How to choose your anti-pollution mask for running?
Running in urban areas, pollution can make your sport difficult, especially on days with high pollution peaks. If scarves and surgical masks don’t really protect your lungs from particles, what about pollution masks? Are they really effective? Here are some explanations.
Why use an anti-pollution mask when running?
To provide our body with the oxygen it needs, we need to breathe about 15,000 liters of air per day. This high exposure makes the environment the main threat to our lungs and our health.
Using a running pollution mask offers superior protection against fine particles, dust and other air contaminants, but also against pollen and other allergens.
Particulate Matter is the fine solid and liquid particles carried by the air. In simple terms, fine particles are like dust. In the case of air pollution, these dusts are often the result of combustion that is not total, and generate unburned particles. When we see smoke coming out of a muffler, a chimney, or a cigarette, it is because there are a lot of particles, of more or less small size.
The advantages of the anti-pollution mask
When you are on foot, bicycle or motorcycle, the anti-pollution mask protects you from emissions. With the arrival of the beautiful days, this mask is also useful to protect you from bacteria and volatile allergen components such as pollen, but also from allergens from animals.
Some mask models use an activated carbon filtering principle. Activated carbon refers to a carbon that has the property of effectively fixing and retaining particles that come into contact with it. Its strong absorbent power is due to its structure composed mainly of carbon atoms, obtained after a carbonization step at high temperature. In summary, the activated carbon filter allows the mask to filter polluting fumes such as exhaust emissions.
The mask is positioned under the chin and around the mouth, and a piece of flexible aluminum sewn into the mask allows its shape to be shaped to fit around the nose, thus avoiding air leaks. Inspiration remains easy and fluid even when riding a bike in an urban environment.
Anti-pollen mask, a solution?
In France, about 5 million people are sensitive to pollen every year.
One of the first signs of the arrival of spring is pollen and its allergies. Pollens are small plant cells (from 7 to 150 µm) allowing plants to multiply. Their size makes them impossible to filter through the natural barriers of the human body, which is why they manage to enter the heart of the lungs.
A mask will allow you to breathe air that will filter the pollens as well as the bacteria present in the air while keeping a comfort and style, while running, on your bike during your biketaf trips for example.
