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1. Gym Harassment: 56.37% women harassed while working out:
We wanted to understand how prevalent harassment is in gyms and how it impacts members, gyms, and the industry as a whole. To investigate this we surveyed 3,774 gym members (1107 female and 2667 male) in June of 2021.
Key Findings
56.37% of female gym members have experienced harassment at the gym - 2.68x more than male gym members (21.00%)
92.31% of cases of harassment against females go unreported
Of the female gym members who experienced being harassed:
25.65% stopped using gyms completely or switched gyms
28.69% felt unsafe or uncomfortable at their gym
30.13% changed their gym routine, schedule, or avoided certain areas at the gym
20.19% changed their clothes or appearance when going to the gym
More...from RunRepeat.
2. Saucony Endorphin Trail Performance Review:
What You Need To Know
Weighs 12.1 oz. (343 g) for US M10.5
First trail offering with the PWRRUN PB midsole found in its road cousins, the Endorphin Pro and Endorphin Shift
Exceptionally tacky PWRRTRAC outsole with 4.5 mm lugs
Sock-like and form-fitting upper (can get super hot though)
This shoe should not be in the Endorphin family
Releases July 15 for $160
TAYLOR: Last year, Saucony’s Endorphin Pro was one of the first legitimate competitors to the hydra-headed Empire of racing shoes, the Nike Next% and Alphafly. The PWRRUN PB midsole was a fresh face in the game, and it was beautiful – spilling over to the Endorphin Speed made that shoe our favorite overall shoe of 2020.
Earlier this year, we started seeing leaked photos of the Endorphin Trail. And we were stoked. Oh, the possibilities! The first trail shoe sporting the new PWRRUN PB foam and SPEEDROLL technology. Coupled with an aggressive trail attitude, could this be the trail speedster to rule them all?
More...from Believe in the Run.
3. How humidity affects hydration, endurance and performance:
During February of each year I like to take a refresher course in the massive difference between how ‘hot and dry’ weather differs to ‘hot and humid’ conditions when it comes to endurance exercise.
It’s around this of year time that I typically go to visit some of the Major League Baseball teams Precision Hydration work with as the squads are starting spring training in either Arizona (the ‘Cactus League’) or Florida (the ‘Grapefruit League’).
I always travel with my running shoes and, when I’m not either sweat testing or dodging stray balls while watching batting practice, I try to log a few miles in both locations. In fact, one of my all-time favourite runs is up and down ‘The Camelback’ in Phoenix, Arizona.
Although I’ve raced and trained in all manner of environments over the years, what really strikes me each time I visit both places in quick succession is just how different the conditions are. The immediacy of the back-to-back experience of running in both environments really hammers the variation home for me.
More...from Precision Hydration.
4. Why Masters Cyclists Need Strength Training:
Maintaining strong muscles and good bone density is a necessity for masters cyclists. Here’s why strength training is your key to a lifelong cycling career.
There’s a reason many cyclists don’t make time for strength training — riding a bike is a lot more fun than pushing weights in a musty gym. However, strength training is a must if you want to continue to have fun riding and racing your bike for years to come.
Strength training can provide great performance benefits — it will make you faster in the short term, but it will also keep you fast for many years to come. In the world of masters racing, cyclists who remain youthful, vigorous, and healthy will continue to excel while many of their cohorts will start to slow down. The gym is, quite literally, a fountain of youth, and is a major key to success as a master’s racer.
Your Muscles and Aging
Your muscles put watts into the pedals — if you lose muscle, you lose power. Unfortunately, chronic muscle loss due to aging (aka, sarcopenia) can begin as early as your 30s, though the rate at which this muscle loss occurs is highly dependent upon your lifestyle. Naturally, those who are physically inactive and have poor diets will lose their muscle much faster than a healthy cyclist.
More...from Training peaks.
5. When it comes to achieving fitness goals, the voice in your head matters:
A peek inside the head of a novice runner during one of psychology researcher Noel Brick’s recent studies reveals a familiar refrain.
“Why am I doing this?” the runner asks herself. “Why am I putting myself through it? I hate this, I hate running! Why am I doing it?”
We all have an internal monologue chattering away in our heads, and that voice is often critical to a degree that seems absurd when you see the words written down. We brush it off but, as a pair of new books argue (and as sports psychologists have been trying to convince us for decades), the words in our heads matter. Learning how to change that internal monologue, it turns out, can boost your physical performance as surely and as tangibly as hitting the gym.
