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1. High Levels of BPA Were Found in Sports Bras — Here's What You Need to Know:
Working out is supposed to be good for you — and a great sports bra can make you feel good about yourself and push you to work out that much harder. But news from the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) is making people question whether their sportswear might have an unwanted impact on their health.
The Center for Environmental Health (CEH) conducted a variety of tests on branded sportswear and found high levels of BPA, an industrial chemical used to make some plastics.
BPA exposure "is a concern because of the possible health effects on the brain and prostate gland of fetuses, infants, and children. It can also affect children's behavior. Additional research suggests a possible link between BPA and increased blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease," writes Dr. Brent A. Bauer, M.D. for Mayo Clinic. BPA is often found in the plastics used to hold food and water (like plastic water bottles) and can be used in other consumer products as well — like in this case, stretchy athletic clothing.
More...from PopSugar.
2. Why Running Slow Is Good For You:
There are all kinds of benefits from slowing down (and varying) your pace.
No matter how fast or slow you think of yourself, it’s time to own it. There’s speedy for you, and then there’s your own version of a leisurely jog, and that’s the great thing about running—you can go at your own pace.
Running coaches will note multiple reasons why runners should incorporate different paces into their training. One of the most important reasons is because so many runners suffer injuries from not running slowly enough—or ever.
Think about it: Many runners simply head out the door and go as hard as they can. There might be a little variation depending on the day or terrain, but generally speaking, they have one pace and it’s go. Alternatively, if you’re always taking it super easy, where you are rarely breaking a sweat or not breathing hard, you should also challenge yourself with some speedy efforts. Variety is the key.
More...from Women's Running.
3. 4 Tips for Building Muscle and Burning Fat After Menopause:
In her book, Next Level, female physiology expert Stacy Sims, Ph.D. reveals how women can work with their hormonal changes to achieve their goals.
Even though women live nearly 40 percent of their lives post-menopause—female life expectancy is around 81 years and the average age of hitting menopause is 51—it’s surprisingly difficult to find guidance on maximizing your fitness during these decades.
“Every woman’s going to go through it and we don’t talk about it enough,” said female physiology expert and Tonal advisory board member Stacy Sims, Ph.D. in an interview with Tonal. “It can be overwhelming, but if you know what your body’s doing and understand the physiological changes, then you can take steps to navigate it.”
To make up for the lack of available information about exercise, nutrition, and health during and after menopause, Sims combed through the research to write her new book, Next Level: Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond, the October pick for Tonal’s book club, Read Between the Reps.
More...from TONAL.
4. Does running really wreck your knees?
Contrary to popular opinion, distance running rarely causes knee problems in runners, and often leaves joints sturdier and less damaged.
Almost all runners, whether veterans or newcomers, poky or fleet, youthful or antique, share one bond. Someone soon will warn us that we are ruining our knees.
“A lot of people think that running is bad” for knees and other joints, said Jean-Francois Esculier, a clinical professor of physical therapy at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, who studies running.
But accumulating research, including studies from Esculier and others, generally shows the reverse. In these studies, distance running does not wreck most runners’ knees and, instead, fortifies them, leaving joints sturdier and less damaged than if someone had never taken up the sport.
More...from the Washington Post.
5. Female Athletes Are Redefining Active Pregnancy:
Elite women are training, competing, and yes, winning, during and after pregnancy, rewriting the playbook for moms in sport.
It wasn’t that long ago that active women were discouraged from continuing their exercise routine when they got pregnant. Sure, they were supposed to meet the bare minimum of 150 minutes a week of physical activity. But doctors cautioned them to walk, not run, and to “take it easy”, not understanding that for a woman who clocks 60 miles a week and bangs out blistering track intervals every Tuesday and Thursday, a Sunday morning jog is taking it easy.
This is exactly what Lizzette Perez demonstrated during the 2019 Boston Marathon when she ran the event while eight months pregnant. A lifelong runner, Perez found out she was pregnant a week after she qualified for the prestigious event. She continued running, got regular checkups, and when race day came, she “took it easy,” which as she told ABC news, meant plenty of water breaks, snack breaks, and porta-potty breaks along the way. She finished in 5:49:20, healthy and elated. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl just over a month later.
More...from Dr. Stacy Sims.
6. New Pill Replicates Exercise and Strengthens Muscle:
A drug has been identified by researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) that replicates the benefits of exercise on mice’s bones and muscles.
You can look and feel better by keeping up a regular exercise schedule, but did you know that exercise also supports bone and muscle health? Locomotor fragility, which affects people who are unable to exercise, causes the muscles and bones to deteriorate. Recently, Japanese researchers discovered a new drug that, by producing effects comparable to those of exercise, may help treat locomotor frailty.
Physical inactivity can result in a weakening of the muscles (known as sarcopenia) and bones (known as osteoporosis). Exercise dispels this frailty by boosting muscular strength and suppressing bone resorption while simultaneously promoting bone formation. Exercise therapy, however, cannot be used in every clinical situation. When patients have dementia, cerebrovascular disease, or are already bedridden, drug therapy may be very helpful for treating sarcopenia and osteoporosis. However, there is no one drug that targets both tissues at the same time.
