Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast. We’re your hosts, Jessica Warpula Schultz and Jeanne Kolker. Whether you’ve tried everything to feel better and something is still missing or you’ve already discovered the wisdom of the body. This podcast will encourage and support you in healing old wounds, strengthening relationships, and developing your inner potential- all by accessing the mind body connection.

Please know, while we’re excited to share and grow together. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for mental health treatment. It doesn’t replace the one-on-one relationship you have with a qualified healthcare professional and is not considered psychotherapy.

Thanks Jess. And thank you for listening. Now, let’s begin a conversation about what happens when we take an integrative approach to improving our wellbeing.

Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk. I’m your host, Jessica Warpula Schultz. Today. My guest, Amanda Bauer from Forrest coaching and studios. And I talk about running. Running is a great way to move the body and connect to something deeper with it. I often hear runners talk about feelings of freedom, lowered stress, increased clarity and creativity.

even if they’re running alone runners describe a deeper sense of connection to others. World sounds pretty amazing. What I also hear from runners is that it’s a difficult sport, injuries are common and running is something you can only do for so long before those injuries start to add up and you have to choose between the sport you love and making things worse, or just stopping altogether.

Often people keep running and that’s why I’m so glad Amanda is here today. Amanda’s going to share new ways to experience running. She’ll give tips on breathing correctly, assessing the neurological connection between breath and your running pattern, tips on listening to your body in order to increase sport longevity, and increasing your understanding of your body as something that is empowering, strong and safe.

Amanda is a certified oxygen advantage, coach breathing, running, and kettlebells expert amanda specializes in coaching, recreational runners, as well as any client looking to bring ease and comfort to their everyday lives.

She offers sessions both virtually as well as in-person through Forrest coaching and students. No forest coaching located just off the Capitol square Madison. Wisconsin happens to be one of my favorite studios in town because they believe in trauma informed fitness training. They work to create an inclusive environment for all bodies.

And you’ll never experience that no pain, no gain then is best calories in calories out. Bullshit prescribed by the diet and fitness industry. You’ll find real people with excellent training who can help you reach your health goals in a way that supports the whole person. So welcome, Amanda. Thank you so much for being here today.

Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure. Let’s get straight into it. I know that Madison is a big running community. I know running is a sport internationally, probably one of the most popular sports, I would assume because there’s easy access to it.

You just need a pair of shoes. It’s affordable. There’s a large community around it. What brought you to Rome? You’re exactly right. It is definitely one of the most popular sports. What brought me to running was, oh boy, that is a, that’s a loaded question. When I was in high school grade school, my, let me tell you a story.

So back up a little bit I heard my phone ring. I was maybe like four or five years old running around the house chasing my older sister, loved her, wanted to be her. And she answered the phone. She said, yes, I’ll love to, I’ll be there soon. And it was her friend asking her to come and play soccer with her.

They needed another person on the soccer team and I wanted to do what my sister did. So what did I do? I tagged along and. 12 years later ODP programs torn meniscus guy, there were all sorts of injuries, sprained ankles, a broken wrist. I despised soccer. It was the worst.

It was just this, team sport where everybody was pitted against other people and it was just. It was really hard emotionally to try to be there and support others. Where I felt the blame quite often, if a goal went by, I was like, oh, keeper. I stopped playing sports. I stopped working out.

I had a period of very unhealthy eating unhealthy movement practices. And then some things changed and one day I just. Decided to go on like a one minute run a one minute walk. And by the end of the month, I ran my very first 5k with my dog. Very important to me. And there’s like maybe 30 people in this race and we got second in our age group.

Okay, cool. It’s possible, but there’s just something about an entire, an entire community that is there to support you instead of look down on you for it. Getting that extra minute faster. So that me to running was really that sense that it is an internal and something that’s very internal, but externally motivated.

So if I can explain that a little bit better, you have an entire community around you, but really you’re only battling with yourself and supporting yourself inside when you’re on the run. It was my introverted extroverted personality. Yeah. Identify with that. I often have told previous people I’ve worked with, or, I’ve often told people that for me, I don’t need to hear who’s faster.

