Run to Stay Young
well.blogs.nytimes.com
well.blogs.nytimes.com
There's been numerous (human and animal) studies showing benefits of strength training for elderly. Ergo-log covers [1] those [2] all [3] the time [4].
Then there's evidence [5] suggesting that higher calorie burning is directly associated with reduced death rate.
And a specific quote on muscle mass:
"A recent theory suggests that developed muscle mass results in considerable emissions of anti-inflammatory and life-extending signal substances. That's why muscular strength is believed to protect against cancer and why strong men are thought to live longer."
(links to studies confirming those claims are in the article)
The thing about running (if we're talking about traditional jogging) is that it does poor job at burning calories. It's a movement that becomes "familiar" very quick (and so becomes easier, according to Principle of Adaptation) and the one in which it's difficult to increase intensity. You also don't develop muscle mass when jogging, which would contribute to higher metabolic rate and reduced chance of injury.
Everything suggests that strength training (whether it's bodyweight, yoga, suspension trainer, or barbells and kettlebells) combined with proper supplementation is the best bang for your buck.
[1] http://www.ergo-log.com/over-seventies-benefit-more-from-pow...
[2] http://www.ergo-log.com/combination-strength-training-green-...
[3] http://www.ergo-log.com/over-nineties-still-react-to-strengt...
There was another study that showed that people who take up mixed martial arts in their late 40s are healthier than people of the same age who only walk [1]. No word on whether genetics plays a role.
Kata practicing is an exercise in explosive power over long period (several minutes), thus strength endurance training.
All MA training I attended interspersed action with rest. Thus interval training.
7 years later he died of a heart attack while jogging at the age of 52.
His death doesn't mean running is a bad idea - a single anecdote is statistically insignificant - but perhaps it can remind us that nothing we do can guarantee a long and healthy life.
All too often we take a mildly correlated statistic, give it a hand-wavy air of "science", and then pronounce it as a set-in-stone moral absolute. How much of the received wisdom about healthy lifestyles that you were taught has been shown to be completely wrong? I don't doubt that in 3 years there will be another New York times article, demonstrating why running is actually terrible for you, and you should never do it no matter what age you are.
Growing up in a secular society ancient religions can seem awful strange: why did people worship stone statues and sacrifice to them? Did they really believe all that effort did anything?
But perhaps our modern obsession with "healthiness" reflects the same underlying human motivation: incapable of accepting the reality of our own deaths we grasp at anything to try and give ourselves the illusion of control. Is eating an organic strawberry in the hopes of living longer really any different than performing a ritualistic dance in the hopes of bringing rain?
Virtually none of it.
>I don't doubt that in 3 years there will be another New York times article, demonstrating why running is actually terrible for you, and you should never do it no matter what age you are.
I do doubt that. I doubt it very much.
>Is eating an organic strawberry in the hopes of living longer really any different than performing a ritualistic dance in the hopes of bringing rain?
That seems like really desperately grasping at ways to dismiss things you don't like. Exercise is good, even if you don't want it to be.
What? Milk? Multi-vitamins? Stretching? This stuff is discussed heavily; I do not know enough about these things to weigh in on validity, but if nothing else, these discussions might be very symptomatic.
Most doctors I know still advise not eating after 6pm, while it has been shown to be either worthless or even plain ineffective.
That sounds pretty sketchy. Do you mean "for people with acid reflux"? Because that's perfectly valid. I've never even heard of a doctor recommending that in general.
Also, not all religious people do ritualistic rain dances. Newton, Godel etc were all completely rational creatures.
I have a feeling that you are just saying "these grapes are sour".
No matter how sore you feel things like yoga, meditation, good living and exercise contribute to better quality of life and longer lifespans. Just go to scholar.google.com and spend some time researching.
I don't think anybody who works out is under the assumption that they will live to be 130+ years old.
We're all very well aware of babies with Cancer these days. Anything can happen.
But one thing's for certain, being active certainly prolongs life. That much I think we can all be sure of at this point.
How many true couch potatoes do you know that have made it past the ripe old age of 90? 80 even?
what we can be sure of is that being active improves the quality of life. Hell is not being able to move.
you forgot to say "on average" here.
You're right that nothing we can do will guarantee a long and healthy life. If nothing else, we could be hit by a drunk or texting driver while crossing the street. So enjoy the strawberry for the taste.
Truth is, you aren't much without it. Stephen Hawkins might be able to think and write wonderful essays while occupying a severely diminished body, but you might not. I've seen people sinking into their growing disabilities due to lack of exercise, and I myself suffered from physical traumas (severe back pain, hernia), which seriously impacted my psychological stability and self-confidence.
