Some of today’s most suggests that you should eat less often, forcing yourself to go longer periods of time without food—a practice that was common just a few centuries back. Our basic, primal instincts drive our brain to function best when we are hungry and physically active, says Mark Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the . “It evolved, in part, for success in seeking and acquiring food.”

The way many of us eat today—satiating hunger with snacks high in simple carbs—leaves the body craving a constant sugar fix. Without it, you crash and suffer from fatigue, lack of mental clarity, and deteriorating athletic performance, among other things. But fasting has been shown to help stabilize blood sugar levels through a process called glucose regulation, says Mattson. By putting your body through short-term stress, you teach it how to use energy more efficiently and recover quickly, he says.

Learning how to fast and getting started can be a daunting task, but we’re here to make it simpler. Read on for your guide on how to hit your body’s reset button.

How to Fast: Choose Your Preferred Style

Fasting is distinct from the likes of a juice cleanse or a two-day restrictive diet. There are two categories—traditional and intermittent—each of which appeals to different individuals depending on their goals and lifestyles.

While both can be beneficial to your brain health, intermittent fasting is better for weight loss and maintenance. Pick the one that works best for what you want to accomplish.

Traditional Fasting

Traditional fasts typically last anywhere from 24 hours to seven days or longer. They emphasize developing willpower and honing self-discipline as opposed to weight loss, making them a favorite among those looking for a mental or spiritual refresh. While you’ll certainly see some physical effects, the changes of a single fast won’t be permanent. That said, it’s a useful tool to help you understand hunger and your reaction to it.

If you’re a beginner learning how to fast, start with a 24-hour goal: Eat dinner, and then refrain from eating until the next night. Be sure to drink plenty of water to prevent dehydration, and plan your fast for a non-training day. Going for a walk can help you get into —a state where your body starts to burn fat rather than glycogen—but don’t do anything more strenuous until you get accustomed to existing with lower energy levels.

If you’re going to try for multiday fast, consider timing it so that it ends on Sunday night. That way, you’re at work only during the first part of your fast, before it gets especially challenging.

Since this program is temporary and short-term, traditional fasting caters to those who, in addition to wanting a radical system reboot, don’t want commit to the thought and preparation required to fast every day or every week.

Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting usually involves a long-term routine of short-duration fasts that last for part of every day, and its physical impact tends to be greater than that of traditional fasting. Specifically, it’s highly effective in its ability to regulate blood sugar, which prevents a host of symptoms like fatigue, mood swings, and metabolic health, Mattson says. In addition, it can protect the brain from stroke, neurotoxins, epileptic seizures, and oxidative stress, he says. It’s also an effective way to simply lose weight, depending on the fasting routine you choose.

If you’re hoping to lose weight, try either the the or . In the former, you’ll eat regularly five days a week, then eat 600 calories a day for two days. In the latter, you’ll rotate between regular and 600-calorie days. You will eat fewer calories than normal, even if you follow your regular diet on the nonrestricted days. Although highly effective for those looking to shed a few pounds, these two styles of eating should be avoided by most athletes, because you won’t be eating enough calories to train properly.

LeanGains: Time-Restricted Eating

Time-restricted eating, also called , is the better choice for high performers. Eat the same amount of food you normally would, but eat it during a shorter window, ideally eight hours. You’ll reap many of the benefits of fasting without restricting calories, so you can keep training hard. It’s easy to maintain your weight or gain lean mass.

With time-restricted eating, your goal is to fast for at least 12 hours a day, which is the point at which the benefits of fasting begin, Mattson says. Pick the window that best suits your life. Most people choose to eat from midday through dinnertime, because it’s easier to incorporate into a regular family and social life. It is possible to train during the part of the day when you’re not eating, though many people will choose to time their training after they have eaten some food—often after work. While 12 hours seems like a reasonable window to avoid food even when you aren’t fasting, that means no late dinner reservations, no snacks at the Friday night movie, and no crack-of-dawn coffee when you wake up for your morning workout. And if it really does feel that easy to eat only in a 12-hour window, try ratcheting it up so that you’re able to nosh for only, say, eight hours a day.