I don’t need to hear who did more burpees before I got there. I don’t, that doesn’t motivate me at all. And often for me, at least it creates a little bit of shutdown because then I get in my head about it. But if I. I’m looking and thinking about what I’ve done and how I can improve and how I work to become more efficient or better at something that’s very motivating to me and then doing that within a community.

So that internal, external, I like the way you phrase that. So maybe that’s why a lot of people enjoy running perhaps is that it meets both the external person’s needs. The timing they liked to competition. They like to see where they place. They like the community, but also for people who are more introverts, maybe it’s just a really beautiful way to connect to themselves and build a relationship with themselves.

Exactly. There are so many people. I know that hate going to gyms because they don’t like looking at yourself. If you can’t really look at yourself when you’re running, so yeah, that’s a really good point. You just got to look at all the beautiful nature. At least if you’re outside, right?

So you are a neuro biomechanical running coach. What does that mean? From forest coaching studios, that is what we do. We look at things from a brain-based perspective. So in simple terms, we take what happens to us. Our brain integrates that decides what’s happening and it gives us an output.

So from a neuro biomechanical sense, how your foot strike is approaching the ground, hitting the ground and pulling off the sides, your speed it, despite the sides. Yeah. Rate of exertion decides how fast you’re going to breathe and taking not only into account your foot strike, but what you’re seeing, how fast things are coming by you your relationship to Really like the heat that’s around you, the chill that’s around you.

So from the neuro biomechanical aspect, it’s not, it is not training from a sense of how fast are you going? And we get faster by just continuing to increase mileage and increasing your speed. But we look at four. Perfect form. And we look at how you’re interacting with the environment and how your brain is deciding on that interaction to create a greater and better output to keep you safer.

When you feel safer, you are able to perform at a higher. Agreed. And that’s something that we’re starting to hear more about. And research is starting to show that when athletes feel safe or they’re relaxed, they have optimal results versus utilizing stress to get the system to go faster, the system to improve.

I love how Forest Coaching brings that in. It was one of the first places I ever heard about that theory, which then started me on my own journey. Investigating the polyvagal theory and working with Forest Coaching. It changed even how I interacted with clients who experienced trauma as a psychotherapist, this idea that our brain is really involved in all the choices we make.

So when you approach, when you coach someone on running, how does that, what does that look like? How do you start. I’m stuck. I don’t start with gate. I start with breathing absolutely. First. The first thing that you do when you enter this world is you take a breath and that’s the last thing that you do.

So from that perspective, You breathe thousands and thousands of times a day. And when you’re running really the biggest limiting factor is can you control your breathing, controlling your breathing controls a lot about the safety mechanisms that’s in your brain. I will assess breathing patterns to make sure that breathing patterns are functional.

And after that, we’ll really assess gates after that, because the fascinating thing about gates and running is you can tell a lot about someone’s brain. Hard thing about it is that oftentimes you think, oh you’re just landing on your heels. So land on the balls of your feet instead, and pronate do this, do that.

It’s very difficult to train. Especially with how many thousands of times you take steps. So instead of telling an athlete we need to stop landing on your heels. It’s more of creating safer drills and creating a safer space. Brain and the body to actually want to land correctly. So as not to heel strike your heel striking, you’re often putting undue pressure on the knee often leads to either shin splints or it band syndrome put those in quotes reasons.

And those are really just ways for your body. Your brain to tell you something doesn’t feel safe here, not interacting with the environment. I want you to sit down if you’ve ever experienced runner runners, Naples. That’s pretty much why I don’t run is because I have this. This is why I dislike running.

When I’m not on a podcast, I use stronger words to talk about it, but I used to do a half marathon here, five case there, and then my right knee always gets all puffy and icky and I just don’t want to do it. And after you sit down, how does your knee feel? Gosh, I haven’t ran in a really long time.

I know that when I get up, it feels really stiff and sore. I don’t, what do you mean when I sit down? Just that it feels better. Runner’s knee. I get this quite often and you’ll find this a lot with recreational runners is that we’ll run. And then our knees will feel really weak and we’re like, oh, I just need to sit down and you sit down for a little bit and you stand up.

