I am Catholic and I run! A 52 year old husband and father working to get faster and fitter. 🙏🏃🏋️
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Running while Catholic retweeted
A sauna is not a passive activity. Your heart works about as hard as it does during light cardio, and that changes how you should read the survival data.
Sauna gets treated as relaxation, which makes the longevity findings look like magic, but the mechanism is simple. When you sit in heat that intense, your body's main job is to get rid of heat before your core temperature rises. It does this by opening the blood vessels in your skin and sending a large share of your blood to the surface, where the heat can escape. With so many vessels open, your blood pressure would fall, so your heart has to pump faster and harder to hold it steady. Your heart rate climbs and stays up for the whole session.
One study tracked heart rate and blood pressure through a 25-minute sauna session and compared it with an exercise bike test in the same people. The strain on the heart matched light to moderate exercise, roughly the effort of an easy to steady bike ride. Sitting still in the heat was doing real cardiovascular work.
In another study, 102 adults who each had at least one heart disease risk factor did a single 30-minute session. Afterward their arteries were measurably less stiff, and the top number of their blood pressure dropped from 137 to 130. One session moved both in a healthy direction.
The survival data lines up with that. In a study of 2,315 Finnish men followed for about 20 years, the more often someone used the sauna, the less likely he was to die during the study. Death rates dropped step by step. They were highest in men who went once a week, lower in those who went two to three times, and lowest in those who went four to seven times a week. Deaths from heart disease followed the same pattern, so the benefit grew with how often the men went, not just whether they went at all.
This study observed one group of middle-aged Finnish men rather than running a controlled experiment, so it cannot prove that sauna caused the benefit, and the frequent users may have been healthier to begin with. No trial has tested sauna directly against lifespan. What the evidence does show is that heat gives your heart and blood vessels a real workout, and the dose that matters appears to be how often you do it.
References: Laukkanen et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015. Laukkanen et al., Journal of Human Hypertension, 2018. Ketelhut and Ketelhut, Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 2019.
Running while Catholic retweeted
When being just and honest comes at a price, pay it. When forgiving seems like a defeat, forgive. When everyone tells you to think of yourselves first, do not be afraid to put yourselves in the last place. Be willing to give up time, money, comfort and plans to serve others. May those who see you find themselves asking: “Why do they live in this way? Where do they get this freedom? Why do they love one another so much?” #ApostolicJourney #Uruguay
Running while Catholic retweeted
We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that there are children who do not go to school. We cannot silence our conscience when we see a mother lacking the means to feed her children. We cannot ignore the many people around us who are suffering, alone and vulnerable. We need to commit ourselves to the charity and closeness of the Good Samaritan who did not remain indifferent upon seeing misfortune, but took responsibility for his brother’s life. (Lk 10:29-37) #ApostolicJourney #Uruguay
Running while Catholic retweeted
Creatine and beta-alanine may help decisive endurance efforts 🚴♂️
This structured narrative review included 19 articles, examining creatine, beta-alanine and their co-supplementation for endurance athletes 🔍
Key findings ⬇️
🧬 Beta-alanine increases muscle carnosine and intracellular buffering, potentially delaying fatigue when glycolytic demand is high
⏱️ Its clearest value may be in efforts lasting 1–10 min, or longer races containing threshold work, repeated surges, climbs and finishing sprints
📈 Some studies improved time to exhaustion, 10-km running or late-race sprint power, but several found no benefit for time trials or VO₂max
🥄 The review suggests 3.2–6.4 g/day for ≥4 weeks, divided into smaller doses to reduce paraesthesia
⚡ Creatine may support repeated high-intensity efforts through greater phosphocreatine availability, ATP resynthesis and buffering capacity
🍞 It may also enhance carbohydrate-mediated glycogen resynthesis and potentially reduce muscle damage and inflammation
🚴 Benefits appear most plausible in cycling, triathlon and tactically variable events involving repeated accelerations or decisive sprint finishes
🏃 Any transient body-mass increase may matter more in weight-bearing events such as running
↔️ Creatine has not consistently improved VO₂max, lactate threshold, time to exhaustion or overall endurance performance
🧪 Combining creatine and beta-alanine has not shown a clear additional benefit for aerobic capacity or endurance performance
⚠️ Most evidence comes from untrained, recreational or moderately trained participants, with little direct research in elite endurance athletes
For endurance athletes, creatine and beta-alanine are best periodised around high-intensity training or races involving surges, climbs and sprint finishes, rather than treated as universal supplements for steady-state endurance ✅
Reference:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4295…
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Running while Catholic retweeted
'I consider myself a poet first and a musician second.'
