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If you are interested in taking your athletic performance to the next level - whether that next level is beginning a training program for the first time, improving your personal best time, winning your age group, or turning professional - you came to the right place.
Joe Company, PhD is an experienced coach and experienced athlete. He applies sports science as well as his personal experiences as a coach and athlete to customize training programs for all abilities of athletes. Joe's mission is make your training and racing experience as rewarding as possible. The goal is to help you become a healthy, successful, complete athlete by providing a training plan that helps you reach your goals while maintaining balance in your life.
In addition to custom training plans, Joe offer laboratory bike and run VO2max and lactate testing as well as 'field testing' for bike power. These tests allow unparalleled optimization of your training plan.
It is time to take the guesswork out of your training!
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 NutritionNutrition just might be the 4th discipline. |
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Science Scientific articles to maximizing your endurance. |
 TrainingSpecific workouts to enhance your performance. |
Endurance Company LLC
Joe Company
(573) 326-9618
joe@endurancecompany.com
© 2012 Endurance Company, LLC - Joe Company - joe@endurancecompany.com
All of us race, participate, or train for different reasons. After several years of racing, my wife Jill as a spectator/supporter and me as a delusional age grouper, we have made some interesting observations. We thought that it might just be helpful to share these, in the context of our recent experience in my first half ironman. Just to give folks something to chew on and maybe even remember at their next race.
Now is the time of year that most northern hemisphere athletes begin to ramp up their training in preparation for their first big race. In previous years I tended to come out of hibernation in late-February - early-March and begin serious preparation for my upcoming season. It is a really fun time of year to begin this type of training with the temperatures beginning to rise, the sun shining longer, and the first race of the year quickly approaching.
In the January 26-27 Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates wrote an article titled, "My Plan To Fix The World’s Biggest Problems – Measure Them!" The take home message was: without feedback from precise measurements, any progress is destined to be “rare and erratic.” Gates writes, “You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal.” 
Over the years, I have come to appreciate a restful, meditative style of yoga called Yin Yoga. Yin is practiced “cold” without warming the muscles. This allows you to bypass giving the muscles a stretch, allowing you to target the deeper connective tissue - fascia, ligaments and tendons. 
I am just coming off the longest break from training I have ever taken in my 30 years of running. Early last summer I developed a calcaneal stress fracture and after several misdiagnoses, I ended up having a ten week running break. These past months have been some of the most difficult and humbling of my life. What I came to realize was that the sooner I accepted that I was not invincible, I no longer struggled and began to heal.
As we wrap up the 2012 season, I wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who is part of the ECo family. I was very impressed with how hard the athletes worked this year, how open the athletes were to adapting to new training, and how well the athletes performed. ECo athletes are part of a group of incredible athletes who have chosen to train wisely, work hard, and redefine their limits. The results speak for themselves. 
When I began running longer distances, I learned that elite distance runners had a cadence of 90-95 foot-strikes/minute. Since I came from a sprinting background, leg turnover wasn't an issue, but it was a challenge for me to keep my cadence at ~90 for longer runs. It took practice, but I after a while, I was able to adapt ~90 strides per minute as a comfortable, relaxing running cadence. But, at certain times of the year, I tried to bump that number up a little bit. 
In the October 1996 issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Izumi Tabata showed that a high-intensity intermittent exercise or High-intensity interval training (HIT) protocol had better aerobic and anaerobic improvements than long-duration endurance exercise (1).
It’s easy to get off kilter. So many things in our lives can set us off into a downward and distracted spiral. To help get focused (and develop killer intrinsic foot, ankle and glute muscle strength), try some balancing poses. Remember that it’s next to impossible to stay committed to these poses without steady breathing and a calm relaxed mind.