I’m not normally into runs farther than 10 km as I tend to get bored doing the same thing for such a long time. Last weekend, however, Keenvibe attended Mud Masters, an 18 km run bristled with 47 obstacles just outside of Hamburg. And let me tell you this: Those 18km did not bore me in the slightest!
The obstacles covered a decent range of difficulty levels. One of the obstacles was as easy as running up a tiny hill in the forest. Lots of the other obstacles were slight variations of climbing or jumping over bales of hay, wooden walls or scaffolding. However, there were quite a few more interesting ones too:
Now the pictures above may look as though the race was made for tough adrenaline junkies. But really, anyone with a half decent fitness level could have participated.
Beginners can start with the 6km option, well-trained athletes may choose to go for the full marathon distance. We chose 18km as it allowed us to try out all the obstacles without having to repeat any of them.
The race is not about speed and you can skip any of the obstacles if you wish. With some help from others, however, a reasonably fit person should be able to overcome the vast majority of obstacles without too much trouble. Most people show up to enjoy the day after all 😉
The cardiovascular system distributes oxygen and nutrients in your body. Without those two essentials, your body cannot function properly. To this end, we rely mostly on our heart and lungs. Exercises that use and strengthen these two parts of your body are called “cardio exercises”. Typically they will get your heart rate above your normal level and make you breath harder over an extended period of time.
how much weight can your muscles move and how many times can you contract a group of muscles repetitively. Improving these aspects will boost your overall strength, stability and balance. In turn, you will become less prone to injury.
If you only isolate body parts in the gym and if you only focus on typical cardiovascular sports such as running, you will lack this aspect. It’s about coordinating your movements and teaching your body to engage all the right muscles to perform a certain task or movement.
This is about joint mobility and range of motion: At which point will your ligaments, tendons and muscles restrict motion? In many sports, greater flexibility leads to better technique. Without the right degree of flexibility, correct and healthy execution of certain movements is impossible.
People have long realized that a healthy diet is key to a healthy life. What exactly should be part of a healthy diet, still gets you many different answers. Clean-eating, for example, focuses on eating only unprocessed foods. Paleo goes even further by restricting your meals to what was eaten in the Paleolithic era. On the other end of the scale, you get the supplement industry. For every aspect of your sports performance that you might want to improve, you can get a supplement. Ultimately, everyone has to find the right balance between taste, convenience and the feeling that you actually know what you eat.
There was a lot to take in at the Urban Fit Days. For sports people, it was definitely worth going. The workouts alone should be reason enough to attend for anyone interested in sports and according to the organizers, there will be a next time.
Why it had an effect on my routine
In a single week, I’ll try and find out how the product is received by swimming, running, cycling, climbing, doing yoga and body weight training with other sports people. These people have opened my eyes to new types of sports, new running trails, different techniques for performing exercises and suggestions regarding nutrition. I now feel that I have become more well rounded as an athlete. I realized that solely hitting the gym for strength and running for stamina is not going to provide the same health benefits as a truly varied mix of sports.
ow, I won’t tell you to go found your own start up in sports, obviously. What I will do, however, is recommend to you the benefits of adding more variety to your sports sessions. You’ll simply become more wholesome as a sports person. Obtain balance on the slack-line, flexibility in your yoga session, mental strength through climbing, endurance through running, good posture through swimming, … the list goes on. But don’t get stuck with a single set of sports. Swap out each type of sports every now and then to target new muscle groups, wire new connections in your brain and pick up more transferable skills.