Take care of your body, it will take care of you. Haruki Murakami has a wonderful book about body and mind, and their equilibrium, called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running [1], I very much recommend it.
[1] http://www.amazon.ca/What-Talk-About-When-Running/dp/0385681...
I don't know, do you really believe there is anything that suggests mathematics exists in reality outside of the maintenance of symbols, structure, and meaning in the mind of man?
Some things exist to teach patterns, to maintain a style of thinking. There are tons of things we don't understand about culture socially - in maintaining peace, individuality AND unity with ourselves as individuals and ourselves in society, that might have been intelligently dealt with in a very real way in cultures you consider primitive, intelligible, irrational, unscientific, archaic, and non-secular.
You can't judge a book by it's cover, so to speak. The superficial observation of ritual does not mean it serves no purpose. The meaning of things change over time, as these things are interpreted and understood by different cultures that come from different backgrounds with different ways of representing and interpreting information about the world. Math does not always represent what it says it represents. Neither do dancing statues. There are certainly TONS of things people rely on, things they assume about how existence functions, that we can't even begin to touch the tip of, because we are blinded by the complexity of our own minds.
> His death doesn't mean running is a bad idea - a single anecdote is statistically insignificant - but perhaps it can remind us that nothing we do can guarantee a long and healthy life.
Or one could see it this way: His father had a heart attack at 35 and died of another heart attack at 42. Jim Fixx, who had a genetic condition, was a heavy smoker until age 36, etc., might very well have bought himself an extra ten years or so.
Running can and will mess with your endocrine system.
Except advances in biotech...or at least I'm drastically hoping so.
Conclusion from the paper:
Running mitigates the age-related deterioration of walking
economy whereas walking for exercise appears to have
minimal effect on the age-related deterioration in walking
economy.Diet also plays a major role in consistently reducing your recovery time and increasing the quality of life.
Because running looks easy as opposed to say weight lifting, people often do it without thinking. Running is just like any other exercise in that you have to start slow and work up to more. You also have to do some research for proper technique and equipment.
My ankles roll in a lot, with out a fair bit of support, my knees kill me.
Also, muscles recover quick but tendons take forever to heal - you're not running from a lion, so you can take your time and experiment with what works for you in a safe way. (it sounds like you are, so good for you)
Since you're doing the C25K I'm assuming you are not super athletic to start. If you are overweight, you may want do some other cardio until you get your weight down a bit. If it hurts obviously don't do it and find some professional advice. Re-doing days in a training program is fine, everyone has their own pace.
Good luck!
* too quick of ramp up or not enough recovery (it can take a long time to ease into this stuff)
* you were running incorrectly, either directly because of bad technique or you had bad technique because of bad posture/stride. many people land hard on their feet or turn one foot out when they run.
* you have actual medical problems with your feet or legs that would cause this
if you enjoyed it you should really look at different running techniques and make sure your stride is good so you can get back to it! if your posture is bad your stride will almost definitely be bad; you may need to start there.
http://www.prevention.com/fitness/strength-training/foam-rol...
When I started running, I wore shoes, and my feet hurt all the time. I stopped wearing shoes, and the foot pain stopped, too. I've since found shoes I can wear when it's cold/wet that don't hurt, but running barefoot is still my go-to style.
I think normal running shoes are probably fine for most people, but I benefited quite a lot from running without shoes at all.
The ounce of truth is that feet (in general) need to be strengthened. YOu can do fun stuf like walking on the beach, on gravel roads, or proper rock climbing, or balance beam work. All of which iwll work to strenghten your feet. What's funny is once your feet are strong, shoes have little to do with it.[1] The inverse is not true - weak feet in barefoot shoes - is likely to create a problem.
Barefoot style shoes may be useful for some people with strong feet, but they are a poor substitute for developing strong feet in the first-place. And they can be outright dangerous for people with weak feet and poor balance, or people subjecting themselves to long-distance or endurance situations. Whereas a trail-running shoe used in a hiking application is a better, safer, and more useful piece of gear.
Lastly, one nice feature that has come out in the recent years is the ability to get the right (so called) drop, in a variety of styles of shoe. And shoes that are either too angled or too 'flat' will present additional challenges, but expecially people with weak feet. The footbed angle needs to be selected based on application.
[1] They can still hurt you, but strong feet in good shoes tend to be fine.
