Not Quantity But Quality

I don't have a ton of respect for the authors of this newsletter, but this truth is particularly well expressed:

"Regular physical activity promotes general good health, reduces the risk of developing many diseases, and helps you live a longer and healthier life. For many of us, “exercise” means walking, jogging, treadmill work, or other activities that get the heart pumping.

"But often overlooked is the value of strength-building exercises. Once you reach your 50s and beyond, strength (or resistance) training is critical to preserving the ability to perform the most ordinary activities of daily living — and to maintain an active and independent lifestyle.

"The average 30-year-old will lose about a quarter of his or her muscle strength by age 70 and half of it by age 90. “Just doing aerobic exercise is not adequate,” says Dr. Robert Schreiber, physician-in-chief at Hebrew SeniorLife and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Unless you are doing strength training, you will become weaker and less functional.”"

http://view.mail.health.harvard.edu/?j=fe6617707764037d711d&m=febb15747d630d7a&ls=fde81d737062077c7d12757c&l=fe57157677630c7b7217&s=fe28167076600174771278&jb=ffcf14&ju=fe2a177571600d7e771576&r=0

Living is moving.  If you can't move, your life is diminished.  This is the potent, valid truth behind fitness - you don't need exercise to burn calories and lose fat (if you eat the right food, your body will regulate intake far better than you can), you NEED EXERCISE SO YOU CAN HAVE A GOOD LIFE!  So you can have choices, so you can keep living almost as long as you are alive, so that you can love full speed, play full speed and have the impact on those around you that will make your death a cause for grief.

Don't aim for hours on the treadmill, aim for more strength, more mobility, more power (for example jumping, sprinting and other speed work), more tests of balance, more coordination, higher skill levels, and always working for variance.  Invest in quality of workout not quantity.

BUT, don't give up the good because you can't be perfect - at least do something!  Do whatever exercise or movement you like and will do, and work for something better over time.

Bench Press - Just Say No

Many folks see deadlifts and squats as "dangerous", or even the olympic lifts (clean and jerk, or snatch), but the truly deadly lift is .... the bench press.

According to Mark Rippetoe (I do not remember if this was referenced in "Starting Strength" or "Practical Programming"), 12 people kill themselves annually bench pressing.  It happens when a barbell falls on the athlete's throat, resulting in (presumably) spinal cord injury or a crushed larynx or both.  This happened to a USC football player about two years ago, proving the value of "spotting" to bench press safety.  If so inclined, a YouTube search will reveal some gut wrenching video, and often from powerlifting meets in which the lifts have the so-called safety spotters, which seems to mean "someone who can safely lift the bar off of a guy after it crushed him."

You can certainly hurt yourself squatting, and it's pretty easy to do - just load up a bar really heavy and squat poorly; the less technique the better if you plan to trash your knees or back.  

Not that I recommend that!

In fact, I recommend you spend a lot of time learning to squat with skill, and squat to at least parallel, in which case the weights will be limited to just "human" levels when compared to the "superhuman" weights some folks foolishly do to quarter squat depths with poor technique.

However, looking at the risk/reward curve, the bench press is the worst of all worlds; it has no unique functional benefit (unlike squats, cleans and deadlifts), it is not safe without a physical object to prevent the bar from falling on a lifter's throat, and all the benefits you might get from "benching" can be had by pressing overhead, or weighted dips (and preferably both).  A big bench is fun, but a 50+ pound weighted dip is even more so!

I hate to even write those words - I benched unspotted, and heavy as I could manage, for years and scoffed at those who dared suggest there was anything wrong with that.  Luckily, I'm not benching stat today, and I plan not to be in the future.  I bench now, rarely, but with a home built platform under each side that allows me to bench with a high margin of safety.  BTW, these cheap platforms also serve for box jumps if needed, and with some adjustment allow squatting heavy (set up that way in photo below) without fear of a catastrophic fail (note for those who lift truly heavy - you won't need me to tell you that these boxes shouldn't be expected to save you from that 800 pound or heavier lift gone awry!).

Use It Or Lose It

Abstract

A contributing factor to the loss of muscle mass and strength with adult aging is the reduction in the number of functioning motor units (MUs). Recently, we reported that lifelong competitive runners (master runners = ∼66 yr) had greater numbers of MUs in a leg muscle (tibialis anterior) than age-matched recreationally active controls. This suggested that long-term exposure to high levels of physical activity may limit the loss of MU numbers with adult aging. However, it is unknown if this finding is the result of long-term activation of the specifically exercised motoneuron pool (i.e., tibialis anterior) or an overall systemic neuroprotective effect of high levels of physical activity.

