|
1. Women Matter Canada:
Our current focus, outside of elections, is to shine a light on different issues that matter to women in the form of campaigns.
Our current campaign is focused on the changes to female sports. Biological males have been allowed to compete in female divisions based on self-identifying as girls and women. This has been detrimental as the physiological advantages males have has led to males completely dominating in women's competition and poses safety concerns, especially in contact sports. Recently the MacDonald Laurier Institute released a report that takes the position that male divisions in sport should become open divisions to allow for a variety of gender identity, whilst female divisions must remain for biological women and girls to ensure equity, fairness, and safety for female athletes. Just a couple of years ago World Rugby also published its research showing the safety concerns of biological males competing against females in a high contact sport.
More...from Women Matter Canada
2. Make Swimming Your Summer Workout:
With just 30 minutes and a few useful tricks, a trip to the pool can become serious exercise.
Summer is here and you’ve decided this is the year to trade your running shoes for a pair of swim goggles. Maybe you’ve tweaked a knee and need a lower impact form of cardio, maybe you just can’t face your outdoor boot camp class when it’s 90 degrees.
Whatever your reason for taking to the water, swimming is one of the best exercises you can do for your health. It’s a total body workout, taxing your arms and legs, as well as your cardiovascular system, yet it puts less stress on your joints than most other exercises. And on a hot summer day, the cool water is a good place to get sweaty.
More...from the New York Times.
3. Adidas Adizero Adios Pro 3: First Thoughts On This Bargain of a Super Shoe:
What You Need To Know
Weighs 8.8 oz. (250 g) for a US M11
Updated carbon-fiber Energyrods are now a single unit
Dual-density Lighstrike Pro midsole for exceptional energy return
Redesigned lightweight upper
Releases June 23 in the U.S. for $220 (a bargain for this level of performance)
Supershoe season is upon us. Over the next few months, the forecast calls for carbon rain with the release of everything from the Asics Metaspeed Sky+ to (likely) the Nike Alphafly 2. It’s been hard for companies to stick to the release schedule with the ongoing supply chain delays, but Adidas has pulled through with the updated Adizero Adios Pro 3.
Last year’s version of the Adios Pro was a sleeper super shoe that quickly became a legend in both the novice and pro space, including Peres Jepchirchir’s historic feat in becoming the first athlete to win both Olympic gold and the New York Marathon in the same year.
More...from Believe in the Run.
4. A Data-Driven Analysis Of ”The Shoe Effect”:
World Athletics Data Analysis – Synopsis
Introduction
The past decade has seen two major impacts on the global performance of athletes:
1. The COVID-19 Pandemic
2. The introduction and availability of Carbon-plated Footwear Technology
How can we identify and evaluate this impact of both COVID-19 and Carbon-plated Footwear Technology?
Performance Criteria
Examining performance criteria over time is one way of evaluating an impact. Normally, the number of athletes globally who exceed a certain performance criterion is relatively stable from year-to-year, with slight fluctuations in Olympic and pre-Olympic years. Also, it is expected to see a gradual increase in the number of athletes exceeding the criterion over time, through natural ‘event development’. The years from 2015- 2021 are analysed here.
More...from Track and Field News.
5. How to Interpret HRV to Reduce Stress and Increase Performance:
This comprehensive article explains how monitoring your HRV in training can help you pinpoint stressors that are hindering your performance.
After putting in months of diligent base training, your racing season approaches. If you’re like most athletes, you don’t spend that much time thinking about the training process because you’re just training for fun, following a training plan, or paying a coach to figure out your workouts so you don’t have to. Still, the basic training process isn’t that complicated, and it’s worth taking a look at, as you’ll see below.
Most coaches follow this coaching process to produce peak performance in an athlete:
Determine an athlete’s strengths and weaknesses with respect to event demands
Manipulate the intensity and volume of training to produce specific adaptations
Manage Chronic Training Load (CTL, or Fitness), Acute Training Load (ATL, or Fatigue) and Training Stress Balance (TSB, or Form) to produce peak performance when it matters
As an athlete, what you probably notice the most during the build period is the ‘Manipulate’ column. Why? Because workouts get harder, longer, and you get tired!