I was a runner on cross county and track teams in high school, but basically went thirty years after that without running regularly. I would often start up for a few weeks in the summers, then peter out. As I aged into mid 40's, found that I was getting injuries when starting out, and they didn't go away. I tore my calf muscle at age 45 (trying to imitate Usain Bolt), and that injury stuck with me for several years; I thought I'd probably never be able to run pain-free again.
Then a few years ago (2011) I started running and took everything more slowly, both mileage and pace. I actually started out just doing hikes in nearby mountains, since my calf injury made running painful but hiking/walking was fine. I ran a little bit later that year, things went okay but I still caused myself some injuries because I always wanted to try and run faster. The same thing happened in 2012, although I ended up running my first marathon late that year. It was painful and my persisting Achilles/calf injury was always present, at least in a small degree.
In early 2013 I started running again and threw all thoughts of fast pace out the window, and paid close attention to pains, backing off and sometimes taking time off until some niggling pain went away. I started running more often, five or six days a week, which paradoxically helped. Yes, you generally need more recovery time as you age, but if you keep your runs on the slow side and don't tax your body as much, running every day can be easier and more injury-free than running just a few times a week. I have talked to others with same experience.
I ended up qualifying for Boston Marathon last fall, proving that you don't need to train fast or hard to race fast (in fact best training for marathon is much slower than most people think). And this year I've run the Boston Maraton, a 50 mile mountain trail race, and I'll be logging well over 2,000 miles for the year (i.e., averaging 45 miles per week).
I have heard similar stories from many runners I know. "Injury prone" is very often a tag that attaches to any person who tries to start running too many miles or who tries to run them too fast. Since most people try to start running that way -- trying to do too much too soon -- most people end up being "injury prone".
Instead, start out slow, walking most of the miles if you want, and ramp up very slowly. I've gone from being injury prone to being injury free, mostly because I know the sorts of things that would cause me injury and I avoid doing them. The good thing is that once you've slowly ramped your body up to a given level, say for me 50 miles/week at pace around 9:00 to 10:00 per mile, my body is rock solid. I'd have to be careful if I wanted to increase mileage or speed, but if I just want to keep running at level my body is acclimated to the odds of injury are very low. And the pleasure when running is very high.
In my late teens, I began to have very bad bouts of this syndrome, whenever I sprinted. The more I ignored the pain, the longer it would take to heal.
In my early 20's, I suddenly took up running--eventually ratcheting up my route to 7 miles--after being somewhat sedentary for a couple years. The result of this was perhaps the worst case of Plantar Fasciitis I'd ever developed.
Shortly after, I visited an expensive shoe store downtown, and explained my problem to the salesman. He recommended a pair of high-end Asics, in the price range of $80-$120. I believe the pair had the title "gel evolution" in it somewhere. He also laced them up a special way. Whenever I use them, I maintain this special lacing, and always have to carefully tighten them just enough so that my feet still have enough flexibility to bend my foot without constricting it or cutting of circulation.
These shoes provided incredible arch support, being manufactured with a great deal of material surrounding the ankle and the sole, but while also being made of flexible material in the rest of the shoe. (Note that the shoes I'd been wearing when I injured myself were incredibly cheap, and had virtually no arch support).
To further enhance the arch support, I also replaced the soles with some fairly thick "Superfeet" soles, which are rather stiff and are curved to rise where your arches are.
Since then, for the last 5 years, I've been running on a daily (or at least weekly) basis--the problem has never come back, even though I seem genetically predisposed to the syndrome. Having excellent shoes makes all the difference.
Later on, I picked up a pair of Asics from Nordstrom Rack, at a great price (under $50). These were much cheaper (instead of having "Gel Evolution" in the title, they were just called "Oasis"). These have worked just as well for me, although I suspect that my continuing foot health can also partially be attributed to the muscle strengthening of my feet, as well as good form. (When you are still in pain, be very careful not to continue running if you feel like you need to modify your gait in order to avoid the pain ("limping"). This can result in injuring yourself in a new, different way, such as your knees!)
By the way, I highly recommend jogging or running, in general. I wouldn't be the person I am today without it, since it is often when I am outside, running, when I come up with the best ideas. I suspect this has something to do with the time-scale of the activity (lasting long enough for sustained thought), the freedom for the mind to roam (since exercising is not mentally taxing), and not the least due to the increased oxygen in your system. If you run often enough, you begin to become addicted, to the point where you feel "high".