You’re fine. It’s very similar to when you’re on a boat near, maybe under you’re rocking around and you go into, I feel nauseous and you go and look at the hurricane. You go and look at the horizon, your uppy Downy, Oregon’s your balance. Oregon’s then feel like they know where they are in space, so it can create a better input into your brain, which makes you feel a little bit less wonky, a little less nauseous.

That’s just creating a change. So what is runner’s knee aside from your brain requesting a change? It doesn’t feel safe anymore in this room. So it’s going to ask you to sit down. So as a coach, I would say at what point in your run, where are you experiencing this? And if you were experiencing this super quick into your run, how was your warmup?

Do we need to create safer input mechanisms around your knees? Maybe around your feet, maybe around your hips, maybe your hips aren’t extending well enough. You’re pulling isn’t good. So we really look at these different. I guess injuries or issues or chronic issues. And instead of giving you strength drills to strengthen your glute minimus, glute medius, to prevent it band syndrome, we look at why is this occurring in the first place and is it occurring because your feet aren’t mobile.

So that’s the approach that we use. I love that. Yeah, it totally does. I know. When I worked with Annie and I met with you a couple of times as well. One of the running drills you gave me was to, run thinking about it and then run thinking about someone I love and then run a lap, thinking about my form and then run a lap, thinking about something that I love doing and to really.

Start to tell my brain, give it some of those messages of happiness and joy and safety as you’re working on this so that you decrease that threat response. Because for me, it comes back again, to those survival responses that our body naturally will do. So when, tell me about this, thinking about talking about first response.

I’ve experienced this other clients I’ve worked with have experienced this. Why do some people experience increase in anxiety, incur panic sensations while running or intense cardiovascular exercise? Or are you ready to get really nerdy? Yes. That’s where I’m asking you. Bring it up. Now, depending upon the individual, obviously there’s definitely individual considerations may not apply to everybody, but in general, if you think about where the diaphragm is and where the heart is, so the heart sits right on that diaphragm, as you inhale that diaphragm descend.

And the heart has more space. So if it has more space thinking about the blood that is in that heart, the pressure is a little bit lower, which sends signals to your brain stem to increase your respiration rate. When the diaphragm a sense comes up with your exhale, the heart gets a little bit, has less space, so it has a little bit more pressure.

So the brainstem and then says let’s decrease the respiration rate. As you are running, you need to regulate your breathing pattern in and out. If you were constantly trying to suck that air in, yes, that shallow breathing, you have that constant decreased or increased area.

For the heart. So the brainstem is then saying, keep breathing harder, keep breathing faster. We need to regulate our blood pressure. We need to regulate how much oxygen is in our system. Like we’re not getting the greatest like optimal, like functioning, which is again, threat. There’s a threat, right?

Why something changed? Homeostasis is where the body wants to stay. So in that moment, if you’re panicking, if you’re over-breathing, if you’re breathing in too much and you’re not expelling enough, you’re not exhaling your heart rates going through the roof, which obviously is not safe. So that sends signals out saying, Hey, let’s stop for a little bit.

Let’s regulate our breathing. Let’s calm down so that, Nope. No catastrophe happens. What about levels? What about CO2 levels during that? So as far as that goes to you, you have all of this oxygen that’s coming in Carbon dioxide is what we need in our system in order to. Get the oxygen into the working cells. carbon dioxide and oxygen are partners and they need to maintain a certain level in your system when you’re over oxygen.

Yeah. There’s no mechanism to get oxygen into your working cells, into your brain, into your lung cells and to your muscles, because there’s so much oxygen.

It’s like the blood gets filled with oxygen and another threat and it’s not moving into ourselves, another threat and that shallow breathing that often accompanies anyone in a survival response of S flee fight. Or anyone with anxiety often we breathe through our chest. Say we have, can you tell that someone here might have anxiety?

So you breathe through your chest a lot, or even your throat, which without that big diaphragmatic breath, you’re not getting the CO2 into yourself, which is another. The accumulation of the carbon dioxide. So if you do not have that proper buildup of carbon dioxide, if we are over oxygenating, we are not actually utilizing that oxygen and it’s not getting to our working cells

 It’s it’s this unload offload kind of mechanism, you’re one of the first people to ever talk to me about carbon.

