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1. BOA Is Hydration in Your Hip Pocket; a Two-Second Aerosol ‘Blast’ That Keeps Endurance Athletes Enduring:
“We deliver nutrients rapidly to the human body. That technology we call OraBlast, and there's about 18 patents around it. The technology takes whatever nutrient it is we create, a blend or formulation, and that composition of matter. We have a delivery mechanism which is very innovative and has a lot of moving parts, but essentially we use oxygen. Oxygen is the compression gas that forces the nutrients we create to be atomized and delivered through what is called a Blast. We're delivering at a fairly high PSI, using oxygen as the compression method. The nutrients are delivered rapidly, and we call them atomized nutrients. That whole process gets us to what we're trying to do, which is to solve specific problems we've identified—one, for the athlete community where we're starting, but, ultimately, for everyone, because this is not just envisioned to be a sports product. We’re bringing attention to a problem that you solve with this elegant solution in sports and then move down. The first product is called BOA Endure. It essentially delivers sodium rapidly. That's important because whenever any athlete is doing full exertion, they burn sodium. If you don't have sodium, your hydration system doesn't work, you can't pull your fluids into your muscles. Some athletes burn sodium at a really incredible rate, 5,000-6000 milligrams an hour, and there's no way to replace that through a traditional drink. You can't catch up because we burn it faster than we can replace it. This is a solution to rapid sodium replacement. Most everyone has fluid available to them. When you run out of sodium, you can't pull it through the muscles themselves. It’s a complex solution, but it's a really elegant one that is simple. It's a canister that's convenient, easy to carry, you use it while you run or whatever it is you're doing. You take a two-second spray, we call the Blast, and it delivers 150 milligrams of sodium. We have a two-ounce and a four-ounce. The two-ounce, the smallest, delivers 3,750 milligrams in the canister. It has 25 servings. The amount of sodium in this canister is equal to about 24 12-ounce bottles of whatever isotonic drink you use. It’s fast-acting, it's concentrated and it's convenient. We make it taste good, and that's a hard thing to do because sodium is a harsh, metallic nutrient. This is potentially very disruptive. The sodium-replacement market versus the biggest markets possible is fairly small. But think about all the other markets and all the other problems we could go at, like, you need carbs, caffeine, energy. We think we can create a composition of matter, a nutrient replacement mixture to address the problem. The OraBlast is the universal way to do it. It’s a change in behavior, it’s a new step for people. But we're really excited about the potential to be extremely disruptive.”
More...from SportTechie.
2. New self-assessment helps pregnant women start exercising safely sooner:
One-of-a-kind tool removes a major barrier for women looking to get or stay active during pregnancy, says U of A expert who led its development.
Pregnant women are now able to easily and quickly determine whether they should be exercising thanks to a new one-of-a-kind tool developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Alberta.
The Get Active Questionnaire for Pregnancy, newly published by the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology, guides pregnant individuals through a series of yes/no questions to confirm whether it is safe to exercise during pregnancy, and identify the small number of individuals who should seek medical advice before starting or continuing to exercise.
Margie Davenport, a U of A pregnancy researcher in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, who led the development of the questionnaire, explained that previous guidelines—no matter the score—urged women to speak to their health-care provider before beginning or continuing to be physically active during pregnancy. This, she said, created a major barrier to participation.
More...from the University of Alberta.
3. Sports Illustrated's Fittest 50 2022:
There’s no denying it: all athletes’ bodies are built to meet the unique demands of each sport and withstand the rigors of the game. At the elite level, physical fitness and conditioning is ever present. But what happens when you level the playing field and compare athletes of all shapes and sizes in disparate sports?
Each year Sports Illustrated accepts the challenge and ranks the best-conditioned athletes in the world, consulting the expertise of trainers, exercise physiologists and performance experts with experience across the college, pro and Olympic levels of sports. The panel evaluates athletes on the following criteria: performances over the last 12+ months; demands and risks of their respective sports; durability; training regimens; and other physical benchmarks including power, speed, strength, agility, endurance, flexibility and more.
More...from Sports Illustrated.
4. You’re Not a Small Man, But You May Need to Eat Like One!
Research shows that female athletes have the same relative energy requirements as their male counterparts.
As anyone who’s been following me for more than 3 days knows, I’m all about women fueling properly, because the fact is that most active women do not eat enough to support their performance and recovery. Thanks to the diet industry, women have gotten the message they should always eat less, even when they’re moving more. We also get strong societal messages that we should eat less than men.
