The Science of Cold-Weather Running

Dan has a PhD is Exercise Physiology from Penn State University, a 2:26 marathon PR, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Integrative Physiology of Aging Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder. He also happens to be a good friend of mine, and on long runs, he always has interesting scientific info to share as the miles fly by. He is no stranger to NeelyRuns.com as he wrote a guest blog called Train Hot Race Cool and now he is back with more insight on how climate affects running.

Cold temperatures are on the way for runners all over the country. While humans are very good at acclimating to hot weather (we increase our sweat rate and skin blood flow), we are relatively poor at acclimating to cold weather. Because of this, cold weather poses a unique challenge for runners. Here, I’ll tell you why the cold slows you down and what you can do about it.  

One way the cold temperatures can negatively influence your running performance is by decreasing muscle force production. Cold muscles contract with less force than warm muscles. The cold also changes the neural recruitment pattern of muscle fibers (basically, the brain changes the way it signals muscles to contract), which results in less efficient contractions and further reduces muscle force. This means you’ll have to increase your effort to maintain the same pace, which isn’t ideal for performance-oriented runners. How can you counteract this? First, do a dynamic warm-up (lunges, squats, clamshells, donkey kicks, etc.) indoors before going out and running in the cold; this will increase muscle temperature and blood flow. Second, wear running pants or tights when the temperature drops to near- or below-freezing levels. Sure, it might look tough to run in shorts when it is zero degrees out, but you don’t get a bonus in races for being a dumbass.

Another way the cold can affect your running is by changing metabolism. In the cold, your body uses fewer free fatty acids and more glycogen for energy. In long races, like the marathon, running out of glucose and glycogen results in hitting the wall. So, in cold weather you’re likely to hit the wall a few miles sooner than in warm weather. Be sure you start your run well fueled by eating plenty of carbs in the preceding 24 hours. Also, be sure you are fueling during any long run or race in the cold. Drinking too much cold liquid while running can lower your body temperature, so I recommend using gels or chews that can be carried with you and kept warm by your body heat (note: you’ll still need to drink enough to maintain hydration, however this will be much less than what is required when it’s hot outside).  

To summarize, in cold weather be sure you:

1.     Do a dynamic warm-up

2.     Dress in warm clothes

3.     Consume carbohydrates 

Do these three things and you’ll be ready to conquer to cold weather and your competition.

Cold weather fun fact: Ever wonder why you have to pee as soon as you go out in the cold? The cold causes vasoconstriction of the blood vessels in your periphery, which redistributes more blood to your core, including the kidneys. The increased blood flow to the kidneys increases urine production, which makes you pee.

Happy Running!

Guest Blog: Post-Workout Recovery: Why Every Endurance Athlete Should Take Magnesium

Luke is a fitness and health blogger at Ripped.me and a great fan of the gym and a healthy diet. He follows the trends in fitness, gym and healthy life and loves to share his knowledge through useful and informative articles.

Ask any avid runner or endurance athlete and they will tell you: post-workout recovery is just as important as working out. In fact, you could argue that the way you treat your body after a vigorous training session, especially as a distance runner, will not only set the stage for your next workout, but also determine whether or not you could encounter an injury down the road.

Keep in mind that sports injuries are cumulative, meaning that just because you haven’t sprained your ankle during your run doesn’t mean that your knees are not developing patellar tendonitis without any notable symptoms. This is why proper post-workout recovery is super important for every aspiring endurance athlete, and magnesium might just be the wonder mineral you need to keep your body fit and able for the challenges ahead.

Helps eliminate muscle spasms and cramping

Athletes hailing from all sports ranging in intensity, duration, and volume of training know all-too-well that one bad cramp can be a debilitating blow to their performance, if not their entire training week. Yes, when you’re training hard and when you’re running for the distance, your cramps tend to be a bit more severe than when you get off your butt after watching Netflix for three hours.