Dioxide as much as oxygen, all you ever hear in like popular vernacular is oxygen. I don’t think we’re thinking about the exhale nearly as much as we should or what even happens in between. Gosh, that’s just fascinating to me. So I know you have a drill for this, that people can try a breathing drill two and a half minutes long to help balance that offload and onload that oxygen and that CO2 distribution.

Hey, I do, especially, it’s an emergency panic attack. Drill. Try not to do this while you are running, but sit down and it’s very simple. Breathe in you breathe out. You’re gonna hold your breath on an exhale for a count of five. After that five, you’re going to resume breathing for about 10 seconds.

Normal in normal, out through the nose. After 10 seconds, you will exhale and hold your breath for another five seconds. And you’ll repeat that for about two and a half minutes. So it’s about 10 cycles. So the pattern is normal breathing for 10 seconds and exhale nose only. Okay. Yes. I could go into an entire diatribe and an entire podcast about why nasal breathing is more important than mouth breathing, but that’s next time.

Yeah. So in through your nose, out through your nose, normal breathing for about 10 seconds, exhale, creates a calming effect. Yeah. Activates the parasympathetic nervous system helps ground helps regulate that. Getting calm or just thinking. I love it. So try, that can practice. It sounds like at any time, probably easier, like you said to practice when you’re not running, but it will have the effect of starting to teach your body where diaphragm.

How to breathe correctly, how to regulate, which is wonderful for anything in life, any exactly. And let’s see, while you’re running, what you can think of is just extend your exhale. Ah, okay. And then while you’re running, extend your exhale. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for that. Let’s move to longevity of sport.

So listening to your body sustainability. We talked about at the start of this podcast, how, I think when there’s, when someone loves running, they’re going to run their entire life. I’ve never met someone who stops running. Oh yeah. This has been good. I think I’m going to move on, try something new, y’all are dedicated to this mind body experience.

So how does someone increase the longevity? So increase their ability to do it well for as long as they can. And that again is going to be so individual. But I think the important thing to note is that we do have community here, especially in Madison, which is absolutely amazing, but we always want to be at every single run.

We don’t want to have a DNF. And. It’s our community. So if we miss out on a run, we miss out on a group setting. So in my opinion, the best way to increase the longevity of your sport is to first of all, get your breathing in order second, listen to your body and really take good care to create perfect form through.

Not running on injury, right? So we’re not actually allowing ourselves to run during injury because the only thing that does during injury and pain is if we’re running through pain, we’re running through injuries, it teaches us to expect it. And so if we expect that to happen, especially with your brain, if we think of it from a neuro neurological aspect, if.

Our brains really rely on prediction. They can predict what happens if we run on a sprained ankle, we know what’s going to happen. It’s going to hurt a little bit. That’s fine. It’ll be great. And then your output is really going to be changing. Your stride so that pain doesn’t occur. And so you’re going to make up for that by instead of putting a much pressure on that right.

Ankle, because you’ve sprained that right ankle. You’re going to put a little bit more on the left. What’s going to happen. You’re going to start to create some weird things that are going to happen with that left hip. That’s going to travel all the way up to that right shoulder. And you now have gone from, instead of, yeah.

Resting and really doing a really good job of creating good input in that right ankle. You’ve now created a neck injury on your upper spine, and now you have a stiff neck and probably around its spine and running is going to be probably pretty painful. So it’s correcting those bad habits when you find them making sure that you’re not ignoring those little aches and pains.

But you’re understanding why they’re there and trying to create a safer I say for understanding around, around them and around your body, how can someone prehab, what does that look like? Can you explain the idea of pre having in order to avoid injury?

Of course. And I think most runners will understand that. Getting through your strength work. It is absolutely doing that. And it is also. Creating good distibular and balanced inputs. It is understanding that you can’t just run every single day without squatting a couple of days without working on your core and having some of your runs be slower than other runs.

And rehabbing to me is really having just a really good cross training program. There’s a reason why all of us running coaches around Madison tell people that they need to have a cross training program. Running is a beautiful, wonderful, magical thing, but it is not resistance training. You are not strengthening and creating a plasticity through a lot of your tendons and muscles and all that good stuff.