More...from SciTechDaily.
7. CORE Sensor Is a Wearable Used for Monitoring Body Temperature to Help Athletes Perform Better and Safer in Heat:
Our product is a wearable sensor, and it can continuously and non-invasively measure a person's or athlete’s core body temperature. So, why is this important? When we do sports, we're generating mechanical power. Unfortunately, but naturally, the human body is like other machines so we're not 100% efficient but rather around 20%. That means for every watt of mechanical output, we create four watts of thermal output. Usually, the human body has really good thermal regulation and can dissipate heat quite well but there's limitations to this. This is when the environment where we're doing sports in is hot or we're wearing insulating clothing. Then, what happens is the body cannot get rid of that heat and starts accumulating that heat inside the body and the core body temperature starts racing. Now, there's a critical limit to what our body can sustain and if you go toward, let's say 40-41 degrees Celsius, it gets critical because basically proteins can decompose, and it can become life threatening. The body then starts interacting, it's like when it's too hot in your home, your air conditioning kicks in.
More...from SportTechie.
8. Puma Deviate Nitro 2 Review: The Big Cat’s Pajamas:
What You Need To Know
Weighs 9.1 oz. (258 g.) for a US M9 / US W10.5
Finally, a shoe that unites the whole team
This shoe is proof that Puma is listening to feedback
Is it possible to make this max-cushion trainer that much better?
Available now for $160
THOMAS: Puma went hard last year, dropping an entire lineup of trainers. We were pretty well impressed across the board. There was room for improvement, but the Deviate Nitro was a hit for almost everyone. However, for us, the heel counter kept it in the good but not great category. If you didn’t deal with heel lift, maybe you wound up with a blister from the lack of padding. Puma’s Nitro foam with a carbon-infused plate offered a nice cushioned ride, but it wasn’t as responsive as we hoped for. But, as this was the first good Puma running shoe in years, we were just excited to see them back in the game.
Even then, we weren’t sure how committed Puma was to the running segment. So we held our breath waiting for the next round. Supply chain issues rocked the joint in 2021 and 2022, and Puma was hit pretty hard. So, as a result, we’ve only seen four releases for the year: Fast-R, Velocity Nitro 2, the female-specific XX Nitro WMS, and the Puma Deviate Nitro 2. We’re happy to report that both updated shoes improved over the originals.
More...from Believe in the Run.
9. Want to Run Faster? You Probably Don’t Need More Speedwork:
Aerobic capacity, not speed, is usually the limiting factor in how fast you can race, even for a distance as short as the 5K.
Perhaps the most often misunderstood concept of training is the role of aerobic endurance versus speed in racing success. It’s easy to think that not being able to race faster at shorter distances, or not being able to kick the last 800 meters of a race, is due to a lack of speed. This is why so many runners spend so much time on lung-busting 400’s, 800’s or mile repeats to help them get faster.
This confusion stems from the fact that what you feel doesn’t always correlate with what is happening physiologically in your body. For example, the heavy, cement-like feeling in your arms and legs at the end of a 5K isn’t a sign of muscle weakness. Rather, this feeling is caused by the release of hydrogen ions when racing beyond your anaerobic threshold, which creates an acidic environment in the muscles and impairs muscle contraction. To avoid this feeling, and the reduced race pace it demands, you are better served hitting the roads for a tempo run than you are hitting the weight room or even the track.
More...from Outside Onlin.
10. The Link Between Zone 2 Training, Fat Burning, and Performance:
How do easy Zone 2 rides actually better your performance? Here’s a peek into the physiology of aerobic training and fat burning.
At face value, riding steadily at a relatively easy pace would not seem to help your racing. How does riding for hours on end in Zone 2 replicate shredding the field on the finishing climb in a road race or making the winning break in a criterium? While it may not seem like it, endurance rides are a requirement for successful training. One of the most important adaptations that you get from endurance rides is the ability to use fat more efficiently.
Why Fat Burning Matters in Cycling Races
Apart from explosive one-off events such as track racing, short time trials, and 5 ks, efficient fat burning is a major key that sets great racers apart from the rest of the pack. In professional cycling, there are lots of riders who can do a 5-minute or 20-minute power test on par with Grand Tour contenders; however, in real races, these riders are often pack-finishers and domestiques. Why? Racing tactics and skills play a large part, but another major key is the ability to burn fat.
At lower intensities, you burn mostly fat and some carbohydrates. The harder you ride, you begin burning an increasingly higher percentage of carbs and a decreasing percentage of fat. At around your lactate threshold and beyond, you burn almost entirely carbohydrates. If there are not enough carbs in your system (i.e., glycogen), you simply won’t be able to reach these intensities. You have surely felt this at the end of a long ride. It’s unlikely you would be able to do a 5-minute best after four hours of hard riding because there’s just not enough left in the legs.
