Author: alex

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Jockology: exercising in the heat

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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This week’s Jockology column in the Globe and Mail is a round-up of a few recent studies on exercise in hot weather: how the brain slows you down more than the body; how acclimatization does (and doesn’t) work; and how cooling your palms can make your workout feel easier.

[…] “Slowing down in the heat could be a subconscious regulation to protect us from damage, such as heat stroke,” explains University of Bedfordshire researcher Paul Castle, the lead author of the study.

In other words, you don’t slow down because your body has reached some critical temperature. Instead, your brain slows you down to prevent you from ever reaching that critical temperature. It’s a subtle difference – but as the cyclists in the study discovered, it means that our physical “limits” are more negotiable than previously thought… [READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE]

 

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Canoeing the Lievre River in Quebec

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Another bit of self-promotion: my travel piece on canoeing the Lièvre River in Quebec is running in this weekend’s New York Times Travel section:

WE had two choices: stop and haul our canoes and gear along a four-mile trail running parallel to the river, or paddle into the canyon, with its 19 sets of rapids and near vertical walls. Either way, the decision would be final.

It was our fourth day on the Lièvre River in Quebec, about 170 miles north of Ottawa, and the current, gentle at first, was getting pushier with each tributary we paddled past. The land around us, thickly blanketed with pines and dotted with occasional cedar and birch, rose steep and rocky on both sides of the river ahead of us. From around the bend came the muffled roar of angry water… [READ ON]

It was a great trip — and a great incentive to keep working at some upper-body strength instead of just running (those whitewater canoes are wayyyy harder to portage than the ultralight Kevlars I used to use for trips in Algonquin and Temagami). My biggest regret about being in Australia for the summer is that I’m going to miss this year’s canoe trip.

 

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8.5 hours of sleep a night boosts speed and shooting average

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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It’s more or less an annual ritual: Cheri Mah of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory releases some results that show how getting more sleep improves performance in Stanford varsity athletes. I’ve written before about her results for tennis players and swimmers. This year’s data, published in the journal Sleep, focused on basketball players, who were asked to aim to increase their time in bed to 10 hours a night:

Participants shot 10 free throws from 15 feet, making an average of 7.9 shots at baseline and 8.8 shots at the end of the sleep extension period. They also attempted 15 three-point field goals, making an average of 10.2 shots at baseline and 11.6 shots after sleep extension. The timed sprint [which improved from 16.2 to 15.5 seconds] involved running from  baseline to half-court and back to baseline, then the full 94-foot length of the court and back to baseline.

None of these sleep studies were randomized or controlled, so we can’t take the data too seriously. (Particularly in sports like swimming, we’d expect to see improvements from early season to late season even without a change in sleeping habits.) Still, it’s interesting stuff.

What differentiates the basketball data from some of the earlier studies is that sleep time was measured objectively using actigraphs (basically watched-sized devices that monitor movement at night). So we know that the basketball players managed to increase their actual time asleep (as opposed to just time in bed) for just under 8.5 hours a  night, an increase of110.9 minutes from baseline. That’s a big difference — and it’s a lot of sleep, considerably more than most people even aim for.

Mah offers these tips:

  • Prioritize sleep as a part of your regular training regimen.
  • Extend nightly sleep for several weeks to reduce your sleep debt before competition.
  • Maintain a low sleep debt by obtaining a sufficient amount of nightly sleep (seven to nine hours for adults, nine or more hours for teens and young adults).
  • Keep a regular sleep-wake schedule, going to bed and waking up at the same times every day.
  • Take brief 20-30 minute naps to obtain additional sleep during the day, especially if drowsy.

This is all eat-your-vegetables kind of advice. I mean, we all know sleep is important — but sometimes it’s good to be reminded that the results show up objectively.

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Is leading a race stupid? Some 1500m championship data

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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‘Tis the season for championship track racing — and with it, the annual moaning about slow, tactical middle-distance races. At both the U.S. and Canadian national championships last weekend, the men’s 1500-metre races went very slowly (until, late in the race, they suddenly started going very fast). On the message boards, people started the usual criticisms of everyone who didn’t win, saying that they should have taken the lead and made the race faster from the start — much like Christin Wurth-Thomas did in the U.S. women’s 1500m. (The fact that Wurth-Thomas, who had the fastest seed time, was passed by three women in the final straightaway and thus failed to qualify for the World Championships, seems lost on these critics.)