Or, to use the language of the model, during the build period, your workouts get harder (intensity goes up), and sometimes the duration (volume) of your workouts also goes up, which results in the highest (or nearly the highest) training load of the year. Because you’re accumulating more fatigue than normal, you’re tired.
More...from Training Peaks.
6. Master your VO2 max: What is it and how can you find out yours?
What is VO2 max and why is it an important tool to help gauge fitness levels?
If you’re into fitness, the chances are that you might have heard the term VO2 max at some stage or another. Maximizing your workout and achieving optimal performance is probably somewhere on your mind when you’re exercising (behind the beads of sweat on your forehead!) and this is where knowing the basics of VO2 max can be useful.
When it comes to understanding your body, VO2 max is a helpful indicator. Basically, the term refers to the maximum amount of oxygen that a person can consume and use in one minute during exercise. VO2 max is measured in milliliters of oxygen consumed by each kilogram of your body per minute (mL/kg/min). The higher the number, the better. But why is that so important for fitness?
More...from LIveScience.
7. Fitness: Kickstart your workout with a cup of joe:
Caffeine allows athletes to work at a higher intensity for longer.
Canadians love their coffee. Most often a morning habit, a jolt of caffeine helps shake off the early blahs. But there’s more to caffeine than its ability to kickstart your day.
It can also boost to your exercise routine, enhancing the performance of elite and recreational athletes, including the average exerciser looking to get the most from their workout.
Confirmed by the International Olympic Committee as one of the few supplements that improves performance, caffeine has long been popular among the world’s best athletes. Urine samples collected from athletes in several sports organizations revealed that 76 per cent use products containing caffeine before and/or during a competition. Widely studied in labs and during real-world competition, the results are impressive. Endurance athletes like cyclists, runners, cross-country skiers and swimmers see a two-to-four-per-cent caffeine-related improvement in performance, with similar results realized among strength and power athletes (sprinters, jumpers, throwers and weightlifters).
More...from the Montreal Gazette.
8. 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.
9. Could flywheel training be the key to getting stronger? Here’s the science:
Learn more about this newly researched form of strength training that’s providing promising results for trail runners.
The majority of runners I know have to be pushed, pulled, and prodded into doing strength training – after all, we like to spend our leisure time doing what we love most: running. For many of us, we’d rather walk into the dentist for a root canal than get under the squat rack or hammer out a sad set of push-ups.
One of the biggest reasons runners may not see results from their strength training is often that they aren’t doing it consistently, or aren’t lifting heavy enough. But what if there was a method that provided effective, efficient results – in less time, and with more bang for our buck?
Before you write this off as the latest trend to scoff at, hear me out: I had not heard of flywheel training prior to researching this article. I set out to write an article on the best forms of strength for runners, and found myself faced with a new method I had yet to dive into. Several research studies later, I found that flywheel training holds a lot of genuine potential. Although the concept has been out there for a while, it hasn’t yet become prominent in the sports performance space, particularly as it relates to running. Let’s dive into the science behind flywheel training.
More...from TrailRunner.
10. Why women and men need to exercise differently:
Fat burning, heart health, stamina — how you respond to exercise is affected by your sex, the experts tell Peta Bee
How your heart responds to exercise depends largely on whether you are a man or a woman, according to a new study funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) and presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference in Manchester today. And older male endurance athletes may be losing the race for heart health, as the researchers from Barts Heart Centre at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, St George’s Hospital and University College London found their vascular age to be almost ten years older than their chronological age, whereas the hearts of female athletes showed no such signs of accelerated ageing.
Over 300 competitive “masters” athletes in their forties and older, all of whom had trained for running, cycling, swimming and rowing for at least ten years, took part in the trial which involved undergoing MRI scans to find out if there were differences in the stiffness of their aorta, the largest artery in the human body which carries oxygen-rich blood away from the heart to the rest of the body and the brain. Stiffer arteries are associated with an increased risk of heart and circulatory disease in the general population, although the risk for athletes hasn’t yet been studied.
More...fromThe Times.
11. Under Armour to Launch First Female-specific Running Shoe:
The launch of the UA Flow Synchronicity is part of the sports brand's quest to enhance its standing with women.
Under Armour is accelerating its efforts to attract the female athlete.
