What helps you fight stress? For some, it’s time they spend with their closed ones, for others, it’s playing at IviBet. But lots of people fight stress with running? Want to try? Then keep reading.
What Running Is Good for and Who It’s Suitable for
Unless there are obvious health contraindications, running can be suitable for absolutely everyone. It’s a sport with the lowest threshold of entry. Roughly speaking, except for sneakers, nothing is needed. You can run anytime, anywhere, any distance.
These are the most useful properties of running:
- Running helps you cope with anxiety. Even on a physiological level: we get energy from adrenaline, which is made from cortisol, which is responsible for stress and anxiety. While running, you can lift anxious thoughts from the subconscious and throw them into the furnace – they will burn, give energy, and then you will calm down. For some time after running, nothing bothers you at all, there is simply no more cortisol in the body, which causes anxiety. And during running, you can rethink some things that once frightened you, look at them from a different angle.
- Running gives you confidence. After running in the morning, you feel more confident all day long. You’ve already accomplished something, you haven’t let yourself down and you’ve done what you planned. In running, you need to find comfort in discomfort. That’s a valuable skill in life and running is a great school. When everything hurts, you can barely breathe, sweat is pouring into your eyes, but you feel fine. You get a state of flow and your legs seem to carry you forward.
- Running teaches healthy overcoming. Few people really want to run. Running is such an integrated healthy masochism. Running is enjoyable in that it’s unpleasant, difficult, sweaty, but you run anyway. And this “I can” makes you feel good: you get the feeling that anything is possible.
Finally, running teaches you to feel your body: when something is really bad and to your detriment, and when your body just wants to be weak and won’t let you go a little further. It’s not defeat we fear most, but success, how strong we can be. Running teaches us to make friends with that strength.
How to Prepare for the Class
Start running with a sober assessment of your abilities and physical condition. Perhaps you should consult a doctor for an objective assessment of your condition. There are a lot of contraindications and opportunities to harm yourself in running. It’s desirable to avoid them competently, and not to run through them with a battering ram.
Don’t run with excess weight: you can harm yourself so that then the joints won’t recover (it’s a huge load on them). Don’t run with cardiovascular disease. Do not run after drinking alcohol, even the next day.
Also before you start training, do some theoretical preparatory work. Find a coach who will show how to do everything right. Enroll in a running club where you can run with other people, knowing that they will prompt, help and rescue in case of trouble. Watch some videos on how to run properly. Make a plan – you don’t have to stick to it strictly, but it’s important to draw a trajectory for your further development.
It’s important not only to run but also to integrate a set of other healthy habits into your life. Eat a nutritious and varied diet: perhaps by increasing your food intake a little, especially on running days. Do stretching, yoga, and some static exercises that strengthen muscles and ligaments. Add strength training, emphasizing the development of body proportion: training the back and legs, jumping. Balancing strength training and cardio is good for the heart.
Perhaps jogging classes will allow you to get rid of bad habits. When you start running, you notice especially clearly how bad smoking, alcohol and even fatty foods make you feel.
You can start running on a treadmill: it’s suitable for all weathers and guarantees the same working out people around you if you work out in the gym. But it’s hard psychologically and can put the technique wrong. When you run in the street, everything around you changes – it’s inspiring.
How to Choose Equipment
Choose the right running shoes. To do this, you need to understand what surface you will be running on, what are the peculiarities of your foot and your running in general. To do this, you can go to special stores where they will examine you and pick up what you need.
In amateur running, the best choice of shoes is Asics. They have a wide range of different models for different needs (asphalt, ground, track) and different foot features. The guys from Runlab can help in the selection of shoes.
Everything else can be any. There are special running lines at H&M: you can buy shorts and T-shirts there. Everything is high-quality, drains moisture well, and lasts a long time (and clothes are subject to washing when running).
Think through where you will store things while running. It’s better not to keep your phone in your hand, but to place it in a special purse, for example. Water for short runs can be left out, but you can consider bags with bottle mounts. The best ones are those where the bottle will be located near the back – so it doesn’t dangle and doesn’t interfere with the run.
As your distances increase, consider running nutrition. For long distances, carbohydrate gels are critical. They help restore the body’s carbohydrate stores so that the body has energy to draw from. For long distances, it can physically run out of energy if you don’t start supplementing on time.
If running is regular, add isotonic drinks to your diet to help restore water and salt balance, avoid cramps, dehydration, and other negative consequences. A wide selection of different isotonics is available in any sports store, they are also sold in ordinary grocery stores.
