More results from less effort. It’s the dream that everyone who exercises has at one point or another. How could I do less but get more in return?
Few workouts can provide your body with the number of benefits that running does in the same amount of time. Once running becomes part of your life, you feel that you get out of breath much less frequently Taking the stairs is not the chore it once was. You will feel stronger, look better, and have improved confidence in yourself and your ability to accomplish other activities in life.
Sound like we are putting running too high up on a pedestal? Keep reading and see what you think after.
Cardiovascular Conditioning
With a bit of cardio added to each workout, you will notice everyday tasks become easier. From something as miniscule as walking from your parking spot to the store with more breath to spare to having the ability to run around with kids or grandkids. Even tasks such as cleaning the house or putting away yard supplies can seem less daunting when you have the cardiovascular strength to accomplish them.
Improving this cardiovascular endurance requires you to pay some attention to your heart. The heart is a muscle, or more specifically, made up of many tirelessly working cardiac muscles. As we know, muscle can be and needs to be worked and strengthened. Your heart is a muscle that never stops working to keep you alive and functioning. The stronger your heart is, the easier and more efficiently it is able to do this. A strong, healthy heart pumps more blood with less effort with each beat than an unhealthy, unconditioned heart. An unconditioned heart is when the cardiac muscles are not given sufficient exercise and must then work much harder to supply the body with the same amount of oxygen and nutrients.
Today, having an unconditioned heart is more commonly the case than a conditioned heart. We can put some blame on technology, cars, elevators, desk jobs, and overly-busy lifestyles but we cannot use them as an excuse. Taking responsibility and taking notice are the first steps to increasing your cardiovascular health.
A conditioned heart is a healthy heart. A healthy heart can pump blood with oxygen and nutrients through our body more efficiently and in turn lasts longer. According to the CDC, heart disease is currently the number one cause of death in the United States with an estimated 600,000 deaths caused by it a year. This is a staggering number that can be reduced dramatically with a lifestyle change.
Take your heart health into your own legs and simply walk. Weather can also be eliminated as another excuse with a treadmill. Having a treadmill in the convenience of your home during freezing winter months and scalding summers, and even those grey and rainy spring and fall days will allow you to keep up your workout schedule and not fall away from it, keeping the benefits and gains you have made. Once you have started with walking, condition your heart further by going on power walks and then runs. Many studies have been done to support the evidence that running and high intensity walking in both males and females is linked to a significant reduction in heart disease.
Running as part of a daily routine reduces many of the factors that lead to a heart attack, such as cholesterol, when compared with a sedentary lifestyle. Distance runners, on average, have the lowest heart rates in the general population. This means, their hearts are so well conditioned they are able to pump the necessary volume of blood with less beats per minute, making their hearts extremely efficient at their job. This is an important factor in the longevity of a heart. The less effort it needs to put forth throughout a lifetime, the longer it will last. The more often you get your heart pumping the stronger and more efficient your heart will become. You will quickly notice you’re less out of breath after walking up a flight of stairs than before, and even notice yourself wanting to take the stairs.
Avoid weather as an excuse with a treadmill and add a daily run or walk to your workout program and you will reduce the risk of heart disease, strengthen your cardiovascular system, and feel the change.
Weight loss/ Maintaining weight
Running is one of the most effective ways to burn more calories. While the actual output of calories burned will vary widely depending on your gender, weight, and effort exerted during your run, few activities stack up to running in terms of calories burned per hour. A quick calculation to determine the amount of calories burned per mile ran is to multiply your weight by 0.63. Therefore a 150 pound runner would burn ~94 calories for each mile ran, while someone weighing 200 pounds will burn ~126 calories.
However, there are more surefire ways to easily calculate the number of calories burned while running. When using a treadmill or a running app, it is easy to calculate how many calories you’ve burned during your workout. This goes a long way in helping with weight loss goals. By being able to track how many calories you’ve burned, you will be able to plan your diet accordingly in order to maintain your calorie goals.
One of the greatest weight loss benefits of running is an improved metabolism. While the quick conversion or a tracking app mentioned above are great for calculating calories burned during a workout, running also has an “afterburn” effect that will keep your body using extra calories even after you’ve completed your run.
Several studies, including this one published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise have shown that this afterburn effect can increase calorie burn for up to 14 hours following a bout of vigorous exercise (defined as reaching 73% or higher of your maximum heart rate), burning nearly 200 additional calories. That’s 200 calories burned, after you are done working out.
