Carbon Filter Masks

Do you have bad seasonal allergies? Or maybe the air quality where you live leaves a little to be desired?

In today’s Extra Kick, Coach Michael reveals the truth behind carbon filter masks and whether or not they’re right for you!


Audio Transcript

Coach Michael: Hey Runner Connect fans. Welcome to the Run to the Top Extra Kick podcast. I’m here to answer your training and racing questions.

Today’s question comes from Merek. He says, Hello Runners Connect community. Thank you so much for your great work. It helps me a lot. Winter is coming.

For most of you it only means a temperature drop. For me and I hope not for many people it also means training in the smog.

I live in a big city where in the winter time, smog is a disturbing matter. Of course, I can spend hours indoor running on the treadmill where air conditioning reduces pollution, but I don’t want to be stuck on a treadmill for several months.

The other solution except for moving out is to use a filtering mask.

Can you think of any evidence based benefits behind using such an aid? Can it be beneficial in anyway? Such news would be great incentive to run in such an inconvenient environment.

Michael: This is a great question and I’m going to start off with this but, there just hasn’t been that much research on this for runners.

There’s a lot of research for the effectiveness of masks in general environments, like work environments. For runners, there’s not much evidence. There are elite runners who use them like the American recordholder in the 10K Galen Rupp.

If he is racing somewhere that has either a smog issue or for him he has some bad allergies or somewhere with high pollen counts, anything like that, he’d wear this little mask when he warms up and even like for part of the race, if it’s a longer race.

I saw him do it in person. It was kind of weird seeing somebody with that mask on. There are people who use it but again there’s just not much studies done on runners in terms of the effectiveness.

One study I looked at was looking at different types of what they call personal respiratory protection equipment. They were looking at this in workplace conditions and I won’t go into the subject and method.

Their effectiveness during usual working condition was around 83% percent. That’s obviously a pretty massive amount so at that point I would assume that they mean you are eliminating 83% percent of the toxins.

Another study showed that carbon masking exhibited good absorption ability and this characteristic may contribute to avoiding inhalation exposure to vaporized C.P.A.

These results suggest that wearing activated carbon masks may prevent anticancer drug inhalation by health care workers.

That was specifically talking about people working in hospitals and stuff like that but nonetheless, you can see that there are effective; they’re effective to some degree.

Whether you can use them with running is a different story. In your specific case, I would have to say I think I would recommend doing a lot of training on the treadmill.

I hate and despise the treadmill and it’s no fun.

I completely understand that but at the same time, I think this is such a huge risk and I think because there haven’t necessarily been any good studies on these things for runners specifically, I don’t feel like I can properly recommend that you go run outside.

Based on my intuition, I would say that maybe that the harder workouts and the speed sessions is probably the more important stuff to do on the treadmill.

You really are literally sucking air, right? I would see that to be a time where get on the treadmill just makes more sense.

It’s hard for me to recommend you do any training out in that but if you have the mask clearly, we can see from several different Pub Med studies that clearly it does work.

It eliminates some toxins and it does help improve the quality of the oxygen that you’re inhaling but at the same time It has been studied on runners. I think you’d probably be best to just bite the bullet and train on the treadmill for the winter.

Not a whole lot of evidence necessarily but clearly it does have some effect.

One other thing I did want to add is that when you’re talking about issues with your environment talking about oxygen you know getting poor oxygen, a lot of a lot of times you talk about free radicals.

This gets into maybe a not so well studied territory but at the same time, there is definitely some things that are pretty universally accepted to help you reduce those free radicals in your body and detox your body.

Detox has been thrown around a lot kind of in like pseudo-science realms but nonetheless it is something that’s important.

The number one thing is water. Make sure you’re getting a lot of clean water ideally filtered. Make sure you’re very well hydrated. You should be peeing you about 8-10 times a day.

Eat your vegetables.

Vegetables have great properties that allow them to fight free radicals in your body and keep you healthy.

You could try juicing vegetables. You can get a good juicer for like 40$ or something on Amazon and juicing vegetables can just be a very potent shot of the nutrients from vegetables in your body.

Other than that, keep your stress as low as possible. Sleep well, all the regular stuff in terms of a good diet and a good lifestyle, is all very important to eliminating in and reducing the impact of those free radicals.

Merrick, I really would recommend that you honestly just bite the bullet like our good friends in the of the U.S. and Canada and such, who have to bite the bullet and do the majority of their running on the treadmill.

That’s it for today and thank you so much for joining me this week. I had a lot of fun. Don’t forget to submit your questions at runnersconnect.net/daily and we’ll feature a question on the show.

Enjoyed this question and answer? Consider subscribing to our daily podcast where we answer your questions.

By subscribing, you get to learn every day while you run or while at the gym. Plus, you can always skip over questions you already know the answer to.

Have your own question? Ask our coaches!

You May Also Enjoy...

Running downhills

How do you get better at downhill running? Are there any tweaks you can make to your form or things you can do in training

What to do at stop lights

How should you handle unplanned breaks in your run for things like stoplights, etc? Should you jog in place, walk, or stop? Does it even

When to replace your shoes

When should you replace your shoes? Many of us have heard every 400-500 miles, but what if they were all treadmill miles, or still look