In a return to in-person events, the Baltimore-based sports brand hosted a two-day event in the Meatpacking District in New York City for a group of media, influencers and athletes — all women — as it sought to further shine a light on product and marketing initiatives specifically focused on females.
The event was centered around next week’s launch of the UA Flow Synchronicity, a new running shoe designed by women specifically for women.
Lisa Collier, chief product officer for Under Armour, explained that traditional women’s running shoes are created from a men’s last, just made smaller to fit the female foot. That means they often lack the flexibility, fit, and arch support women need.
More,,,from Women's Wear Daily.
12. How U.S. Track and Field Athlete Chari Hawkins Tackles Anxiety:
Panic attacks, depression and crippling anxiety led Hawkins to develop mental resilience training. Here are her tips.
U.S. track and field team member Chari Hawkins wants people to take actionable steps to focus on their mental health and find a strong sense of self-worth.
The 30-year-old from San Diego, who competes in the heptathlon, fell short of her dream of making the Olympics in 2021. She became deeply depressed and stayed in bed for weeks. Hawkins lost all of her sponsors except one. She also lost her trainer, who told her that they only work with Olympians. She was left alone by her family and friends to cope with her loss. In her darkest moments, she even considered ending her life.
“I didn’t want to be here anymore,” Hawkins says. “It was really hard, and it was also confusing. It was a nightmare. All the things that I had conquered, this idea that you are not your performance felt like it came true. People care about you because of how you perform.”
More...from US News.
13. Your Watch Doesn’t Know How Much Recovery You Need:
The algorithms used to estimate your training load have some fundamental flaws, scientists say,
A recurring joke among my training partners these days is the advice their GPS watches give them when we finish an easy run. “You need 42 hours of recovery,” the algorithm tells them, even though they’re not even breathing hard. Hard interval workouts, on the other hand, don’t seem to impress the watches.
Where do these numbers come from? The algorithms are proprietary (Garmin’s, for example, are provided by a Finnish company called Firstbeat Analytics, which it bought in 2020), but they’re based on a concept that’s taking on greater importance in the age of ubiquitous wearable devices: training load. Athletes used to track their training with a hodgepodge of different variables: miles run, duration of session, average power, heart rate, and so on. Now that detailed second-by-second training data can be recorded and analyzed with minimal effort, they’re combining multiple variables into a single measure of how much stress a given workout imposed on their body. The approach has great potential to finetune the delicate balance between training and recovery—but, according to a recent study in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, it also has some fundamental flaws.
More... from Sweat Science on Otside Online
14. Why Fitness Experts Are Obsessed With “Bulletproofing” the Body:
Bulletproofers will do anything to avoid injury. Here's where to start.
In the mid-2010s, when gonzo biohacking was first picking up steam, a team of California scientists put a form of chlorophyll into a man’s eyes. The idea was to give him “night vision,” and their experiment sort of worked. For a brief period of time, the man could reportedly see people moving 160 feet away in a pitch-black wood.
In recent years, there has been a steady stream of biohacking tests and tips, some of them somehow even crazier than applying eyedrops of a photosensitivity solution (like implanting radio transponders in necks), but most of it is mainstream and buzzy — the sort of “hacks” often touted on podcasts and featured in Instagram ads. You know the classics: nootropics, elimination diets, infrared therapy, intermittent fasting and thermoregulation.
More...from InsideHook.
15. Why Pain Doesn’t Always Mean You’re Injured:
Sports medicine physicians are rethinking the relationship between damage to your body and how it feels,
You’ve just put in a great block of training. Now your knee hurts. Does that mean you’re injured? Well… it’s complicated, according to a new opinion piece in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Athletes are constantly dealing with pains and niggles, some that disappear and others that persist. Judging which ones to ignore and which ones to take seriously is a delicate art—and how we choose to label those pains, it turns out, can affect the outcome.
The new article is by Morten Høgh, a physiotherapist and pain scientist at Aalborg University in Denmark, along with colleagues from Denmark, Australia, and the United States. It argues that, in the context of sports medicine, pain and injury are two distinct entities and shouldn’t be lumped together. When pain is inappropriately labeled as an injury, Høgh and his colleagues argue, it creates fear and anxiety and may even change how you move the affected part of the body, which can create further problems.
More...from Sweat Science on Outside Online.
|
Know someone else who's interested in running and triathlon?
