Life’s a Beach...Run It! The Pains & Gains of a Beach Run

If you want a hardcore way to improve your fitness levels, as well as your wellbeing, try running on the sand. This is the mantra of Mike Musso, a lifeguard in North Wildwood who’s aiming to run his first marathon this autumn in two hours and 45 minutes (if you don’t run marathons, believe me, that’s a good time). According to Musso, speed work on the water’s edge is an integral part of his training and wellness and he’s not wrong – beach running isn’t easy!

 

Beach running is like ‘running with weights on your ankles,’ explained Dr. R. Amadeus Mason, a team physician for USA Track and Field and an assistant professor of orthopaedics and family medicine at Emory University. Whether you go barefoot or wear shoes, Dr. Mason notes ‘it’s harder to get your foot planted into the ground, and it’s harder to get your foot up off the ground.’ Dr. Thierry M. Lejeune, of St. Luke’s University Clinics in Belgium and lead author of a study on beach running that appeared last year in The Journal of Experimental Biology, to run on sand you need 1.6 times more energy than you would to run on a hard surfaceyou’re your ‘muscles perform more mechanical work when running or walking on sand than on a hard surface.’

 

When running on a hard surface, it’s most likely that you’ll hit the ground with your heel first, as this is what most runners do. Your momentum and forward-moving weight then causes your foot to go flat, then forward to the toes, which pushes your body up off the ground and into the next stride. However, the soft and shifting beach surface means that your foot has to work hard to displace the sand, and so your muscles can’t work as efficiently. Dr. Mason says, ‘When you’re on soft sand, your heel strike doesn’t come down and hit that firm surface.’ As a result, your body relies on the small ankles around your ankle to keep your foot steady, and your calf muscles come into play because your foot can’t go flat on the sandy surface.

 

As your calves work so hard to normalise this motion, and then get the toes up off the ground again, you may notice they’re more sore than usual after your run. Dr. Mason comments, ‘When you go for toe-off, some of the sand gets on top of your muscle and you’re not able to bring that toe up as easily. That’s where the calf muscle starts to work more, because you have to lift your toe up as you’re doing your normal toe-off.’ Even if you usually strike the ground first with the middle or front of your foot, you will still have to work harder to gain a solid footing. ‘The sand will cause some spreading of your toes, and that can be uncomfortable,’ Dr. Mason points out.

 

So if it brings so many aches and pains, why on earth would runners like Mike Musso bother training on sand at all? While the side effects are there if you’re not used to it, these are often temporary and can translate into a faster time. Dr. Mason asserts, ‘There’s more drag on your feet as you’re doing that training, so when you’re in an environment where there’s not that drag, your legs will not fatigue as easily. When beach runners get on the normal pavement, they move even more quickly because there’s not that kind of impediment.’ Musso can attest to that fact, as he notes, ‘I’ve been getting faster every year.’

Categories: beach, Beach Running, Better Performance, dr mason, foot, hard surface, mike musso, muscles, Running, sand, surface nbsp

Have a Gym Session: Why Jamming in the Gym Gets Results

Wellness experts and fitness enthusiasts alike know how beneficial music is when you workout; having an MP3 player with you on a long run can help distract you or motivate you to keep going, but according to a new study it’s not just listening to music, but making music yourself that can make exercising a whole lot easier. The research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even goes so far as to suggest that our love for music may have evolved, in part, to ease physical effort.

 

While researchers have long-known that listening to music is beneficial to your workouts, as well as your overall wellbeing, up until now no one has even thought to investigate whether creating — and not merely hearing — music might have an effect on your performance, or indeed whether this impact might be even better than just merely hearing the sounds through the gym speakers or your headphones. Therefore, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and other institutions invented an electronic kit that could be integrated into the internal workings of weight-training machines, transforming them into oversize boom boxes.

 

The kit, depending on how you manipulate the machine’s weight bar or other mechanisms, produced a range of propulsive, electronic-style music with a variety of sound levels and rhythms. This was installed in a stair-stepper machine as well as two weight machines with bars that could be raised or pulled down to stimulate various muscles. For the study, 63 healthy men and women were divided into groups, each being assigned to use one of the musically equipped machines during a strenuous six-minute exercise session. The sound level rose and fell with each individual’s effort, and twinned with the rhythms created by the other two exercisers. According to study leader Thomas Hans Fritz, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute, ‘Participants could express themselves on the machines by, for instance, modulating rhythms and creating melodies.’ Basically, the exercisers were the DJs for their own workouts.

 

The volunteers then took part in a separate exercise session, using the same machines minus the musical add-ons. However, elsewhere, another group used the musically-equipped machines, which meant that one group was passively listening to sounds created by another. The results of the study revealed that working at the musically-equipped machines – rather than the unmodified ones – caused most of the volunteers to generate significantly greater muscular force, use less oxygen to generate that force and report that their exertions had felt less strenuous. Their movements were also more smooth in general, which resulted in a steadier flow of music.

 

Dr. Fritz explained that creating their own rhythms and melodies made exercising more subjectively alluring to participants than if they just passively listened to the same music. Moreover, making the music helped participants to lower the physiological cost of exercise. Dr. Fritz pointed out that, in a similar way, early humans may have been motivated to whistle or hum while they hunted, and later to raise their voices in song during barn raisings and other intense physical labour. Still, the exact reason as to why orchestrating your own beats has more physical benefit than simply hearing the same song is not clear. Dr. Fritz noted, ‘We think that the observed effects are most probably due to a greater degree of emotional motor control.’ So what does that mean for you? Dr. Fritz advised ignoring the music in the gym, and instead humming to yourself or harmonising – however badly – with your workout partner. That way, he said, you’ll be ‘jymming; that’s like jamming, but with a “y” from “gym.”’

Categories: Better Performance, dr fritz, equipped machines, exercise session, fritz, machines, Making Music, max planck, music, musically equipped, planck institute, Research