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6. Can You Exercise After Getting the Vaccine?
Dear Readers,
With the rollout of the new coronavirus vaccines in the United States, we know you have a lot of questions. Health and science reporters from The Times have answered many of them, about everything from how to get the vaccine to potential side effects and what risks you may still have for contracting the virus.
One question runners may be wondering about is, "Can I run in the days after getting the shot?" The short answer is yes, if you feel up to it.
If you’re getting vaccinated in the United States right now, you’ll receive the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine, in two doses about 28 days apart. You’ll probably have soreness at the injection spot. You may also experience fatigue, headache and chills, though this is more likely after the second dose. If you’ve had Covid-19 already, you have a greater chance of feeling rotten after the first dose, too.
If you want to run, go ahead, said Dr. Jordan D. Metzl, a sports medicine physician at Hospital for Special Surgery and frequent Times contributor (his piece on returning to exercise after having the virus is a must-read). He had a sore arm after both doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and said he felt “lousy” the night after his second.
"This is a time for body listening. For most people, exercise makes them feel a lot better physically and mentally," he said. But pushing yourself if you feel bad isn’t a great idea.Remember, right after you get the vaccine, your body will be hard at work already, and running might be too much.
If you’re the kind of person who feels anxious when you don’t get in a scheduled run, I recommend planning an easy run or rest day after your first shot, and a rest day after your second. It may be that taking a walk is all you feel ready to do — if so, go easy on yourself.
In general, greater fitness seems to aid immunity to most colds and flus. For example, in August, Gretchen Reynolds reported on two studies suggesting that athletes may have a greater immune response to flu shots than people who don’t work out. I hope exercise also helps with the response to the Covid vaccines.
I became eligible for a vaccine in New Jersey, and just received my first shot of the Moderna vaccine. I felt a little tired that first night, as if I’d done a long run and didn’t take a nap after. I did an easy 40-minute run the following morning, and the only trouble I had was putting on my sports bra. My arm was sore and I didn’t want to scrape fabric over the injection site.
I’ve already planned a rest day after the second shot, and my dog will be going to "camp" in case listening to my body tells me to lie on the couch and watch Marvel movies instead of walking her four times a day.
Have you gotten vaccinated yet? How did you feel? Let me know — I’m on Twitter @byjenamiller.
Run Well!
Jen A. Miller
Author, "Running: A Love Story"
www.NYTimes.com
7. If you want to build strength, you don’t need to lift heavy weights:
Back in 2010, researchers at McMaster University proposed a heretical idea.
To build big muscles, they suggested, you don’t necessarily have to lift big weights. Instead, their research showed the same benefits from lifting light weights or heavy weights or pretty much any weight you want—as long as you lift to the point of failure, when you’re incapable of completing another rep.
The simplicity of this prescription is a welcome counterpoint to the usual complexity of strength training guidelines. It’s easy on the joints, simple to apply with minimal equipment and works as well at home or at the park as it does at the gym.
But pushing all the way to failure is a daunting prospect for all but the most hardcore lifters, and researchers have been split on whether it’s really necessary. The good news: a new review published last month suggests that, for most of us, failure is unnecessary and perhaps even counterproductive.
The original idea of training to failure was based on the way our brains recruit muscle, explains McMaster kinesiologist Stuart Phillips. When you lift a light weight, you can get away with activating only smaller bundles of muscle fibres. But as those fibres fatigue, you recruit larger and larger bundles until, at the point of failure, you’re recruiting everything you’ve got – just as you would if you’d started with a heavier weight.
More...from the Globe and Mail.
8. How much effort does it take to build stronger muscles?
The latest research suggests we've given too much weight to the idea of training the muscle to failure
The weight-training crowd is often more influenced by the practices of the guy with the biggest muscles than the latest in strength and conditioning research. This is especially true when it comes to selecting the optimal combination of reps, sets and loads to build muscle strength and size.
Traditional theory suggests that muscle size and strength are maximized by lifting heavy weight for fewer reps, while muscular endurance is best achieved by using less weight and more reps. As for the number of sets, there’s no shortage of experts willing to debate the effectiveness of anywhere between one and five sets. Yet as much as the weight-training community likes a lively debate about reps, sets and loads, it’s been suggested that there’s only one variable that really counts when it comes to maximizing results, and that’s training the muscle to failure. So whether it takes three or 12 reps, one or five sets, heavy or light weights, as long as the muscle is fatigued to the point where it can’t perform one more repetition, strength gains will be realized.
More...from the Montreal Gazette.
9. Keto, sports and human performance:
Low-carb continues to get rave reviews for increasing energy and performance, and improving health. Ketosis too! But is it for you?
Traditional sports nutrition promotes glucose as the body’s primary fuel, with fat taking a back seat. These guidelines are slowly fading away as many athletes today are relying more and more on fat for energy and significantly improving their performances.
High-carb sports nutritionists suggest that ketosis and sports do not mix - a false notion. Humans have been big fat burners from the beginning. Today, relying more on fat for energy can significantly improve performance and health — athletes can even grow physiologically younger! The key is finding the best approach for your body’s needs.
During fasting, and periods of carbohydrate restriction, the liver produces ketone bodies in large amounts to serve as an important energy source. While smaller levels of ketones are generated most of the time and used by the heart muscle and other body areas, increasing fat-burning can also increase ketones for use as an energy source to help keep blood sugar stable and, especially during exercise, prevent depletion of glycogen stores.
High levels of ketones - nutritional ketosis - can improve mitochondrial function, where fat-burning takes place. It also reduces both oxidative stress and inflammation. The result is that physical and mental performance can improve, often significantly.
