Roundups

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

Beet juice for the brain

You’re late in a race. Maybe you’re running a 10 miler, shooting for 80 minutes, and you just went through 9 miles in 1:11:34 after going through mile 8 in 1:03:42. Quick. How much time do you have to cover the last mile and is that faster or slower than you covered the prior mile? Right now, that’s easy to answer. You know as well as me that it would be a far different story if you were trying to do the math during the race.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about the likely endurance benefits of beet juice and its key ingredient, nitrate (also found in dark leafy greens and some other foods). What if there were another benefit?

Well, Alex Hutchinson finds a study that points to another potential benefit.

When you’re exercising hard and hyperventilating, levels of carbon dioxide in your blood drop, which can in turn cause your blood vessels to constrict, reducing the amount of oxygen reaching your brain. The nitrate in beet juice, which is converted to nitric oxide, plays a crucial role in dilating blood vessels, so it may counteract this effect.

That’s just a hypothesis right now. However, with those taking beet juice able to respond to a cognitive test more rapidly, there definitely appears to be some benefit.

Pre-exercise dynamic stretching

What do you do in regards to stretching or mobility exercises before workouts or races? Nothing? Static stretching? Dynamic stretching? There is plenty of debate as to what kind of exercises are good to do pre-exercise or whether it’s best to do none.

In the battle of none vs. dynamic, let this be a vote in favor of dynamic:

The results demonstrated that the DS [dynamic stretching] treatment improved the endurance performance of running at a velocity equivalent to 90% VO2max in well-trained male runners, although it did not change the RE [running economy]. This running velocity is equivalent to that for a 3000 or 5000 meter race. Our finding suggests that performing DS during warm-up before a race is effective for improving performance.

This is when compared to non-stretching. I’d definitely consider this pretty significant. Time to exhaustion at 90% VO2max was significantly longer on average and total running distance was, on average, nearly 700 meters longer (just over 4301 meters vs. just short of 3617 meters). That’s a result to pay attention to.

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.

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

Two studies in this post that remind us to keep an open mind until the science is settled.

Running and knee osteoarthritis

If there is one health factor for which it seems running may be bad for us, that would be knee osteoarthritis. Do we essentially wear our knees out by running? Possibly.

Or, possibly, not.

These results, the team says, suggest that regular running does not raise the risk of knee osteoarthritis among the general population; it may actually protect against the disease.

Is it a sure thing? Hardly. However, this is a positive sign and this also makes sense intuitively. While we do place a lot of strain on our knees while running, most runners will not run upwards of 1 hour per day. For the other 15 hours (if you figure 16 waking hours a day) we’re carrying less weight around on our knees as the average runner weighs less than the average non-runner.

Which is harder on the knees? Running 1 hour or less per day or carrying extra weight all day? It’s hard to say for sure but this gives us some hope that there is another positive health aspect to running. At the very least, it might not be bad for us in this one way it has seemed it could be. Again, hardly a sure thing right now but definitely something I’d like to see more on.

Pre-run static stretching

We’ve heard a lot in recent years about how pre-run static stretching is probably bad for your running performance. It makes sense. Elastic muscles are more efficient as they can act like springs or rubber bands to store energy when stretched and release that energy upon contraction.

However, a new study suggests this may not be the case:

These data suggest that SS of short duration (<30 sec) may actually improve acute speed performance, whereas SS of moderate duration may not hamper speed and agility performance.

What to make of this? Personally, I’m not taking too much into this at the moment, other than to keep an open mind. Maybe static stretching is bad. Maybe it’s actually good. It’s hard to say right now. This is the nature of science, though. We don’t always have a clear picture of things.

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

I came across a good summary of what we know currently on kinesio tape that I wanted to pass along. Also, mixed results for mega doses of antioxidants.

Good kinesio tape?

Well…maybe not. Unless you like the placebo effect. (Note: I’m not opposed to using placebos if they will help.)

Bad antioxidants?

In recent years, we’ve heard of the bad side of long term megadoses of antioxidants.

There’s a new review of studies out looking specifically at Vitamin E and some related compounds with some interesting results:

In other words, short term intake appears to be good. Long term intake, not so much.