Anyway, as I always do, I got sucked into the debate too, in a thread on tnfnorth. Given that USATF results now offer complete splits for every lap of every race, it’s possible to do a much more detailed analysis of tactics than it used to be. Out of interest, I looked at the three semifinal heats of the USATF men’s 1500m. There were three intermediate splits (at 300m, 700m and 1100m) taken in each race, which means a total of nine intermediate leads recorded. Seven men filled these nine leading spots; none of them qualified for the final.

Of course, this data didn’t convince anyone. Just a fluke, they said. So I’ve decided to take it a bit further. I looked back at World Championship results between 1997 (the earliest year for which intermediate leaders are listed in the results) and 2009 (the most recent championship). Here is how the first-lap leaders (after 400m) fared in the 23 quarter-final heats of the men’s 1500m in that timespan:

As expected, there’s a full range of results — leading the first lap doesn’t guarantee either success or failure. But there’s a pretty pronounced tilt toward the right-hand side of the graph. Indeed, 35% of first-lap leaders managed to either hang in the top six or take their race out fast enough to get a time qualifier. In contrast, 65% failed to move on to the semis.

Now, the tactics in qualifying races (where the goal is simply to place within the top N) are obviously different than those in finals (where the goal is to place as highly as possible, with every place counting). There’s not as much data for the finals, but here they are nonetheless:

Let me emphasize that race tactics are enormously complicated, dictated by the individual’s physiology, psychology, abilities relative to the rest of the field, weather conditions, and so on. I have beliefs of varying strengths regarding many of these factors — but I don’t believe this data answers any specific questions. It does, however, give a snapshot of how all these factors play out in the real world when they’re mixed together. And it suggests (to me, at least) that taking the lead during the first lap of a championship men’s 1500m race rarely ends well.

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Steven Blair on “magic bullets” vs. lifestyle change

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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The U.S. government plans to spend $1 billion on a new NIH centre on “Advancing Translation Sciences.” Great news, right? Not according to James Hebert and Steven Blair of USC, who have a new commentary just posted online at the British Journal of Sports Medicine:

This plan typifies the search for a ‘magic bullet’, in pill form, that will cure all diseases and health problems…

[L]arge drug companies have spent ~US$400 billion on drug research over the past 15 years. We should examine the effectiveness of this huge expenditure in terms of public health benefits… What happens in a society in which people are told that pills are available to put them to sleep, wake them up, stimulate them, calm them down and control appetite and body weight? We argue that the answer is in the growing number of people with mental disorders including depression and anxiety, sleep disorders, deteriorating nutritional status and increasing rates of obesity unprecedented in human history. The pills that have been developed, advertised on television and demanded by a desperate populace have been spectacular in their inability to address the major and growing public health problems of the USA.

Instead, Hebert and Blair want to see more emphasis on lifestyle change. They cite some interesting data from studies comparing lifestyle and pharmaceutical interventions. For example, a study found that just three or four sessions with a dietician produced the same reduction in total and LDL cholesterol as taking statins. And two randomized trials found that “lifestyle interventions” were twice as effective as drugs in preventing high-risk individuals from developing diabetes. The authors are “puzzled and concerned” that results like these haven’t received more publicity and follow-up.

So what’s the solution? They suggest an NIH “National Institute for Improving Healthy Lifestyles” instead of the translational medicine institute. Would this make a difference? It seems to me that if we knew how to get people to change their lifestyles, we’d already be doing it. But perhaps they’re right: with enough resources — and $1 billion would be a pretty good start! — maybe lifestyle change wouldn’t look quite so daunting.

We understand that while changes in diet and physical activity are conceptually easy, they are diabolically difficult to do in practice. The promise of even easier solutions to cure the consequences of years of sloth needs to be debunked.

That, I think, is the key point. We need to stop promising that getting healthy will be easy, and emphasize instead that it’s worthwhile. To borrow a thought from physics, it’s like that Einstein quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”