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1. Powerful New Metric Pushes Aerobic Performance Beyond VO2max:
Unmatched aerobic performance increase in weeks instead of years
Bob Prichard, president of Somax Performance Institute, has discovered a new metric that improves aerobic performance in a few weeks–far beyond years of fitness training.
Chest expansion (how much the chest expands from full exhale to full inhale divided by its circumference), not VO2max, is the major limiting factor in endurance sports like running, cycling, swimming, soccer, lacrosse and tennis.
“Every endurance coach and athlete needs to measure breathing ranges,’ says Prichard, “because 98% of endurance athletes have chest restrictions that have reduced their lung capacity up to 33%, preventing them from optimally filling their lungs with fresh air and oxygen during training and competition.”
More...from Endurnace Sportswire.
2. Over 50? These Fitness Tricks Will Add Years to Your Life, Trainer Says:
Plyometrics and anaerobic sprints can help improve your muscle mass, strength, mobility, and flexibility.
There are some inevitable truths we all need to accept about growing older. As in, our metabolisms will begin to slow down and our production of hormones, like testosterone, starts to decrease. We'll likely also lose muscle mass, strength, power, mobility, and flexibility. While admittedly depressing, these are also the exact reasons why it's imperative for us to stay as fit and active as we possibly can.
In order to fight off aging and add years to your lifespan, you have to build and maintain muscle and power at all costs. The best way to do that is through strength training, and more specifically, focusing on the six basic movements: squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, and lunge.
More...from Eat This, Not That!
3. VJ Spark Performance Review:
What You Need To Know
Weighs 8.1 oz. (230 g) for a US M8.5 / US W10
Still #bestgripontheplanet, and sometimes too grippy
An excellent option for unpredictable fall trails
Available for $150 on VJ’s website
TAYLOR: We’re not strangers to the originally Finnish company anymore. This small-name brand (in the US at least) is starting to make some waves around the world with top-level mountain/trail athletes crushing in their shoes. British athlete Jon Albon is a particularly good example of this with a most recent win at the OCC as part of the UTMB parade of races. Many seem to dismiss these as simply an Obstacle Course Racing brand, but VJ continues to prove its prowess on various terrain.
VJ was birthed with purpose. Those standards carry through to their newest offering, the Spark. In general, you’ll be sure to get durability, extreme grip, and a lightweight package from VJ. The Spark takes that to the next level as one of the more minimalistic shoes in their lineup. Does it have enough to shred the trails like its more cushioned cousins, the MAXx and Ultra? Or is it simply a lightweight, soft-ground, OCR shoe?
More...from Believe in the Run.
4. Do heavier athletes need more?
Carbohydrate intake recommendations during exercise are expressed in grams per hour and depend on the duration of the activity. They are not expressed per unit of body mass and thus the recommendation is the same for a 50 kg (110 lbs) female runner and a 90 kg (198 lbs) athlete. This seems counterintuitive but there is a reason.
Why are the recommendations not expressed per unit of body mass?
Generally the longer the activity the more carbohydrate should be ingested during that activity. For an hour bike ride very little carbohydrate is required (up to 30 grams/hour), but small amounts have been shown to improve exercise performance. When exercise is more than 2 hours and certainly when the activity is longer than 3 hours, a carbohydrate intake of 60-90 grams per hour is often recommended (with certain combinations of carbohydrates recommended when intake exceeds 60 grams per hour). The absolute exercise intensity also plays a role. For example a slower athlete who uses less total energy per hour will not require 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour. Body mass, however, is not important. The advice for carbohydrate intake during exercise does not take into account the runner’s body mass. The advice is the same for a 50 kg (110 pound) female runner and a 90 kg (198 lbs) athlete.
More...from MySportSciance.
5. The Uncertainty of Aging and Athletics:
The aging process brings up some difficult questions for all athletes. Talking openly about the age-performance curve can be healthy for everyone.
I have always been acutely aware of time passing by.
I remember listening to Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. Whatever when I was 11 and ruminating on a lyric. “The years start coming and they don’t stop coming.” So true, I thought. Just before I had been an elementary school stud, and suddenly I was a middle school scrub. Smash Mouth made some philosophy bops. (Between drafting and publishing this article, the lead singer of Smash Mouth may have been cancelled, which is perhaps the ultimate proof that time is a flat circle.)
