Ryan

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

I hope nobody gets the wrong impression. I really don’t think running should be such a painful thing. That said, I have two pain related topics for today. Gender specific injury prevention and our memories of painful events.

Gender specific injury prevention

This seems like an interesting topic to me. Let’s be honest. As much as I love the sport of running because it’s so open to all people, all ages, all genders, men and women are different even when it comes to running. There are some differences in our physiology that simply can not be overlooked.

How might those differences affect our susceptibility to injury? Well, Alex Hutchinson came across an interesting study on that topic.

Comparing within each sex, the injured female runners displayed greater hip rotation than healthy female runners. The same pattern didn’t show up in men, though; instead, injured male runners had greater ankle rotation than healthy males. So while the end result is the same, “females develop this injury from a hip-down perspective while men develop it from a foot-up perspective,” Ferber says.

Now, that’s an interesting result. The suggestion was that women should focus on hip strength to reduce injury risk while men should focus on foot and lower leg strength. I’d suggest that all runners should pay at least some attention to all these areas but it may be worth considering where an additional focus is given if you have a history of problems.

Our memory of pain

Think back to your last marathon. If you haven’t run a marathon, think back to your big race last year. What do you remember? The accomplishment? The sense of achievement you felt when you realized you hit your goal? Oh yeah, it hurt some also, didn’t it?

I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising but you probably have forgotten more about the pain than about the accomplishment.

In short, that’s exactly what happens. You remember the sense of accomplishment. The memory of the pain it took to get there fades.

What can we do with this? The article suggests trying to associate the pain during a race with the sense of accomplishment that is coming at the end because that’s what your future self will do. More practically, I’m not sure but it’s interesting to think about and I thought worth a share.

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

A couple interesting things I want to point to today. One on that old boogeyman, lactate. Another on the idea of rinsing your mouth with a carbohydrate drink after exercise.

Lactate

For decades, lactate has gotten a bad rap. While some of us have known for years that lactate isn’t the boogeyman that it’s been made out to be, it can actually be used as a fuel for one thing, it still has that bad rap.

To be clear, when your muscles are sore the day after a hard workout, that has nothing to do with lactate. Once your workout is over, lactate is cleared from your body very quickly as it is used for fuel or converted to other substrates that can later be used for fuel.

Let’s take a look at another myth: the myth that lactate causes fatigue:

These results suggest that blood lactate appears to have a protective effect against fatigue, at least at level of primary somatosensory cortex, although at the expense of efficiency of adjacent areas.

So let’s stop hating on lactate. It’s not all good but the bad rap it gets in many circles is almost totally unwarranted.

Post-workout carbohydrate mouth rinses

In recent years, we’ve seen some interesting results from studies testing simply rinsing your mouth with carbohydrates before a hard workout or race. You apparently don’t even have to swallow. Just rinse with the carbohydrates and your body responds by assuming that more fuel is about to be available and makes more fuel available for use. That’s a good thing in shorter races where we’ll never tap into our complete stores.

What about post-workout, though? Does simply having carbs in your mouth, even if you don’t swallow, have a benefit?

It appears the answer is a qualified yes:

These data suggest that CHO mouth-rinsing attenuates neuromuscular fatigue following endurance cycling. Although these changes did not translate into a performance improvement, further investigation is required into the role of CHO mouth-rinse in alleviating neuromuscular fatigue.

No performance improvement found here so maybe the benefit isn’t functionally useful. However, it’s interesting that there was a reduction of neuromuscular fatigue. I’ll be interested in watching for some follow-up to this.