April 6, 2023

Use downhill running to boost leg strength & performance

Many runners dislike downhill running. It can be uncomfortable and perhaps cause injuries. But it can also lead to rapid muscle adaptations that improve your running, especially if you’re headed to the Boston Marathon this month.

Here,10 subjects did 10 modest downhill workouts over a 4 week period. Result: The downhill training “promoted neuromuscular adaptations typically observed after high-intensity eccentric resistance training.”

The researchers observed no change in vo2 max, and didn’t conduct other performance testing. Still, they concluded: “These novel results suggest that short-term, moderate-intensity DR training is an effective method of promoting rapid gains in knee-extensor muscle strength, size and structure.” 

And there’s no doubt that you want strong muscles around the knees for efficient running. Or as the investigators stated: “The chronic use of downhill running can stimulate muscle hypertrophy of the main locomotor muscles, i.e. quadriceps femoris.” More at European Journal of Applied Physiology (free full text).

How to exercise more without eating more (and gaining weight)

Many experts in the weight-loss field are confident that exercise doesn’t do much. They believe that eating less should be the primary goal.

One reason why: Exercisers tend to “compensate” after a workout. They reach for a bar or a smoothie or some form of processed food that quickly adds more calories to their daily energy balance than the calories burned by their workout. 

However, most studies have been conducted in a laboratory setting. Recently, an Australian group decided to retest the compensation hypothesis in a “naturalistic” manner. They followed a group of moderate exercisers (2 to 5 workouts per week) to determine what and how much they ate on exercise days vs non-exercise days.

Result: On exercise days, the subjects did not eat more unhealthy foods than on non-exercise days. In fact, they ate better foods. The exercise seemed to provide a reinforcing diet stimulus rather than a junk-foody “compensation” pattern.

However, subjects did eat more on exercise days. Perhaps the exercise stimulated their appetite. The results seem to indicate that you should pay more attention to meal size and total calorie intake on exercise days. More at PLOS ONE (free full text).

Sara Hall’s 6 steps to coming back from a long term injury

Sara Hall, now 39, is known for her longevity in the sport. In high school she won the national cross-country championship, and she has run a number of top marathons past age 35. But last year was a tough one, as an IT band injury sidelined her for 8 months. Last week wasn’t great either; she had Covid. 

So what did she do over the weekend? She took the top American spot in the 50th annual Cherry Blossom 10 mile--a rite of spring in Washington, D.C.

And in another 10 days she’ll be running the Boston Marathon. Here, Hall shares her advice on how to bounce back from a long term injury like her IT band issue. A unique tip: Hall takes an inquisitive approach, applying curiosity to the process. She enjoys digging into “the back story” of her running career to figure out what went wrong, and what she has to do to correct it. More at Runner’s World.

Do running shoes prevent injuries?

Sara Hall didn’t bother looking for a new pair of shoes to cope with her injury, and there are good reasons why. The same reasons that running shoe companies generally don’t claim their shoes will prevent injuries. 1) There’s little to no evidence for this. And 2) A decade ago Vibram paid several million dollars to settle a lawsuit based on the injury-prevention claims of its Five Fingers running shoe. (Vibram didn’t admit guilt; it just settled.)

This excellent article doesn’t mention the Vibram suit. Nor does it look at an emerging belief that more minimalist shoes could help with some knee pains, while high-rearfoot cushioned shoes could reduce Achilles and calf problems. But it references good research (especially this Cochrane Review), interviews appropriate experts, and reaches a consensus conclusion. You should read it for a solid update. More at the NYTimes.

“Social fitness:” A surprising new way to boost your running

We’ve all read about a million articles on the importance of relationships in a happy fulfilled life. No doubt we should glance up from the smartphone every once in a while to, oh, I dunno, maybe have a conversation with a spouse, child, friend, or other. Even better if we join a nonprofit volunteer group.

