’, and go ‘anaerobic’. And nor is it a threshold, a clear dividing line.

What we’ll look at here is how to simplify this concept for a runner in terms of training pace, not what this means to an array of sports scientists all with their minutely differing interpretations involving mMol of blood lactate, deflection points and all that sort of scientific stuff. (more…)