Runners' World: Ticker Taping?

How Exactly Does a Fitness Tracker Monitor Your Heart Health? 

We tapped an expert to break down how a heart rate monitor works—and who should invest in one. JORDAN SMITH/Runners' World.com/Sep 18, 2020 

Tracking your heart rate during workouts isn’t new, but heart rate tracking technology is rapidly advancing. Gone are the days of merely monitoring your beats per minute; the latest trackers can now alert you to an irregular heart rhythm, and some are even rolling out low-range VO2 max tracking. 

With more younger people suffering from strokes, and more reports of cardiac arrests happening during exercise, it might be a good time to consider upgrading your tracker. We tapped experts to find out just how much you should rely on your new tracker’s heart-monitoring software...

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Runners' World: Not Just The Cave

The Best Conditioning Exercises You Can Do to Stay Fit in the Off-Season 
Combine alternative cardio workouts with a strategic strength circuit so you’ll be firing on all cylinders when you get back into the swing of full-on training.
Ashley Mateo/Runners' World.com, Dec 17, 2019

You might be logging tons of miles a week during warmer weather, but when the temperature drops and the amount of daylight gets shorter, it’s not as feasible to keep that up.

That doesn’t mean you’re sentenced to a season of running on the treadmill in your basement. The off-season is a great time to build your foundation not just with conditioning exercises, but also with cross-training modalities that will keep you rolling strong right into your peak running season, says Zack Allison, a senior coach with Source Endurance and racer for Team Clif Bar... 

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Phil Maffetone: Java (No) Jive

More Coffee?
Dr. Phil Maffetone/December 10, 2019

I enjoy writing about coffee, especially over my first morning cup. This update adds to my other articles on coffee, caffeine and their many potential benefits.

The high caffeine content of coffee makes it one of the most popular psychoactive drugs in the world. It also may be the most popular — and legal — performance-enhancing substance among athletes and fitness enthusiasts.

Coffee’s fat-burning effects can help athletes go farther, faster. Even the caffeine from one cup can increase oxygen consumption, blood circulation, muscle function, and mitochondrial activity (fat-burners in our cells). The increased fat-burning conserves glycogen stores, and, despite claims, it won’t dehydrate you. In addition, caffeine can also help recovery...

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Training Peaks: Beat the Heat

Race Day Strategies to Beat the Heat
Jim Peterman, Training Peaks/August 9, 2017


The dog days of summer are here but so too are some of the best races of the year. Performing well in these races requires both fitness and an ability to withstand the heat.


Heat acclimatization in the weeks prior to an event is the most important step for beating the heat on race day.1 However, in addition to acclimatizing to the heat, there are a number of different strategies that can help you keep cool and improve performance on race day.


When you are exercising, roughly 75 percent of the energy required for muscle contraction is lost as heat. Hot summer days make it difficult for the body to get rid of all this heat. As a result, your body temperature begins to increase which can lead to dizziness, headaches, nausea, and even brain damage.


As you might guess, all of these symptoms can affect performance. Therefore, the key to maximizing performance in the summer (and what the strategies listed below attempt to achieve) is to limit the increase in body temperature...


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Outside: Nooner!

How to Nail the Lunch Workout
There's nothing quite like breaking up the workday with a run, but logistics can make it tough to pull off. Here's how to execute flawlessly.
By: Wes Judd/Outside, May 26, 2017

We get it: Not everyone has time for a lunch workout. When new hires move out to our Santa Fe headquarters, they can’t believe they’re allowed to ride, run, or climb for an hour in the middle of the day. That’s too bad, because even a 30-minute workout can be the ultimate fitness and productivity hack. In fact, a 2011 study in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that employees get more done when they take a break to exercise.

Learning how to properly execute the midday workout is tough—especially in an office that doesn’t have lenient lunch policies—but get it right and it’ll change the tone of your day entirely...

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CTS: Heart Rate? Good. Now Ignore It.

Why Heart Rate Is Not a Good Training Tool for Ultrarunning
Jason Koop/CTS, May 18 2017

If you are going to use interval training to accumulate time at intensity and target specific areas of your fitness, you need a way to figure out how hard you are working. In some sports this is simple. As mentioned earlier, a cyclist with a power meter can directly measure workload in watts, determine how many watts he or she can produce at lactate threshold, and then create intensity ranges based on percentages of lactate threshold power. Ultrarunners don’t have it so easy. For a long time, runners have tried to use heart rate to gauge intensity, intensity ranges based on percentages of lactate threshold heart rate or the average heart rate recorded during a 5K time trial. Others have used pace ranges based on time trials or goal race paces, or a combination of heart rate and pace ranges. Prescribing intensity based on either heart rate or pace is notoriously difficult in ultrarunning, and after trying all manner of methods, I found the greatest success in a remarkably simple, nontechnical, yet scientifically accurate method: rating of perceived exertion...

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Outside Online: Work Hurts Badly Enough

The 5-Minute Warm-Up for Any Sport
Just a few quick moves will set up your body to perform at its best in any sport and keep you injury-free while you work
By: Michael Easter//Mar 20, 2017

We can’t blame you for wanting to skip the fitness foreplay and go straight into your sport, especially when time is limited. But the hurried approach does more than just slow your first few miles or stiffen your reps. When you drop the hammer before your body is ready, at best you’re limiting your performance potential; at worst, you’re putting yourself at much greater risk for injury, according to researchers at the University of Alabama.

Many people skip the warm-up because they assume an effective routine must also be a long one. But science tells us that’s just not the case. The right set of moves can prep and prime your body in just five minutes, says Doug Kechijian, co-founder of Resilient Performance Physical Therapy, in New York City. “An ideal warm-up elevates your heart rate and body temperature, allows you to move better during your activity, and gets your system ready to fire,” he explains.

Kechijian has worked with every type of athlete in the book, from Special Forces soldiers and NBA stars to professional outdoorspeople and amateur gym-goers. He says the majority of people dream up and then abandon complicated warm-ups. In reality, he says, most of us have the same tight areas and benefit from the same drills, so a one-size-fits-all routine is more feasible than you might think. Kechijian pulled the six most-powerful moves from his arsenal and bundled them into your new no-excuses warm-up routine. Move through the set continuously before jumping into your workout.

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