Now this idea has entered the fitness world as “social fitness.” I like it. “Not exercising your social fitness is hazardous to your health,” says Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of a new book, The Good Life, with lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness

It’s possible that we can only maximize our vo2, running economy, etc, when we also focus on our social fitness. After all, a lonely runner who’s feeling unsupported isn’t likely to race strong.

In a similar manner, Army research has shown that “social fitness exercises such as doing someone a favor or practicing conflict resolution reduced loneliness and boosted well-being in soldiers.” More at Outside Online.

Here are four great suggestions straight from Wadlinger and his work. Try to practice: 1) Generosity; 2) Radical curiosity; 3) Communicating back to others; 4) Regular relationship check-ins. More at TED.com.

Maybe 90 is the new 50

Antonio Rao, 90, finished last month’s Rome Marathon in an age-record 6:14--beating the old record by more than 30 minutes. He also improved his own time from last year by 6 minutes. Rao, who still trains about 15 miles/week, said he enjoys running because: “When I run, I don’t think about problems. I feel free.” He reports that he has been running regularly since 14--that’s 76 years. More at Canadian Running.

In a new review article, senior author and exercise-heart specialist Ben Levine begins with an unusual title: “Exercise in Octogenarians: How Much is Too Little?” The paper notes that cardio fitness can remain quite high until age 70, but then begins to drop off more substantially.

What to do? That’s easy. Keep exercising, no matter how much you slow down. Why? Because: “Recent studies have provided compelling evidence that reinforces the favorable effects of prolonged and vigorous endurance exercise training and competition on the exercise performance of men and women in their late eighth to tenth decades of life.”

The ideal exercise program is one that you follow from your teens onward. But even if you don’t begin exercising until mid life, you get a significant late life payoff. It’s the decline in late-year exercise that must be avoided. In fact, that’s when you need it the most. More at Annual Reviews (free full text). Infographic and conclusion. 

Didn’t see this one coming: Exercise reduces risk of bad sleep

With more than 92,000 subjects whose daily activity was objectively measured with accelerometers, here’s a sleep study with more oomph than most. I don’t think anyone was surprised that sleeping less or more than optimal (about 7 hours) was “associated with higher risk for all-cause mortality.”

The twist in this study was a new question: Does your daily movement amount change the mortality risk? Answer: Yes! More total activity, or more moderate-to-vigorous activity (ie, exercise), lowered “the excessive mortality risks associated with short or long sleep duration.”

In other words, exercise is so good for you that it somewhat offsets the harms of a major lifestyle problem like poor sleep. More at European J of Preventive Cardiology. Here’s a nice graphic summarizing the study results.

Another accelerometer study measured daily step counts of more than 3000 adults around age 50.

In a 10-year followup period, those taking at least 8000 steps on 1-2 days a week, were 14.9 percent less likely to die than those never reaching 8000 steps. Those taking 8000 steps on 3-7 days/week were 16.5 percent less likely to die. The results were interpreted as good news for “weekend warrior” types who can only find exercise time several days a week. More at JAMA Network Open (free full text).

An accompanying editorial added: “It is important to note that these data merit replication and likely miss other important dimensions of health, such as neurologic health. Recent evidence indicated that higher thresholds (eg, 9800 steps per day) and higher intensities may be important for higher-order benefits, including reductions in incident dementia.”

Big article but no evidence to support diaphragmatic breathing

Even the NYTimes is guilty of overhyping articles from time to time. Like this one: “Power Your Run With Better Breathing.” That implies that you’ll get a big payoff if only you breathe right.” Ahh, nope. The reporter is more honest: “While there is not a lot of research on how diaphragmatic (or “belly”) breathing directly improves running….” The article doesn’t present any convincing evidence. More at the NY Times.

But I get it. Everyone finds their breathing gets difficult (labored) at some point, usually when they speed up. And we naturally wonder if there’s a right or better way to breathe. Some advocate for nasal breathing (seems unlikely to help). Some believe in synchronizing breaths and strides at a certain ratio. Maybe. But not likely.

