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1. Strength of trans women drops slightly after year of treatment, research claims
Loss of lean body mass around 5% after testosterone blockers
Study raises questions for sport related to safety and fairness
Men have a greater performance advantage over women in cricket, golf and tennis compared to sports such as running or swimming according to new research, which also finds that testosterone blockers taken by transgender women only minimally reduce the biological advantage underpinning performance.
The study, published in Sports Medicine, found that while elite men are around 10-13% faster than elite women at running and swimming, the gap is between 29% and 52% when it comes to bowling cricket balls, hitting long drives, weightlifting and in sports that generally rely more on muscle mass and explosive strength.
More...from the Guardian.
2. Winter Strength Training to Avoid Summer Injuries
Ready to start training again? Here’s how to craft your winter strength training to build a solid, injury-free foundation.
Winter is the perfect time to iron-out any little niggling injuries that may have developed over the season. By properly programming your training, it is possible to reduce the chances of injuries in the future.
In this blog I aim to set-out five training priorities. The purpose is to help you reduce the risk of having an injury as well as to help you excel into your next season.
Two Categories of Injury
Let’s first begin by highlighting typical types of injury. These fall into two categories: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic injuries would include tendon strains or overuse injuries such as stress fractures or tendonitis (from general training and normal events). Extrinsic injuries might include sprained ligaments, fractures or cuts, abrasions or dislocations (from falling off the bike for example).
There is no way to completely avoid getting injured; certain things will be completely out of your control. However, it is possible to program your training to better reduce the chance of injuries.
More...from: Training Peaks.
3. Can youth athletes use Precision Hydration products?
We’re regularly asked by parents and coaches whether Precision Hydration electrolyte drinks can be used safely by younger athletes.
The answer is yes but context is key.
It’s important to appreciate that there are big differences in the hydration needs of an aspiring youth athlete who’s approaching full physical maturity compared to a young child who simply takes part in recreational sport for fun.
‘Youth athlete’ or a ‘child playing sport’? The key differences
These days, the lines between youth and adult athletes are more blurred than ever. For example, world-renowned gymnast Simone Biles was just 16 when she won her first Olympic gold medal at Rio in 2016 and 16-year-old Harvey Elliot made history for being the youngest ever Premier League soccer player when he made his debut for Liverpool during the 2019/20 season. Then there’s Coco Gauff, the female American tennis player who burst onto the scene as a 15-year-old when she knocked Venus Williams out of the first round of Wimbledon in 2019.
These up-and-coming ‘youth athletes’ are still well below the legal age to get a driving licence or go to a bar in most countries but are already going toe-to-toe with more experienced, world-class opponents and winning.
More...from Precision Hydration.
4. Shopping for Running Gifts:
Dear Readers,
While the holidays aren’t going to look the same this year, many of us are still looking forward to giving — and getting — gifts. Rather than offering my own gift ideas, I’ve asked running stores what’s flying off their shelves right now.
Cold Weather Apparel
With a lot of runners staying out of gyms because of coronavirus concerns, demand for winter running clothes has grown, “from pants and jackets to traction aids and of course shoes,” said Darcy Berard, United States general manager of the Running Room, which has locations in the United States and Canada. Their own brand Extreme Balaclava Jacket and the Brooks Ghost 13 shoes have been particularly popular.
Don’t forget the rest of your body, either. Sally Loeffler, co-owner of Beyond Running in Fargo, N.D., said that wind training gloves by SmartWool and the Icebreaker Adult Flexi Chute, which can be worn to keep your head or neck warm, are selling well for them this holiday season.
Masks
Jessica Grant, creative director at Sports Basement in San Francisco, said that the Outdoor Research Essential Mask has been a popular gift this year, and a favorite among staff. “It’s lightweight, and the adjustable nose bridge and ear loops make it fit just about everyone perfectly,” she said.
Massage Tools
Runners love to work out the kinks in their systems. The Red Rock Running Company in Las Vegas is selling a lot of the Roll Recovery R8 Deep Tissue Massage Roller and Pro-Tec Orb Activate massage tools.
At the Falls Road Running Store in Baltimore, the hot seller is the Theragun mini massager. The store owner, Peter Mulligan, said he’s not surprised, and not just because this version of the massager is small and packable. “With people not going to get a massage due to Covid and social distancing, take the massage at home,” he said.
(And if you’re blanching at the cost of massage guns in general, you can do what our Smarter Living columnist Tim Herrera does and use a car buffer instead. I don’t know how you’d explain that one as a gift, though!)
Still looking for a gift? Check out our 2020 Well Holiday Gift Guide or the, well, I’ll call them eclectic recommendations from the Style Desk.
What’s on your runner holiday list? I’m on Twitter @byjenamiller. I’m also still hoping to hear from more of you about what you’ll do when it’s safe to run with other people again. Let me know!
Run Well!
Jen A. Miller
Author, "Running: A Love Story"
From NYTimes.com.