'It ain’t the melodies that’re important man, it’s the words.'
- Bob Dylan
Running while Catholic retweeted
Concurrent training may limit maximal strength without blunting hypertrophy 🏋️
This randomised 11-week study compared endurance, resistance and concurrent training in 30 trained young men, examining lower-body strength, explosive performance and muscle morphology 🔍
Training comprised 5 weeks emphasising maximal strength, followed by 6 weeks targeting explosive strength 📆
Results 📊
💪 Maximal voluntary isometric contraction increased only with resistance training (+18.4%), suggesting concurrent training may limit maximal-strength development
⚡ Peak rate of force development improved with resistance (+31.8%) and concurrent training (+23.1%)
⏱️ Resistance training produced progressive improvements across both phases, whereas concurrent training improved mainly during the second
🚀 Early-phase force development (0–50 ms) improved earlier with resistance training, while the concurrent group improved only from mid- to post-training (+38.3%), alongside greater quadriceps activation
🆙 Countermovement-jump positive impulse increased with resistance (+12.7%) and concurrent training (+8.8%), with no evidence of interference
📈 Vastus lateralis cross-sectional area increased with resistance (+17.0%) and concurrent training (+8.8%)
🧬 Muscle pennation angle also increased in both groups: +18.6% with resistance and +10.1% with concurrent training
↔️ Endurance training alone produced no improvements in rate of force development
⚠️ The study was small, included only trained young men and lasted 11 weeks
For trained athletes, concurrent endurance and resistance training may constrain maximal isometric strength and delay rapid-force adaptations, but well-periodised resistance training can still produce meaningful hypertrophy and explosive-performance gains alongside endurance work ✅
Reference:
ovid.com/jnls/nsca-jscr/abst…
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Running while Catholic retweeted
'I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it'
Bob Dylan speaking to the New York Times in 2022
Running while Catholic retweeted
Yes, but…
Not if you exercise beforehand.
Older muscle needs more protein in a single meal to get the same building response as younger muscle. In older men, muscle building kept climbing with protein doses well past the point where it had already maxed out in younger men.
Older muscle is less responsive to small amounts of protein, so a light meal that works fine for a 20-year-old may do very little for a 70-year-old.
If someone is hoping to hold onto muscle with age, it's clear that each meal needs a generous serving of protein, and that need grows over the years.
Running while Catholic retweeted
Since zone 2 is now dead I’m going to just run easy for about 80 percent of the time.
Running while Catholic retweeted
After 6 years of living in America, this young man returned to Brazil to celebrate his father's birthday without anyone knowing..
Running while Catholic retweeted
🏃♂️🫁 A remarkable historical photograph (1968) of the legendary exercise physiologist and running coach Dr. Jack Daniels.
🔬 Daniels sits atop a car, holding an oxygen-measuring device (Douglas bag) used to collect expired air from runner Bob Williams, who is wearing a breathing mask.
🏔️ The photograph was taken at the U.S. Olympic team's high-altitude training track, located at 7,377 feet (2,248 m) above sea level.
The test was one of dozens conducted daily to assess athletes' physiological adaptations to high altitude in preparation for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, held at a similarly high elevation.
📸 August 8, 1968 | Bettmann / Getty Image
Running while Catholic retweeted
Creatine may improve sleep consistency during perimenopause 💤
This randomised trial examined whether creatine supplementation alongside 6 weeks of high-intensity resistance training influenced cognition, sleep and menopause-related symptoms in 51 perimenopausal women 🔍
Participants were allocated to creatine (n=18), placebo (n=20), or non-training control (n=13) 🏋️
Creatine and placebo groups completed a 5-day loading phase at 20 g/day, followed by ~4.5 g/day maintenance, alongside twice-weekly progressive resistance training 🥄
Results 📊
🧠 Stroop reaction time improved over the 6 weeks, but there were no between-group differences in cognitive performance
🩸 During the Stroop test, prefrontal oxygenation increased with creatine by +0.32%, while it decreased with placebo by −1.62%
😴 Sleep consistency improved more with creatine, with a baseline-adjusted advantage of +7.4 percentage points versus placebo at week 6
🌡️ Creatine was also associated with fewer self-reported temperature-sensitivity days
↔️ The abstract does not report clear benefits for memory performance or other menopause-related symptoms such as fatigue, soreness, brain fog or bloating
⌚ Sleep and symptoms were monitored daily using WHOOP wearables, while cognition was assessed with Stroop and Rey 15-item memory testing
⚠️ The intervention was short, the sample relatively small, and creatine was combined with resistance training, meaning the findings do not isolate creatine in a completely sedentary context
For perimenopausal women undertaking resistance training, creatine may offer benefits beyond muscle by improving sleep consistency and cerebral oxygenation, but larger and longer trials are needed before treating these effects as established ✅
Reference:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4292…
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Running while Catholic retweeted
Jess McClain just got 2nd at the NYC Marathon. In 2020, she walked away from professional running when it became "all about making the podiums and teams at all costs."
