>6. To Fight Inflammation and Help Recovery After Exercise, Just Add This Fruit:
While intense exercise, like training for a marathon, or hitting it hard at the gym, is great for our overall health, it can take a toll on the muscles, joints, and ligaments, and cause injury. If you're feeling achy or beat up from overdoing it, you may not be eating enough of the specific nutrients to help your cells recover properly. The usual go-to is to follow a tough workout with protein, to replenish amino acids that will help rebuild or repair muscle that breaks down when you go hard, a new study indicates that you could do yourself a favor by adding citrus fruit. A specific compound in citrus was just shown to help athletes improve performance.
The study, published in Antioxidants, found that a flavonoid in citrus called hesperidin has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. In previous research, hesperidin has been tested on animals, but there was little or no evidence of how it could affect humans until now, which shows that hesperidin works to reduce inflammation and boost athletic performance.
More...from The Bett.
7. The Benefits of Light Activity--Such as Walking or Stretching--According to New Research:
If you sit a lot during the day, it’s crucial to incorporate moderate or vigorous activity throughout the day.
f you sit a lot during the day, simply getting the recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise won’t be enough to counteract sedentary behavior, new research finds.
Researchers recommend getting three minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity or 12 minutes of light activity to every one hour of sitting.
Light activity--such as tidying up, walking the dog, gardening, even a few minutes of stretching--can be more beneficial to your health than you might think.
At this point, "don’t sit too much" has reached the same level of other health advice like wear sunscreen, drink more water, and get enough sleep.
The good news is that you can counteract that sedentary behavior if you incorporate more light physical activity throughout the course your day, no matter what that activity looks like, according to a recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. And yes, this advice applies to you even if you go for a 30-minute run but spend the rest of the day sitting; it’s important to consider your activity habits all day.
More...from Runner's World.
8. Which energy products are right for you?
When it comes to working out your fueling strategy for endurance events, understanding how much carbohydrate you need to ingest per hour to sustain peak performance should be your Number 1 concern.
Everything else lags someway behind in terms of importance, so if you’re not sure about your carb numbers yet, consider working those out before you go much further.
Once you’ve got a handle on how much you need (in terms of grams of carb per hour), the next logical question is "what’s the optimal way to get that amount of fuel on board given your specific circumstances?" After all, there are practical and logistical considerations - not to mention preferences around taste - to take into account.
What follows is an attempt to highlight the main pros and cons of each of the 4 major fueling formats commonly encountered by athletes: drinks, gels, chews and bars...
More...from Precision Hydration.
9.As Heart-Rate Tracking Technology Continues to Evolve, Your Reliance on It Should, Too:
Heart rate data from wrist-worn, optically-based devices is flawed but can still be valuable. Understanding that nuance is the key to leveraging your metrics, not getting lost in them.
When Starla Garcia, 31, a runner based in Houston, TX, was training for the 2019 Grandma’s Marathon, she noticed the data provided by her Garmin Forerunner 235 watch often seemed skewed, giving her very high heart rate readings during easy efforts. While there are many factors that can affect heart rate including heat, research suggests that Garcia, a Mexican-American runner, isn’t the only one who has experienced inaccuracies.
In a 2017 study published in the Journal of Personalized Medicine, researchers found that while most wrist-worn devices adequately measured heart rate in laboratory-based activities, device error was higher for males, darker skin tones, and those with higher body mass indexes. Those training at altitude or in extreme climates may also notice inaccurate data because external factors such as temperature, elevation, and humidity can also affect your heart-rate readings, says Neal Henderson, head of sports science at Wahoo Fitness, which uses an optical heart rate sensor in its watches.
More...from Runner's World.
10. Teaching My Black Son to Swim:
A mother’s determination to end a legacy of racial trauma started with mother-son swim lessons.
My son, Nasir, and I took our first "mommy and me" swim class just after he turned 1. He had always loved sticking his feet in the water at the beach or floating on my husband’s back, but this would be his first experience learning to immerse himself in a body of water. And although he was a bit distracted by the floaties, squeaky toys and attempting to drink the water, he had a natural inclination for swimming.
As the instructor gently focused on the mechanics of my son kicking his feet and navigating through the water on his belly, I thought of my first experience "learning to swim" in a pool. I was taught to swim by my father dropping me in the deep end of a hotel pool during a family reunion and telling me to meet him on the other side. I was around 4 years old at the time.
