Training

 

 

Let’s cut through the hype about ‘hot girl walks’ and get real about what constitutes effective exercise. While walking delivers undeniable benefits for both physical and mental health—from mortality risk reduction to enhanced work performance—the question remains: Is it enough on its own?

## The Hard Truth About Walking
Walking is foundational movement, not a complete training program. Here’s why:

– **Cardiovascular Impact**: Walking primarily works in one energy system at a relatively low intensity
– **Muscular Development**: Minimal resistance means limited strength gains
– **Bone Density**: Insufficient loading to promote significant bone health improvements
– **Overall Fitness**: Lacks the variety needed for comprehensive physical development

## Breaking Down the Guidelines
The standard recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise weekly is just the baseline. For the fitness-focused individual, this should be your starting point, not your goal.

## When Walking Alone Might Suffice
Walking as your sole exercise might be enough if you’re:
– Just starting your fitness journey
– Returning from injury
– Dealing with mobility limitations
– Using it as active recovery

## The Complete Fitness Formula
For optimal results, structure your weekly routine like this:

1. **Base Movement**
– 30+ minutes daily walking (separate from structured workouts)
– Think of this as your foundation, not your workout

2. **Cardiovascular Training**
– Minimum 3x weekly high-intensity sessions
– Options: HIIT, sprints, cycling, swimming
– Focus on pushing your heart rate into higher zones

3. **Strength Training**
– 2-3x weekly resistance sessions (this is where we come in)
– Include compound movements (this is where we come in)
– Progressive overload principles (this is where we come in)
– Focus on full-body development (this is where we come in)

4. **Recovery Work**
– Mobility training
– Flexibility work
– Low-intensity movement days

## Making It Work
To level up your fitness:

1. **Get Breathless**: Aim for at minimum three heart-pumping sessions weekly
2. **Add Resistance**: Incorporate progressive strength training
3. **Track Intensity**: Use heart rate zones or RPE to ensure sufficient stimulus
4. **Progress Gradually**: Systematically increase duration, intensity, or load

## Bottom Line
Walking is essential daily movement—treat it as your baseline activity, not your workout. Real fitness progress comes from a structured program that includes strength training, cardiovascular challenges, and proper recovery protocols.

Remember: The goal isn’t just to move—it’s to move with purpose and progression.

It’s been many articles, a book on Amazon called “Transparency”.. to say THANK YOU to my 5000 + subscribers. This journey WE are taking is still a mission one person at a time. Are you ALIVE…let me know

 

by V_gritcamp

There are countless hacks and tweaks which we, as OCR athletes and hobbyists, can adopt in training and racing routines. Predictably, a lot of them revolve around gear and using it to boost your overall performance. Here, I’ll take you through my essential and favourite gear hacks, which actually work, and which I always rely on order to get the most out of my gear on race day.

 

1. Lace the last holes of your shoes for optimal stability

Runners will know this one already, however a majority of people, especially the starting crowd, never use the last lacing holes on their shoes. They’re usually position slightly to the side of the shoe, not in line with the other holes, and they have a slightly different shape which might be why people don’t even try to use them. The fact is, these holes are there to help you secure the ankle and tighten the shoe to the max. This helps with overall foot stability, but more importantly for obstacle racers, it leaves no chance that you’ll lose your shoe in the mud, mid-race.

I like to tie my shoe using the following method:

2.1. Be visibly clean after the race by using compression gear

Want to keep your body relatively clean during an obstacle race without losing any enthusiasm for mud and water? I’ve got just the answer for you. Use compression gear: pants, top etc. will not only increase your endurance by improving the blood flow to your limbs, but also will act as a good layer keeping the mud away. This is a surprisingly effective hack, because after taking the gear off your skin will be at least visibly clean.

2.2. After the Race: Get half of a towel wet and keep the other half dry

If the compression gear trick didn’t impress you there is another way to scrub your body and look like you didn’t even participate in the race – good problem. During multiple races with teams I would always get comments and questions on how to get sharp clean in just 2mins. You can easily achieve this by bringing a towel and dipping only half of it in water. Simply rub all of your exposed skin. This should not take more than couple of minutes and should not take more than a half medium sized wet towel. Once you are done with one limb – use the dry part to scrub it dry, then do the next part and so forth.

3. Use inside of a headband to clean your action camera

I’ve completed quite a few races with my goPro (to bring some wicked action reels to Grit Camp!) so I know the trouble of keeping the lens clean. Imagine jumping into a river, pond or mud pool, this almost immediately would result in your camera getting splashed. With most of your body parts and gear being muddy and wet you wouldn’t be able to use that to make it clean. It would just smear even more mud and wet marks all over it. Luckily, there is a way to quickly wipe the dirt away – using your Spartan race/Tough Mudder headband, or to be precise its inner side. This won’t save you any time, but chances are if you are racing with a goPro you don’t really care about that anyways.