Ease Into It

Don’t start with a seven-day fast if you’ve never fasted before or are new at teaching your body how to fast. With a traditional fast, start with 24 hours, and then bump it up to three days if the first one goes well. With the time-restricted approach, don’t immediately limit yourself to eight hours a day of eating if you’re used to eating every hour that you’re awake; start with 12 hours on, 12 hours off, and go from there. Have realistic expectations, and make gradual changes to your current routine.

How to Fast: Plan Ahead and Be Flexible

Once you’re used to fasting, you may find that you can incorporate a short fast on little notice. But when you’re just starting out, make sure to plan your fast at least a few days in advance. You’ll want to ensure that your fast isn’t going to interfere with work, family, or training, all of which can counteract the positive effects of the test run.

Put some thought into where and how you will be fasting. Fast at home before trying it in the wilderness or on vacation. Have plenty of water on hand. Tell your friends and family you’re fasting so they know what’s going on if you start feeling irritable, and so you won’t have to answer the same questions 25 times at the next group dinner.

Lastly, don’t be too rigid. If you typically eat from 11 a.m. to 7 a.m., it’s perfectly fine to eat before a morning race or a big training day, breaking that fasting window. Consistency is good; inflexibility is not.

Prepare for Your Body to Feel Different

Many people feel tired, get a headache, and generally feel “out of sorts” on days two and three of any fast. That’s normal. The negative side effects of fasting typically go away by the end of day three or four. If you’re going shorter than two days, you’ll likely start to feel better just as the fast comes to a close. Once you turn the corner on day three, most people feel great after the negative symptoms have passed, and a sense of calm, well-being, and heightened concentration takes over. But if you feel like something is wrong during a fast—more than just feeling a bit tired—definitely eat. You can always try again another time.

The post How to Fast: The Beginner’s Guide appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

By now you’ve probably been inundated with stories about how good meditation is for you. Like a lot of people, I’ve tried it over the years but without much success at sustaining the practice. I do it for a few days or a few weeks, but something else always comes up, I get out of the habit, and I stop for long periods of time.

Part of my struggle is that even when I was good at making time for meditation each day, I was never sure if I was doing it right. Turns out this is a fairly common question for a new meditator, says Steven Leonard, founder of BodyMind Training and a meditation teacher at the Kripalu Center, a yoga and wellness institute in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. You set aside some time, you found a quiet place, and you sat in a comfortable position. Perhaps you cued up , counted your breaths, or repeated a mantra. Ten minutes later, you’re still sitting there, wondering: Is anything happening?

A slew of new products aim to answer that question. Just like a heart rate monitor can give you feedback that helps quantify whether you’re hitting your goals, companies are introducing digital headbands that claim to help you meditate better when paired with proprietary apps. Commercial companies like ($99), ($799), and ($249) produce electroencephalography (EEG)-based meditation headbands that monitor your brain waves while you meditate and reveal what state your mind is in. I decided to test one over five months.

I chose the Muse, which has a slim profile and a moderate price and is one of the more popular EEG meditation devices around—the company says it’s used by thousands of health practitioners and more than 100 universities around the world. The Muse pairs with an app and plays soothing sounds from your phone while the headband measures your . Several kinds of brain waves are prevalent during different activities and states of mind: delta (deep sleep), theta (REM sleep, daydreaming, and deep meditation), alpha (awake but relaxed), beta (awake and active), and gamma (awake and hyperalert). EEG technology has been used to measure these waves for a century, often to diagnose brain disorders like epilepsy, but the basic measurements of brain waves can be applied in all sorts of situations; for example, when meditating, EEG users might observe higher alpha and theta activity.

“Neuroscience is still in its infancy—it hasn’t even scratched the surface of understanding the process of meditation,” says Leonard, who, along with neuroscientist Andrew Heusser, co-leads a program called the . In the program, the scientists use EEG to show participants’ real-time changes in brain wave states during various forms of meditation.

When I first put on the headband and connected it to my phone via Bluetooth, I found it easy to sit quietly, and I found the default background noise (waves crashing on a beach) soothing. The way Muse is set up, you hear the waves (and sometimes rain) when your mind is less calm. When your brain is calmer, you hear the sound of birds. The changing sound is not meant to calm you, but rather to let you know that your mind is calm—it’s a real-time window into your brain, giving you real-time affirmation that your brain is calm. (Or, alternatively, that it isn’t.)