More...from Training Peaks.
11. Understanding the Difference Between Eccentric and Concentric Movement Can Unlock More Gains:
There's more to strength training that just picking up weight and putting it down.
IF YOU'RE LIKE most guys in the gym, when you’re doing a big lift—whether it’s a max bench, a PR squat, or the last rep of a strip set of curls—you’re focused on one thing: Getting that weight up.
But that’s only part of the rep. Each lift you do actually has three distinct phases: the concentric phase, the eccentric phase, and the isometric phase. Understanding the difference between the three can unlock new strength and size, help to safeguard from injury, and improve your performance on those big lifts—and in the rest of your life.
Concentric, Eccentric, Isometric: Here’s What They Mean
More...from Men's Health.
12. What’s the Most Reliable Predictor of Your Marathon Time?
Researchers in Japan try to figure out which miles matter most for long-distance runners.
A few years ago, I wrote an article about a high-tech marathon prediction study that crunched Strava data from 25,000 runners. They extracted each runner’s fastest training segments over distances ranging from 400 meters to 5K, plotted the data as a hyperbolic speed-versus-duration curve, used that curve to calculate the runner’s critical speed, and used the critical speed to predict their marathon time.
If none of that made sense to you, or if you don’t have a GPS watch, or if you simply can’t be bothered to upload all your training data into an all-seeing algorithm, then I’ve got a different kind of marathon prediction study for you. In the European Journal of Applied Physiology, Japanese researchers led by Akihiko Yamaguchi look at simpler variables like how much and how often you run, and come up with some big-picture insights that are worth bearing in mind next time you tackle 26.2 miles.
The researchers surveyed about 500 runners about their training habits leading up to the Hokkaido Marathon, focusing on monthly training volume, number of running days per week, average run distance, and longest run distance. (According to the paper, Japanese runners and running media generally track their training volume by month, rather than the weekly totals more common in North America.)
More...from Sweat Science on Outside Online.
13. Yes, The Elliptical Can Create Champions. Here’s How:
In training plans of athletes who are volume-limited, you’ll often see a pattern: a couple hours on the elliptical a week. Should you consider the elliptical in your training plan? Here’s why the elliptical might be the fitness machine with the biggest bang for your cross-training training buck.
Last year at the NCAA 5K championships, we may have seen one of the most astonishing moments in US running history. Parker Valby, a redshirt freshman at the University of Florida, finished 2nd place… off 2 runs per week for 4 weeks.
“I credit all my success to cross-training,” she said in the post-race interview.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Around 8-10 runs all season before finishing 2nd place at a national event? Talent is one thing, but at that level, everyone is talented. For her physiology, that cross-training regimen must have been what allowed her talent to shine as brightly as any of her competitors who were doing full seasons of consistent running training.
While watching that race, my co-coach Megan and I were screaming. Part of that symphony of shrieks was excitement and awe, but the other emotion was extreme scientific wonder. Some people get noise complaints for banging their beds against the wall; we get noise complaints for scientific curiosity.
More...from Trail Runner.
14. Why I Stopped Running to Win:
n important image to hold in your head: once, running, “racing” a man in Prospect Park in Brooklyn who did not know we were racing, I slipped onto the dirt path next to the road to get a little distance on him, and, because I was trying to see how close he was to passing me, I did not notice a root sticking up out of the ground and I tripped and fell and bloodied both elbows and both knees. I have been known to not be able to let small children pass me, should they sidle up beside me as I run. I’ve torn a quadricep twice, once in high school and again in college, trying to extend my legs in the final stretch of an 800-meter race. I love running, but for a long time I didn’t know this. I loved winning. Running was just the tool by which this was achieved.
My mother is a runner, winner of local age-group races, protector of that silent precious pre-dawn hour when no one talks and she has her body to herself. In high school, having run cross country, track, off-season hot Florida summer training, nearly every day since I was 13, I said to my father that I would never be a runner like my mother. Absurdly, I said, “If I’m not competing at a high level, what’s the point?” For a stretch of time in college, I stopped running, for lots of reasons really, but also because the prospect of not winning was so paralyzing, I couldn’t fathom running if it meant I might lose.
More...from Times.
15. How to Fall Back Without Missing a Beat:
Earlier mornings and shorter evening light can be a tough adjustment. But there are ways to prepare for the end of daylight saving.
The transition to fall is scattered with seasonal markers: The occasional chill in the air; the wearing of the flannel shirt to the pumpkin patch; the urge to make soup.
These changes so far have happened like clockwork, and next comes the one that actually involves clocks. On Sunday Nov. 6, people in the United States and Canada will “fall back” to standard time, setting their clocks back an hour and signaling the end of daylight saving time. (Arizona and Hawaii, which are on permanent standard time, keep their clocks the same.)
Most Americans dislike this twice-yearly time reset, according to various polls, and it may soon end. Earlier this year, the Senate passed legislation to make daylight saving time permanent, perhaps as early as next year.
More...from the New York Times.
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