June 2, 2022

Coffee Drinking Linked to Lower Mortality Risk, New Study Finds

The research found that those who drank moderate amounts of coffee, even with a little sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. NY Times (paywall)

May 24, 2022

Can Exercise Help Make Therapy More Effective? A Pair of Studies Suggests It Might

For many people, exercise is a whole lot more than just a way to make physical progress. And if you’ve been running for awhile, you’ve probably read about (or experienced) the many ways exercise can benefit your mental health. It doesn’t take all day to reap the benefits of a...

May 18, 2022

Are water stations useless for 5Ks and 10Ks?

After participating in Toronto’s Sporting Life 10K a couple of weeks ago, I was curious to know how many of the top 50 runners grabbed water at 8 km. My friend who was working the water station told me zero–no takers. Obviously, races are required to have water stations, but...

May 18, 2022

Why Running at Night Feels Harder

The new study, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, had 15 volunteers do a series of ten-minute treadmill walks in four conditions: with and without a 56-pound pack, and with and without a blindfold on. The treadmill was set at a comfortable pace of around 30 minutes per...

May 13, 2022

The Trail Ultra Project: Have Your Say in the Story of North American and British Off-Road Endurance Running

The off-road running communities of Britain and North America might be separated by thousands of miles, many time zones, and the great Atlantic Ocean, but they share a lot of common ground. The recently launched Trail Ultra Project aims to provide a comprehensive account of the rapidly growing sports of...

May 6, 2022

Skin Spews Telltale Gases for Health Trackers to Tap Into

Scientists are doing experiments to see whether sensors might be added to wearables to tell us even more about our health based on gases released by our skin. WebMD

May 4, 2022

New study finds exercise improves heart health even more for those with anxiety and depression

A new study from the American College of Cardiology suggests that regular exercise can decrease the likelihood of heart complications by 22 per cent in individuals with anxiety and depression, compared to 10 per cent in those who don’t. Put simply, exercise seems to have stronger benefits for the heart...

May 2, 2022

Scientists say they have nailed down the ideal amount of sleep in middle and old age

New research has found that around seven hours of sleep is the ideal night's rest, with insufficient and excessive sleep associated with a reduced ability to pay attention, remember and learn new things, solve problems and make decisions. CNN

April 23, 2022

Why Cyclists Can Handle Heat Better Than Runners

A team of Spanish researchers coordinated by David Barranco-Gil of the Universidad Europea de Madrid pooled eight years of data from 74 world-class cyclists (48 men and 26 women) and asked a simple question: how does air temperature affect performance? The answers offer some useful insights about the differences between...

April 21, 2022

5 Science-Backed Mental Tricks For Getting Through The Toughest Races

As much as we can prepare physically for races, if we don’t bring our mental A-game, things can go south quickly. Luckily, there are some tried-and-true techniques we can incorporate into our daily training to build mental strength. In his latest book, Chatter, award-winning author, psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Ethan Kross...

April 19, 2022

What Americans Keep Getting Wrong About Exercise

In 2009, New York Times writer Gretchen Reynolds discovered something big: Readers loved to click on stories about tiny increments of exercise. That June, Reynolds wrote her first story about single-digit high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. The piece, titled “Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week?,” described a study...

April 18, 2022

There’s New Data on How Your Arm Swing Affects Running

You can’t run fast without using your arms—or can you? Scientists have had a hard time agreeing on exactly why we swing our arms, and whether there are specific ways we can use our arms to speed ourselves up. The latest addition to a century’s worth of often conflicting research...

April 14, 2022

It doesn’t take a lot of exercise to fight depression, study says

The meta-analysis, published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, looked at 15 studies involving over 190,000 people to determine how much exercise was needed to reduce depression. Adults who did activities equivalent to 1.25 hours of brisk walking per week had an 18% lower risk of depression compared with those who...

April 6, 2022

New study says high cushioned shoes improve exercise performance

Results indicate that a high cushioned shoe may not only improve your recovery but also benefit your performance in the absence of muscle damage. Canadian Running Magazine

April 5, 2022

How This Simple Breathing Exercise May Improve Your Endurance

When you’re working out, you may be neglecting one group of muscles that can be key to your performance: those that help you breathe. New research presented at the American Physiological Society annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2022 finds the benefits of certain muscles that control our breathing may extend...

March 29, 2022

ASICS Experiment Reveals Just One Week of Physical Inactivity Has a Similar Impact as a Week of Broken Sleep on Our State of Mind

Today, the impact of physical inactivity on our mental state has been revealed for the first time in the Mind Racei – an ASICS experiment in which regular exercisers paused their normal fitness routines for one week. The impact on their state of mind was found to be similar to...

March 24, 2022

Study: stay fit to prevent Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s and other dementias affect more than 740,000 Canadians, and unfortunately, science has not yet found a cure for the debilitating disease. The absence of an effective treatment puts even greater emphasis on the importance of prevention, and recent research shows that runners are already giving themselves a leg-up. Canadian...

March 9, 2022

Organs have their own pace of aging, a Chinese study finds

People are aging constantly, but individual organs have their own pace. The study published on Wednesday in the journal Cell Reports reported multiple "clocks" within the human body. An international team led by Chinese scientists measured the varying biological ages of his or her organ systems. News

March 5, 2022

Doing 30 to 60 minutes of one exercise weekly could help you live longer, study says

Strengthening exercises most benefit your muscular and skeletal health, but they could have two other big perks: helping you prevent disease and live longer, according to new research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. CNN

February 24, 2022

‘I get high to exercise’: How cannabis became the gateway drug to fitness

In a recent survey of 600 cannabis smokers by science journal Nature, four out of five respondents admitted to lighting up just before exercising. "Bring your own bud" and "cannabliss" exercise classes have started sprouting up in the UK and US, and there's a budding trend in influencers who pair...

February 23, 2022

Exercise Can Build Up Your Brain. Air Pollution May Negate Those Benefits

Work out in polluted air and you may miss out on some of the brain benefits of exercise, according to two, large-scale new studies of exercise, air quality and brain health. The studies, which involved tens of thousands of British men and women, found that, most of the time, people...

February 17, 2022

Your Brain Fatigues First In Running. Cycling? It’s Your Muscles

While the outward manifestation of fatigue—the reduction in force of muscle contraction—is universal, it turns out the reasons that fatigue accrue are different in different sports. Guillaume Millet, professor of exercise physiology at Jean Monnet University (St-Etienne, France), recently published a study on those differing mechanisms of fatigue in running...

February 15, 2022

Study: cushioned shoes won’t ruin your form

New research says highly-cushioned shoes don't negatively affect your running biomechanics. lot of runners prefer soft, cushioned shoes, but some worry they might have a negative effect on their running mechanics. Recently, a couple of Harvard researchers set out to find out how these highly-cushioned shoes affect your running form...

February 14, 2022

SFIA’s Topline Report Finds Continued Pandemic Benefit To Activity Rates

SFIA’s Topline Report showed that America’s inactivity rate declined for the second year in a row, reaching its lowest levels in the organization’s annual survey.  Pandemic-friendly activities, including tennis, golf, running, hiking, yoga, skateboarding, and surfing, continued in popularity while other categories, including team sports that declined in 2020, show...

February 13, 2022

Exercising right after vaccination can boost immune response

New research from Iowa State University has found a long bout of moderately intense exercise following COVID-19 or influenza vaccination can amplify the body’s immune response. The study showed 90 minutes of exercise immediately after vaccination increased antibody responses four weeks later. New Atlas