Roundups

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

It looks like this is going to be a chilly post…

Do you remember cooling vests? I seem to recall them first coming to prominence around the time of the Athens Olympics in 2004. With the hot marathons, the American marathon teams used them with good results. Were the results pure coincidence or was there a connection? Likely, some of both.

I still see them being used at times in pre-competition settings, especially when it’s going to be warm during the competition. The theory makes sense. Lower your core temperature and you’ll perform better.

While the vests work, maybe they would be even better off using cooling pants.

Findings indicate that torso and thigh precooling during a warm-up reduces thermoregulatory strain. However, thigh opposed to torso precooling provides greater performance improvements.

Remember ice baths after workouts?

Some time ago, I wrote a post that, along with other topics, at least referenced the idea that ice baths may not be as good as we once thought.

Well, now we have more evidence.

Local muscle endurance increased in both groups, but the increase in the cooled group tended to be lower compared to the noncooled group. Regular post-exercise cold application to muscles might attenuate muscular and vascular adaptations to resistance training.

Based on what I have seen, if I even did have convenient access to ice baths, I’d be seriously thinking twice about using them after my workouts. I’m surely not going to be going out to seek out ways to get an ice bath in.

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

Coaches and placebos

Last year, I asked if the placebo effect is a bad thing. My point then being, if it helps you run faster, I don’t care if it’s placebo or a real effect. It helps you run faster and that’s what matters.

It turns out I’m not alone. Coaches regularly use placebos in order to get performance gains.

Overall, the coaches are optimistic about placebo use in sports. Close to half of them, especially those coaching at higher levels of competition, may use it regularly while achieving positive results.

Personally, I say good. While we don’t want coaches going around lying to their athletes, if they do something for an athlete saying this will help you run faster and the athlete does run faster, is that lying?

After a successful placebo intervention, only 15% of the coaches would administer it again without consulting the athlete.

To me, that’s a good sign. Coaches aren’t lying. They are using the placebo, then saying look at what you accomplished. You did this with the benefit of a placebo. Now, believe in yourself. Use the placebo if you wish because you believe in it but go into your next competition knowing what’s possible.

Avoiding muscle soreness

Alex Hutchinson at the Sweat Science blog has another good one. This time, about how to overcome muscle soreness.

Have you ever experienced the situation where some specific workout simply tore apart your legs and they were really sore for some time after? The next time you do the same workout, though, it’s not so bad. That’s called the "repeated bout effect" and it’s a real thing that can help us avoid soreness. Maybe not in that first workout but, if we use it right, possibly in races.

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

One would think asking the following two questions would produce common sense answers. In one case, one might be wrong.

Does running in combat boots make you more likely to sustain an injury than running in running shoes? No. What? Really?

One would expect that running in combat boots would lead to a higher injury rate than running in running shoes, right? Well, the US Army changed from using combat boots to running shoes for PT in 1982. A review of studies was done comparing injury rates during Basic Combat Training (BCT) before and after the 1982 change. The result?

These analyses provided little support for a reduction in injury risk after the switch from boots to running shoes for PT in BCT.

What does this mean? I’m not totally sure but it’s interesting to think that running shoes may be no more useful in avoiding injury than combat boots.

Is more running healthy? Yes. Surprised? Why?

Alex Hutchinson explores the topic again.

I’m with him in that it’s a shame we even have to address this issue. This time, we have a study with the numbers to draw a more fair and accurate conclusion. What does it find? Even at high fitness levels, being more fit definitely decreases your mortality.

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

I can’t even believe I have to post about the fact that running more isn’t bad for your health but people who don’t like running, of course, grab on to poor explanations of inconclusive studies and try to drag runners down. I just want to do all I can to make sure anyone reading this knows there’s no basis in what they are saying.

Also something interesting on being mindful during your workouts.

Running more IS good for you

I recently posted about poor reporting on an inconclusive study. The study said we didn’t have enough evidence to determine whether or not running every day or nearly every day was good for you, basically because they didn’t have enough people in the study who did run every day or nearly every day. The media spun that into running too much is just as bad for your health as being a couch potato. Bad reporting on an inconclusive study.

So what do we really know?

First, Alex Hutchinson has a great follow-up.

