Health Benefits of Running
Health Benefits of Running ,So a good place to start is with why you should run in the first place.
And the big reason for a lot of people reading this is going to be that whole ‘weight loss thing’ that we talked about. Simply put, running is the number one way to lose weight..
Why Running is THE Number One Way to Lose Weight – Health Benefits of Running
That sounds like a bold claim, so let’s back it up.
And to do that, we’ll start by assessing how anyone goes about losing weight ever. What is the key to weight loss?
Actually, there is one very simple equation when it comes to losing weight –and that is that you have to consume fewer calories than you burn.
When you eat food, your body absorbs the nutrients to help support various processes in the body and it absorbs glucose in order to provide useable energy. That glucose moves around the bloodstream and when you move, breathe or run it is sent to muscles and the organs in order to give you the energy you need.
But what if you are just lying around and you’re left with energy left over? In that case, the sugar is converted into fat and is stored around the body under the skin. This is what makes us look less attractive and what can also cause numerous health problems.
Health Benefits of Running
On the other hand, if you need more energy that is available to you, then your body will have to look toward its existing fat stores. It will then put you in an aerobic state, meaning that oxygen will be sent to the fat stores and will break down the fat to provide you with more energy.
All this happens on a moment-to-moment basis but the best way for us to monitor it is to look at our daily total. That means we need to look at your daily calorie intake and our daily calorie burn in order to work out the difference.
What you’ll be left with is either a ‘calorie deficit’ or a ‘calorie surplus. A surplus means that you have leftover energy that the body is going to store as fat. A deficit means that you used more than you burned, so you’re going to have removed some of your fat. It’s a little like writing a budget but instead of trying to save money, you’re trying to lose calories.
Health Benefits of Running , so where does running fit in? It actually plays an important role for all kinds of reasons but the most simple and straightforward to understand is this: running burns a lot of calories. In fact, a forty-minute run will help you to burn something like 500–800 calories. That’s a huge amount and more than you could probably burn with any other form of exercise.
And to put this in perspective, most people will naturally aim to consume around 2,000–2,500 calories in a day. That means that running for just one hour can burn somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3rd of your total calorie count. That’s a big difference and it’s enough to make a significant impact even just twice a week.
There are actually more efficient ways to lose weight with running specifically though. We’ll talk about that more in a future chapter but just know – you can burn through a lot of calories.
But there’s more to this as well. Because if you look online for dieting, you’ll find that there’s a lot of debate as to whether this whole ‘calorie counting’ strategy will really work. Some people say it’s too simplistic and it’s more important to focus on the type of calorie you eat and things like hormones. Their view is that you can’t accurately track calories and that some people will burn more calories than others owing to metabolic differences. Maybe you have more testosterone, maybe you have more T3, maybe you have a slow thyroid.
And this makes a lot of sense if you look at someone who uses anabolic steroids or someone who does have hyper or hypothyroidism. Even someone with diabetes or insulin resistance. Hormones really do make a difference and calorie counting on its own doesn’t account for this. These individuals focus on things like low-carb diets because they believe they can control insulin and other hormonal responses that way.
What’s the truth here? Well, both camps have their points and again we’ll get to this in a future chapter. But what really matters is that it’s immaterial – because running helps you lose weight in this way too. When you run, your body will release a number of hormones like adrenaline and myostatin which will help you to break down fat and tissue. What’s more, is that your body will become more energy-efficient, so that even when you’re sleeping, you’ll be burning more fat. This will also be helped by the increase in muscle tone in your stomach and calves and your elevated VO2 max. We’ll get into all this later.
But basically, running has the short-term effect of burning lots of calories and the long-term effect of helping you to alter your metabolism and your hormonal makeup so that you will always be burning through more calories than you previously were…