Is every kid like that? God, I hope not. Around the same time, I made another memory that is imprinted deep in my brain, from a random drive to the mall with my mom. I was looking out the window, gazing through miles and miles of cornfields. Suddenly, I felt it. True emptiness. Darkness. The eternal vacuum of space. Whatever you want to call it, in that moment, I fully felt…death. I didn’t tell anyone, deciding to grapple with that shared reality on my own. Now That’s What I Call Unhealthy Psychological Processing.
More...from TRail Runner.
6. Three ways you could be unknowingly sabotaging your workouts:
It’s been said that “showing up” is the not-so-secret key to career success. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true – there are countless factors outside of our control that hold sway over our ultimate fate – but I get the idea. I often use this line of thinking to help clients who are struggling to make room for exercise in their lives: Whatever your particular goals may be, I guarantee none of them will come to fruition unless you actually invest some sweat equity.
Now if simply showing up was all it took to get in shape, trainers like me wouldn’t have a job. People wouldn’t become frustrated with their lack of progress, everyone with a gym membership would be jacked like a Marvel superhero, and no one would ever wonder if working out is a waste of time. If you’ve been showing up on the regular but still aren’t seeing results, consider the following subtle methods of self-sabotage that are all too common in the fitness world.
More... from he Globe and Mail.
7. Body Shaming Dressed Up as a Fitness Goal Is Still Body Shaming:
The University of Oregon is known for its track and field program. The women’s team has won two national titles since Robert Johnson took the helm of the program in 2012, and the university’s athletic programs enjoy significant financial support from Nike (whose co-founder Phil Knight is an alumnus). Hayward Field, the home of the Oregon Ducks’ track, hosted the Olympic Trials in 2021 and will be the location of the World Athletics Championships in 2022.
But in late October, the Oregon women’s track and field team made headlines for an entirely different reason: Six athletes had left the team citing fears that the program’s approach to their weight and body fat percentages put them at risk for eating disorders.
In women’s sports, discussions of weight is nothing new, and has led to life-threatening behavior. Just to name a few examples: In 1988, a judge at an international competition reportedly told the American gymnast Christy Henrich that she was too fat, and her coach, Al Fong, allegedly called her “Pillsbury Dough Boy.” (The Los Angeles Times reported that Fong denied these accusations.) Henrich, who competed for the United States at the World Championships in 1989 and was a rising star in the sport, developed anorexia and bulimia, and died at the age of 22 from complications related to her eating disorders. Other prominent athletes, like the Russian Olympic champion figure skater Yulia Lipnitskaya, who left skating in 2017, have retired from their sports due to disordered eating.
More...from the New York Times.
8. What is PNF Stretching?
Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation – How to do it, precautions to take, safety guidelines, and PNF stretching examples.
Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) is a more advanced form of flexibility training, which involves both the stretching and contracting of the muscle group being targeted. PNF stretching is one of the most effective forms of stretching for improving flexibility and increasing range of motion.
PNF stretching was originally developed as a form of rehabilitation, and to that effect it is very effective. It is also excellent for targeting specific muscle groups, and as well as increasing flexibility, it also improves muscular strength.
There are many different variations of the PNF stretching principle. Sometimes it is referred to as Facilitated stretching, Contract-Relax (CR) stretching or Hold-Relax stretching. Post Isometric Relaxation (PIR) and Muscle Energy Technique (MET) are other variations of the PNF technique. And Contract-Relax-Antagonist-Contract (CRAC) is yet another variation.
More...from Stretch Coach.
9. Does High-Intensity Exercise Affect Our Hearts? Minds? Life Spans? Waistlines?
What you need to know about high-intensity interval training, or HIIT.R>
For the past five years or so, high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, has been one of the most popular and controversial forms of exercise. Consisting of brief spurts of intense exercise interspersed with rest, various versions of HIIT have been tested, tried, talked about and sometimes derided by countless researchers, coaches, journalists, influencers and almost anyone else interested in fitness. Gym franchises and online classes specialize in HIIT. Dozens of scientific studies every month explore its benefits and drawbacks. By almost any measure, HIIT is hot.
