Throb No More
How to fend off those exercise-induced headaches

By Christie Knudsen

Just as you charge up a hill, intense pain clamps down on your head. For some six million people, it turns out, adrenaline is not the benign friend they thought it was. "When exercise pumps up adrenaline," explains Seymour Diamond, director of the Chicago-based National Headache Foundation, "it constricts blood vessels in the head, neck, and scalp, often producing a headache." And if the throb doesn't hit you midstride, it very well might afterward: As adrenaline subsides, the blood vessels relax and swell, causing the same sort of pressure.

To fend off so-called exertional headaches, you'll want to keep your adrenaline — and thus your blood vessels — from suddenly ebbing and flowing. Diamond says this is a matter of heeding several tenets that could benefit any athlete. First, warm up and cool down for 15 minutes, rather than the typical five to 10, which will rev up your circulatory system gradually. Second, don't skip sleep to fit in a workout: Fatigue makes you more sensitive to these fluctuations. Lastly, don't pooh-pooh the effects of bad-air days, altitude, or heat; these conditions do to your cranial vessel what the moon does to the tides.