This is an interesting report of a study looking at how teaching people to eat at maintenance - neither gaining nor losing - can have big benefits for long term weight control.
women who spent eight weeks mastering weight-maintenance skills before embarking on a weight-loss program shed the same number of pounds as women who started a weight-loss program immediately. More importantly, the study showed that the "maintenance-first" women had regained only 3 pounds on average a year later, compared to the average 7-pound gain for the immediate dieters.
Skyler Tanner, of Efficient Exercise, discusses shoulder and hip mobility exercises. These exercises can be useful to anyone but especially those in sedentary desk jobs.
I posted somethings earlier this year after seeing a talk by Nesa Carey. Here is a story I spotted the other day, which talks about some of the implications of this areas of discovery.
new research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine demonstrates that nicotine exposure also causes asthma in the smoker's grandchildren
ConclusionsGermline epigenetic marks imposed by exposure to nicotine during pregnancy can become permanently programmed and transferred through the germline to subsequent generations, a ground-breaking finding that shifts the current asthma paradigm, opening up many new avenues to explore.
For those who are parents, or wil be, this gives an awesome responsibility - your actions will be having an impact on your children and grandchildren that you cannot even understand. That is positive and negative.
In keeping with the last post on simplicity, I thought I'd post this. Remember that Einstein adage that we need to keep things as simple as possible but no simpler.
I went back to John Little's article - Done in One and I wanted to pull out some of the key principles that he stated there that might keep us on track:
What is the purpose of exercise?
the purpose of exercise is to recruit and stimulate as many muscle fibers (in all categories – slow twitch, intermediate twitch and fast twitch) as possible
for this to occur, a muscle or group of muscles must be given a load sufficient (but not excessive) enough to initiate a sequential recruitment of fibres, and
given a time frame that permits such fibres to be recruited.
to stimulate your body to grow stronger; getting stronger makes everything easier;
to employ fibres that otherwise might be left to decondition and atrophy and, thus, give your body a strong impetus to retain (or, in the case of sarcopenia, reclaim) these fibres and the multiple metabolic pathways contained therein. This is why we want to sequentially recruit all possible fibres.
to empty the glycogen stores within muscle fibres, which can serve to stave off potentially health-threatening conditions such as Type II Diabetes, high blood pressure, arterial plaque and heart disease.
However there can be negatives from exercise
injury - acute injury from a movement. A strain, rupture, tear, fracture.....
wear and tear - chronic problems that accrue from ongoing movement
So we want the benefits while minimising the risks.
How do we do this? What you do and how you do it
What you do? - pick safe movements that take account of proper biomechanics, joint function etc. Read Bill DeSimone's work, or watch this:
How do you do it? .....how indeed. How you perform each movement is important. Quoting John Little again:
Fibers can be recruited with motionless exercise (in which time and load are the only factors) [think TSC which is the latest fad], and they can be recruited with repetitions (in which case load, distance and varying leverage factors combine to accelerate the fatigue and recruitment process (i.e., in positions of poor leverage and higher levels of moment arm, the fatigue rate is accelerated, while in positions of good leverage and lower levels of moment arm, the fatigue rate is slowed).
You might have noticed that my frequency of posting has diminished a bit recently. There are various reasons - busy work, other commitments - but one thing is a degree of realisation of how much we try to complicate things. So much of exercise / health / fitness at root is pretty simple and straight forward. However we often seek novelty, look for the new secret exercise, protocol or diet that will transform us. Basic persistence and patience on the fundamentals gets too boring. There is a great value in Occam's Razor:
Plurality must never be posited without necessity
or
"Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler." (allegedly Einstein)
This happens so much with exercise. Making it complicated, using esoteric language, creating the secret gnostic priesthood who really understand and have the knowledge. Lets keep it simple.
Of course. Build some muscle so that they sugar you are eating has somewhere safe to be stored....
"Exercise professionals should strongly encourage the activity of lifting weights among adults of all ages to promote metabolic health," Drs Magyari and Churilla conclude. These efforts should focus on groups with lower rates of weight lifting: women, older adults, Mexican Americans, and lower-income people.