But plenty of questions remain about HIIT. Is it particularly good for our hearts? Minds? Life spans? Waistlines? Is it better for us, long term, than taking a brisk daily stroll? And what does “intense” exercise even mean?
More...from the New York Times.
10. 4 Ways to Use the Training Data from Wearable Tech:
Your GPS watch and other gadgets are great at describing training, but prescribing it is a harder challenge.
The central question that sports scientists are grappling with these days is this: What the heck are we going to do with all this data? In endurance sports, we’ve progressed from heart rate monitors and GPS watches to sophisticated biomechanical analysis, internal oxygen levels, and continuous glucose measurements, all displayed on your wrist then automatically downloaded to your computer. Team sports have undergone a similar tech revolution. The resulting data is fascinating and abundant, but is it actually useful?
A new paper in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance tackles this question and presents an interesting framework for thinking about it, derived from the business analytics literature. The paper comes from Kobe Houtmeyers and Arne Jaspers of KU Leuven in Belgium, along with Pedro Figueiredo of the Portuguese Football Federation’s Portugal Football School.
More...from Nutrients.
12. Fitness: Strapped for time but need a workout? Try an exercise snack:
Exercise snacks are bursts of high-energy movement meant to be squeezed in between meetings, phone calls, classes, answering emails and the constant demands of parenthood.
Short bouts of high-intensity exercise have gone from fad to mainstream, with more and more science validating their place in the increasingly large spectrum of fitness options. But even within the realm of high-intensity exercise, there are choices to be made. From sprint interval training (SIT) to high-intensity interval training (HIIT), exercisers can choose how hard and how long they want to push their limits.
Then there’s the new kid on the block, aimed at shaking things up on days when even a short visit to the gym is impossible.
More...from the Montreal Gazette.
13. The Coaches: Why Mindset Matters:
Responders and non-responders are easily identified but poorly understood. Elite coach and sports scientist John Kiely from the Institute of Coaching & Performance, University of Central Lancashire, discusses why our response to training is about more than just genetics, offers tips on how to change mindset and trust in the process and if neurobiology can unlock training benefits for all.
Listen to the podcast on The Real Sciance of Sport.
14. How many hours should athletes train during pregnancy?
A study published in 2019 investigated how taking part in gruelling endurance challenges like the Tour de France, an IRONMAN and Race Across the USA affects the human body and found that one of the toughest challenges you can participate in is carrying a baby in your womb for 9 months.
What does that mean for expectant mums who want to train whilst pregnant? Is it safe? How much is too much? Let’s take a look...
Comparing pregnancy with endurance events
The study focused on the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) - or resting energy expenditure - of participants during certain activities and found that we can sustain a maximum of 2.5x our BMR, which is the ‘ceiling’ of human endurance.
Athletes completing the gruelling ‘Race Across The USA’ levelled out at 2.4 times their BMR toward the end of the 140-day race. Pregnancy sat only slightly lower than this at 2.2 times BMR, but let’s not forget that pregnant women maintain this rate for 9 entire months with very little time for recovery afterwards, what with a new-born baby to look after!
More...from Precision Hydration.
15. Smell Ammonia? Taste Metal? Your Body’s Trying to Tell You Something:
Here are nine common signals you should pay attention to and what they mean when you experience them.
Your body is full of signals that are trying to tell you something—whether you’re training too hard, not eating enough, needing more sleep. The problem is you don’t always recognize the signals your body is giving you. These signals don’t come in words; they come in the form of organic molecules and complex interplays between them. Some of those interplays give off odd sensations and experiences when things go askew in training, and it’s those sensations that you should listen to.
1. Ammonia Smell
Smelling ammonia usually happens towards the end of a long or challenging workout and is a strong indicator that you have been burning protein as fuel. The reason you smell ammonia is because the protein breakdown product urea is being produced faster than it can be excreted by your kidneys, and is subsequently leached into your sweat as ammonia.
What your body is telling you is your muscles are being directly broken down, metabolized, and used for energy during your exercise. Not ideal! The way to prevent this is to fuel with a higher carbohydrate intake before and during exercise.
More...from Triathlete.
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