Here’s a twist on synchronization. In the first ever Boston Marathon-funded research project, investigators at Boston this year will be looking at heart rates and stride rates. Do they match up to some degree? If so, is this good or bad?

It’s a novel but interesting idea, because when you think about it, a 40-year-old runner has a max heart rate around 180 and is also told by many to aim for a stride rate near 180. Hmmm. More at BAA.

SHORT STUFF you don’t want to miss

>>> Going too far: Do ultra runners have more mental-health problems?

>>> Seeing the light: Exercise protects against retinal disease.

>>> Not guilty: Coffee/caffeine don’t cause problematic heart contractions  contractions.

GREAT QUOTES make great training partners

“It’s hard at first to understand that it’s not about beating other runners. The competition is against the little voice inside you that wants to quit.” 

--George Sheehan

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading. See you again next week. Amby

March 30, 2023

Psst! We have a world record holder in our midst

This is a bit of a privacy invasion, I suppose, but I don’t think Camille Herron will mind. Last weekend in Australia, she set a female world record for the 48-hour run as she covered 270.505 miles. This also made her the only American female to hold a distance record superior to the best American male--a neat asterisk.

Camille holds many other records as well, and is also a subscriber to the full-text edition of RLRH. Congrats, Camille! Keep running long and healthy. More at Outside Online.

Will you run faster if you lose weight?

These days it’s practically verboten to speak/write about weight loss among endurance runners. Only a few top researchers manage to explore both sides of the question in an open, honest manner.

Australian sports nutritionist Louise Burke qualifies as one of those “top researchers.” She’s also a serious long time marathon runner. That helps her produce insightful work. She knows how endurance athletes think, and the ways they eat and train. 

Here, she tackles one of the biggest questions every runner has: Should I lose a few pounds? Will it help my performance or hurt it?

Burke is fully aware that adolescent athletes, particularly females, might face short- and long-term harms (including bone injuries) by weight-cutting. She quotes “expert opinion that Low Energy Availability can be associated with a variety of health and performance concerns.”

On the other hand, a lot of midlife runners could improve their endurance times by dropping 5 to 10 pounds. And Sweden’s Hans Smeets became a world-record-setting 1500-meter runner at age 75 after shedding 15 pounds (research here and personal communication from Smeets).

In this trial, Burke and colleagues divided elite race walkers into two matched groups of about 10 walkers apiece. While continuing their hard training (70 miles a week of running and race-walking, plus additional cross-training), one group maintained its normal high-performance diet for 9 days (consuming 3660 calories/day), while the other group cut back to 2170 calories. During this time, the first group lost about 2 pounds while the second group lost 4.4 pounds.

Both groups then consumed a high-carb diet for 24 hours before racing a 10K time trial. This equal carboload presumably excluded low glycogen as a variable in the outcome. It centered attention on the subjects’ changed body weights.

Result: There was essentially no difference in time trial performance between the two groups. This occurred despite the fact that “the physics of movement in running events show theoretical and empirical support for the benefits of a lighter body mass.” The researchers had hypothesized that the low cal group would “achieve similar (or even superior) benefits.”

Why didn’t they? Perhaps because the low-cal athletes registered higher-stress and less recovery on a Stress Questionnaire. Every day, scientists are believing more strongly that our mental-emotional state has direct physical effects. 

All the same, Burke et al don’t dismiss the potential for intelligent weight adaptation. They state: “A series of strategically timed but brief phases of substantially restricted energy availability might achieve ideal weight as part of a long term periodization of physique by high performance athletes.”

In other word: Your training follows a pattern of hard weeks followed by easy weeks, so that you don’t overtrain. You could possibly do the same with calorie restriction. However, be careful not to drift into months of insufficient energy intake.That will have an impact on both your performance and your health.

