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1. New Research Finds Link Between Sugary Drinks and Bowel Cancer:
Hydrating? Yes, but some beverages, such as sports drinks, may have health risks if don’t watch your intake.
Drinking two or more sugar-sweetened beverages (like sports drinks) per day may up your risk of developing bowel cancer before age 50, new research shows.
This is likely due to the way sugar-sweetened drinks can cause a rapid rise in blood glucose and insulin secretion, which causes inflammation and obesity—both associated with a higher risk of bowel cancer.
When you are on a run or doing other exercise, a sports drink can be beneficial if your activity is at moderate-to-high intensity and lasts for more than hour. Otherwise, it’s best to hydrate with water.
Maybe you’re not a fan of plain water—we get it!—so you’ve created a mix of beverages to drink both on runs and in everyday life. That could be soda, energy drinks, and fruit juices, in addition to sports drinks. While that might solve your taste issue, a recent study in the journal Gut suggests you may want to rethink your drink.
More...from Runner's World.
2. 10 Best Carbon-Plated Running Shoes for 2021:
We review a lot of shoes here at Believe in the Run. Not to play favorites, but we’d be lying if we said that taking carbon-plated racers out at fast paces isn’t one of the most fun things on our "to do" list. Since the boom of carbon use began, the running world has seen some impressive innovations in what a shoe can do and, more importantly, what a shoe can do for you. On the flip side, this is the most expensive tier of running shoe on the market.
It’s commonplace for carbon-plated racers to retail for over $200, and the best of the best are approaching the $300 mark. Racing shoes are an investment in results, so it’s important to be confident not only in your purchase but also at the starting line. Here are our 10 favorite carbon-plated racing shoes with some quick thoughts from our team.
The 10 Best Carbon Plated Running Shoes
* Nike Zoom Alphafly Next%
More...from Belive in the Run.
3. You can HIIT or LITT. Which is best for you?
People looking for the best exercise program want to know what kind of training they should focus on, how much they should do, how hard they should work and how long they should spend at each session.
The answer is always: it depends.
There are just too many variables that will determine what constitutes the best path for anyone to take. Some of the things to consider are age, experience, medical or injury condition, time availability, facilities available and desired outcome. All of these things will have an impact on how to proceed.
Earlier this week, I happened across an article that compared two popular training methods. It reminded me of the different physical challenges that I’ve had in my life and how I’ve met those challenges with different workout styles. The two workouts were low-intensity interval training (LIIT) and high-intensity interval training (HIIT). The article highlighted the similarities between the two, but also described how different their application is in regards to a number of variables.
More...from the Hamilton Spectator.
4. Risks of Concurrent Training:
Incorporating strength workouts into your endurance training is widely accepted, but there are risks involved. Cycling Coach Kolie Moore explains how to protect your aerobic fitness while reaping the benefits of strength training.
Simultaneously undertaking endurance and strength training is known as concurrent training. Concurrent training helps you improve your FTP, VO2 max, endurance, and other aspects of aerobic fitness while also programming in heavy squats and other leg strength exercises.
Balancing the two different types of training can be challenging. Frequent issues with concurrent training include where to fit strength training into a normal week of endurance training, what order to place endurance and strength training during the same day, and how to balance fatigue from each modality. The best solution for you may not be the same as for another athlete, depending on the goals to be achieved. This article will look at different ways to assess your needs and how to adjust training accordingly.
More...from (Training Peaks.
5. A Guide to Regaining Core Strength Postpartum:
hat you should know about safely returning to sports after pregnancy
When climber Beth Rodden was a child, she asked her mom why she chose to walk, instead of run, with her friends. One of her mother’s friends laughed and said, "When you have kids, you’ll understand. It’s just not appropriate anymore." Rodden recounted the memory on Instagram last August, next to a photo of herself in wet running shorts. Her six-year-old son, Theo, had asked what happened. "Mom’s pelvic floor never fully recovered after having you, so I pee when I run," she told him.
The challenges of returning to sports after childbirth go far beyond finding the time and energy as a new mom. When Rodden had Theo, she figured she’d bounce back quickly. After all, her body had already carried her through an illustrious athletic career that included the first free ascent of Lurking Fear on Yosemite’s El Cap with Tommy Caldwell and the first ascent of Meltdown (5.14c), one of the hardest crack climbs in the world, a feat which wasn’t repeated for ten years. But her return to sports called for more patience than she expected.
More...from Outside Online.
6. Heart study reveals how many minutes of exercise you need to live longer:
High-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts have become popular in recent years for a number of reasons. They don’t require as much time as a regular workout (some can take as little as 10 minutes), and research shows they improve fitness, lower blood pressure and help people better manage their blood sugar levels – which may aid in weight loss and prevent disease, such as type 2 diabetes.
And recently, a review has found that a form of HIIT workout called low-volume HIIT has benefits on cardiometabolic health. That means low-volume HIIT could induce similar – or greater – improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness, blood sugar control, blood pressure, and cardiac function compared to continuous aerobic exercise (such as a five-mile run).
