Running can give you a longer life, better sleep, improved immunity, mood and more—it’s even good for your knees and lower back.
When you become a runner, it changes your life. But you may not know how much it improves every aspect. Here’s the evidence:
1. Running adds years to your life and life to your years.Numerous studies have shown that running increases lifespan. This has led to the oft-repeated observation: “If exercise were a pill, it would be the most popular pill in the world.” Worth noting: It would also be the least expensive, with little to no cost.
Few of us, however, simply want to live longer. Rather, we hope for a long, productive, healthy, active life. That’s where running and high-fitness shine. Since “seniors” consume a high percent of the public-health budget with their late-life illnesses, much research is targeted at what can be done to keep them healthy. Exercise nearly always wins this race.
2. Running helps you sleep better.If you haven’t seen numerous articles on the importance of sleep in recent years, you’ve been, well, asleep under a rock somewhere. And sleep may be especially important for athletes. After all, it’s when the body performs all its repair work. In Good to Go, her book on sports recovery, science writer Christie Aschwanden rates sleep as one of the few recovery “techniques” that’s actually supported by good evidence.
According to experts from Johns Hopkins, “We have solid evidence that exercise does, in fact, help you fall asleep more quickly and improves sleep quality.” An article in the American Journal of Lifestyle Exercise notes that the exercise-sleep connection goes both ways. The more you exercise, the more you need quality sleep. Also, the worse your sleep habits, the less likely you are to exercise regularly.
3. Running can improve your knees and back.This is one running benefit that many find difficult to believe. They reason that running is an impact sport, which must be bad on the joints. What’s more, everyone knows a few runners who developed knee pain, and had to switch to bicycling. True enough, but it’s also true that sedentary, out-of-shape adults have worse knee and back problems, on average, than most runners.
4. Running helps you lose weight, and keep it off.Because it involves continuously moving your entire body weight, running burns more calories than most other activities. And you don’t have to run fast to achieve max burn. You get almost as much from running slow (but it takes twice as long).
5. Running improves your immunity.Exercise scientist and 58-time marathoner David Nieman has spent the last 40 years looking at the links between exercise and immunity. He’s uncovered mostly very good news and a few cautionary notes, while also looking at the effects of diet on the immunity status of runners. His summary: Modest exercise improves immunity, ultra-endurance efforts can decrease immunity (at least until you have fully recovered), and dark red/blue/black berries help your body stay strong and healthy.
6. Running improves cognitive function, and reduces cognitive decline and Alzheimers.This is the newest and most unexpected area of health benefits produced by running, but it makes complete sense. Running raises heart rate and blood flow. That includes oxygen-rich blood being pushed to the brain. It’s hard to imagine this wouldn’t be a very good thing.
7. Running reduces risk of many cancers.In 2016, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a remarkable “Original Investigation” into the exercise habits and cancer incidence of 1.44 million American and European adults. The authors concluded that high-fitness exercisers, such as runners, had a lower risk for developing 26 different kinds of cancer than low- and non-exercisers.
8. Running improves mental health, and reduces depression.Many runners take up the sport to improve their physical fitness. After a short time, these new runners often give a different answer to the “Why do you run?” question. That answer: “Because it makes me feel better.” They’re talking about emotions, mood, mental energy, fewer blue days, and the like.
9. Running improves glucose regulation, and lowers risk of diabetes and pre-diabetes.High blood glucose levels, often leading to diabetes, are a major “side effect” of the obesity-overweight epidemic in the Western world. They also threaten to shorten healthy lifespans, and to overwhelm the public-health system (so many individuals; very high cost).
Running and other vigorous exercise can substantially improve this grim outlook.
According to the American Diabetes Association, exercise can:
1) Prevent or reduce Type 2 diabetes (caused, typically, by poor lifestyle)
2) Benefit those with Type 1 diabetes (largely caused by genetics). It can also prevent those with pre-diabetes from developing full-fledged Type 2 diabetes.
Bonus: Running builds your self-esteem.And when you have that, you can achieve just about anything. We don’t have a lot of studies to support this running benefit, because it hasn’t been much investigated. (Although this study of diabetes patients found that “Regular aerobic exercise plays an important role in improving self-esteem.”)
But we do have Oprah Winfrey. In the early 1990s, Oprah decided she wanted to do something special for herself during the year of her 40th birthday: She wanted to get in shape, and finish a marathon. Despite her background as being an overweight, non-exercising, African American woman, she nailed her goal in the 1994 Marine Corps Marathon, completing the distance in a respectable 4:29. Afterwards she said, “Life is a lot like a marathon. If you can finish a marathon, you can do anything you want.”
In addition, we’ve heard thousands of stories from runners about how running taught them an important life lesson: Take one step at a time, just one at a time, and you can get where you want to go–in a marathon, in pursuit of your educational goals, in launching a new business, in recovering from loss and disease, and so on.
We’re not saying that running is easy … or that life is easy. Neither are. But running is measurable; we count the miles and minutes; we can see where we were at the beginning of our journey, and how far we have come. This teaches a simple truth: Effort produces results, no effort produces nothing. The effort is worth it.