Now, she becomes the first American to make the podium since 2018.
Sometimes you have to let go to get the most out of yourself.
McClain was a phenom, high school star, multiple time all-american in college, signed a pro contract. But it just wasn't working. "There was a point earlier in my career where it was all about making the podiums and teams at all costs. But I realized that was not the best approach...It's a fun-sucker when it's all about pace and you're focusing on splits every 200 meters."
Jess found her way back to it doing it her own way working a full time job and staying busy.
"I've lived the life of having running be my full-time job day in and day out. And personally, I just can't operate in the sport in a healthy way with that approach. I just need something else to focus on." The job gave her a safety net: "I knew at the end of the day I could blow up, but I would still have my job."
She came back on her own terms and paved her own way to participating in the sport she loved and wrote her own definition of success. One with more perspective than we're sold online: "I realized, 'Ok, on this giant planet, running is a very, very small part of it...My friends and family love me because I'm Jess. And not because I'm an elite runner.' As silly as it sounds, my personal mission with running is just to keep it fun—to control what I can control and enjoy getting to the starting line. And I'm having a total blast."
Now, she went toe to toe with the best marathoners on the planet, battled all the way to the finish. Too often, we paint the picture that there's only one way to the top. You've got to be obsessed, all-in, serious, no fun...
That's not true. Yes, McClain works incredibly hard. But she's found a way to hold on to the love of the sport, to keep the fun that fuels her pursuit.
There's a paradox when it comes to performance. You have to care deeply, but that care can become the thing that gets in the way. It starts to suffocate you, to take away the joy that made you fall in love with the pursuit in the first place. The best performers learn how to care deeply, but to hold it loose enough to keep the joy. To make it where it doesn't feel like do or die, but instead that they are free to explore their pursuit.
T.S. Eliot once said, "teach us to care and to not care."
He might as well have been talking about racing.
Jess McClain just showed us that super power.
Care deeply, but don't let it steal your joy. We are at our best, when we are doing what we love, together, with others by our side, and it being an expression of ourselves. Not a verdict on who we are.
Running while Catholic retweeted
Believing you’ve had caffeine can improve performance ☕
This systematic review and meta-analysis included 17 studies and 257 participants, examining the effect of giving athletes a placebo while telling them it was caffeine 🔍
Key findings ⬇️
☕ Across primary performance outcomes, “placebo caffeine” produced a small-to-moderate improvement versus baseline (d = 0.49)
⏱️ The largest pooled effect was for time to exhaustion (d = 1.07), although this was based on only 2 studies
😮💨 Perceived exertion improved moderately (d = 0.52), suggesting expectation may make exercise feel easier
🏋️ Placebo caffeine also increased repetitions performed (d = 0.48) and total weight lifted (d = 0.73)
↔️ Effects on power output, velocity, heart rate, lactate and oxygen consumption were not significant
🧠 Placebo effects were larger when researchers were blinded to whether participants had actually received caffeine, suggesting researcher expectations may also influence outcomes
📣 Using more strategies to reinforce the belief that caffeine would improve performance was associated with larger reductions in RPE
🙋♂️ Effects appeared larger in studies with fewer women, but 82% of participants were male, making sex differences highly uncertain
📊 Between-study heterogeneity was low (I² = 21%), and results were not driven by any single study
⚠️ However, 9/17 studies were high risk of bias and the remaining 8 had unclear risk, resulting in low overall certainty
Interestingly, the pooled placebo effect (d = 0.49) sits within the range previously reported for actual caffeine, suggesting some of caffeine’s ergogenic effect may come from expectation alongside its pharmacological effects 🧐
For athletes, believing caffeine will work may meaningfully contribute to its performance benefit, so familiarisation, positive expectations and a consistent caffeine routine could help maximise the effect of actual caffeine use ✅
Reference:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4289…
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Running while Catholic retweeted
Written account of Jesus rising from the dead identified in 2,000-year-old manuscript, study suggests trib.al/caFpzVT