Purpose: The purpose was to estimate the number of functioning MUs (MUNEs) in the biceps brachii (an upper body muscle not directly loaded by running) of nine young (27 ± 5 yr) and nine old (70 ± 5 yr) men and nine lifelong competitive master runners (67 ± 4 yr).

Methods: Decomposition-enhanced spike-triggered averaging was used to measure surface and intramuscular EMG signals during elbow flexion at 10% of maximum voluntary isometric contraction.

Results: Derived MUNEs were lower in the biceps brachii of runners (185 ± 69 MUs) and old men (133 ± 69 MUs) than the young (354 ± 113 MUs), but the old and master runners were similar.

Conclusions: Although there were no significant differences in MUNE between both older groups in the biceps brachii muscle, with the number of subjects tested here, we cannot eliminate the possibility of some whole-body neuroprotective effect. However, when compared with the remote biceps muscle, a greater influence on age-related spinal motoneuron survival was found in a chronically activated MN pool specific to the exercised muscle.

http://mobile.journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/_layouts/oaks.journals.mobile/articleviewer.aspx?year=2012&issue=07000&article=00006

You already know that as you age you lose muscle, and you may know that an estimate is that you lose 6% per year of muscle unless you engage in strength training, which is estimated to slow the rate of muscle loss to 1%. 

As a side note, the fact that Louie Simmons is powerlifting in the neighborhood of 700 pounds in the deadlift, 800 pounds in the back squat, and 600 pounds in the bench press at age 60+ is ... well, I don't know what to say about that except that Louie is one incredible lifter.  I doubt he has any serious contenders for the title of "World's Strongest 60 Year Old." http://www.westsidebarbell.com/  Yes, I know powerlifters use funny lifting suits and they are not shy about their use of drugs which allow them to train harder, some of which are of questionable legality.  Still - that's a lot of hard work and determination and guts.

If I read this abstract right, the short version is that it appears you delay muscle loss for those muscle you put to work.  The authors hope there's a systemic benefit, but this test did not show that effect. 

In other words, common sense prevails - if you want to sustain your ability to move yourself around as you age, train all the functions of the body.  Run, jump, climb, push, pull, lift and press.  If you want to maintain the ability to generate power (speed and force), you must train with explosive elements (punching, kicking, throwing, oly lifting, jumping, sprinting).  This stuff isn't, as the old joke goes, rocket surgery.

Muscle Mass Is Cancer Prevention

Very interesting study, skip to conclusions below if you don't like (as I don't) reading geek-speak in studies.
Abstract

BACKGROUND: Several hypotheses proposed to explain the worse prognosis for older melanoma patients include different tumor biology and diminished host response. If the latter were true, then biologic frailty, and not age, should be an independent prognostic factor in melanoma.

METHODS: Our prospective institutional review board (IRB)-approved database was queried for stage III patients with computed tomography (CT) scans at time of lymph node dissection (LND). Psoas area (PA) and density (PD) were determined in semi-automated fashion. Kaplan-Meier (K-M) survival estimates and Cox proportional-hazard models were used to determine PA and PD impact on survival and surgical complications.

RESULTS: Among 101 stage III patients, PD was significantly associated with both disease-free survival (DFS) (P = 0.04) and distant disease-free survival (DDFS) (P = 0.0002). Cox multivariate modeling incorporating thickness, age, ulceration, and N stage showed highly significant association with PD and both DFS and DDFS. DDFS was significantly associated with Breslow thickness (P = 0.04), number of positive nodes (P = 0.001), ulceration (P = 0.04), and decreasing muscle density (P = 0.01), with hazard ratio of 0.55 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.35-0.87]. PD also correlated with surgical complications, with odds ratio (OR) of 1.081 [95% CI 1.016-1.150, P = 0.01]. CONCLUSIONS: Decreased psoas muscle density on CT, an objective measure of frailty, was as important a predictor of outcome as tumor factors in a cohort of stage III melanoma patients. On multivariate analysis, frailty, not age, was associated with decreased disease-free survival and distant disease-free survival, and higher rate of surgical complications.

