Photo: Antonio Guillem (Shutterstock)

If you’ve gotten used to monitoring your Cardio Fitness level on your Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Health, or another activity tracker or app, you may have noticed that it has been going down lately – or maybe did not increase that much you would have expected. But if you’ve kept your workout, the dip may not mean a drop in fitness at all.

I speak specifically to those of you who live in climates that are currently summer and the heat is somewhere between intense and oppressive. In other words, much of the United States right now. Naturally, We all run and cycle more slowly when it’s hot outside, and even slower when heat and humidity come together to make being outdoors especially punishing.

And since fitness trackers use your workouts to calculate your cardio fitness score, slowing down in the summer can affect results.

This is how the cardio fitness score of your app is calculated

To understand what’s going on, it helps to know how these cardio fitness scores are calculated. While some devices, including Fitbits, use your resting heart rate to give a rough estimate when you can’t do GPS-enabled exercise, most devices use outdoor distance runs to find out how fit you are. If you are able to run faster than before with the same heart rate or the same speed as before with a lower heart rate, the gadget will conclude that you have become fitter. (Depending on the device, other training units also count towards the cardio fitness scores; Garmin z. can use cycling, assuming you have the right setup.)

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This makes a lot of sense, and as a result, you can have one decent estimate of your VO2 maxthat would otherwise require a laboratory test. But the algorithm doesn’t take into account all the factors that can speed up or slow you down. Some only measure cardio fitness on level ground, which is a good place to start, but as far as I can tell, no one takes the weather into account.

We run slower in the heat and our heart rate increases up to 20 beats per minute faster while our circulatory system reconfigures itself to keep us cool (for example, more capillaries open near the skin, which as a side effect leads to that tomato-faced look). As a result, your gadget’s fitness calculations may be discarded.

I started looking at my fitness score in the spring and enjoyed seeing it slowly climb higher as I did more cardio. But on the first really hot morning of summer, while chugging up a hill, the thought occurred to me: This will boost my score, won’t it? I’ve been watching the numbers, and yes they’ve gone down a bit since the temperatures started to rise. According to my Apple Watch, my score was 33.5 in April, 34.6 in May, and 34.9 in June, but it’s now back down to 34.5. The good news is that once the weather cools again in the fall, my stats will likely skyrocket again.

But more importantly, this is a reminder that the numbers coming from your fitness tracker are simply the numbers that the tracker can easily measure and calculate. They are not always the most useful yardstick for understanding your fitness. Instead, pay attention to how much time you spend training, how constant you are in your workouts and how you perform on the metrics that are important to you, such as your times in target races. And most importantly, look for year-on-year trends instead of getting excited about things that change from week to week or day to day. Work hard consistently over the years it will always pay off.

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Running injuries are common. So often that, I guess 50 percent of runners get injured every year, with some experts thinking that the real number could be even higher. Common injuries are stress fractures, IT ligament injuries, and runner’s knees. And in the past year, many people have changed their running routine – some out of necessity, others because of increased stress or anxiety.

“I’ve seen a huge increase in stress fractures, which are an overuse injury from high impact activity,” said Dr. Katherine Rizzone, an assistant professor of orthopedics at the University of Rochester who specializes in the management of injured runners.

In the past year, Rizzone has experienced many injuries such as tendonitis and fatigue fractures. Since she lives in Rochester, NY, she also saw many injuries from runners slipping on snow and ice during the first few months of the lockdown, when the weather was cold and slippery and the gyms were closed.

In a recent study published in the journal Limits in sport and active lifethe researchers asked more than 1,000 runners about their running routines before and during lockdown and about injuries they might have sustained.

Of the 10 percent of runners who said they were injured during lockdown, the most common risk factors included increasing the frequency of intense training sessions, moving from training location to lockdowns, and making multiple changes to their training routines at the same time.

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Although this study has a number of limitations – including self-reported data and a biased, mostly female group of respondents – the results are in line with some of what Rizzone saw at their runner clinic over the past year. As conditions have changed over the past year, many of us have changed our running routines.