Finally, “The relationship between body mass, training quality, and performance in weight-dependent endurance sports is complicated.” Note that sports like running and race walking are weight bearing, whereas swimming, cycling, and rowing are quite different. This changes the calculus of weight gain and loss. More at Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

Hop to it, and run a faster 5K

The last several years, I’ve attempted to improve my rope-jumping skills every spring. I thought the lower-leg training might help me run better. But I never got very far. Didn’t have any skills. This year I think I’ll switch to just basic hopping without the rope. Maybe I’ve got enough talent for that. 

Here, German researchers assigned recreational runners to 6 weeks of “hopping exercise” in a randomized, controlled trial. The runners did only 5 minutes of “double legged hopping” daily, starting with just 10 continuous seconds at a time, followed by a rest period. Over the 6 weeks, they gradually increased the length of each hopping repeat.

This wasn’t simple hopping. I probably would have called it “explosive jumping.” The instructions: “Hop as high as possible with both legs, keeping the knees extended, and aiming to minimize ground contact time.”

At any rate, the hopping worked. It increased running economy (but not VO2 max), and didn’t produce injuries. Conclusion: “This study provides the first evidence that 5 minutes of daily hopping improves RE at moderate and high running speed.” Me? I’m going to start with gentler hops. More at Nature (free full text).

Beat the calendar: Maintain your speed through the years

Ken Cooper once said, “We don’t stop exercising because we grow old. We grow old because we stop exercising.” And before him, George Bernard Shaw noted: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” 

Alex Hutchinson found much support for these observations in a SweatScience column based on recent research that investigated causes of slower performance with increased age. Yes, we do all get slower at some point, but this is “closely related to changes in training volume.” In other words, if we continued the training of our 20s and 30s, we wouldn’t slow down nearly so much.

Of course, no one can train as fast and far in their 70s as they did 4 decades earlier. That shifts the question in this direction: What are the best training adaptations to make as you get older? About a billion of us would love to know the answer to that one. But we don’t, at least not yet. 

For now, I’m placing my chips on “Train long and slow” vs the opposite, “Train short and fast.” The long/slow approach aligns with the philosophy of endurance expert Alan Couzens who has devised a simple formula for staying fit for life: Increase your training by an hour per month with each passing year.

Simple enough, but don’t do the math. It implies that 70 yr old runners must train an additional 20 hours per month (5 hours per week) over what they were doing at age 50. That’s nearly 45 minutes a day. Couzens himself admits: “Easy to say. Hard to do.” More at Outside Online.

Do super shoes prevent injuries? Or cause them?

Here’s an excellent article on the debate over whether or not super shoes might increase injury risk. There’s good evidence the shoes can make you faster, and they might do this in part by changing the way your feet and lower legs function on the road. This could be good, of course. Many coaches and athletes feel that the shoes “save” a runner’s legs, allowing more and harder training, with less recovery.

However, if your legs are functioning in a novel manner, this could lead to overstress injuries. What’s the best approach? You’ve heard this one before: The experts all suggest a gradual transition to your use of super shoes. More at Live Science.

Also, this podcast interviewed two experts who have done research with super shoes. The “show notes” are so complete that you don’t have to listen to the 66-minute pod. The notes discuss how slower or lighter runners might get less “return” from super-foam shoes than faster/heavier runners, and explore the debate about injuries. More at Scientific Triathlon.

How running can chase away the “blues”

Happiness researcher Jaime Kurtz is also a Boston Marathon runner--a happy combo, in my opinion. Here, a top running journalist, Cindy Kuzma, interviews Kurtz to pull out 7 ways to find more joy in your running.

We’re practically drowning in “Happiness” articles and books these days--a likely comment on our recent confused and depressing years--and most of the suggestions from various experts sound similar. Still, there’s no more important topic for runners, since the enjoyment we derive from running is closely related to our motivation and satisfaction. And those are two of the biggest factors that keep us keepin’ on. 

I particularly like Kurtz’s advice about the collective energy we receive from other runners, the importance of “giving back” in whatever way we choose, and taking time to be grateful for every healthy run, no matter what the pace might be. More at Runner’s World. 