HIIT is characterized by alternating between low- and high-intensity intervals of exercise. For example, this might include cycling at an easy pace for a few minutes before increasing effort to a high or even maximal level for a short period of time before returning to an easy pace. This is then repeated throughout the exercise session with the total time spent at high-intensity typically low. Different categories of HIIT exist depending on the intensity of exercise required.
More...from Inverse.
7.3 Ways To Cope With Pre-Race Nerves:
"I don’t think I ever went into a race, even a smaller local race, where I wasn’t nervous." The words of Ironman legend Dave Scott are a reminder that pre-race nerves affect everyone, from amateur athletes to the elite performers who seemingly win races for fun.
The tell-tale signs of pre-race jitters - clammy hands, an increased heart rate, excessive sweating, thoughts of ‘why am I doing this?’ - will have affected most athletes at one stage or another, and the reaction to the situation can be attributed to the ‘fight or flight’ response of our autonomic nervous system.
What causes pre-race nerves?
One of the earliest theories that attempts to explain nerves in relation to sporting competition is that the body elicits a ‘fight or flight response’ - which is the body’s automatic reaction to perceived harm or stress. Races and competitions are seen as potential stressors because they threaten an individual’s self-esteem.
More...from Precision Hydration.
8. Yes! You are an athlete. No! You shouldn’t practice Intermittent Fasting:
I sat down with 8x U.S. Champion Steeplechase runner and Olympic bronze medalist Emma Coburn for Episode 5 of Nuuness TV, a Nuun-sponsored YouTube series devoted to women in sports.
It didn’t take long before the topic turned to my scientific impressions of current diet trends. Of course, I jumped right in with my thoughts on intermittent fasting (IF) and the ketogenic diet, both of which I would like to see out of the athletic population—especially among women!
If you missed it, I’ll gladly summarize here again, because it’s important and so many women are still getting the message that IF and keto are the way to go for mental focus, high performance, and weight loss. And it is simply not true.
As I’ve said many times, from a health standpoint, intermittent fasting is useful. This is particularly true for the general population who are not very active and struggling with metabolic diseases. However, when you dig deeper and look at longevity data in terms of both intermittent fasting and exercise, they’re both beneficial, but you do not garner any additional benefits from layering intermittent fasting on top of exercising (which I know you all do!)
So if you’re already exercising, it’s not particularly helpful. And if you’re a woman who is adding athletics on top of intermittent fasting, it can be harmful to both your performance and your health.
More...from Dr. Stacy Sims.
9. Women and endurance running part one: how to train with your cycle:
We spoke with researcher, entrepreneur and recreational athlete Dr. Stacy Sims to understand how women can work with their periods rather than against them
Dr. Stacy Sims is a researcher, entrepreneur, recreational athlete and scientist whose area of expertise is exercise physiology and sports nutrition. Early in her career, she became frustrated by the fact that the vast majority of sports science treated women like small men — most studies were conducted on men, and all the training, recovery and nutrition principles we learned from those studies were applied to women, despite the fact that female physiology is different from that of a man. We sat down with her to talk about these differences to determine how women runners can work with their bodies to become stronger, faster and healthier athletes.
Today, in Part One of this series, we will be diving into the female menstrual cycle and how it affects training. Part Two will cover nutrition strategies to boost performance throughout your cycle and how contraceptives affect training, and Part Three will look at puberty, perimenopause and menopause.
More...from Canadian Running Magazine.
10. Zooming Out: Finding and Leveraging Patterns in Training Data:
Let’s face it, for many athletes it’s been a long time since you’ve had the opportunity to toe the start line. And, as races are drawing closer, athletes’ anxiety about their fitness is building. They look at their training logs through a lens of opportunities lost. The missed long runs and the foregone interval workouts unfortunately become the focal points as they decide what to do next. All too often, athletes fall prey to the makeup game, where missed miles on one day are compounded and "made back up" the following day. During this perceived crunch time for athletes, I emphasize a critical skill for navigating the final weeks of training: Zooming Out.
What is Zooming Out
Zooming Out, from a training perspective, means looking at your training through the lens of several months, not several days. By doing this, you are looking at the entirety of your training development and can drill down your future training needs in the areas of volume, performance and key workouts. The day to day fluctuations in your training runs, how you feel, and how fast you are running make little difference in this exercise. What matters more are the trends over these longer periods of time. This is an area where maintaining a training log of some sorts is of critical value. If you have over 2 years of training data available, you are going to be able to glean plenty of valuable information from the techniques described below. However, even with a minimum of 6 months of training log information, you can still put these patterns to use. If you don’t have a training log, well, continue reading and use this as motivation to get one going.
More...from CTS.
11. The Ultimate Hill Workout:
Incorporating steep inclines into your training can help improve strength, agility, endurance, and more.