Well…new research would beg to differ (as would I!). Pound for pound, active women have the same energy requirements as men, and active women overwhelmingly miss that mark—especially when it comes to carbohydrate intake.
A study published last month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise reports that when compared to a group of adult male professional soccer players, the relative daily energy requirements for professional female soccer players are the same as their male counterparts. What’s more, 88 percent of women in the study fell short of those requirements and had low energy availability.
More...from Dr. Stacy Sims.
5. Inov-8 X-Talon Ultra 260 V2 Review: Built For The Worst Conditions:
What You Need To Know
Weighs 9.1 oz. (260 g.) for a US M8.5 / US W7
Soft terrain is gonna treat you right with 8mm lugs
POWERFLOW MAX should have you powering through the miles
Available now from Inov-8 for $160
TAYLOR: With every trip around the sun, I realize there is more and more than I don’t know. No matter what my brother says, I do not think it is because I’m stupid. There’s just so much to make sense of in life!
One thing that I genuinely do not understand, though, is how a company like Inov-8 is not more well known! They are a UK-born trail-centric company that is nothing less than innovative — I mean, it’s in the name! 2020’s BIG Trail shoe of the year was their Terra Ultra G 270, which melded state-of-art outsole, up-to-date foams, a secure fit, and their classic durability. This accolade was even agreed upon industry-wide.
more...from Belive in the Run.
6. Three Base Training Experiments You Should Try Now:
Base season is the perfect time to test out new training modifications without the risk of harming your racing performance.
When you study the careers of elite endurance athletes who perform at a high level over an extended period of time — folks like elite runner Abdi Abdirahman, who qualified for five U.S. Olympic teams over a span of 16 years — the thing that always stands out is consistency. Athletes who not only reach the top but stay on top tend to be very consistent in their approach to training.
Recreational endurance athletes, by and large, are more erratic in their training. In search of great leaps in performance, they bounce from one coach or system to another, wondering why the leaps they seek never come. The answer, in most cases, is lack of consistency. Once you’ve found a good formula, you need to stick with it, mining it for incremental improvements year after year.
Why Base Training Is the Perfect Time to Experiment
There is such a thing as too much consistency, however. Even athletes like Abdirahman, who perform at peak levels well into their 40s, experiment with small adjustments to their training. They do so not in search of giant leaps in performance but in pursuit of marginal gains. The ideal time for such experiments is the off-season or early base-training period. The reason is that some training experiments turn out well, while others don’t. When you test a new method during the off-season or early base-training period, you have plenty of time to get back on track before your next big race if the experiment fails. But you also have plenty of time to take full advantage of the new method if things go well.
More...from TRaining Peaks.
7. How to Increase VO2 max Power and Duration for Cyclists:
There is an entire generation of cyclists that views VO2 max as a genetically pre-determined performance ceiling. A more modern and nuanced take shows it to be quite responsive to training. With different types of workouts we can increase VO2 max itself, as well as peak power, fractional utilization, and power duration at VO2 max. That’s a lot of terms to throw around, but we’ll explain them as we go, tell you why they matter for performance, and how to improve them and get faster on the bike.
What is VO2 max?
VO2 max is the maximum volume of oxygen your body can take in and utilize per minute, so it is considered your maximum aerobic capacity. We express it two ways: absolute or relative. Relative takes a person’s weight into account and is expressed as Liters/kilogram/minute. Absolute is just Liters/minute. Several factors determine an athlete’s VO2 max:
More...from CTS.
8. Are Superpants the Next Supershoes?
Scientists have figured out how to make simple exoskeletons that improve running efficiency. Should track and field authorities be worried?
shoe that made runners four percent more efficient, a trio of researchers from the University of Tehran in Iran published a little-noticed paper in the journal IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering that promised an eight percent savings. The trick was a spring-loaded exoskeleton, worn around the waist and clamped to the upper legs, that helped swing the rear leg forward with each stride.
Rodger Kram, the University of Colorado researcher whose lab performed the initial testing of Nike’s Vaporfly 4% shoe, tipped me off about the paper—with, I suspect, a twinkle in his eye, given all the controversy sparked by the Vaporfly results. I thought the paper was interesting, but mostly as a novelty. The design was a little too cumbersome, and the spring a little too springy, for me to imagine that anyone would actually use it, much less that it would be deemed legal for competition by World Athletics. Here’s what the prototype looked like:
More...from SweatScience on Outside Online.
