COVID – 19, no doubt, has totally thrown many of us, out of gear. Initially, it was due to lockdown and now due to increasing cases for every passing day. Owing to lockdown restrictions, lot many societies and apartments have closed down the clubhouse/gyms. One cannot venture out of the premises either. In that situation, the one workout which comes or goes under the radar is running. Even during the lockdown, cops are generally easy on runners/joggers. Running is one of the most inexpensive sport. All that one need is a willingness to run and hop into sneakers and you are set to go. On the other hand, hitting a gym or mounting a cycle or for that matter, any other sport would mean subscription charges or investment into heavy gear.
Generally, an average running shoe would last for about 800 to 1000 km mileage. Hence, once you invest in a good running shoe, you can forget about it for about a year or so, assuming you do about 30-50 km mileage a week. In terms of output, an average runner burns about 70 – 80 calories a kilometer, depending upon speed, age, weight, and gait. Running early morning also means intake of a good amount of fresh air, which is good to keep your lungs healthy and also boost your immunity thereby keeping you safe from COVID-19.
Think about it. You may like to start with one kilometer. After all, the journey to 1000 miles starts with a single step.
Running Benefits Your Nervous System—Here’s Why That’s Important
Regular exercise, like running, has ample benefits for your cardiovascular system, as well as muscle mass and bone density. But that’s not all, a recent study found: You can tone up your nervous system, too.
Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research looked at 63 healthy participants, ranging from young children to physically inactive older adults. Each volunteer took part in a range of running exercises suited to their activity level, doing either running indoors on a treadmill or outdoors. Researchers recorded electrical activity from numerous muscles and the amount of force the body exerted onto the ground. Then, they used a machine-learning algorithm to identify the way multiple muscles acted together, called muscle synergies.
What they found is that the nervous system adjusts its commands for running, and that prior running experience actually made a significant difference in these commands, according to study co-author Vincent Chi-Kwan Cheung, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“If you’re training consistently, like for a marathon, you won’t be just improving heart health and mental endurance, but you’ll also be training your central nervous system,” he told Runner’s World. “This is because the human nervous system can learn to activate the muscles in a manner that produces energetically efficient forms of running.”
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Muscle synergies can be combined in different ways by the nervous system, he added. The more you run, the more combinations your brain will create, which could improve how well you move. For example, the participants who had been training for years showed more muscle activation and more synergies.
Trying to play around with this as a training tactic will require more research, Cheung said, but if you’re looking to use this knowledge, his advice is to simply keep running.
“It was interesting that the muscle synergies for running changed as subjects trained to run,” he said.
He also added that previous research has found that these synergies increase with activities that require complex movement, like ballet, but researchers didn’t expect the same reaction with running.
“Before the experiment, we expected the muscle synergies to remain constant through training, and also across the subject groups with different training experiences,” he said. “We were frankly surprised to see that kind of nervous system improvement and efficiency happening.”
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