Pre-race stress and yogurt better than milk?

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

We all know that pre-race stress is not good for our race performances. But why? Well, there are a lot of reasons. We now have another.

We all also know that calcium is important for our bones and dairy is a good source of milk. But what if one type of dairy is better than others?

Pre-race stress

You already know to avoid pre-race stress because it’s not good for your race performance, right? You might even know some of the reasons it isn’t good, right?

Well, here’s another way:

During acute psychological stress—in this case, seeing and being told they were failing at a pressure-packed task—the triathletes’ pain thresholds decreased significantly.

In short, your pain threshold is reduced after dealing with psychological stress. As a result, you can’t push as hard through the pain that is inevitably a part of racing.

Is yogurt better than milk?

We all know that calcium is important for maintaining bone health and dairy is a good source of calcium. But is it possible that one kind of dairy could be better than others?

It appears this may be the case:

He noted that other dairy products did not produce a similar effect and cautioned that some yogurts are high in sugar, “so we have to be careful about that.”

It’s not everything but it appears yogurt may be a super food (besides the high sugar content in some flavored varieties) in yet another way.