5. Can Skinny People Run Faster?
Running fast requires good genetics and solid training -- simply being skinny doesn't make you a fast runner, but it can help. Losing excess weight can improve your speed but it's not a substitute for training. Even if you do lose weight, there's a limit to how much it can actually help you -- if you lose too much weight it can actually slow you down.
Lighten Up for Speed
Losing excess weight can improve your running. According to the Runner's World website, you can knock up to 20 seconds off each mile for every 10 pounds that you lose. In a 5K race this would add up to about a minute in savings. In a marathon, which measures 26.2 miles, this could improve your time by nearly 9 minutes.
Why Lighter Is Better for Running
Being lighter improves your running times because it improves your maximal oxygen uptake, or VO2 max. VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can deliver to your muscles. When you lose weight it's easier for your body to deliver oxygen throughout your body. And when your body can deliver oxygen to our muscles more efficiently, you're able to run at a faster speed. Research published in PLoS One in 2014 notes that BMI is most restrictive for longer-distance events — meaning the longer you run, the more being lighter will benefit your time.
More...from the Houston Chronicle.
6. How to train hard:
How do you keep going when your legs are dying, your lungs are burning and the little voice inside your head is screaming at you to stop?
If you want to be the best you have to know how to train hard. That means to be able to push yourself to your limits. It’s something that as an athlete I have always been quite good. However, until I started coaching, I hadn’t reflected much on it. Now as a coach I would say it’s both a talent and a skill developed over years of training and racing. So how do you develop this skill?
What is pain?
A good place to start is by understanding what is pain. It’s an unpleasant sensory experience associated with tissue damage. We feel pain when a signal is transmitted along neural pathways to the brain. It’s also an emotional state. In essence, pain is literally all in your head.
More from Fast Running.
7. Why Running Outside in the Winter Is So Good for You:
The mental and physical benefits make it worth the extra effort.
Sure, the treadmill can be a valuable training tool in winter. But most of the time, gearing up, embracing the outdoors, and hitting the roads is the better option. What’s the difference, you ask? Training outside any time of year—but especially during the year’s darkest days—unlocks a host of mental and physical benefits. Here are four reasons to take your workouts outdoors this winter.
You’ll Kick SAD to the Curb
Amy Kugler understands firsthand how running can help combat seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Back in 2013, when the 30-year-old content strategist had just moved to Seattle, she found herself unconsciously upping her mileage as a way to cope with the lack of sunshine. “The rainy season kicked in around September and it was gray all the time,” she says. “My husband would encourage me to get out the door because he saw that when I returned from my runs, I was much happier.”
More...from Outside Online.
8. Increasing Mileage: When, Why, and How:
Should you follow the 10% rule for increasing mileage? Are you destined to be injured if you increase mileage too quickly? In this podcast we tackle all of the questions around mileage. How much, what does it do, when should we increase it, and much more.
Listen to the podcast on: Science of Running.
9. Work through the pain if you have arthritis: It will get better:
The first thing to do if you’re diagnosed with osteoarthritis in your knees is, unfortunately, exactly what your knees are telling you not to do. Exercise is the first-line treatment—but it hurts.
This paradox creates all sorts of problems, because people worry the pain is a sign that they’re making their joints worse and hastening the progression of the disease, says Trevor Birmingham, a professor of physical therapy at University of Western Ontario and co-director of the Wolf Orthopaedic Biomechanics Lab. There’s even a name for the resulting reluctance to exercise: “kinesiophobia,” a fear of pain associated with movement.
That’s what makes a new study from Birmingham and his colleagues significant. They put a group of 59 osteoarthritis patients through a specially designed 12-week exercise program, pushing them hard. The results, which appear in the journal Osteoarthritis and Cartilage, should be heartening to kinesiophobes: as the intensity of the exercise program ramped up, the level of pain the patients experienced actually decreased.
More...from the Globe and Mail.
10. Why genetics is a poor predictor of athletic talent:
You've probably heard people say some athletes have "the right genes" for running, but it turns out that's not very accurate.
When describing the best runners in the world, a lot of people might say the top athletes are simply built for the sport or that they have the right genes for running. It’s a fair assumption that an athlete’s prowess is mostly due to winning the genetic lottery, but new research out of the Human Kinetics Journal suggests otherwise. Through case studies of five elite athletes, researchers found that genetic testing couldn’t distinguish between an elite athlete and a non-elite participant.
The study looked at five elite track runners (including one Olympic champion) and compared their scores to 503 non-athletes. Each runner’s genotype score (essentially an assessment of DNA) was observed and used as the basis of comparison. The results were surprising, indicating that genotype has very little to do with predicting international medallists. Researchers found that elite speed-power athletes scored higher than endurance athletes when looking at the speed-power genotype score. This makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is that using this same score, 68 non-athletic participants scored higher than the elite athletes. That’s 14 per cent of the non-athletic population in the study who, based on their speed-power genotype alone, should be better athletes than the elite participants. Another surprising finding was that when the endurance genotype was assessed, the speed-power athletes scored higher than the endurance runners.
