Running

As a runner, you know your sport is hard on the legs. At the end of a long workout or a race, your thighs and calves feel beat-up. In fact, the sheer pain and weakness that results from absorbing three to four times your body weight on each foot, 40 or more times per minute, is often a bigger performance limiter than running out of energy. Think about it: at the end of your last marathon (or the longest race you’ve run), did you feel more tired than sore, or more sore than tired?

The next morning is even worse. Just getting out of bed can be difficult. And the more sore you are when you wake up, the worse your run will be that day. Research has shown that lingering muscle damage from previous training reduces running economy and interferes with the muscles’ ability to replenish their glycogen fuel stores. Muscle damage and soreness are facts of the runner’s life. However, there are some things you can do to limit the amount of muscle damage you experience during running and accelerate your muscle recovery. And supplementing with ARX is a great start.

How ARX Accelerates Muscle Recovery

Reducing muscle damage and soreness will improve your performance in tough workouts and races. It will also increase the amount of running you can do without becoming overtrained, as accumulating muscle damage and the inflammation that comes with it are believed to be major causes of overtraining fatigue. There are many different causes of muscle damage during running. One cause is called mechanical strain. Muscle fibers sometimes rupture under the stress of absorbing ground impact forces. Another cause is free radicals produced by your working muscles. These unstable oxygen molecules take apart muscle cell membranes, causing their contents to leak out, causing further damage.

Yet another cause of muscle damage during running is catabolism. In this process, the stress hormone cortisol breaks down muscle proteins so that their amino acid building blocks can be used for energy. Thanks to cortisol you are able to keep running even after your muscles run low on their preferred glycogen fuel. The downside is that your muscles are damaged in the process. Research has shown that as much as 15 percent of the muscles’ energy is supplied by protein during exhaustive exercise.

Low muscle glycogen levels act as a signal that triggers cortisol release and catabolism. Therefore anything you can do to spare muscle glycogen as you run will delay catabolism. One way to spare glycogen is to reuse the lactate that is produced by your muscles when glycogen is broken down anaerobically—that is, without oxygen—which happens increasingly as your running pace increases. Your body has a system called the lactate shuttle that clears excess lactate away from your working muscles and delivers it to the liver for conversion back to glucose and glycogen, and to other tissues for use as a direct energy source. The better your lactate shuttle works, the more energy efficient you'll be. As a result, it takes longer for your glycogen supplies to run low and for catabolism to begin.

That’s where ARX comes in. ARX is scientifically shown to accelerate the lactate shuttle and speed muscle recovery. Studies have also demonstrated that the resulting glycogen sparing dramatically increases endurance. But that’s not all. By sparing glycogen from use as a fuel, ARX spares your muscle protein from catabolism. That means you wake up the morning after a hard workout or race with less soreness and lingering muscles damage and you run better.

Run a little better every day with ARX and you’ll race a lot better when the time comes!