Because you do have that repetitive nature out of it. Brains love the novel. They love doing different things and creating new programs around it. So from a neurological perspective, if all you do is run, your brain is wired to make that lazier to make it easier. It creates shortcuts around it. Thanks brain.

Yeah. Thanks for being so awesome and smart and fast, but written your signature. And I don’t know about you, but my signature just looks like an X hi, that’s fine. I’ve done it so often when I was a little girl, I took painstaking like strokes. But you could see it and I practice it, made it perfect.

And now it’s just whatever. So I think that the same thing can be said about running is that if we just look at it from, oh, I just am going to go for a run and not actively practice, maybe a couple strides at a time, beginning of the run, middle of the run. End of the run. Where’s my foot landing. Am I.

Leaning forward. Where are my eyes? Are they on the horizon? And I’m breathing my regulating my breathing. So practicing drills and practicing your strength training program, honestly, pretty simple. That’s great. No, keep it simple. And yet. It’s nuanced. It’s still complex in my opinion. What about the misconception? And I hear this a lot and I guess I have a voice in my head that agrees that running will lead no matter what it leads to injury. For example, I’ve often said when people say, oh, do you run? I’m , no,

I like my knees. I think that’s one of my favorite ways to explain why I don’t run. I like my knees the way they are. So what are your thoughts on it?. I have some problems with that.

The biggest problem is. Let’s take your example. So you’re creating that story in your head. Oh, if I do this, it’s going to lead to injury it’s this idea, this output that our conscious brain puts towards something, because something in your unconscious centers doesn’t feel safe with running, and that’s fine.

You do not have to love running, but if you do love running and then it’s something that you want to do into your eighties. And there are people. That run into their eighties and run the Boston marathon every single year, which is amazing. And it does not have to lead to injury, especially if you take care to practice your form, you can think about, you’ve got athletes that squat, they love squatting. They love the Olympic squat lift and their snatches, and they set up.

Perfectly every single time they take care to practice their other lifts that will assist with the safety of their lift, because what is that heavy lifting? But every time form is key. If your form is right, if your form is off for a one rep max squat, you will likely be slightly hurt some place. If we, as runners looked at running the same way that we look at our strength training, I think we would be far better.

Instead of just going, ah, it’s fine. I can heel strike or just be lazy and running during this sprint. I just need to get through it. Or you are beat you’re exhausted and you just, that probably getting through that last one K last half, half a mile, you are maybe running on your runner’s knee.

Walk it sit down, do a drill. Don’t force it.

Can you talk a little bit more about working on skills and and how skills can increase safety? Not only biomechanically, but also just emotionally what other thing, what are other things people can do on your own without a coach, things that you can do are really good ankle mobility drills, specifically love to say this lunges. So the angle that you have between the top of your foot and your.

How can you make that feel really safe your toes as well? There are pulling drills that I would recommend. I can talk a million years, but along this stuff, but oftentimes if you can think about running in a little kitty pool, if you’re just running in place, if you are kicking the water in a way that the water actually leaves the pool behind.

You are pushing down and backwards and you’re not running very efficiently. You’re not pulling the ground with you to run forward. So instead you can think about pulling your heel to your butt, do your took us, if you will. Lovely lady that I work with and is teaches me and it hilarious anyways.

So if the water drops vertically down, as you’re pulling in, you’re leaning forward, that’s a great trail. Get into a kiddie pool and retrain your gate so that you’re pulling through your hamstring, pulling through your glutes instead of kicking back, and then you have to have a harder dry and your drive forward.

You’re pulling up with your knees and your core. If you’re pulling up with your knees in your quads, your legs are going to start burning way faster and your hamstrings are meant for endurance as are your calf. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me more about the toes. What is a drill to help get to know your toes? Oh I liked scrunching and I also liked picking up pens and pencils with your toes.

And there’s also the beauty of it. Skin stim. Touch is a good. Making sure that adding sensory to your toes, like touching your toes, telling your brain here, my toes. Hello toes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Not just with your hands, but also with maybe a paintbrush or a tissue or poke at it and you want to get all nerdy.