Because of this, it’s more important than ever to take a look at your entire exercise regimen to avoid some of the most common injuries Rizzone saw in runners during the pandemic. To avoid becoming one of Rizzone’s next patients, here are some exercise strategies she recommends:

Cross training is important

For many runners, closed gyms meant they weren’t able to do their normal cross-training like swimming, biking, or elliptical machines.

“Instead, they are now running again six or seven days a week. That wasn’t smart for a lot of people, ”said Rizzone.

As a result, she has seen many more overuse injuries from runners who used to do cross-training regularly but just ran again. To avoid an overload injury, make cross-training part of your routine instead of just running all the time.

Gradually increase the intensity

When trying to increase your workout, be it total mileage or intensity, it is best to do so gradually. With regard to mileage, the recommendation is not to increase your total mileage by more than 10 percent per week.

Rizzone’s advice is to work on increasing your total mileage and intensity at different times. For example, you could spend a couple of weeks increasing your running performance and then a couple of weeks increasing your intensity.

“If you increase the amount and intensity at the same time, you really get into trouble,” she said. “Increases one by one.”

Weight training helps

Runners are notoriously bad at incorporating weight training into their routine. However, strength training has many benefits for runners.

“Runners have lower bone density than other people, so they should be lifting to protect their bones,” said Rizzone.

Weight training also has the benefit of increasing your overall body strength and correcting some of the muscle imbalances that you would get from constant running. The leg muscles you get from running are a definite advantage, but it’s nice to have a strong core and some upper body strength too.

Factor rest and relaxation

The value of rest is often overlooked by runners.

“Rest days are important,” said Rizzone. “People shouldn’t really be walking six or seven days a week.”

For people who are having a hard time resting, they can take relative rest periods where they do a different type of workout that uses a different set of muscles, such as yoga, weight lifting, or cross-training. It is important that you do not overuse the same muscles over and over again, as this will lead to injuries.

Think about other lifestyle changes

The runners who followed a constant training schedule over the past year also had problems, mostly due to changes in the rest of their lives. One culprit is that we are much more sedentary than we used to be, which can lead to back problems. Another surprising reason is the fact that most people do not wear shoes during the day when they are working from home. If you develop foot pain without significantly changing your workout, you can wear shoes during the day.

“I’ve seen a lot more foot pain in runners over the past year,” said Rizzone. Eventually she learned to ask if they wore shoes during the day. For many of them, the answer was no.

“For many people, foot pain went away when they wore shoes more regularly,” she said.

Injuries happen. When they do, they’re frustrating for a number of reasons, not least because they’re forced to sit on the sidelines just to get out. To prevent injury, it is important to take a holistic view of your training and remember that the goal is to train safely over the long term.

Photo: Rimma Bondarenko (Shutterstock)

Tomato paste is a kitchen staple that adds vegan umami and depth to sauces, rice dishes, stews, and any seasoning or dressings you stir it into. And whether you buy your paste in a can or in a tube, there’s always that last, annoying bit of paste that isn’t quite enough for a full recipe, but just enough to do anything with. That something should be Bloody Marys.

A tomato-based cocktail should be a super hearty umami bomb. Tomato juice is pretty umami-forward (and clam juice and fish sauce can help), but the concentrated nature of tomato paste allows you to enhance the flavor without the need for shellfish or fermented anchovies, which can be off-limits due to dietary restrictions or allergies.

Tomato paste brings the focus back to what the Bloody should be about: How well tomatoes go with vodka (or tequila or gin). It contributes deeper, richer flavors and less water than juice, and keeps your alcohol-to-no-liquor ratio where it should be (heavy in the alcohol).

It’s not difficult to add tomato paste to a cocktail. Squeeze or dab it directly into the shaker, or use it to make a lot of mixture. I never make my bloodies the same way twice, and I almost always make them to taste, but one tablespoon of paste per drink should be enough. Combine it with Horseradish Vodka for a brunch drink to cleanse the sinuses or with a Sprinkle of Adobo sauce for something spicy and smoky. Shake with plenty of ice, then pass through a sieve to collect pasty lumps and bits. After all, we make cocktails, not soup. (The only things you should chew are pickles, vegetable sticks, and various other snacks that come with the drink, not the drink itself.)