Needless to say, a cramp or muscle spasm is always better to prevent than treat, and magnesium can help you in both cases. In fact, magnesium is the key ingredient in relieving muscle cramps and spasms, and magnesium deficiency has been proven to increase the risk of muscle cramps in the lower body. As a runner, you cannot afford your lower body to suffer like this.

An essential nutrient in energy production

To keep things simple and to the point, glucose is your source of fuel the body uses for energy and it’s what keeps you going through the toughest of challenges. Now, given the fact that your needs to turn glycogen into glucose first, you need to understand that this process wouldn’t be possible without magnesium.

So much so, that magnesium deficiency or simply the lack of frequent intake will cause your energy levels to drop rapidly, and as a result, you will feel more fatigued, thus unable to complete your workout. And of course, if you try to push yourself under these conditions, you will risk injuring yourself. So just take ample amounts of magnesium prior to your next training session, and right after as well.

Improves muscle and CNS recovery

Out of all the health and performance benefits regular magnesium intake brings to the average athlete, improved muscle and CNS recovery has got to take the proverbial cake. However, keep in mind that because magnesium does have lower bioavailability (meaning how much you can actually consume from foods), supplementing with magnesium tablets is not only a healthy option but a prudent one for athletes looking to get all the benefits. (*not endorsed by Get Running or NeelyRuns)

When you supplement with magnesium, you can also tailor your nutrition around other crucial nutrients instead of trying to consume handfuls upon handfuls of pumpkin seeds. In any case, because magnesium is a potent anti-inflammatory agent, it’s excellent for reducing muscle and joint pain, CNS fatigue, and other post-workout inflammatory conditions that might hinder your next run.

Boosting explosive power and vertical movements

Every endurance athlete and professional player knows just how important it is to skim a second off your personal best, or increase your vertical jump by a centimeter or two – any little improvement can help you achieve better results. This is where magnesium comes in as a crucial element in force production and overall explosiveness from the ground.

By eating or supplementing with magnesium on a regular basis, you can not only ward off injuries and repair your body, but over time you can also add centimeters to your vertical, and if you’re a distance runner, improve your explosive speed to reach the finish line faster without fatiguing too early. Seeing as how there is no need to cycle magnesium, you can use it long-term to experience the cumulative benefits.

Helps you build lean muscle mass

Last but not least, building lean muscle mass should be one of your primary goals no matter if you’re a sprinter, a ninja warrior, or a bodybuilder. While you should build muscle according to your needs and aspirations, it will be crucial for your performance on the track to have as much functional mass as possible.

Remember, when combined with proper endurance training, the muscle can never be dead weight! Given the fact that your body’s insulin sensitivity increases with the amount of magnesium in your system, you can improve the fat-burning and muscle-building process while experience the aforementioned benefits as well.

Proper macronutrient and micronutrient intake is crucial for any athlete looking to become better at the sport and set higher goals for the near future. With that in mind, magnesium just might be the mineral that will help you take your fitness game to the next level and ensure a long and healthy career to boot.

If you're interested in submitting a guest blog, please email me neelyruns@gmail.com

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The Importance of Hydration Before and After Running: A Guest Blog

This guest blog is by Harper Reid, a freelance writer from Auckland, New Zealand who is passionate about healthy living and fitness. When she's not writing, you'll find her sweating it out in the gym, practicing yoga or checking out the latest fitness trends. You can find more of her work on her Tumblr.

Photo Credit: Alan Carrillo via Unsplash under License

We can all appreciate, in theory, how vital water is to our health and wellbeing – but do we know the specifics of how H2O interacts with exercise? If you’re a runner, keeping hydrated will prove an integral aspect of your active lifestyle – and here’s why.

It starts beforehand
Hydrating for exercise doesn’t start the moment you run out the door; rather, you should prep for a good workout far in advance by regularly drinking H2O. It’s especially important to keep tabs on your hydration during the warmer months, as hot conditions will put extra strain on your muscles and vital organs - most of all your heart - while running.