It has a lot to do with the structures in your brain, too. The sensory cortex that tells you where things are, which sits just behind where you can move things. So you have to touch things before you can actually move them or know how to move them. So with feet specifically, it does have a lot of touch.

And how important are your toes when you’re running? Like how much do they matter? Oh, Yes, the answer is yes. Yes. They matter a lot. Imagine having your big, your great toe. Imagine breaking it and attempting to walk. And if you don’t have. A good understanding of where your toes are.

Cause they, they push off through the ground through that great toe, your little toe, whatever. It’s a little toe and I’ve run on toes where I didn’t realize that they were even broken, probably should have, but the same thing is very true. Every other structure in your body, right? If you have a broken finger, running’s going to not be terribly difficult, but you’re still going to come and probably feel that.

I remember when I was in October, I had my teeth, I had my wisdom teeth pulled and attempting to run three weeks. After that, I had a massive headache. It was awful. You’re relearning your body. You’re relearning what can move and what doesn’t move. So the importance of your feet and your toes it’s your relationship with how fast you’re going?

Your relationship with how much force you’re putting in through the ground is you’re pulling off and landing and the unconscious input that your feet and your toes give to your brain while you’re running. There’s huge millions and million of drills, or a really cool way to maybe start working on something different, wake your brain up around, running and do something different.

I hear you talk about stride and I can imagine how that would start to feel a little overwhelming because of all the different nuances. But I could handle scrunching my toes around things every day. I could handle trying to pick up pencils and get to know those toes and see how it changes on my own.

Yeah. And are there other things you choose, just make sure that you can actually wiggle your toes in your shoes. So I want to tie those so tight. Okay. So shoes, toe drills. This conversation has been really interesting to me, Amanda, thank you for being here. And as we wrap up, are there any other habits that someone could work on your eyes where you are looking while you’re running while you’re doing things is so important, oftentimes.

Runners tend to look down at their feet instead of out at the horizon and your body wants to go where it looks. If you’re looking to the left, oftentimes you turned to the left. So giving yourself some good eye droves like what’s an hydro look far away often, especially if you’re on your computer.

Yeah. Yeah. I we’re only looking in one place all day long. And then I drove could be just to look out. 20 feet away for 20 seconds and hold that because we have so many different muscles in our eyes that we’re only using maybe a couple of them to look at these screens all day there’s a great beat. One that I often find helps when people have tight hips. So you stick your thumb about an arm’s distance away from you. You look directly at your thumb, keep your head where it is, and then draw that then down and to the side, keeping your eyes on it.

Hold your gaze there. Close your eyes. Bring it back to the Midland. And repeat it a couple of times on each side,

that particular drill, keeping your heads, get still training those muscles in your eyes. First of all, to see, without moving the head to perceive what’s down in that site, while you’re running, that’s pretty important to see your sides, your hips as well, why it affects your hips. Again, I could go into. The neurological science-y kind of connections back there.

But for some reason I find that works very well for a lot of my runners that have issues with their hips or tight knees or it band issues. Okay. I like that. And my instinct is thinking about how you’re right, when the head moves, the body moves. And if you’re looking down, you’ve got that slight curve of the back.

Maybe, the system, isn’t quite sure what’s going on. Things tighten up to protect and practicing. Allowing your brain to know you can look down and I’ll keeping the head up. Just probably increases safety, right? You want to let your body know you’re safe as often as possible and scanning the environment while maintaining that relaxed posture sounds like it would be really helpful.

Exactly. Very cool. You are a wealth of knowledge, Amanda. I really appreciate it. And I think people will get a lot from this information. Thank you. Very welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. To wrap up, take what you learn out into your world, listening to your body, listen to your brain while you’re training, practice, those breathing drills.

Practice those tow drills. And remember, try not to run on injury, allow your body to heal so that it doesn’t learn how to run on an injury. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks again. Thanks for F orest Coaching for sharing you with us today. I really thank you so much.

 Thank you again for joining us on Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-centered mental health podcast. We hope today’s episode was empowering and supported you in strengthening your mind-body connection We’re your hosts Jeanne and Jess. Please join us again as we continue to explore integrative approaches to wellbeing. Until then, take care.