In short, another study that supposedly finds that too much running is bad for you. The catch this time? They controlled for BMI. Hutchinson perfectly describes the problem with that with this:

The data shown above has been adjusted for various potential confounding factors, including BMI. That’s problematic, because BMI is actually both a confounding and a mediating variable: exercise lowers your BMI. For example, the group that never exercised had an average BMI of 27.2, while the group that exercised daily had a BMI of 25.2. Adjusting for BMI effectively penalizes the exercise group for being thinner, as if it were a random effect rather than a direct result of the exercise.

What I like about this, as Hutchinson also points out, is that the researchers understood and discussed this limitation, then gave further numbers to break things down. The result?

For lean participants, more workouts was always better. For overweight and obese participants, 4-6 workouts per week was worse than 2-3 per week but not worse than no activity.

Two key takeaways in my opinion. First, for those who are fit, more exercise is better. Second, this shows the importance of considering the fitness of the individual. Any exercise is strenuous for an obese individual. It makes sense that 4-6 strenuous workouts a week isn’t going to be good for anyone. So we need to prescribe exercise differently for different people. Less for those who need to build some baseline fitness, then more as they build their fitness and improve their health. More to start for those who already have some baseline fitness.

Next up, thoughts from the National Runners’ Health Study.

Dr. Williams’s research has found progressively greater health benefits for runners topping 30, 40, even 49 miles a week.

…

"Almost everybody can benefit significantly by increasing their exercise level," says Dr. Williams, who is publicly calling for a two-tiered approach to exercise guidelines, one that would give substantial attention to the benefits of going far beyond the current minimum recommendations.

A lot of good and very powerful benefits listed here. The one concern some present is that you keep it sustainable. This seems obvious but is often overlooked. No amount of exercise now is going to benefit you decades from now unless you’re still doing it decades from now.

Mindfulness

Ok, enough about more being good for you. Let’s shift gears.

How do you enjoy your running more? Maybe by being more mindful.

In short, we’ve known for some time that one of the best ways to stick to an exercise routine is to find it satisfying. But how do you make a routine more satisfying? Apparently "awareness of what is happening in the present moment" (aka mindfulness) plays an important role.

“The message is that mindfulness may amplify satisfaction, because one is satisfied when positive experiences with physical activity become prominent,” says Kalliopi-Eleni Tsafou, a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Utrecht University who led the study. “For those experiences to be noticed,” she continued, “one must become aware of them. We would argue that this can be achieved by being mindful.”

The study isn’t perfect (to be honest, show me a bulletproof study with bulletproof results and I’ll be highly impressed) but the results are interesting and worth considering.

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

What? Yep, it’s true.

Bacteria

Alex Hutchinson has another good blog. This time on how your body’s "friendly" bacteria appears to make you faster.

A little of what was seen in mice:

So in this case, having "normal" gut bacteria is the best option; having all your gut bacteria wiped out is the worst option; and having at least one gut bacteria is better than nothing. Why? The researchers focus on the possible role of gut bacteria in enhancing the body’s antioxidant response, and they do indeed show that antioxidant activity was reduced in the germ-free mice.

And in humans:

Which brings us back to beet juice, whose key ingredient is nitrate, which is converted by friendly bacteria in the mouth to nitrite, which is then converted to nitric oxide, which is what boosts endurance. In this case, then, it’s your oral microbiome rather than your gut microbiome that matters. There’s already some interesting research from back in 2008 showing that, if you use an antibacterial mouthwash, you completely wipe out the benefits of ingesting nitrate.

Interesting stuff. I’m not going to go out and tell anyone to avoid antibacterial mouthwash but, if you take beet juice for performance benefit, you might want to think about your timing. Further, I’d say we should probably at least be aware of these things. Just don’t go overboard. As mentioned in the end, probiotics aren’t a panacea.

Cursing

No, I’m not encouraging you to run all over the place swearing in front of kids and as you’re passing churches. However, as this old study that someone I follow on Twitter linked to shows, it can help relieve pain if used in moderation.

This article presents further evidence that, for many people, swearing (cursing) provides readily available and effective relief from pain. However, overuse of swearing in everyday situations lessens its effectiveness as a short-term intervention to reduce pain.

Used in the right situation, maybe we could tap into this to overcome the pains of racing and run faster. Just be careful. You don’t want to upset parents of young children because you’re flying into the finish line screaming every four letter word in existence. You also don’t want to overdose, as much as you might want to at times.