After each session, you can look at your phone to see the results from both that session and those from the past two weeks. The app displays graphs showing how long you meditated, your score based on the app’s reward system, and what percentage of time you spent in a “calm” state, according to your brain waves. (The company declined to reveal what, exactly, the app is measuring when reporting “neutral” and “calm” states beyond the fact that it includes all five brain waves in its algorithm.) The more time you spend in a calm state, the higher your score for that session; you get one point for each second your brain is in a neutral state and three for each second it’s calm. Muse also lets you know how many days in a row you have consistently used the headband to meditate.

Before using Muse, most sessions felt pretty similar to each other: I concentrated on my breath as much as I could, but I spent most of my time shifting in and out of thought. Sessions with Muse were similar—it wasn’t a miracle cure, clearing my mind of all distractions—but the feedback helped me interpret them differently. For example, without Muse, I had imagined the key to being at ease was absence of thought. But now I saw that thoughts didn’t necessarily disrupt my calm. As long as I eventually brought my wandering mind back to my breath, those detours didn’t immediately change my brain waves. As far as my mind was concerned, I was still in a meditative state.

The main benefits of Muse are as simple as that: When I have confidence that something I’m doing is having a specific positive effect, I’m more likely to want to do it. Over the course of a month, I was able to extend my sessions to 30 minutes, keeping my brain in a calm state the entire time, and to meditate more often. In fact, after I began using Muse, I meditated for 90 days straight.

At the same time that my meditation practice became more consistent, I started to notice an overall calmer sense of the world within my daily life. (I was also getting enough sleep—training for ultramarathons helped with that—and I was eating well. I doubt Muse would have made up for bad habits; rather, it amplified good habits.) I was less easily fazed by minor annoyances and felt better throughout the day. My attitude toward training was in line with my attitude toward meditating, and it was easier to be consistent about all the habits I was forming. While Muse wasn’t necessarily responsible for all these changes, it certainly contributed.

Since developing a consistent meditation practice with Muse, I’ve been able to let go of negative feelings like the ones I experienced during a 50K race this summer. Throughout the run, I felt mentally calm and alert despite my faster-than-usual pace. When my legs hurt, and they often did during the final ten miles of the race, I repeated a mantra that came to me during a race last year: “This is exactly where I want to be.” I felt the pain or discomfort lessen and then disappear. Meditation didn’t make me run faster, but it did help me handle the mental burden of running fast.

The most surprising effect of using Muse was being able to see how running affects my post-run meditation. On days when I ran five to 15 miles, Muse told me that my mind was very calm during meditation, almost without exception. In contrast, on rest days, my mind was much more likely to be distracted. I also found that more isn’t always better: On big days, when I covered 20 to 30 miles, Muse indicated that my mind was often very distracted, akin to what it was like on a rest day. I don’t think that means long runs are bad for me any more than off days are; rather, each type of activity plays a specific role in my training program and mental state.

Sound like something you might benefit from? Keep these three things in mind.

Look for Feedback

Whether or not you decide to use a device like Muse, feedback is one of the keys to learning. Top performers in sport, art, and industry use feedback to improve what they are doing. That’s what your mile splits on your watch are—feedback. Something as intangible as meditation can be frustrating in part because it doesn’t provide immediate feedback, and Muse helps solve that.

Don’t Be Scared Off

Until recently, few athletes would have thought that meditation could be useful in their own lives. Keep an open mind about the tools you can use to improve your athletic performance and everyday life.

Training Wheels Are OK

I don’t think I’ll be using Muse forever. I’ve already begun doing at least half my meditation sessions without it. Though meditation can be trying when first starting out, it offers long-term results. After several months, I feel better both immediately after a session and throughout the day—meaning it’s probably time to remove the training wheels.

The post Can Headbands Help You Get Better at Meditation? appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

For several years during my early thirties, I was constantly tired. Starting around 2012, I was going for a five-mile run about three times a week, lifting weights just as often, and usually getting a good night’s sleep. I wasn’t training for the Olympics or running ultras, and I didn’t have a newborn keeping me up at night. I also wasn’t out of shape, overweight, or unhealthy. Yet every afternoon I felt the need to lie down for a nap—and if I didn’t, I was often irritable. I struggled to explain the problem to my wife and friends. I was fit and healthy. This was the prime of my life. Shouldn’t I feel great?