The good old urine test is a sure-fire way to check your internal water levels. The darker and yellower, the more water you need to fuel your body with. Aim to drink regularly through the day, and consume an extra half a liter of water a few hours before you set out for a long run.

Photo Credit: Maarten van den Heuval via Unsplash under License

 Running depletes your stores
When we’re dehydrated, the amount of water in our body decreases to the extent that we can lose up to 2% of our sum body weight. This loss of water wreaks havoc on our cardiovascular system, energy levels, and the efficacy of our muscle function. We tend to forget that our muscle cells are made up of 75% water, so it makes sense that if we’re losing fluid through sweat, we’ll feel weaker pretty quickly.

But don’t go too far in the other direction: too much fluid can be detrimental not only to your running performance (hello, water bloat!) but to your overall health. In the worst-case scenario, severe over-hydration can lead to hyponatremia, a condition that occurs when salt levels in the blood reach a life-threatening low.

Remembering to drink
Keeping hydrated isn’t a case of just remembering to drink when you’re bone thirsty. As a general rule, drink around 100ml of water every quarter of an hour that you exercise (this amount may need to be increased or decreased depending on your body size, the temperature outside, and the intensity or length of your run). If you need to set a watch alarm to remind you, then do so, and make things easier for yourself by investing in a hydration pack that you can easily pound the pavements with.

When doing an intense activity like running, you may want to switch out water for a sports drink with added carbohydrates and electrolytes. The kinds of chemicals and minerals contained within electrolytes (like sodium, potassium, and chloride) will replace the nutrients you lose by sweating, which will then help you to fend off the runner’s enemies – dizziness, leg cramps, and racing heartbeat. To DIY your own drink, mix a cup of water with a cup of orange juice and a pinch of salt – easy, effective, and tasty.

Photo Credit: Dominik Vanyi via Unsplash under License

The benefits of hydration
So: why is drinking water so important during, before, and after a run? Well, aside from keeping our bodies functioning at the cellular level, water can actually improve athletic performance. Studies have proven that running endurance and speed is enhanced significantly with proper hydration – we’re talking minutes off of your 10km time!

And since all that sweat loss can lead to very dry skin (something you’ll want to avoid if you suffer a skin condition like eczema), runners should keep in mind the benefits of hydration for skin health. Skin is an organ like any other, with skin cells mainly comprised of water. If you’ve been feeling a little dry around the edges lately, you may want to start taking hydration during exercise more seriously.

Train Hot, Race Cool: A New Way to Improve Running Performance

Most runners are aware that when summer rolls around, their body needs to acclimate to the rising environmental temperature. The human body will respond to a couple weeks of running in the heat by delivering more blood to the skin, increasing sweat rate while retaining electrolytes, and increasing plasma volume (the liquid component of blood, which allows more blood to be pumped to the skin for cooling). These physiological changes help to prevent hyperthermia and improve running performance in the heat.

In most of the country, the heat of summer is quickly giving way to the cold of winter. This means fewer sweltering, sweaty runs and more hats, gloves, and jackets to keep warm. It also means that runners will start to lose their heat acclimation.

Recently, exercise scientists have started studying whether heat acclimation can improve exercise performance in colder weather. Why is this? Well, expanded plasma volume is one of the main ways the human body responds to training, regardless of temperature. The idea is that training in the heat will cause the largest increase in plasma volume and cause a bigger improvement in running performance than training in cool to cold weather.

A preeminent researcher in this area is Dr. Christopher Minson; he and his colleagues at the University of Oregon have been studying the effects of heat training on cool weather exercise performance in endurance athletes (mostly cyclists). They’ve found heat training improves cool-weather VO2max, lactate threshold, and time trial performance compared to the same training protocol done in cool temperatures. Other researchers have tested the benefits of exercising in cool weather but then keeping core temperature high by immediately sitting in a hot tub or sauna after exercise. This post-exercise heat stress has been shown to elicit similar improvements in running performance compared to exercising in the heat. All these results suggest that heat training would improve running performance in cold-weather races.