There’s a good reason runners say "Hills pay the bills." Not only is hill training crucial for rolling courses like the February 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials; it’s also the ultimate workout multitasker. As Rice University women’s track and cross-country coach Jim Bevan explains, running uphill strengthens muscles, boosts speed and agility, stretches the Achilles, and promotes hip extension. That makes it beneficial for everyone. All you need are a pair of shoes, a hill roughly 40 yards long, and about 30 minutes.
These are Bevan’s favorite drills, inspired by running coach and father of hill training Arthur Lydiard. Warm up with a jog or a brisk walk, then do five repetitions of each exercise, walking down in between.
Gentle Start
Why: Hills tax legs differently than level ground. Bevan recommends easing into it with a gentle climb. This will lead to better form and higher aerobic capacity.
How: Keep your eyes focused on the top and ascend at an easy pace. Maintain good posture while lifting your knees and pumping your arms. Leaning slightly into the hill can also be helpful.
More...from Outside Online.
12. The Best Time of Day to Exercise for Metabolic Health:
Late-day exercise had unique benefits for cholesterol levels and blood sugar control, a study of overweight men eating a high-fat diet found.
Evening exercise may be more potent than morning workouts for improving metabolic health, according to a helpful new study of exercise timing. The study, which looked at high-fat diets and overweight men, found that late-day workouts moderated the undesirable health effects of a greasy diet, while morning exercise did not.
The study involved only men who were eating a fatty diet, but adds to growing evidence that exercise timing matters and, for many of us, working out later might have particular advantages.
Although we may be only dimly aware of this, operations inside our bodies follow busy, intricate and mutable circadian schedules. All of our tissues contain molecular clocks that coordinate biological systems, prompting our blood sugar to rise and dip throughout the day, along with our hunger, heart rates, body temperature, sleepiness, gene expression, muscle strength, cell division, energy expenditure and other processes.
More...from the New York Times.
13. New Study Reveals You Don’t Need to Work Out As Long As You Think:
High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is shorter than most workouts, but could be just as effective
physical health. It’s also a timesuck. But a longer workout isn’t always a better workout, and a new study reveals that you may not actually need to work out for as long as you think to reap fitness rewards.
Low-volume high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which includes no more than 15 minutes of high-intensity exercise with periods of rest breaking it up, can boost heart health and blood sugar control, according to a new review study.
There are several types of HIIT workouts, but the low-volume variety involves no more than a quarter of an hour of intense exercise. For example, a practitioner may jog for a couple of minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, then repeat several times.
More...from Fatherly.
14. Running’s Cultural Reckoning Is Long Overdue:
Since Mary Cain spoke out about the Nike Oregon Project in 2019, a growing wave of young runners have come forward with their own allegations of negligent coaching and toxic team cultures across the sport
Hannah Whetzel couldn’t sit down. When she did, pain radiated everywhere. So the then junior at the University of Arizona stood. She stood during the four-hour bus ride to Flagstaff for the team’s first cross-country meet of the 2017 season. She stood at breakfast. And she stood any time she wasn’t driving or in class.
The problem started in her hamstring while at preseason running camp. She notified her coaches during the first week of school, but she says they didn’t seem too concerned. At times Whetzel broke down crying due to the intense pain—sometimes in front of her coaches, sometimes alone in her car. But she kept running and racing. Oddly, it didn’t hurt when she ran hard workouts. It was as if her body’s circuitry misfired, holding off the searing sensation until the endorphins faded. Since she was a non-scholarship member of the team, she felt like she had no wiggle room to disappoint her coaches. Finally, in February 2018, Whetzel got an MRI, which revealed a partially torn hamstring and tendinosis. After receiving two platelet-rich plasma-therapy injections, Whetzel was left to rehabilitate on her own with little direction from athletic trainers or support from her coaches. "I felt incredibly alone and isolated," she says.
More...from Outside Online.
15. Rundown? Underperforming? Research Shows You’re Likely Undernourished:
Here’s how to make sure you’re eating enough!
When women come to me because they’re struggling with poor performance one of the simplest (though not always easiest) and most successful strategies I provide is getting them to eat more.
Many women athletes are chronically underfed, whether it’s because they’re afraid to eat; they’re in a constant state of trying to lose weight (a.k.a. afraid to eat), or they are unknowingly under fueling themselves because they just don’t realize how much energy and nutrition they need.
This is more common in women than men and a research review (change to the English view in your browser if needed) published earlier this month in the journal Archivos Latinoamericanos de Nutrición (Latin American Archives of Nutrition) shows the consequences: Women athletes are more susceptible to iron, calcium, and vitamin D deficiencies than their male peers. Iron is essential to produce oxygen-carrying hemoglobin and calcium and vitamin D are essential for bone and muscle health (among many other things!). The women were also at increased risk for being low in magnesium, which helps with muscle function, blood pressure, bone health, and maintaining blood glucose.
More...from Dr. Stacy Sims.
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