Updated February 20, 2025.

If you are beginning a new fitness program, you may hear your instructor or trainer mention activating your “glutes.” While you have probably heard the word before, you may not know why they matter to your fitness. What even are they, and how do they affect your daily movement?

Buying new shoes can be overwhelming. You could just get the most popular thing on the market, or you could spend hours reading articles and product reviews to try and figure out which shoe is really the best. With running and walking shoes, especially, it seems like everyone has an opinion about which ones are the best. But what’s the difference? Do you need a pair of shoes for each activity?

When you want to get serious about running as a sport, there are a few things you need to consider. First, you think about your goals. Do you want to do that marathon with your friends next year, or just learn to love running as a daily activity? Then, once you figure out your goals, it may be time to go shoe shopping. But how do you know what shoes would suit you best?

In any sport, there is a drive for constant improvement. The most successful athletes are the ones whose drive for improvement never fades. There is a constant hunger to be faster and prevent injury for runners, especially. But when you want to adjust your training to promote better running mechanics, where should you start? What should you focus on?

When you look at a picture of a Tyrannosaurus rex, you can quickly figure out what they were built to do. With 6-12 inch teeth and a powerful jaw, as well as solid thighs and enormous feet, you see immediately that this dinosaur was built to run after and eat other dinosaurs. It would be terrifying to meet one in real life, but you may get one chuckle out of the experience - seeing its arms. T-rex’s are famous for their tiny arms, which look pretty funny compared to the other huge parts of their body.

They say you are what you eat, which is partially true, in that what you eat influences directly how your body performs. To say it differently, you get out what you put in. If you only feed your body lousy food, you are guaranteed not to perform as well as you would like.

Many runners know what it is like to run through pain. You wake up in the morning with a sore knee, but you go out and run anyway because usually, your pain goes away after a minute. But what if it doesn’t go away? What if you seriously injure yourself because you do not know when to stop?

Picture this: it’s a beautiful day outside, and you decide to replace your daily gym routine with a nice run. After your warm-up, you pick up a good pace, feeling your heart pounding in your chest and the sun on your face. Suddenly, you feel a searing pain in the front of your shin that causes you to come to a full stop. You wonder, what in the world was that? Then, you worry that you may be suffering from a very common stress response for any runner: shin splints.

Rest is essential to any athlete’s routine, especially runners. If runners neglect to rest, they increase their injury risk and decrease their muscles’ ability to recover. Some runners may not rest as much as they need to, thinking that if they rest, they will slow their progress. On the contrary, runners who prioritize rest days tend to gain more progress over time.