For me just changing shoes with a 6mm difference in heel-to-toe drop was enough to create the same problem. I woke up one morning with a pain that felt like a nail being driven up into my heel. I spent about an hour doing deep tissue massage on my arch and calves - did a workout the same day and didn't have any issues the next morning.
You probably don't need quite as much support as you might think if you were willing to slowly remove support which would strengthen/stretch the muscles around the heel.
>since it is often when I am outside, running, when I come up with the best ideas.
There's quite a lot of support for the idea that walking helps people think better.
Particularly the 'idea of getting up from the floor without use of arms' made me think of certain simple motions that are hard for me. There is a Korean buddhist practice of 108 bows - I recently tried and got to about 25. (not just Korean - I should have said I learned it in a Korean context)
I am disturbed by the idea that there will come a day where I cant do "x" anymore, where x is running, drinking guinness or some other such activity.
Recently bought a block of training sessions at a gym and discovered stretching with the aid of hard plastic tubes or rollers that help stretch out areas of the body that are a bit hard to stretch otherwise. Hip flexors, trapezius (sp?), etc. This has greatly improved my mobility and has helped me do things which were hard to do before (shoulder presses, running) without pain.
Reading this article it made me think of how walking alone might not stretch out muscles in the same way as running (or swimming, rowing, etc).
"But researchers and older people themselves also have noted that walking ability tends to decline with age. Older people whose primary exercise is walking often start walking more slowly and with greater difficulty as the years pass, fatiguing more easily."
They don't explicitly talk about flexibilty and running but some form of stretching is somewhat implied. It might be interesting to see those possible correlations.
And I thought of the octo- (and maybe nono-) genarian Koreans who would briskly walk by me on the small mountains in Seoul on their way to a temple to throw down a few bows...
http://phraktured.net/molding-mobility.html
I do a full round of the mobility work (15 reps and not the warmup section) every morning within 15 minutes of getting out of bed. It has done wonders for my mobility, and my attitude in the morning (not a morning person and doing this makes me less grumpy).
I always stretched after every workout, but it was half-hearted because I was tired.
Only in the past 3 months have I gotten serious about it. And part of my stretching routine is foam rolling. I'll stretch, feel some tightness, roll the area, and re-stretch. Usually on the second stretch, I can go deeper into the stretch.
but it is the most painful part of my workout. I've probably cursed a little more than I should when I roll my IT bands.
And the world record holder for a pole vault (90+ years of age): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX9h5PVNGaY
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/11/29/inspiration-na...
Barefoot running, and less padded shoes, promote landing on the balls of your feet (as otherwise it's incredibly painful!). Landing on the balls of your feet allows your foot to reduce the force that gets shot up the leg.
I think the notion is to work your way up a lot slower than I did, but I haven't made the same attempt again.
I highly recommend barefoot style shoes in general, but you do have to acclimate to them slowly while you build up your foot strength.
After building foot strength in 'barefoot' shoes, I can now run much faster in any kind of shoe.
If you want an almost barefoot like experience, just get very light shoes, like middle-distance spikes, and train on tracks some of the time. Then do your long, easy miles in cushioned road shoes like a normal person.
By the way, my father recalls seeing Abebe Bikila win the 1961 Košice Peace Marathon, barefoot.
I suspect it's a matter of cross-training, of trying to do some compensating weight training, and luck.
edit: An excellent video showing the subtleties of perfect form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTMgIViinuQ
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/28/134861448/put-those-shoes-on-r...
For example, keeping joints active with weight bearing exercise reduces the likelihood of developing arthritis. As other comments have mentioned, a common problem is overtraining, and especially starting out too fast. Patience is required to build up the strength and technique required to maximise benefits while minimising the risk of injury.
A self-reported group of old runners can apparently walk more efficiently than a self-reported group of old walkers...but the runners were fit enough to run and sustain running to begin with!!
So older people who were fit enough to sustainably run for 6+ months were fitter than older folks who (were possibly not as fit) but choose to walk?
Horrible study...randomly assign fit older people to one or other group, let them run or walk for 6+ months - measure. Reverse the groups again measure.
The real thing you want to control for is the health of the runners and the walkers at the time the runners started running.
Can anyone in the know comment on how realistic or significant it is for a study of this nature to reach any kind of conclusion from a sample size of 30?
not to mention the bowel issues
[0] http://www.mayoclinic.org/runners-diarrhea/expert-answers/fa...
The book 'Which comes first, cardio or weights' from A. Hutchinson offers one hypothesis in which running might protect the knees: by limiting weight gain with advancing age. Less weight means less stress on the joints.