Read more here:
HT:  http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/muscle-and-cancer-it-is-not-getting-old.html

It's difficult to know without reading the whole study how they separated causality - IOW, were the folks that were more frail more frail because their cancer was detected later?  They had already had more treatment?  These obviously would confound the result, it would be nice to think they were ahead of those issues.

The BL:  the more I learn about it, the less significance cardiorespiratory endurance seems to have to health.  Strength is a much more relevant measure of health (or muscle mass, a correlate of strength).  In some ways this seems like a blinding flash of the obvious - if you have the strength to get up and down from the floor, up and down stairs and hills, can push a lawn mower, and so forth - you'll be able to be independent, mobile and active.  The fewer the restraints on your activity, the more alive you are almost by definition.  Running, or jogging, is great, but leaves a lot on the table in terms of health.  By adding squats, pushups, pullups, or any degree of strength training, you can significantly improve you chances of aging well - and apparently, of surviving illness, too.

Glucose Control? Pick Up Heavy Stuff

The link below will take you to the abstract of an interesting prospective study.  As always with these studies, it would be impossible to assert cause and effect relationships.  At least, it shows that having more muscle mass is not bad for you, and that perhaps sustaining activities which result in creating and sustaining muscular strength are healthful as regards glycemic control.

Conclusions: Across the full range, higher muscle mass (relative to body size) is associated with better insulin sensitivity and lower risk of PDM. Further research is needed to examine the effect of appropriate exercise interventions designed to increase muscle mass on incidence of diabetes.

http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/96/9/2898.abstract

Exercise For Brain Health, Maybe

An interesting study with some predictable findings and some findings that were a bit of a surprise.

The study involved 1,238 people who had never had a stroke. Participants completed a questionnaire about how often and how intensely they exercised at the beginning of the study and then had MRI scans of their brains an average of six years later, when they were an average of 70 years old.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/moderate-to-intense-exercise-may-protect-the-brain

The brain scans showed that 197 of the participants, or 16 percent, had small brain lesions, or infarcts, called silent strokes. People who engaged in moderate to intense exercise were 40 percent less likely to have the silent strokes than people who did no regular exercise. The results remained the same after the researchers took into account other vascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and smoking. There was no difference between those who engaged in light exercise and those who did not exercise.
Because this was not an intervention study, we don't know how much or how "intensely" the participants were exercising - and because I didn't look the study up, I don't know how "intensity" was quantified in this study.  I have met people who were convinced they were strong and worked out intensely who were in fact nearly pathologically weak. 

Further, there's kind of a chicken and egg thing - if you start having mini-strokes, do you think that might have an effect on how often and how hard you work out?  It reminds me of the study that showed that all of the 80+ year old folks in some big city or another lived in apartments for which there was no elevator, and they lived on the 2nd floor or above.  Does that mean if you walk up a flight of stairs every day you'll live to 80+?  Maybe, but it might mean that if you are healthy enough to walk stairs, you can stay in your 2nd floor apartment and if you aren't, you moved out.

Another chicken and egg issue involves diet.  If, as Taubes et al suspect, a poor diet affects activity level in the same way it affects health (short summary:  High carb diets create the starvation effect and therefore reduce activity level while accelerating metabolic derrangement), the folks who are eating a high carb, low fat diet will not be exercising as much or as hard - they'll be "too tired" and "won't feel like it" and they will also likely have higher inflammation levels ("I'm hurting today, I don't think we can work out"). 

IOW - the poor diet (which in my book means high carb, low fat) drives low activity level AND other negative health outcomes from metabolic derrangement.

Further, the high intensity folks, although they suffered these mini strokes at a much lower rate, were not immune.

In short, while the study shows a significant statisitical correlation with intense exercise and brain health, it cannot tell us why that correlation exists. 

However, I still advocate frequent, intense, and relatively short workouts for all the other benefits which can be quantified by the results those types of workouts create - more muscle mass, improved health bio markers, faster and more significant adaptation to the higher intensity stimulus, and reduction of the negative adaptation associated with excessive amounts of "cardio" training (muscle consumption, inflammation, joint trauma, inferior range of motion, and too much time spent working out).

For more on how the paleolithic model applies to aging well, I recommend Art De Vany's book, "The New Evolution Diet", which provides a potent mix of anecdotal perspective (Art is 70+ and strong as a bull after 30 years of living like a hunter/gatherer) and science (Art's a PHD and provides a plethora of science that comports with his premise).