Over the course of three years, I spoke to several doctors, but none could pinpoint a major medical issue. One naturopath thought it might be mono, but the test turned out negative. An MD thought I might be depressed, but I didn’t feel depressed. Another naturopath thought it might be chronic fatigue syndrome, but that is, , a “debilitating and complex disorder characterized by profound fatigue that is not improved by bed rest and that may be worsened by physical or mental activity.” I wasn’t facing anything that extreme.

It’s only now, a few years later, that I’m confident I know what was going on: my blood sugar levels were out of whack. I had trained my body to crave simple carbohydrates, and I was caught in a cycle that left me crashing despite a constant sugar fix.

How did I realize this and end the sugar-up-then-crash cycle? I started by fasting for at least 12 hours every day.

Why I Started Intermittent Fasting

Last year, after dealing with chronic lethargy for three years, I read about the benefits of intermittent fasting, including and . Mark Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and author of dozens of research papers concerning intermittent fasting, has argued in his work that humans evolved in situations where food was limited. “Evolution favored individuals with superior cognitive and physical abilities under conditions of limited food sources,” he wrote in a , “and brain function can therefore be optimized by intermittent dietary energy restriction and exercise.”

Three or more meals a day, Mattson pointed out, is not how most humans historically have eaten. Buddhist monks, Neolithic farmers, and traditional hunter-gatherers ate once or twice a day. Although breakfast, lunch, and dinner may seem timeless to us now, it’s only been in the past couple hundred years that became standardized in the West. This shocked me: How did the human race develop and thrive on just a one or two meals a day, yet I’m tired if I haven’t eaten a PB&J in the past couple hours?

Intermittent fasting—of which there are many different types, but all limit the time that one consumes food—most likely causes short-term stress on the body, somewhat similar to the beneficial stress of lifting weights. In a , Mattson noted that intermittent fasting can “protect neurons in the brain against a wide range of severe stressors,” like epileptic seizures, stroke, neurotoxins, oxidative stress, and amyloid, and can help cells cope with and resist injury and disease. However, some research indicates that stress-related , and others have argued that it .

Types of Fasting

I decided to give it a try. There are three main ways to do an intermittent fast: the 5:2 diet, in which you eat regularly for five days a week and reduce your intake to 600 calories during the next two; alternate-day fasting, where you rotate between standard and 600-calorie days; and time-restricted eating, in which you limit eating to a four-to-eight hour period each day.

The 5:2 diet, popularized first in the UK in 2012 and then in the United States in the past few years by , and are both geared toward weight loss, something I didn’t need. In contrast, with time-restricted eating, it’s easy to consume a regular caloric load each day while still getting some of the benefits of fasting. That sounded like a better fit for me, as I planned to remain active most days of the week.

I settled on the 16-hour fast, where I’d limit eating to an eight-hour window every day. As Mattson explains, the liver stores glucose (the body’s main energy source when you are regularly eating carbohydrates) for about ten to 12 hours after a meal. When you fast for more than 12 hours, your body switches from glucose metabolism to fat metabolism, which leads to a bunch of positive . So, if you fast for 16 hours each day, you’re receiving the benefits of those adaptive responses without limiting your total caloric intake.

Fasting 101: Cut Back On Snacks

Before I started fasting, I always ate a snack before bed, often a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a bowl of granola. Just moving my bedtime snack back an hour made me slightly anxious at first; I was convinced I would wake up hungry in the middle of the night. But I did it for a couple days, then a couple weeks, and pretty soon I realized I didn’t need a snack right before bed—I just needed one a couple hours before bed.

Mattson compares starting a fasting routine to exercising: If you’re used to eating many meals throughout the day and jump right into fasting, it’s like trying to become a runner by going for a fast five miles without any training. It’s going to be unpleasant, and there’s a good chance you’ll give it up before you see the benefits. Gradual change and a slow buildup is key.

And so it went, with me moving my snack further from my bedtime and my breakfast further from waking up. Each time I moved the timing of a snack or a meal, I repeated the cycle of minor anxiety followed by acceptance, but it became easier. After about six months of intermittent fasting, I didn’t need snacks as long as I was eating nutritious, filling meals during the eight-hour window.

Does Fasting Make You Tired?