Brick, a researcher at Ulster University in the U.K., published The Genius of Athletes: What World-Class Competitors Know That Can Change Your Life with co-author Scott Douglas earlier this month. It’s a practical guide to the tools of sports psychology, adapted for a general and not necessarily athletic audience, covering topics such as goal-setting, focus, self-confidence and fear of failure. And all these tools, it turns out, depend on effective self-talk.
More...from the Globe and Mail.
6. Fitness: Is it still cool to ice your injury?
eep the bag of frozen peas but pass on any of the engineered cold packs that have a greater chance of frosting your skin.
If you have an active lifestyle, chances are there’s a bag of peas in your freezer just in case you need a dose of cold on sore muscles or injured joints.
An age-old treatment touted by physicians, physiotherapists and athletic therapists, applying ice to an acute injury or submerging the whole body in an ice bath after a tough workout or game has become standard practice. Yet according to the latest evidence, ice isn’t always an athlete’s best friend.
Traditional thinking relied on ice to reduce the temperature and blood flow to the injury or overworked muscles, which in turn moderates pain and inflammation of the soft tissue. With less inflammation, there’s less chance of a secondary injury and greater opportunity for accelerated healing. But results of a few recent studies suggest that icing practices may need to be revised and that repeated icing of tired, overworked muscles could have previously unforeseen consequences.
More...from the Montreal Gazette.
7. Turn Your Phone Into a Fitness Coach:
You don’t need a smartwatch or an activity tracker to monitor your exercise, nutrition and other health information.
Ready to get outside this summer and get fit? Your smartphone’s hardware, its software and an app store full of programs can help lead the way. Here’s a guide on how to get the most out of your device.
Just remember, medical data is sensitive information, so read the privacy policy of any app that’s collecting it or tracking you. Consult your doctor before making major changes to your dietary or workout routine.
Here’s to Your Health
In 2014, Apple and Google both announced dashboard apps to track personal health and wellness, and the companies have been enhancing those apps ever since.
More...from the New York Times.
8. A New Study Suggests Employee Wellness Programs Are Pretty Much Useless:
Employee wellness programs neither make workers healthier nor save companies money, says new research out of Harvard and the University of Chicago.
America's health and wellness challenges were clear before coronavirus struck. Now the pandemic has blown them wide open, revealing gaping disparities and showing how many of us are more vulnerable to disease and disability because of our less-than-ideal lifestyles.
For employers, this has been a horrifying reminder of just how much your employees' health impacts your business. Employee wellness programs were popular before Covid -- 53 percent of smaller employers offer them and 81 percent of large ones -- and, after Covid, it's likely even more businesses will consider adding to their offerings.
That seems logical, but according to a rigorous new study it also might be a massive waste of money. Researchers randomly assigned employees at dozens of BJ's Wholesale Club stores to either participate in the company's wellness program or not and then tracked them for three years. They found wellness programs were pretty much worthless, the study authors, the University of Chicago's Katherine Baicker and Harvard's Zirui Song, reported in recent a Washington Post op-ed.
More...from Inc..
9.The Clock Ticks on Caster Semenya’s Olympic Career:
Whether or not she qualifies for the Tokyo Games, the South African runner will have provoked an important debate about who should compete in women’s sports.
JOHANNESBURG — An Olympic race of sorts ends on Tuesday, and this time Caster Semenya will not reach the finish line first.
Tuesday is the deadline for Semenya to gain a qualifying time in the women’s 5,000 meters for the Tokyo Games that begin July 23. She defiantly refused to suppress her naturally elevated testosterone levels, as required of intersex athletes to compete in women’s track events from the quarter mile to the mile. So, as things stand, Semenya will not be able to run her specialty, the 800 meters, at which she won gold at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics and was essentially unbeatable for much of a decade.
Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke law professor and an expert witness in the Semenya case, wrote in The New York Times in 2018 that the restrictions applied only to athletes who are biologically male.
“Advocates for intersex athletes like to say that sex doesn’t divide neatly,” Lambelet Coleman wrote. “This may be true in gender studies departments, but at least for competitive sports purposes, they are simply wrong. Sex in this contest is easy to define and the lines are clearly drawn: You either have testes and testosterone in the male range or you don’t.”