Wendler Wisdom

http://articles.elitefts.com/articles/training-articles/10-nuggets-of-wisdom/

Every time I get a wild hair up my ass to do some assistance work, I pluck it out. Best be wary of the dingleberry. Training templates are fine but they should always fluid. Make the big exercises matter. Jim Wendler


Wendler's interesting in the ways he differs from Westside, but perhaps because he's no longer lifting as a competitor, and is just lifting because he likes to be strong without spending all his days in the gym. Speculating - but I like these ideas!

Women Need Strength More Than Men

This lady has a way with words! I like her message and how she presents it.  A martial arts instructor that  I trained with in the 80s said "Too much work makes you sick, too little work makes you weak."  The commonest of common sense, but how many of us, or our friends, do anything to solve the obvious problems of physical frailty?  So something!  If you can't get yourself to CrossFit, lift weights at a real gym.  If that's not an option, work on body weight circuits.  Try P90X.  If all of that's out of the question, jog two days a week and run sprints two days a week (kids love to race!).  
More options: Get a sandbag and work with it.  Tie a rope to something heavy and drag it.  Set up a cheap pullup bar and do a pullup each time you walk under it; or buy a set of rings and hang them for pullups and dips.  Mix your sprints, sand bag drags/carrying and pullups with different reps and durations and time your workouts and you are doing CrossFit without knowing it.  The amount of progress you can make with 10 minutes of warm up and skill work and ten minutes of blood sweat and tears doing workouts like these will change your life.


OK, so the point of what follows is how essential strength training is for ladies, but it ain't going to do gents any less good.


Increased self-esteem and decreased depression - Studies show that women who engage in a regular resistance training program report feeling confident and capable as a result of their training. Additionally, a Harvard study found that 10 weeks of strength training reduced clinical depression symptoms more successfully than standard counseling.

Women have 10-30 times less of the hormones that affect muscle-building. If it were that easy to get huge every guy on the beach would have massive biceps. But you don't see that. You see skinny dudes, fat guys and the men that you can tell lift hard, eat well and put in the years of hard work that goes into getting and maintaining a built physique. Getting stronger will make your life easier; picking up your children, putting heavy boxes in the attic, carrying your luggage, and even lugging laundry baskets up and down stairs. Life just gets easier when you're stronger. Start opening pickle jars for him.

Improved performance - You can use your imagination here. You are more ready willing and able for everything when you are stronger and in better overall shape. Whether you love to run with your dog, ski, surf, hike, golf, swim or have rowdy sex, performance increases relative with your strength and fitness.

http://articles.elitefts.com/articles/training-articles/what-women-should-never-do-but-often-do-while-trying-to-get-in-shape-part-1-of-6/comment-page-1/#comment-44048

Decreased risk of injury and chronic muscle aches - The best treatment for injury is prevention. Strength training not only builds lean muscle but also develops stronger connective tissue and increased joint stability. Get stronger throughout your whole body and enjoy the energy, balance and coordination that come with it. I can't tell you how many times I've worked with women and men that described themselves as having bad backs, knees, shoulders etc.and chalked it up to old injuries, pregnancy, and new strains that just won't go away.  The differences were always dramatic and even life changing. Get mobile, get stronger and get back to me.

Marathon for Health?

I've quoted Kurt Harris blog a few times, and now he's "hit the big time" with his blog being published on Psychology Today.  Kurt is noteworthy for being an MD, specifically he's a radiologist, so he's particularly well informed on the subject of this article - how to measure heart damage via imaging.  I recommend that you read the whole article, but he does such a good job of summarizing the subject that I submit that for your consideration.

Of note, my friend Crusader, has been telling me for the last 25 years that jogging is not good for me.  I didn't start to believe him until 2005 or so.  After finding CrossFit in 2007, I stopped "jogging."
Note: Underlining added by me for emphasis.

I think that atherosclerosis is not caused by lack of sustained high-level aerobic ("cardio") exercise.
Just like I don't think lack of "cardio" is the cause of the obesity epidemic.
I think premature atherosclerois is mostly caused by diet. Our susceptibility to a bad diet is contributed to by genetics.
I think that not only does sustained "cardio" not protect you from atherosclerosis, I think it is quite likely that through repetitive shear stress with endothelial damage and promotion of an inflammatory state, that it may promote atherosclerosis and/or direct cardiac muscle damage.