More...from the New York Times.
11. How to Design the Ultimate Interval Workout:
New research sifts through the evidence to figure what types of intervals make you fastest.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about the fine-grained nuances of interval training. According to Paul Lauren and Martin Buchheit’s telephone book of a text, Science and Application of High-Intensity Interval Training, there are 12 distinct variables you can manipulate in order to tailor your workout to your precise physiological goals. Numerous flowcharts and sprawling decision trees guide you through the choices.
That’s great for some people and certain situations--but sometimes, instead of poring over a seemingly interminable menu, you just want to order the special. That’s the payoff promised by a new meta-analysis of interval training studies in the journal Sports Medicine, by a team led by triathlon coach and recent University of Toronto doctoral graduate Michael Rosenblat (who’s now at Simon Fraser University). He and his colleagues crunched the data from 29 different studies to determine the best workouts to enhance endurance time trial performance. And believe it or not, they came up with an answer.
More...from Sweat Science on Outside Online.
12. What happens when you drink too much before a race?
Nervously drinking too much plain water before a race and then standing in the queue for the porta-potty may seem like a harmless, albeit annoying, act. But in this misguided attempt to stay well hydrated, some athletes can put themselves at risk of low blood sodium levels, otherwise known as hyponatremia.
An extreme case of overdrinking
Hyponatremia occurs when sodium and fluid in the body are out of balance. In other words, there’s either too much water or not enough sodium in your blood.
It’s a condition typically associated with clinical populations but athletes are at risk of exercise-associated hyponatremia, especially those taking part in endurance activities.
More...from Precision Hydration.
13. Fitness industry lobbies Ottawa to make gym memberships tax deductible:
Canada’s fitness industry is stepping up efforts ahead of a possible fall election to try to get Ottawa to include gym memberships and services as a medical expense on personal taxes, alongside other eligible costs such as physiotherapy, dietician consultations and medical cannabis.
The Fitness Industry Council of Canada (FIC), which oversees about 6,000 fitness organizations with about 150,000 employees and roughly six million members across Canada, says it has been actively discussing its proposal with the federal government since January.
The FIC was invited to consult on the federal Liberal government’s plan to help the fitness industry recover from the financial hit caused by the COVID-19 closings. Instead of asking for money, the FIC put forward what it views as a longer-term solution to help improve the fitness industry and the physical and mental health of Canadians.
More...from the Globe and Mail.
14. Sore Achilles Tendon? Here’s How to Treat It:
The definitive guide to one of the most common running injuries.
The Achilles tendon is the large tendon connecting the two major calf muscles--the gastrocnemius and soleus--to the back of the heel bone. Under too much stress, the tendon tightens and is forced to work too hard. This causes irritation or inflammation, also known as Achilles tendinitis. Over time, a layer of scar tissue, which is less flexible than the tendon, can cover the tendon. If the inflamed Achilles continues to be stressed, it can tear or rupture causing an Achilles heel injury.
If you’re experiencing a sore Achilles tendon and battling Achilles pain from running, we’ve got all the info you need on why that could be happening, how to treat it, and how to prevent it from coming back to derail your performance.
More...from Runner's World.
15. Update on Topical Use and Ingestion of Menthol as Ergogenic Aid:
This year’s Summer Olympics was scheduled to be a hot one. Tokyo, already known for hot and humid summertime conditions, would have been (and probably will be) hotter than the previous three Olympic host cities (Kakamu et al. 2020). Athletes, coaches and sport scientists will do almost anything to combat the heat. And while the best heat acclimation strategies involve long term protocols such as saunas, hot water immersion baths and exercising in the anticipated environment, over the years more novel and creative strategies have emerged in an attempt to gain an edge. Some off these such as ice-cold drinks and pre-cooling ice vests have stood the test of time and are used routinely by athletes. Others have been tossed on the cutting room floor, either due to lack of efficacy, burdensome equipment and constraining logistics, or other challenges. I can distinctly remember two of these ill-fated attempts in the mid 2000’s in the form of an isopropyl alcohol rub (think of rubbing an alcohol pad on your skin) and a fancy negative pressure cooling glove pioneered by Stanford. Both had their merits, yet are rarely (if ever) seen actually used in practice.
More...from CTS.
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