More...from Canadian Running Magazine.
11. The growing case against stretching :
This long-standing tradition from PE classes of yore is finally on its way out. Real physical flexibility = aerobic + warm up + strength.
Perhaps no activity is more ingrained across so many sports as stretching. It’s a locker room tradition that just won’t die, despite all we know about it.
Stretching is taught in elementary and middle-school physical education classes. We’re directed by coaches to stretch in organized sports activities. As adult athletes many believe we must include stretching as part of an effective exercise and injury prevention program. Health-care professionals of all types continue to prescribe stretching for injury prevention and even rehabilitation.
As a coach, curing the stretching habit is something I constantly have to work through with my athletes who have been mentally conditioned for years by other coaches to touch their toes.
It’s been said that trees which bend in the wind live longer, but how humans really can become more flexible remains a controversy. That’s beginning to change.
More...from Dr. Phil Maffetone.
12. How Will Gym Members Stay Fit in 2021:
Although nearly half of gym members said they would return to their gym when it reopened back in April, only a third had returned since August.
With the pandemic only worsening as 2020 comes to an end, we wanted to learn how this year has changed the way gym members approach achieving their fitness goals.
To do this, we surveyed 1,990 gym members from 120 different countries in order to learn how they will be approaching staying fit in 2021, in comparison to the start of 2020.
Findings:
- Only 15.18% of current gym members think a gym membership is the best way to achieve their fitness goals in 2021 - a 63.31% decline from the start of 2020
- Nearly three-quarters of gym members (71.78%) say running and other outdoor activities (49.92%) or home fitness options (21.86%) are the best ways to achieve their fitness goals in 2021.
- While female gym-goers favor online fitness options, personal trainers, or nutritionists at a higher rate, males are turning to buying home workout equipment and taking up sports.
More...from RunRepeat.com.
13. 2020: A Year in Fitness Like No Other:
The novel coronavirus crept into and transformed every aspect of our lives, including the way we work out.
This year, the novel coronavirus crept into and transformed every aspect of our lives, including our fitness. In countless ways — some surprising, and a few beneficial and potentially lasting — it altered how, why and what we need from exercise.
At the start of the year, few of us expected a virus to upend our world and workouts. In January and February, I was writing about topics that seemed pressing at the time, such as whether low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diets endanger athletes’ skeletal health; if fat-soled, maximalist running shoes might alter our strides; and how completing a marathon — remember those? — remodels first-time racers’ arteries.
More...from the NY Times.
14.Winter Strength Training to Avoid Summer Injuries
Ready to start training again? Here’s how to craft your winter strength training to build a solid, injury-free foundation.
Winter is the perfect time to iron-out any little niggling injuries that may have developed over the season. By properly programming your training, it is possible to reduce the chances of injuries in the future.
In this blog I aim to set-out five training priorities. The purpose is to help you reduce the risk of having an injury as well as to help you excel into your next season.
Two Categories of Injury
Let’s first begin by highlighting typical types of injury. These fall into two categories: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic injuries would include tendon strains or overuse injuries such as stress fractures or tendonitis (from general training and normal events). Extrinsic injuries might include sprained ligaments, fractures or cuts, abrasions or dislocations (from falling off the bike for example).
There is no way to completely avoid getting injured; certain things will be completely out of your control. However, it is possible to program your training to better reduce the chance of injuries.
Some causes of injuries?
More...from Training Peaks.
15. Painkillers in sport: A necessity or a serious health risk?
PH’s Customer Service Manager JP recently laced up his trainers for a tough coastal marathon in North Devon. A grumbling from his Achilles heel meant he was forced to ease off the running during the four weeks leading up to race-day and it prompted him to make an uncharacteristic, anxiety-driven decision on the morning of the event.
On the way to the start of the race, JP nipped into a local shop, bought a packet of ibuprofen and popped a couple en route. His thought process went along the lines of ‘why not? They can only help ease the Achilles niggle, surely’.
This train of thought when using painkillers is commonplace among athletes but a growing body of evidence suggests they do more harm than good. Unfortunately for JP, he found this out the hard way…
More...from Precision Hydration.
FEATURED EVENTS:
*Please verify event dates with the event websites available from our FrontPage.
Upcoming Races, Marathons, Races, and Triathlons
December 20, 2020:
The Marathon Project - Chandler, Arizona
Chandler, AZ
Broadcast
Live coverage will begin on USATF.TV+ at 9:45 a.m. with Paul Swangard, Desiree Linden and Bernard Lagat bringing you the action. There will be a 90-minute replay of the race on NBCSN in primetime from 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. ET.
Live coverage on USATF.TV+ requires a USATF.TV+ Plus membership.
For more complete race listings check out our Upcoming Races, and Calendars.
Have a good week of training and/or racing.
Ken
Email: webmaster@runnersweb.com
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