For the past few months, I’ve been eating breakfast around 10 a.m., lunch around noon, and dinner around 6 p.m. Technically, I’m intermittent fasting, but I don’t really think of it that way. It’s just my normal eating schedule. And if it felt difficult and restrictive at first, now, six months later, it feels liberating. I’m no longer constantly hungry or lethargic or irritable. Intermittent fasting alone didn’t solve all my blood sugar problems, and I’ve also noticed that regular exercise throughout the day and not eating processed carbs have helped bring my A1C—a measure of blood sugar—down as well. But fasting did help me understand how my body uses carbohydrates and fat for energy and why being too reliant on simple carbohydrates had contributed to my lethargy for years.

It also allowed me to cut processed carbs from my diet. Today, my typical meal consists of venison or fish, vegetables, beans or other legumes, and a good dose of healthy fat, like olive oil, nuts, or avocado. All these foods are broken down slowly, which limits the insulin spike and keeps me feeling full for hours. I still eat carbohydrates in the form of fruits and oatmeal, though only on occasion. If I’m going for a five-to-ten-mile run in the morning, I’ll do it fasted. If I’m going for a long run—say, 12 miles or more—I’ll take some  before the run and eat a bar during. And if a friend wants to get dinner after 6 p.m., I don’t sweat it. Most days I eat from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., but intermittent fasting doesn’t require you to obsessively stick to a schedule.

These adaptations to how I eat haven’t changed the fact that I love eating. If anything, I enjoy the process of gathering ingredients, cooking, and eating now more than ever. I’ve realized that fasting, which is often considered ascetic, is compatible with a deep appreciation of food.

The Bottom Line to Successful Fasting

The key to fasting regularly is finding a program that suits your life and training goals. It could be one 24-hour period each month. Or the 5:2 diet. Or fasting on religious holidays that call for it. Fasting is like working out—different people will have different programs, but the goal is the same: to provide beneficial stress that helps your body become stronger, healthier, and more resilient when faced with larger, potentially damaging stressors.

I’ve been intermittent fasting for a year now, and I no longer need an afternoon nap. I’m not irritable if I haven’t eaten in the past couple hours, which used to happen to me all the time. I’ve also hiked the Colorado Trail and run a 50K, and I’m currently putting in 40 to 60 miles a week and lifting weights a couple times a week. Intermittent fasting hasn’t transformed me into a Super Athlete, but I have to say, I feel pretty great.

The post What I Learned from a Year of Intermittent Fasting appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

There’s a scene in Happy People, Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary about life in Siberia, where on a snowmobile after spending several months in the backcountry. “The voyage is 150 kilometers along the frozen river,” Herzog narrates, “and we should note that Nikolay’s dog never rides on the snowmobile. He covers the entire distance running behind.”

Nikolay’s dog runs day and night, over ice and through knee-deep powder. The scene forces any dog-loving endurance athlete to wonder: Did Herzog stumble upon the canine equivalent of an Olympic athlete? Or is this type of endurance possible for most domesticated dogs? And if so, how can I get my dog to run like that?

A couple years ago, when I adopted , I was excited to take him mountain biking and running. But it turns out that not every dog behaves like Nikolay’s—Tucker preferred running around barking at anything that moved, rather than obediently running beside me. Training a new dog to be able to keep up with you all day takes patience, attention, and commitment. Most dogs have innate endurance ability, and if you approach their training right, you’ll have years of adventuring together.

Here’s everything you need to know about getting outside with your four-legged best friend.

What Breed Is Best for Endurance?

It’s a good first question, and the answer, according to , a veterinarian and ultrarunner in Crozet, Virginia, who often writes about animals and fitness, lies in the dog’s ancestor. “We can look at the gray wolf and learn about our own dogs’ inherent capabilities and instincts,” he says.

Wolves are amazing distance runners, regularly traveling 30 to 40 miles per day. “When you look at their diet, which is high in protein and fat, and low in carbohydrates, in addition to their easy loping pace, you realize that they are the ultimate fat-adapted distance runners,” says Andersen. They also have relatively light bodies distributed evenly over four legs, meaning they can handle the impacts of long-distance trips.

There are some dogs that have been bred in specific ways that make them poor running-partner candidates. Avoid “short-faced dogs,” Andersen says, like bulldogs, pugs, and Boston Terriers: they have a hard time breathing, perspiring, and, due to their size, keeping up. A big dog doesn’t guarantee a good runner, either. “Some of the giant breeds, such as St. Bernards, Mastiffs, and Great Danes, have a lot of orthopedic problems,” he says.

