Can you really get fitter in 10 seconds?
A couple of months ago, I wrote about a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology that purported to have found the secret sauce for training.
You could, the authors say, knock some serious time off your races by reducing your mileage and running some short, but crazy-fast intervals.
While interesting, I wondered, really, was there something new under the sun? How different was this from normal interval training?
This mouse will live longer and better than her lazy cousin!
In the press recently, there have been a number of stories about the possible dangers of too much running.
I generally ignore these because a casual observation yields plenty of data indicating we, as a nation, are suffering tremendously from a lack of exercise.
Fortunately for us, Paul Williams is around to reinforce our world view. He hasn’t seen a downside to lots of running, and he’s looked at a lot of runners.
Williams is a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is in charge of the worlds largest and longest study of runners.
Expect to be hearing a lot about Tim Noakes‘ latest book on the subject of hydration and sports. In it, Noakes tears apart much of the dogma surrounding hydration and human performance in athletics.
Joe Uhan, at Irunfar, writes a terrific review of Noakes book, Waterlogged, that is well worth reading. In his review, Uhan writes:
A new book by renowned sport medicine expert, Tim Noakes, MD, aims to change our beliefs– many of them longstanding, many of them inaccurate – on what it means to fuel optimally in endurance sports:
- Drink only to thirst, not on a schedule.
- Drinking does not prevent heat illness.
- Ingesting salt is unnecessary in ultras.
- Urine frequency or color has nothing to do with hydration or kidney function.
Maybe it’s because Le Tour is underway or the Summer Olympics are on the horizon, but it seems that the news is filled with stories about doping in sports.
The first that caught my attention was a story about three top-rated Russian runners, including two European champions, who were busted via the biological passport program. These were middle distance runners Yevgeniya Zinurova and Svetlana Klyuka, and marathoner Nailya Yulamanova.
My favorite aspect of the story was that Nailya Yulamanova had won the gold medal in the European Championship marathon only after the original winner, Zivile Balciunaite of Lithuania, had been stripped of her medal due to a doping violation.
I suppose this means that the original third-place finisher, Anna Incerti of Italy, will now–two years after the fact–be awarded the 2010 European Championship. You need an abacus to keep this straight!
Can a vegan diet help you run faster?
Gretchen Reynolds, writing at the New York Times Well blog, explores the issue of whether athletes can perform well on a vegan diet.
Her piece was sparked by the release of Scott Jurek’s new book Eat & Run, which we all are no doubt going to run off and purchase.
I enjoy Reynold’s writing on running and health, but was a little frustrated by the lack of distinction here between vegetarian (no meat) and vegan (no animal products).
Run faster by running less?
Alert reader, John B. (not me) wrote to tell me about his experience trying the training protocol I had written about in the original post, High Intensity Training.
John writes:
Two blocks at first, two to three times a week? Then ramp up to three.
Run faster by running less?
It’s not quite a “10-minutes a day to great abs” story, but you can expect to see a lot about this in the media over the next few days. A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology showed significant benefit for runners using a pretty short, high-intensity workout.
An article in Science Daily reports:
Over the course of seven weeks, runners were able to improve performance on a 1500-metre run by 23 seconds and almost by a minute on a 5-km run — and this despite a 50 per cent reduction in their total amount of training.
Your brain wants to go for a run.
By now, we’ve all read Born to Run and maybe some of the science behind the assertions in McDougall book.
Generally, it turns out we humans have many physiological features indicating that running (as apposed to walking or sitting in an office chair) was a significant driver in our evolutionary past.
But now that we no longer benefit from our ability to hunt down the occasional antelope, why do we still like to run? (I’ll assume that since you are reading this, you do like to run.)
One of my favorites.
It looks like that chocolate bar I keep in my desk drawer is not a bad thing after all.
NPR explores the question: Does a Chocolate Habit Keep You Lean?
Spoiler alert: Possibly!
A new study finds that people who eat chocolate several times a week are actually leaner than people who don’t eat chocolate regularly.
Proponents of barefoot running often speak of the improved efficiency of barefoot versus shod running, but for some reason we still don’t see many barefoot runners at a competitive level.
Why is this?
A recent study published online in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise worked to minimize the possible confounding factors that have plagued prior research.
To tease out the differences that could be attributed only to the shoes or lack of shoes, the researchers worked with experienced barefoot runners and all the runners in the study were midfoot strikers–with or without shoes.
Then, the researchers added weight to the feet of both the shod and barefoot runners and found, not surprisingly, that people use more oxygen as the weight of the foot or shoe increased.