Build your long-run distance (without getting injured)

There are a lot of ways to increase the distance of your weekly training (for example, the widely known 10 percent rule) but fewer for building long run distance. One might be to add a mile/week for three weeks, then take a week off, then return to adding one more mile. But you couldn’t do this for many weeks before your long runs would be too long.

Here Gordo Byrn proposes a different, more graduated approach. I haven’t seen this before, but I rather like it. His system gives you 3 months to adapt to a long run 3 miles more than your start point. It includes both repeated weeks (a simple, underutilized method) and recovery weeks that don’t include a long run. It’s the combo that makes this approach so do-able.

If you’ve had trouble getting your long runs where you’d like them, this could be a good alternative. More at Feel The Byrn.

Movement is medicine, so take your daily pill

Veteran marathoner-Ironman-sportsmed doc and running book author Jordan Metzl wrote a great Opinion column for the NY Times. It got headlined “Working From Home Is Less Healthy Than You Think,” but that’s not really what it’s about. 

Instead it’s a great summary of research showing that “movement is medicine.” Or as Metzl writes, “Humans need to move,” and “The more we move, the healthier we are.” Not only that, but the more we move, the lower our national expense for healthcare, which now accounts for 18 percent of GDP, or almost $13,000 per person/year.

The Covid pandemic and resultant work from home strategies have made these trends worse the last several years. But it’s not really a question of where you work--office, or home. It’s a question of: How much do you sit and how much do you move? More at NY Times.

Jakob Ingebrigtsen: You don’t need to train “brutal”

At the recent World Indoor Championships, Jakob Ingebrigtsen won two events (the 1500 meters and 3000), dominating his races as he has in so many recent competitions. He achieved these gold medals despite losing a month of training to a viral infection. Did he get sick from overtraining?

“No,” he responded. “Because my tempo training is not that brutal. We always try to find the balance between rest and training, and after a lot of years with the same amount of activity, your body adapts and knows what it can handle.” More at World Athletics.

The “Skeptical Inquirer” is, you guessed it, skeptical about minimalist shoes

Nick Tiller, a physiologist PhD, ultrarunner, and author of the Skeptics Guide To Sports Science, is perhaps a little late to the game of piling on barefoot running/minimalist shoes. But he does it now in a convincing manner. 

He’s got Internet search data over time, references to Chris McDougall and Daniel Lieberman, the Vibram class action lawsuit, and, most importantly, results from several systematic reviews relating to shoe types, forces, and injuries. 

Conclusion: “The practical advantages are few,” and “reduced injury rates should not be among them. The data aren’t on your side.” More at Skeptical Inquirer.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that barefoot running/minimalism is going to disappear, or that some research won’t support aspects of minimalism. Here’s a paper suggesting that the minimalist approach could be good for runners with knee pain: “Minimalist footwear may reduce peak patellofemoral joint loads slightly compared with conventional footwear during running only.” More at British J of Sports Medicine.

What’s your maximal heart rate?

You’ve probably read a lot about your exercise heart rate, including various ways to estimate your max HR. Those vary from the oft-quoted 220 - your age to the probably more accurate (for fit individuals) 208 - 0.7(age). Let’s take someone who’s 50. The first formula yields a max HR of 170, and the second a 173. Because the fitter you are, the harder you can go.

However, you’ve likely never seen an illustration of many max HRs across a wide span of ages. So here’s a neat picture to visualize. When I look at it, it appears that the average max for a 50 yr old is close to 180. Wow. But then this group of dedicated athletes was training an average of 9.5 hours per week (about 80 minutes a day). So they’re no doubt at the high end of the scale. More at Twitter/StephenSeiler.

SHORT STUFF you don’t want to miss

>>> When teens run marathons: “These results do not support a need to restrict high school students from marathon running.”

>>> Not a surprise: Trail runners must be mentally tough and resilient.

>>> Time of month: No evidence that phase of menstrual cycle affects strength or training

GREAT QUOTES make great training partners

“I am not throwing away my shot.”

-- Lin Manuel Miranda from “Hamilton”