Run for your life!
Really! Better brains, stronger bodies, happier hearts—run toward happiness with your Westminster family!
Running can literally increase the size and function of your brain. What?! Harvard Health reports that the boost in heart rate activated by running enlarges your hippocampus, the seat of memory and learning, and helps improve your thinking and remembering! By activating neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine, both information systems and mood get a boost, and neurotrophins, or proteins that affect the health and survival of brain cells, help grow new blood vessels and preserve plasticity, or the ability to learn and grow! Psychology Today explains how this added oxygen, carried in by new and active blood vessels, helps grow new cells; neurogenesis.
And it doesn’t stop there! Your body can better manage insulin and inflammation goes down, along with stress and anxiety, while mood and quality of sleep go up!
Alright—so your shoes are on and you’re poised to push off—excellent! Let’s make sure your body machine is in working order so you can get the most out of this, out of life.
Top to bottom—extend your spine so your ears are over your shoulders and you’re leaning forward from your ankles. Sound crazy? You’re using physics to propel you forward and conserving your energy. Lean forward from your ankles until you feel like you might fall, then catch yourself and repeat. Keep that spine long and lope so you land, rolling, around the middle back of your foot. This will distribute the shock most safely and help propel you forward. Relax your jaw, shoulders, and hands, and pump them forward and back (not side to side). Keep your chest open and your heart forward—imagine pinching a pencil between your shoulder blades if it helps. Breath with each step; in, in, out, out. Your breath is your foundation for everything—including running, and it is inherently linked with your rhythm, speed, and endurance.
So breathe in life. Breathe in community. Breathe in the fresh morning air. Come run with us!