Good candidates include most medium-sized (30 to 60 pounds) shorthaired dogs. Heather Simon-Buonocore, a veterinarian and ultrarunner in Hillsborough, New Jersey, recommends “dogs in the sporting, herding, and working breed groups, like a Vizsla, Weimaraner, Labrador Retriever, Australian Cattle dog, Border Collie, German Shorthaired Pointer, and Siberian Husky, but only if you don’t live in a hot climate.” Don’t let that list limit you: a rescue mutt can also make a great runner.

The last quality to look for is an intangible: a dog who loves to run. “Most dogs do love to run,” says Andersen, “and with proper training and exposure, they can be great partners. Yet some dogs are just terrible runners, behaviorally. They seem bored, or they are reactive, lunging at cars and dogs, or they are just terrible on a leash. So having a good temperament for running is important.”

When Can I Start Running with My Puppy?

When I adopted Tucker, I was excited to have a new running partner. But I was told repeatedly that we should wait until he was at least a year old before running together.

“That’s a common myth,” says Andersen. “I see people not running with their young dogs because they have been told not to, but then they’ll play high-intensity fetch instead, which is way more impact and potentially damaging on their joints.”

Instead of high-intensity ball games with a puppy, he recommends walking, hiking, and, when they reach a few months old, going on easy runs under a mile.

“By three or four months,” Andersen notes, “wolf pups start traveling with the pack on short hunting trips. They are also doing a lot of play, chase, and exploring with the adults and with littermates. By six months, the pups are traveling with the adults on longer hunting trips taking them many miles from their homes.”

How Long and Far Can We Run?

The distance your dog can run depends mostly on his or her innate abilities and current fitness. “You need to learn to listen to your dog,” Andersen says. “If your dog is pulling you on the leash and has constant energy during the whole run, you know you haven’t overdone it. But if they are trailing behind you, becoming less animated, panting hard, then you probably have.”

On your first few outings, go for easy hikes and see how they do. Use those hikes as a baseline when thinking about how long your runs together should be. And make sure to give your dog plenty of recovery time. “You shouldn’t just start running together five days a week, no matter how excited your dog is when you grab your running shoes,” Andersen says. “They need time to adapt just like we do.”

As you think about adding mileage, do so just as you would for your own training: gradually. Simon-Buonocore recommends starting out easy with your young dog—around a mile to begin with—and “increasing overall weekly mileage by 10 to 15 percent. That could mean adding an extra day of running or adding to the length of any particular run.”

What About Really Long Runs?

Once your dog is no longer a puppy and is in good shape, they may be able to keep up with you at any distance or speed. But not all dogs are like Nikolay’s, and there are a couple of things to keep in mind if you’re taking your companion out with you on your weekend-long run.

“It comes down to training, outside temperature, and the dog’s individual ability to adapt,” says Andersen. “One of my running buddies has a dog who regularly runs 18 to 20 miles with him and loves it.”

But take note: if you are a fast ultrarunner going on a long tempo run, you probably should leave your dog at home. “On long runs, you’ve got to give your dog time to take breaks, drink water, and run along at an easy pace,” Andersen says. If you can’t take the time to do that during a run, don’t make your dog suffer.

Should I Use a Leash?

“Dogs are happiest when running free on trails in the woods, able to sniff, sprint, and run without an agenda,” says Anderson. If you live in an area where you can trail run with your dog off-leash, that’s going to be the best option for both of you—assuming your dog will behave when you encounter other humans.

“Unfortunately, many dogs are just not good off leash,” says Andersen, and if you need to use one, he recommends the kind that . “It’s hard enough to work on your running form on your own, but if you have a dog who is pulling or constantly stopping, you’re going to put a lot of torque on your upper body and throw off your form. When they are attached to your waist, you can run with them hands-free and better balanced, which makes it a more sustainable experience for you.”

If you live in a city or suburb far away from off-leash trails, “just respect that running on a leash is not natural for dogs and takes some getting used to,” advises Andersen. Leash training is key.

What Health Concerns Should I Be Looking For?

“The number one thing to be careful of is overheating,” says Andersen. “You can train fitness, but you cannot train a dog to be okay running when it’s 85 degrees outside.”