Further, I think that excessive "cardio" might precipitate the thromboembolic and acute inflammatory events like plaque rupture - acute heart attacks, even if it does not directly contribute to atherosclerosis, which I think it does.

Could "cardio" promote atherosclerosis and myocardial damage by being confounded by diet? That is, could the wheat, excess sugar and linoleic acid found in low fat "healthy" diets be more prevalent in marathon runners by virtue of their greater caloric intake of this noxious garbage?
That's a possibility. I think it may apply to cyclists, most of whom seem to eat horribly and who seem to be prone to osteoporosis.
Even if these findings are all confounded by a noxious athletic diet, I still find no grounds at all to believe that high levels of "cardio" protects your heart or makes you live longer. Certainly not "the more the better" which is what we've been led to think since the 1970s running craze.
I think a modicum of repetitive, aerobic-type physical activity can definitely improve your mood. I like to a run about 5 k a few times a week. It feels good and cross-country seems good for your coordination with all the varied terrain. A little cross-country and some sprinting sure seems to make me more functional.
I am not under the delusion that it will dramatically improve my overall health or my longevity, though. And I've seen no evidence that doing it every day or doing 5 times the mileage would be better. Just the opposite, in fact.
Same goes for eating "fruits and vegetables", gorilla levels of fiber, "antioxidants", and most supplements. No magic foods.
The really good kind of exercise, resistance training, makes you more functional and stronger. That is the only sensible definition of fitness if we follow the hippocratic oath with our selves.
Primum Non Nocere
I vote we keep the terminology. We should keep calling marathons, centuries on the bicycle and hours on those ridiculous stairmasters and treadmills "cardio" to remind us which organ we may be putting at risk.
Running a marathon is starting to look about as smart as boxing or playing football.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/p-nu/201103/cardio-may-cause-heart-disease-part-i?page=3

Take the Good With the Bad

I am, according to Jonathan Goodair, arguably the most revolutionary fitness trainer working in Britain today, a classic example of where most people go wrong. 'All you have been doing is exercising the same muscles again and again in the same way. In running you overwork your quads and underwork your gluts [that's thighs and bottom to you and me]. The body is a very clever machine. It adapts specifically to what you do to it, so it will find the easiest possible way to find fuel for that - in other words the most calorie sparing.'
Which is why at the heart of the Goodair Total Body Plan - a five- or six-week programme of between four and six 90-minute sessions a week - is what he calls treadmill aerobics. 'I want to work someone in the most challenging way possible, and put in as much variety as possible. I don't just make someone run, I make them skip or walk sideways or backwards, and then put in other movements that challenge their balance, and stimulate lots of muscles, not just the quadriceps.'
http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/article/TMG8217206/A-fitness-revolutionary-meet-Jonathan-Goodair.html

What's good about this?  The understanding that we're all - Americans, Brits, any neolithic society - frontal plane dominant, and inadequately developed in the glutes, hams and in the spinal erectors.

Imagine walking fast on a treadmill, then imagine lifting your knees high, like a little girl skipping down the street, then imagine doing that backwards, and sideways, and adding in lunges and squats and crossover steps, and sudden direction changes. This is what Goodair means by treadmill aerobics, and it's exhausting stuff.
What's the bad about this?  Well, first off, you don't need to work for 90 minutes!  If the athlete works hard enough, 10 minutes will buy more adaptation than will 90.  Intensity trumps duration!

Second, reading the above description, the athlete is not required to develop the two foundational attributes - powerful hip extension in combination with the capacity to sustain spinal integrity under load.    In short, this treadmill training is great for working "not very hard for a long time" but will not help the athlete generate force or power through hip extension, or transmit that power through a rigid spine.

Goodair says this engagement of the brain is key. 'Fitness isn't just about having a healthy heart and strong lungs and muscles,' he tells me in his soft Sheffield brogue. 'It is about co-ordination, about neural pathways, about the fact that your brain is connected to your muscles so you know where your feet are going, where your hands are going. If you do this kind of work you end up feeling much more coordinated, your body is much more connected even when you walk down the street.'


This is all fine - but coordination to what end?  Coordination so that you can walk the streets?  Can you lift your children?  Can you lift a suitcase when you are 60 or 80?