Many runners will train through the winter in preparation for a spring marathon. Race-day temperature can vary greatly from year to year and an unseasonably hot day could derail months of dedicated training. You need look no further than the 2017 Boston Marathon, which was run on a very warm, sunny day. Most runners who trained through the winter were not heat acclimated and their finishing times suffered as a result. Heat training can help prepare runners to be able to handle a warm weather race that may otherwise derail a training cycle.

There is still a lot scientists must figure out. For example, might improvements simply be due to the increased stress of exercising in the heat, where the heart must work harder to supply enough blood to the muscles for exercise and the skin for cooling (suggesting the same benefits could be attained by simply training harder)? How long the benefits of heat training persist? What is the optimal exercise protocol (for example, heat training combined with high-intensity interval training has not been studied yet)? While not every study has shown a benefit of heat training, no study has shown that it impairs performance. This makes heat training a low-risk, high-reward investment in your training.

Interested in heat training but don’t have the high-precision heat chambers or ability to constantly monitor internal temperature (rectal probe) like the sports scientists do? Here is how you can make it work for you:

·       Most of the benefits can be obtained with 7-10 consecutive days of exercise in the heat.

·       You should exercise for an hour a day in a hot room. The temperature the room needs to be depends on a lot of things (humidity, airflow, exercise intensity). The simplest rule to follow: it should be hot enough that you sweat heavily.

·       You can also try sitting in a hot tub or sauna 30 minutes after each run.

·       Heat training should be stopped about 3 days before your goal race. This will give you enough time to recover, but you should retain most of the benefits.

·       Hotter is not better and dehydration doesn’t help. Be sure to drink plenty of fluids and stop exercising if you begin to feel any symptoms of heat illness (read about that in detail here).

Hopefully after reading this you are warmed up to the idea (pun intended) that heat training can improve your race performance, regardless of temperature.

Happy training!
Daniel H. Craighead PhD

*Please email Neely if you wish to submit a guest blog at neelyruns@gmail.com

Staying Healthy and Active over 50

Please enjoy this guest blog post by Emily Johnson on fitness and aging.

Hitting 50 doesn’t mean you can quit worrying about your heath and fitness. It’s important to keep active and maintain a healthy lifestyle as you grow older. Here are a few tips and tricks to staying healthy after you’ve hit the big 5-0.

1. Have a workout routine with different fitness regimes. It’s important to stretch (yoga), keep your muscles strong (weights), and work your heart (cardio). It’s a good idea to track your activity, too. A good way to do this is with a heart rate monitor, no matter which type of exercise you’re doing.

2. Protect your body. While you’re working out, it’s smart to save your limbs from too much impact and muscle soreness. Products like compression socks, arm sleeves, and braces are great accessories during any work out to keep your muscles and joints at their best.

3. Don’t forget to work your brain! Taking time to read or do puzzles (like sudoku) will increase your brain function as you get older and decrease your chances of early dementia. Take time to learn new things; maybe take a class at your local community college or start up those tennis lessons you keep saying you’ll take. You can get involved in your community, play with your grandkids or pets, even take that trip you’ve been putting off. Getting out and staying social will increase your brain activity and help you stay and feel younger. So grab your friends and go out for some fun! There’s no better time than now.

4. Update your diet. Along with keeping yourself physically fit, you need to make sure your diet is more specified toward an older age group. Some vitamins will be harder to obtain, so a good multivitamin might be necessary if you can’t get them from certain food groups. Also, making sure to drink plenty of water is as important as ever as you get older. You may feel less thirsty as you get older, but your body still needs at least 20 oz of water every meal.

5. Don’t let your relationship with your doctor diminish. It’s most important to keep up with your check-ups and keeping communication open. Even the little things that you think aren’t important could be, so don’t be afraid to make an appointment.

Just because you’re getting older doesn’t mean life is going to stop. You can be your happiest and healthiest self, even after crossing the 50-year mark!

**If YOU have a topic to share, please email me neelyruns@gmail.com with your pitch and I would be happy to have you as a guest blogger :)