Burning huge amounts of calories during your workout, and continuing to burn calories after you are finished? It is indeed possible to double dip like that with running, and that can help wonders with weight loss.
Happier/ Improved Mental Outlook
Is just reading about all these benefits and possibilities of adding running to your workout routine giving you a renewed outlook? Just imagine how much more your mood can improve when the exercise is implemented.
Exercise is an ideal way to relieve stress and anxiety. Many studies have shown improvements in mood after even a single workout. If mood can improve after a single bout of running, imagine what can be done with adding a run or walk to your daily routine. And to make it even easier, do it with a friend. Make it your social hour, or even an hour of competition. Whatever gets you moving, the endorphins will do the rest. You will benefit emotionally, mentally, and physically. Check out an earlier blog here for some other stress-relief tips to boost the benefits of a run or walk.
Running has been clinically supported in fighting depression. The feeling of euphoria, or runner’s high, that is achieved during and after a workout is your body filling up with feel-good endorphins. Getting these endorphins into your body is a great way to get your mind off the stress of everyday life, and help to alleviate symptoms of anxiety and depression.
A major clinical study conducted from 1996-2003 showed that the benefits of running were virtually just as effective as the benefits received from cognitive therapy when treating depression. These effects were found with frequency of physical activity over intensity. This supports how important it is to just get up and get moving every day, a few times a day, until an exercise program becomes a habit.
A review done by the American Psychological Association in 2011 further outlines the positive effects of exercise on mood and the importance of incorporating exercise in treatment options.
So take control of your mood, put on the tennis shoes, and run. You will feel accomplished, happy, and empowered afterwards. The consequences will be worth the effort.
Fountain of Youth (fighting the aging process)
Have you ever heard that exercise can be a fountain of youth? That saying has been around for a long time, but now there is scientific evidence to help back it up.
For example, a study published in 2012 in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review concluded that regular exercise helps defeat age-related mental decline, particularly functions like task switching, selective attention, and working memory. Highly fit adults also exhibit less age-related atrophy in the prefrontal and temporal cortices in the brain, increases in anterior hippocampal volume, and superior white matter integrity in the corpus callosum (just to name a few), all things that help to slow or even prevent neurological decline.
A study conducted in Germany revealed even more benefits of running throughout life, both externally and internally. The study compared several groups of men and women to look at the lifespan of their cells. There was a ‘young’ class, which was broken into two groups: sedentary (mostly inactive desk jobs) and active (running an average of about 45 miles per week). The ‘middle aged’ group was also broken into two groups, sedentary and active (running an average of 50 miles per week).
One conclusion was quite obvious according to Dr. Christian Werner from Saarland University Clinic in Homburg, “[It] was striking … to see in our study that many of the middle-aged athletes looked much younger than sedentary control subjects of the same age.”
Beyond just looking younger, the cells of those in the active middle aged group were ‘younger’ as well. Cell age was measured by the size of the telomeres in the white blood cells of the participants. Telomeres are the ‘caps’ on the end of DNA strands. When cells in the body divide, the telomeres cap is snipped. If telomeres become too small, the cell can die or enter a suspended state. For us non-Ph.D.s, the shorter the telomere, the older the cell.
The telomere size for both the sedentary and active groups of younger people were about the same size, which was expected as these participants simply were not old enough to have had their cells divide enough. In the middle-age groups, those who were sedentary had telomeres that were on average 40% shorter than the younger sedentary group, while those in the active middle aged group’s telomeres were only on average 10% shorter than the active younger group. Telomere loss was reduced by 75% in the middle aged active group, leading Dr. Werner to conclude that, “[exercise] at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect.”
The percentage of people who run 45 or even 50 miles per week is not very high, so does more moderate exercise also offer an anti-aging effect? Another study conducted in Colorado says yes. This study measured VO2 max, maximum aerobic capacity, in additional to telomere length of middle aged to older participants. It found that a higher VO2 max correlated closely with longer (younger) telomeres. This correlation shines favorably on the notion that the more fit a person is in their middle age and onward, the younger their cells will be.
Running truly is a wonderful exercise, for both your mind and body. What do you think? Why do you run? For your health? Stress relief? To maintain weight? Whatever the reason, it’s clear that running is a great way to stay healthy, both in body and in mind.