9. Is It Harder to Run in the Cold?
If it's hard to run fast, blame it on slick conditions—not chilly muscles.
As you trudge your way through winter training, you might have wondered: Is it harder to run in the cold?
You never have a problem during the temperate seasons of spring and fall. But the swamp of summer humidity always wrecks havoc on your training times. So, it makes sense that the opposite end of the spectrum would have a similar effect.
We talked to some experts to find out whether running in cold weather is as hard as you think it is. Here’s what you need to know.
More...from Runner's World.
10. From smart goggles to electric jumpsuits: How athletes are pushing boundaries with the help of wearable tech:
Adam Lucio has been a wheelchair user since he was a child. After playing wheelchair basketball for Oklahoma State University, he now hopes to become a professional adaptive triathlete and take part in Iron Man contests alongside able-bodied competitors.
Wearable tech is a key part of his training regimen. When playing basketball, tennis, taking on marathons or competing in wheelchair racing, he wears a smart watch. In the pool, Lucio wears FORM Smart Swim Goggles.
Worn like normal goggles, the Smart Swim Goggles feature an augmented reality heads-up display that allows you to track your progress as you swim, letting you know your speed, distance, and biometric data like heart rate.
More...from CNN.
11. When the Last Thing You Want to Do Is Exercise:
Bundle your incentives. Be flexible. Get some support. Here’s how to get — and stay — motivated.
I was so tempted to skip the run. It was a Thursday afternoon in early December, and by the time my five Zoom meetings were done, it was getting dark and the sky was spitting sleet. Still, I headed out the door, because my last call of the day had been with a couple of professional runners, each with multiple national championship titles in distance running under their belt. Physician Megan Roche and her husband David had encouraged me to think of my workout as recess after a long day of work, rather than another item on my to-do list.
More...from the New York Times.
12. The Science of Exercising in Extreme Cold:
It’s time to break out the merino base layers and the heat-exchange breathing masks.
At last month’s World Cup cross-country-skiing event in the northern Finnish resort town of Ruka, some of the top competitors, including Finnish Olympic champion Iivo Niskanen, chose to withdraw at the last minute. “It’s not too long to the Olympics,” Niskanen told a Norwegian newspaper. “Minus 23 [degrees Celsius, or -9.4 degrees Fahrenheit] is too much for me. A simple choice.”
That surprised me, to be honest. Several decades of running through Canadian winters—occasionally, though not frequently, in temperatures colder than that—has left me with the general feeling that it’s almost never too cold to exercise outside as long as you’re appropriately dressed. I even wrote an article about how to survive those frigid runs a few years ago. But a major new review of research on sport in cold environments, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health by a team of researchers from Italy, Austria, and Canada, takes a somewhat more cautious view of things.
More...from Sweat Science on OUtside ONline.
13. How to get your fueling and hydration strategy right for endurance performance:
"Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals"
This quote from American entrepreneur Jim Rohn was aimed at business people but struck a chord with me when thinking about fuelling for endurance athletes.
It fits so well because getting your fueling and hydration strategy right isn't the mysterious art form that some people believe it to be. As Rohn's quote suggests, the key is to consistently apply the ‘basic fundamentals’ in order to be successful...
So, what does that mean in practice?
More...from Precision Hydration.
14. Study reveals impact 10 minutes of exercise can have on adults over 40:
Could you find 10 minutes in your day to increase your physical activity? It might be lifesaving, according to a new study.
More than 110,000 US deaths could be prevented each year if adults over 40 added 10 minutes of daily moderate to vigorous physical activity to their normal routines, according to the study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
An increase of 20 or 30 minutes could lead to even more lives saved, the study noted.
"We know exercise is good for us. This study provides additional evidence of the benefits at the population level: if all adults in the United States (over age 40) were to exercise just a bit more each day, a large number of deaths could be prevented each year," said Pedro Saint-Maurice, the study's first author and an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, via email.
More...from CNN.
15. The Norwegian model of lactate threshold training and lactate controlled approach to training:
A look at some of the concepts, history, and keys to improvement.
I wrote most of the articles found on this site, like Kenyan Training, a Practical Guide back in 2000 – 2004 when I was still running actively.
Since then, I’ve finished medical school, and since 2010 I’ve been busy working as a physician in Southern Norway. I still enjoy running, three times a week.
Note that the post below is by no means a scientific article – and it is not meant to either. Rather, it is some thoughts, reflections, and experiences from an empirical perspective.
More...from MariusBakken.com.
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