More...from Dr. Phil Maffetone.
10. Running Is a Total Body Affair:
We can thank our heads and shoulders — and not just our knees and toes — that we evolved to run as well as we do.
We can thank early human evolution that many of us can enjoy running as much as we do. Watch anyone with a ponytail run, and you can see their hair repeatedly describe a figure-eight in the air, responding to the forces generated by the running. But their heads stay still, their eyes and gaze level.
If it weren’t for some unique evolutionary advances, our heads would do the same as that ponytail, flopping like a swim noodle when we run, according to a clever new study of how — and why — our upper bodies seem to work the way they do when we run, but not when we walk. The study, which involved treadmills, motion capture, hand weights and an eon’s worth of back story, finds that an unusual coordination between certain muscles in runners’ shoulders and arms helps to keep heads stable and runners upright.
More...from the NY Times.
11. How to Train to Run Fast for Decades:
Key workouts and training strategies that helped Nick Willis run a sub-4:00 mile 19 years in a row, Steve Spence sub-5:00 for 43 years, and Harry Nolan sub-6:00 for 57 years.
There are fast milers who break records, win gold medals, and collect big prize money. Then there are milers who stay fast for a really long time. This second group accumulates little but the admiration of their fellow runners. We applaud the mental and physical toughness they display in bucking the tyranny of time.
Nick Willis, Steve Spence, and Harry Nolan belong to both groups, but primarily to the second, having run fast miles every year for multiple decades. Willis has run a sub-4:00 mile for 19 years in a row (and counting). Spence achieved a sub-5:00 for 43 straight years, and Nolan ran sub-6:00 for 57 consecutive years. All three are believed to be world-best streaks in the mile.
More...from Podium Runner.
12. How Your Body Does (and Doesn’t) Adapt to Cold:
Unlike heat training, repeated exposure to cold doesn’t necessarily help you handle winter weather better
On any given group run in sub-freezing temperatures, it’s amazing to see the variety of hand protection on display. Some people have thin gardening gloves; others (and I count myself among them) have what look like boxing gloves lined with fleece and stuffed with down.
It’s not a question of toughness: as a new study in Experimental Physiology illustrates, people’s fingers and toes vary dramatically in their response to cold. And scientists still aren’t really sure what makes the difference, how to change it, or even whether you get better or worse with experience.
Here’s a telling figure from the study, which was led by Clare Eglin of the University of Portsmouth’s Extreme Environments Research Group. It shows skin temperature of the toes before (-2 on the figure below) and after (0 to 10 min) a two-minute dunk in cool water at 59 degrees Fahrenheit, for a group of cold-sensitive subjects (black circles) and a group of normal control subjects (white circles):
More...from Sweat Science on (Outside Online.
13. Humans have not evolved to exercise, says Harvard prof:
Choosing to lounge on a couch instead of go for a run is an evolutionary response to conserving energy
If given the choice between chilling on a couch or going for a run, most of us would gleefully pick the couch. It turns out, that's an evolutionary reaction.
The desire to reduce our caloric output is a natural response to needing to conserve energy, says Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolution and biology at Harvard University, and the author of Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding.
"When it used to be sort of required, spending extra energy doing physical activity was a bad idea," Lieberman explained in an interview with The Current's Matt Galloway.
Now that our modern world is filled with countless inventions designed to prevent us from exerting ourselves, Lieberman says we have to work at ignoring that evolutionary response.
More...from the CBC.
14.Tokyo Olympics Chief Expected to Resign Over Sexist Comments:
Yoshiro Mori, a former Japanese prime minister, had complained that women cause meetings to run long by talking too much. His exit would further complicate the delayed Games.
TOKYO - Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, was expected to resign on Friday, a little over a week after he unleashed a firestorm by suggesting that women talk too much in meetings.
His resignation would follow unrelenting international criticism of his sexist remarks, which presented another challenge to Japan’s efforts to carry off the postponed Games amid a raging pandemic.
Mr. Mori has not given any official indication that he will leave, and both the International Olympic Committee and the Tokyo organizing committee declined to comment on Japanese news media reports that he would step down.
More...from the NY Times.
15. Should You Still Go for a Run If You’re Sleep Deprived?
What experts say about running on no sleep.
For many of us, sleep can be a fickle friend. Sometimes a night with little to no rest is unavoidable. Sleep can be elusive whether we want it to be or not—whether you’re up most of the night with a group of old friends or up every few hours to feed a new baby.
There’s also a psychological component for people who can’t seem to drift off no matter how badly they want to. In fact, runners can be prone to this in particular the night before an important race. A study published in the journal Behavioral Sleep Medicine found that athletes reported impaired sleep up to four nights before competition. Another investigation found that 70 percent of athletes reported poor sleep the night before a competition.
In those next mornings, we’re left with the fallout. We’re left with consequences and questions: Mainly, what is the best way to take care of yourself when you are sleep deprived?
More...from Women's Running.
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*Please verify event dates with the event websites available from our FrontPage.
Upcoming Races, Marathons, Races, and Triathlons
February 13, 2021:
New Balance Indoor Grand Prix - Boston, MA
February 14, 2021:
Austin Marathon - Austin, TEX
February 19, 2021:
RAK Half-Marathon - Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirate
Tel Aviv Samsung Marathon - Israel
February 20-21, 2021:
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February 26-27, 2021:
Texas Qualifier - Austin Texas
February 26-28, 2021:
Adidas Indoor Track & Field National Championships - Virginia Beach, VA
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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