More...from the New York Times.
10. Is it best to drink water or dump it on yourself to stay cool in hot weather?
Pouring water over the head is a tactic you do see being used by athletes in all sorts of sports to try to combat extreme heat and it can be an effective way of cooling down your body.
But when it comes to staying cool during a race, are you better off pouring the water over yourself or drinking it? Precision Hydration and Sport & Exercise Scientist, Andy Blow, explains...
Which is better - pouring water over your head or drinking water?
A study in 2012 set out to answer the first question by comparing the effectiveness of four approaches to cooling and hydrating during a 90 minute walk followed by a 5km time trial run in hot conditions (33°C / 92°F). The four conditions they tested were:
1. Drinking nothing and not pouring water on the head.
2. Drinking some chilled water but not pouring water on the head.
3. Drinking nothing but pouring water on the head.
4. Both drinking and pouring water on the head.
More...from Precision Hydration.
11. Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage:
Males enjoy physical performance advantages over females within competitive sport. The sex-based segregation into male and female sporting categories does not account for transgender persons who experience incongruence between their biological sex and their experienced gender identity. Accordingly, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) determined criteria by which a transgender woman may be eligible to compete in the female category, requiring total serum testosterone levels to be suppressed below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to and during competition. Whether this regulation removes the male performance advantage has not been scrutinized. Here, we review how differences in biological characteristics between biological males and females affect sporting performance and assess whether evidence exists to support the assumption that testosterone suppression in transgender women removes the male performance advantage and thus delivers fair and safe competition. We report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.
More...from Springer Link.
12. Intermittent Fasting for Weight Loss Might Not Be So Effective, Research Suggests:
It’s possible the way you fast could have an effect on muscle mass—and not in a good way.
When it comes to losing weight (if that’s your goal), intermittent fasting may not be any more effecting than simply reducing total daily calories, new research shows.
However, it’s important to eat in a way that works best for you and lines up with your own nutrition and training goals—consulting with a sports dietitian or other medical expert is the best way to personalize your diet for best results.
Intermittent fasting, which restricts your snacks and meals to a certain timeframe during the day, may have some benefits depending on your goals. But when it comes to weight loss—if that’s your goal!—a new study in the journal Science Translational Medicine suggests the approach isn’t more effective than simply reducing the total daily calories you eat, and eating them at unspecified times.
More...from Runner's World.
13. Heat and Athletes: The Science of Performance and Safety when it gets Hot:
Human beings are inherently inefficient. Only a fraction of the work athletes do ends up propelling them down the road, up the mountain or through the water. The rest just of that work generates heat, which has to go somewhere. Normally, the body is reasonably good at dissipating heat, until the environment is also hot and/or humid. Heat illnesses develop when you can’t adequately dissipate heat to the environment, and involves an incredibly complex relationship between your thermal physiology (all that heat you are producing), environmental heat strain, and your clothing (2). Many experienced endurance athletes are well versed in hydration and cooling strategies, but as a community it is crucial for all athletes to understand the signs and symptoms of heat illness, how to prevent it, and how to help athletes suffering from it.
Heat illness doesn’t care how much you know about hydration and cooling. Despite all the right preparations, even experts and experienced athletes can end up with heat illness when things go wrong during training or competition.
More...from CTS.
14. Why Transgender Athletes Threaten Fairness In Women's Sport:
Allowing transgender athletes to compete in women's sporting competitions has created a storm of controversy around human rights. The team get to grips with the facts around moves to prevent transgender athletes from competing in certain women's sports and why fairness, and even safety, are at stake. We also unpack recent comments made by American comedian and social commentator, Sarah Silverman, and explain why she got it so wrong
Listen to the Podcast.
15. The science of tapering: how should you taper before a race?
In a sports setting, a taper refers to a phase of reduced training load that you might undertake in the lead up to an important competition.
The purpose of this taper is to optimise competition performance by reducing the negative impact of daily training (i.e. accumulated fatigue) without suffering a loss of the training adaptations (i.e. detraining) you’ve spent many weeks or months gaining.
With well-planned training, by the time you start tapering you should have achieved all or most of the expected physiological adaptations so, as soon as the accumulated fatigue diminishes, your peak physiological and psychological performance can rise to the forefront...
More...from Precision Hydration.
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