A good rule of thumb: above 70 degrees, be careful where you run (shaded forest versus open desert) and how far you go. And above 80 degrees, you should not be running with your dog unless you are running beside a creek that they can jump in and out of as needed. “Wolves in Yellowstone are not roaming around the park when it’s 90 degrees out,” says Andersen. “They are chilling out under a tree.”

If your dog is lagging behind you on the leash, frequently stopping to lie down or “super panting”—a rapid, almost panicked panting—you should stop right away.

If your dog is in a lot of pain or she’s limping for more than a day, take her to the vet. “Some of the most common injuries I see in dogs who run,” says Simon-Buonocore, “are paw pad lacerations or abrasions and torn cruciate ligaments of their knee.”

And at some point, your dog is going to slow down with age. That’s natural, and it doesn’t mean they can’t be active anymore, it just means they need more rest. “There is always a balance between making sure you give them rest and decreasing the mileage, but also keeping them active,” advises Andersen. “Again, hiking is a great answer here.”

Does My Dog Need a Powerbar?

During long runs, you should always have water available for your dog just as you would for yourself. Keep in mind that and leptospirosis, so if that’s a concern where you run, provide them with treated water. You can carry a or just let them drink from your hands.

“Do not feed your dog a large meal and then go out for a strenuous run,” warns Simon-Buonocore. “That can predispose the larger, deep-chested breeds to developing a life-threatening problem called gastric dilatation volvulus, where their stomach flips on itself and then starts to fill with gas. A wiser option would be a smaller meal at least an hour or two prior to exercise or a meal after exercise.”

Dogs, like humans, don’t really need food during a run less than 90 minutes long, but make sure that the amount of food you give your dog at the end of the day matches their activity level. And don’t feed them crap at home—feed them real food with real nutrients rather than a lot of cheap filler. Andersen recommends dog food with meat as the first ingredient that’s higher in fat and protein and lower in carbohydrates—much like the diet of wolves in the wild.

The post The Definitive Guide to Endurance Training—for Your Dog appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

This summer, my wife and I hiked the Colorado Trail, a 486-mile, high-altitude trek from Denver to Durango. While it’s a challenging hike (only about 150 people complete the trail each year), the says many hikers finish in four to six weeks.

The hike ended up taking us 29 days, though two of those were zeros, as they’re called—rest days spent resupplying in town. That’s an average of 18 miles a day for the 27 days we hiked. Short days tended to be around 15 miles, which took us eight to ten hours, but we sometimes hiked as many as 25 miles in a day.

I was curious to know what hiking every day for a month would do to my body. Before we headed to Colorado, I weighed myself at home, monitored my pulse for several weeks with a Polar watch, had my doctor run blood tests, and completed a metabolic efficiency test at , in Seattle, to see how my body was utilizing fat and carbohydrates for fuel during exercise. When I got home from the hike, I ran the tests again. The differences in the results were pretty striking.

Body Composition

Before the hike, I was fit but not training for anything. I ran five miles a couple times a week, went mountain biking about once a week, and periodically lifted weights. Like most Americans, much of my day was spent in front of a computer. I was 35 years old, 5’9″ tall, and 150 pounds, with a BMI of 22.2 and body fat composition of about 13 percent.

Post-hike, I weighed 140 pounds, with a BMI of 20.7. My body fat was 5 percent, according to a Tanita digital scale. (Though the can be slightly off—it’s possible I could have been a couple percentage points higher, which would still be very low.)

Basically, I had walked myself into a super-fit athlete’s body. I joked with my wife that I should start a business called 8-Hour Abs. Really, just eight hours a day is all it takes!

Resting Heart Rate

Aerobic exercise strengthens the heart—it’s a muscle, after all. A stronger heart pushes more blood through the body with each beat. This increase in efficiency is reflected in a decreased resting heart rate. () After hiking for eight to ten hours a day for a month, my resting heart rate fell considerably, from 48 to 40 beats per minute. Back at home, my standard runs were considerably easier, though I did occasionally get woozy if I stood up too quickly.

Blood Sugar

Before the hike, my doctor was concerned about my hemoglobin A1c number, which measures average blood sugar levels over a two- to three-month period. A result greater than 5.6 percent is an indication of prediabetes; my A1c was 5.9 percent. Given my active life, the result came as a surprise. It was probably due mostly to genetics (my dad is prediabetic), though all those pasta dinners, energy bars, and sports drinks I had consumed over the years probably didn’t help.

