Blog (Page 2)

 “I give up!” – is that your brain telling you during a high effort exercise or running? Cause: Effort overload Occurrence: Anytime you’re pushing your limits Antidote: Train your brain. It hurts too much. That’s the simplest way to explain why you don’t push a little harder during those crucial final miles. But it’s not quite right. Pain—the feeling that makes you go “ouch!”—isn’t what holds you back. When researchers at Great Britain’s University of Kent ran electric current through the brains of volunteers to dull their sense of pain, using a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), it didn’t improve how subjects feltRead More →

Cause: Metabolite accumulation in your muscles triggers signals to your brain. Occurrence: Mile or 5K races, fast surges, or finishing sprints Antidote: Short, fast interval workouts Imagine the searing muscular discomfort of a hard interval workout—focused entirely in your thumb. That’s the odd sensation that 10 lucky volunteers in a University of Utah lab experienced in 2014, when a research team led by professors Alan Light and Markus Amann injected a cocktail of metabolites—the chemical byproducts that build up in your muscles during intense effort—into their thumbs. The results were profound: They created sensations of fatigue in subjects not moving a muscle. For decades, scientistsRead More →

Where is my strength gone? Cause: Inefficient muscle-fiber recruitment Occurrence: Sustained medium efforts like 10K to half marathon Antidote: Train your fast-twitch fibers to be more efficient. The early miles of a half marathon often feel pretty easy. You’re not sprinting fast enough to accumulate high levels of lactate and other metabolites; and unlike in a marathon, you’re not running far enough to empty fuel stores. So why does it eventually—and inevitably—get hard? The answer, according to studies from the University of Copenhagen, once again depends on oxygen kinetics. Over the course of a sustained run at half marathon pace or faster, the amount ofRead More →

“I can’t catch my breath!” Cause: Oxygen deficit Occurrence: Shortly after starting to run Antidote: A “priming” warmup, including a sustained burst of intense running   The first rep of an interval workout always feels hard. You’re gasping for air; your heart is pounding. The next rep, though, is a bit easier. “Your breathing rate doesn’t actually fall; you just kind of settle into it,” says Andrew Jones, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist at the University of Exeter in England. What you’re experiencing is the result of a temporary mismatch between the oxygen your legs require and the oxygen your heart and lungs are able toRead More →