 

4. A hermetic pocket in your shorts to carry small emergency items or performance boosters

I want my gear to be as robust and versatile as possible, and part of that is having a well-secured pocket or two in my shorts. It’s always handy, especially when there is a need for additional energy boosters and other essential items. There are a variety of things I tend to include, depending on whether I’m racing competitively or for fun, solo or with a team. I might pack an energy gel pack or two, mustard pack for cramping, credit card/drivers license and some cash, house key and additional goPro batteries. As you can see some of them are purely for survival purposes and cover the ‘what if’ scenarios, but I like to use the ‘belt and suspenders’ method, where if one plan fails there is an easy plan B to fall back to. Even if you don’t plan on bringing all those items with you it could be a good idea to make one of your pockets hermetic with an additional layer of air and water tight baggie. Alternatively, If your shorts/pants don’t have any pockets whatsoever and you know a friend capable of modifying it, you can sow in a hermetic pocket, accessible from the inside.

5. Use sand/gravel/grass to dry your palms and fingers

Seen just too many times when people after mud and water obstacle jump right into the monkey bar and other challenges which involve extreme grip strength. They fall right down like flies. During an intense race it is hard to keep your hands dry and warm, so that you can perform to the fullest. A simple trick circumventing this is to literally rub the moisture away right after the submersion by finding a dry spot of grass to rub your hands on. This will not make them entirely dry, however if I would grab some drier sand/dirt/gravel in my hands and rub them against each other – the moisture would simply rub off with the sand! It’s as easy as that and would not require you to spend more than a few seconds to do both steps, the rest could be applied during while running to the next obstacle.

6. The counting game

This is something I rely on during those tough episodes in a race, when the weaker body parts start to break down and I feel that if I continue running in this manner I might twist or strain something. Even worse, those mind games put me to the test and make it harder to continue. So – what I do is use a counting system.

Pick a number, let’s say 100, 48 (my pick) or 10 and count backwards. This does wonders when times are excruciatingly hard by tricking your mind into a false idea of progression and delayed gratification once the counting is over. It does not matter if you have to count twenty times till you reach the finish line – it will take your mind off the annoying thoughts of stopping. What does this have to do with gear hacks? You could take counting even further and use your fingers to do the counting, which would then use different parts of brain simultaneously – just like playing an instrument, it will allow you to get into a flow where your only focus is on counting, whilst your body keeps running ‘on auto’.

Counting fingers and moving them will also reduce the usual numbness you would get while in the colder weather or when you’re just out of cold water.

7. Apply kinesiology tape to weaker spots

Having had multiple serious injuries, I cannot overemphasise how great supportive application of kinesiology tape can be. My personal weakest spots are: one of the shoulders, which got dislocated a few years back and tends to go out of the socket from time to time, and the more typical runner’s knee problems. The shoulder requires some stabilising application to limit the movement in order to avoid the weaker shoulder from popping out again. Meanwhile, my knees can go up to 2 miles extra before starting to ache with the tape applied. If you have any chronic weak spots this could be a preventative solution as well as a confidence booster.

by V_gritcamp

Many of us doing mud and obstacle course races get started by seeing it a fun challenge. Once you’ve completed that challenge enough times, it’s natural that you might consider actually competing in OCR, running elite waves with the best of them. That’s where I find myself at the moment.

With various completed races behind me, I wanted to take on a bigger challenge – find myself near the top of the results list or maybe even on the awards podium. So, a few weeks ago, I ran an elite wave of the Spartan Sprint in Manchester. I’m still far from overcoming the bigger challenges, but I’ve learned some about what it takes to compete and I wanted to give you an idea of what to expect and how to prepare. Here’s the 6 things you should definitely know before signing up for a competitive heat.

 

1. Be ‘impatiently patient’ to commit.

First and foremost, know that competitive and elite heats, usually the earliest morning heats, get sold out the quickest. This is because every race organiser limits the number of people able to participate in each heat, and due to their intensity and higher stakes, the elite heats tend to have an even smaller number of runners allowed.

So, if you want to compete you should commit to it as early as possible. I’ve been left feeling disappointed multiple times, because I decided to compete considerably late (a month before the race) when there were no longer any spaces left in the competitive heat.