Before the trip, I was considered active by American standards: exercising for 40 to 60 minutes a day—but also sitting for at least eight hours while working in front of a computer. I was eating what I felt was a pretty typical diet for an endurance athlete: pasta, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and energy bars when I was on the go.

Most thru-hikers eat a diet rich in Snickers bars, dehydrated mashed potatoes, and other high-carb foods, but on the Colorado Trail, we stuck to nuts, jerky, dried fruit, and only one carb-heavy meal a day, like a mac-and-cheese dinner.

After the hike, my hemoglobin A1c dropped to within the normal range. My blood sugar levels were better controlled by my walking throughout the day (including after meals), rather than running or biking just once a day. That’s consistent with a that showed walking after meals to be effective for lowering blood sugar levels. However, simply walking is probably not enough: had I eaten the normal high-carb thru-hike diet, I’m not sure if my hemoglobin A1c would have improved as much as it did.

Cortisol and Testosterone

The two other blood tests that stuck out concerned my cortisol and testosterone levels.

Cortisol has several functions, but high cortisol levels are correlated with stress. My cortisol level was at the high end of the normal range before the trip and dropped by 40 percent during the hike—a testament to the , even when you’re pushing your body.

Testosterone regulates energy, libido, muscle growth, aggression, and a host of other functions. During the trip, my testosterone level more than doubled, which is a fairly astonishing increase. Thru-hiking presents many confounding variables, so it’s hard to know exactly why this happened. Maybe it was carrying a 40-pound pack for ten hours a day (weight training to increase testosterone); maybe it was being on an adventure and . Whatever the cause, I’m not complaining.

Metabolic Efficiency

The body has two main energy sources: carbohydrates and fat. At low exercise intensities—like walking or jogging—the body is mostly fueled by fat. As intensity increases, the body begins using a greater proportion of carbohydrates. A typical person has about 2,500 calories of carbohydrates stored in their liver and muscle cells However, that same person—even if they are elite-athlete skinny—has 50,000 fat calories available. That’s a lot of potential energy waiting to be tapped.

For years, we’ve been told that carbs are the key to performance. That’s changed in recent years, as researchers have observed that, through diet and training, an athlete can burn fat at higher intensities than previously believed. The question I had before my thru-hike was this: Would walking all day, every day, for a month improve my metabolic efficiency when I run at a high intensity? In other words, could I become a better athlete by simply walking?

Before the trip, I was burning 66 percent fat and 34 percent carbs during low-intensity exercise or any activity during which I had a heart rate of 112 bpm. At a slow long-run pace, with a heart rate of 145 bpm, I was burning 52 percent fat and 48 percent carbohydrates. My crossover point—the heart rate at which I was burning carbs and fat equally—was 153 bpm, or a moderate-to-slow running pace.

After the trip, I was, as my test administrator at Real Rehab in Seattle put it, “a fat-burning machine.” At 110 bpm, I was burning 91 percent fat and 9 percent carbohydrates. At 145 bpm, I was burning 70 percent fat and 30 percent carbohydrates. My crossover point had moved to 168 bpm, which I reached at a fairly fast running pace. And even at my maximum heart rate (184 bpm), I was still getting a quarter of my energy from fat.

What does this mean? I can now go on long runs without consuming gels and other foods, or at least a significantly reduced amount. Also, the next time I go backpacking, I will be able to carry less weight in my pack because each gram of fat has nine calories, while a gram of carbohydrate or protein provides less than half that energy—around four calories. This means I can carry more high-fat foods like nuts and cheese, while cutting way back on sugary high-carb snacks like energy bars and candy. Plus, if I run low on food near the end of a trip (something that happened several times between resupplies during our thru-hike), my body will be able to run just fine on body fat until I make it to the next rest stop.

Conclusion

Now that I’m back home, I’m trying to maintain as much of my thru-hiking fitness as I can. In addition to my daily workout, I try to walk throughout the day, especially after meals. I’ve cut down on refined carbs. In their place, I pile my plate with vegetables and a good dose of fat. Two months after completing the Colorado Trail, my weight and body fat remain stable. I’m training for my first 50K.

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