Sacramento Running News

In a recent post, I wrote about the connection between brain health and physical fitness. Now, there is yet even more evidence for keeping kids active. In two separate studies of children and physical fitness, researchers demonstrate the link between fit children and smart children.

One study demonstrated improved performance by the fitter children (identified by a treadmill test) and connected that with actual physical differences that show up in MRI scans of the brains of the kids .

Meanwhile, a separate study (by some of the same researchers) found a similar connection between working memory in children and the size of the hippocampus. Previous research has shown that exercise can increase the size of the hippocampus, but this study linked working memory, exercise and the size of the hippocampus in children.

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Static stretch? Active stretch? Before you run? After you run? Will it prevent injury?

By and large, it appears to make no difference–just don’t stop stretching once you started. Or something. My head hurts.

Read this article in the New York Times about stretching and your head can hurt too!

Hopefully, we’ve all had the experience of buying running shoes at a real running store. If you are a new runner, or asking for help, the salesperson will have you stand with your shoes off and look at your feet and advise you about a shoe that will best fit your needs. (The better shoe stores will put you in the shoes and actually watch you run in them.)

In the US Military, the most typical injuries for new recruits are running related. To address this, they decided to evaluate the feet of recruits and supply them with shoes that shoe companies promote for the recruits’ foot shape.

Normally, the story would stop there.  However, this time the Marine Corps decided to actually test the results and see how these recruits fared.  It turns out the results were about the opposite of what the shoe companies would have liked. The New York Times reports: (more…)

You may have heard the old (and by old I mean ancient) expression: A sound mind in a sound body.  Or, as the Romans said, way back in Roman times, Mens sana in corpore sano. Well, according to some recent research findings, it turns out the two really are linked.  An article in Health Day states:

People with the highest cardiac output for their body size (cardiac index), meaning those with the greatest blood flow from their heart, tended to have more brain volume, which generally indicates a healthier brain.

In fact, the researchers said that people with the lowest cardiac output showed nearly two more years of brain aging than did those with the highest cardiac output.

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Is there a footwear fad that American can’t get behind?  A couple of months ago, I started seeing them everywhere: those funny sneakers with the rounded bottoms.  They were otherwise normal looking people wearing some really odd looking shoes. Even Chuck Norris was getting into the act, hawking these shoes on television. (Okay.  Maybe Chuck’s not the best example of “normal” but bear with me here.)

Like so many fitness fads that have come before, the reports of danger come following after.  The Boston Globe reports:

Local runner Bruce LaBelle sent me this really interesting article from the New York Times about how merely the taste of carbohydrates can improve your performance.  According to the article, “Exercise scientists say they have stumbled on an amazing discovery. Athletes can improve their performance in intense bouts of exercise, lasting an hour or so, if they merely rinse their mouths with a carbohydrate solution. They don’t even have to swallow it.”

These findings seem to help explain earlier research that showed significant performance improvement (in cyclists) from drinking carbohydrate beverages during short bouts of exercise.  The short duration of exertion would not allow the absorption of usable fuel–but somehow athletes benefited.  It seems that even the taste of carbohydrates (not sweet) was enough to “trick the brain.”

This study appears to be reinforce the idea that your brain is really the limiting factor in your running performance.  “Think of a runner who is bonking, takes in some gel or soda, and perks up immediately.  How many calories really could have gone into their stomach and intestines, get adsorbed into the bloodstream, and then transferred into the muscles or the brain in the time it took for them to feel better?” asks LaBelle.  “Note that the observed effect of carbohydrate-specific receptors affecting the brain has interesting parallels with the hypotheses by Noakes and his colleagues on the Central Governor Model of exercise in which the brain dictates to a surprising extent how hard we can run.  It helps explain how we can be reduced to a plod for hours, then see the “One Mile to Go” sign and perk up and be able to run again.”

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If you run until you drop on these hot summer days, you may be recovering for months to come.  Here is an interesting article in the New York Times about how little we know about the impacts of heat stroke.