 

2. It gets extremely intense!

Duh, right? You’d probably already expect this when signing up to compete. I did too. Yet I was still stunned at just how intense the race can get. Be prepared to begin at a much faster-than-usual pace at 10x the intensity to dash among the high-performing athletes. It’s nothing like a jolly mud run where it’s okay to take a breather when you need it. On the upside though, there was a higher purpose to my racing between the start and the finish line, beyond just doing it for fun. Don’t get me wrong however, competing is fun too, even more so if you love to be challenged and test your grit.

With all of this in mind, you perhaps shouldn’t be expecting too much from your first competitive race. Mine was a reality check. More of a test to see what condition I was in, so that I could set SMART goals for my training towards future competitive races.

 

3. Set realistic goals.

Rather than focusing your eyesight on the podium or top 10 finishers list, I’d encourage you to use your first race to explore how the new intensity level and the whole experience feels like. It’s unlikely that you would end up on the podium anyway, especially when there’s a number of racers who have been training to compete and competing for longer than you.

In your first race, your goal should be to assess where you need improvement or maintenance. You can then use this knowledge to set SMART goals, which are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound and therefore more likely to be achieved. When setting goals, consider the number of races you want to compete in and what outcome you’d want from each. Just remember to keep it realistic (based on your current performance) and achievable.

Once I started competing I knew that one should not be cocky and overconfident, since it is still a mildly unexplored field filled with full time athletes. The strategy here was simply to start competing and build slow momentum to greater success.

 

4. There’s more space and no queues for obstacles!

The morning of your competitive race you will experience a new kind of butterflies. You’ll feel a bigger fight-or-flight response and an adrenaline rush to match it.  Almost like a sacred ritual, there is something special in being one of the first to arrive to the race site. When the camp is still empty and clean, and seeing the volunteers begin to assume their places for the day at the obstacles you can just barely see on the horizon.

The race course and its obstacles will be all yours to compete on. It’s easy to overtake other athletes (if you can catch up with them first) and there are no queues at all on any of the obstacles. I was surprised by this, having gotten used to the drag in front of every 8-foot wall with everyone having to wait for their turn. In a way, you could say there are fewer natural obstacles, since you don’t have to stop and wait for the other people, of varying fitness levels, to get over the obstacle.

All of this makes up for a wholly new racing experience. More space, much quicker. No crowd to wave you off at the starting line, but the camp will be packed by the time you get to the finish line. Get psyched!

 

4. It’s a different kind of camaraderie and tribe.

You’ll be running among beasts, not the muddy cubs of open heats. Unfortunately, that does also mean that some of the helpfulness that the OCR community is well known for might be absent from the competitive heat; much like you, the other racers will be just as keen to go one level further and best themselves. If you were to compare OCR camaraderie to that of a naturally wired ant colony, competitive heats would parallel an ant warrior colony mentality. That’s a shared mentality where every ant knows its goal and works towards the greater good of the colony, without the need to reply on others. This is a bit different from open heats where people will often lend a hand.

But leave any negative expectations aside. There is kinship in shared determination with everyone reciting their mantra, thinking through strategies or perhaps trying to visualise victory. The help you’ll get in a competitive heat is verbal encouragement as someone passes you or a pat on the shoulder – these work just as well as a helping hand to climb over a wall.

For example, during the competitive Spartan Sprint, I ran into a guy who was struggling really bad to get over a wall. Being adrenaline-drunk with a racing heartbeat, I shouted at him to get his ass over the stupid wall. He immediately climbed over it and super fast as well. That warrior spirit is the help you will get from your fellow beasts.

 

5. Prep yourself and gear up!

There are things that you can’t afford to neglect if you want to run with the best of them. This includes a strict schedule and sorting out a lot of things days or weeks before the event. As I said above, you’ll want to book your tickets as early as possible, but you’ll also want to organise other such logistics (do you want to stay at a hotel nearby so that you’re fresh the morning of the race?), the best performance-enhancing gear (compression, lightweight equipment), energy snacks and gels (to give you a boost before you shoot out of the starting line).

More importantly, before your start time, you’ll want to be warmed up. This is a step many people running open heats skip, doing minimal to no warmup, but when you’re a competitive racer a seemingly small thing like this can give you a huge advantage on the field. Don’t rely on the race organisers to warm you up during the pump-up speech at the start of the race.

I like to prepare at least 20mins before it’s go time by doing various drills and deep dynamic stretches throughout the body. If the conditions allow, I’ll also foam roll. This is essential knowing how early the elite heats usually are and having dealt with the muscle tightness from sleep or travelling in a fixed position.

 

Now you have a simple outline of things to take into consideration before competing. Are you ready to commit to a such a bigger challenge?