This approach continues in the resistance work, in which weights are largely eschewed in favour of stretchy bands attached to the ceiling, a giant pilates machine-cum-torture instrument otherwise known as the Garuda, and a series of free movements - arm swoops and leg swoops in every direction imaginable - that are incomprehensibly exhausting.
The author is overly impressed with exhaustion.  It's fine, it's far better than nothing, but more important is - what physical capacities are you cultivating?  If you can do that in 10 minutes, why waste 90?

Again, Goodair's chief concern is to avoid his client putting on muscle bulk; to encourage instead the development of the long, lean muscle we all covet these days.
This is nearly comic!  Look, guys can hardly put on all the muscle they want to, much less women - you can count on one hand all the women who will have to worry about gaining too much bulk in muscles!!  If you eat right and gain the benefit of an optimized metabolism, you will enjoy every strong muscle you can get, male or female.

However, here's some additional good:  'It is sugars that transport fat into fat cells, that disturb your body's metabolism, stopping it from burning fat,' says Goodair. 'Sugars make your body a less efficient fat-burning machine.' There is no calorie-counting on the programme, but all high-carbohydrate foodstuffs, be it bread or potatoes or pasta, are verboten.
Right as rain.

'If you are training consistently, yes, the ageing process will take effect, but the difference you can make is enormous. The less we do, the less we can do. The body adapts very specifically to what you do to it. You can stay supple and fluid.
There's aging, and there's quitting entirely.  The latter results in a rapid diminution of life, the former a very, very slight diminution of life.  You finish the race in casket either way, but the life lived can be remarkably different.

'You need to do 40 minutes of cardio three times a week minimum, ideally four, plus follow my resistance programme for 50 minutes four times a week [ see the video here ]. 
That's ridiculous - far too much time spent for way too little benefit gained.  Go short, go hard!  Intensity trumps duration.

Intensity Trumps Duration

Researchers in the area of muscle biology and aging have been finding growing evidence that prolonged aerobics training increase the risk of oxidative damage in the muscle. This type of training causes overwhelming accumulation of free radicals in your muscle, which eventually increase the risk of oxidative damage in your tissues (myofibrils and mitochondria). And this risk of oxidative damage becomes increasingly higher as you get older.

On the other hand, intense exercise protocols which are inherently short, have shown to lower this risk. The short intense exercise protocol gives the muscle the time it needs to recuperate and counteract oxidative stress without depleting its antioxidant pool. And again, short intense exercise yield the right impact needed to trigger your mTOR and increase muscle mass.

But there is more to it.

The mechano-overload impact of intense exercise works directly on your fast muscle fibers, the type IIB and the type IIA. It's the fast muscle fibers that enable you to be strong and fast, and they have the largest capacity to generate force and gain size.

You need them when you climb stairs, carry heavy grocery bags, chop wood or move furniture. And if you lose that physical capacity, you lose your ability to live independently.

http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2011/01/05/best-way-to-prevent-inevitable-muscle-wasting-as-you-age.aspx

In other words, as my friend Crusader tried to tell me in college, jogging isn't good for you.  Sprints are good for you, lifting heavy weights (relatively heavy, and a little bit more each week) is good for you, and high intensity mixed modal intervals (CrossFit) is good for you.  Intensity trumps duration!

There's a lot more in this piece, and I urge you to ignore most of it, particularly the math drill on leucine quantity - you can reach your goals without performing unnatural acts with whey protein, leucine loading, and other massive doses of obscure supplements.  Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar/wheat, supplement vitamin D to make up for our lost capacity to make it for ourselves through sun exposure, and take enough fish oil to make up for the extra omega 6 fatty acids our industrial food chain gives us. That's the critical 80% you need to be well, feel good, and perform at a high level.

Go To The Gym For Brain Food

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/a-better-brain-after-weight-lifting/

"Older women who did an hour or two of strength training exercises each week had improved cognitive function a year later, scoring higher on tests of the brain processes responsible for planning and executing tasks, a new study has found.

"Researchers in British Columbia randomly assigned 155 women ages 65 to 75 either to strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week, or to a comparison group doing balance and toning exercises.

"A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration — 0.5 percent."

Summary:  If you don't work very hard, you don't get a significant positive result, you've just wasted your time.

Weights for Kids

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/phys-ed-the-benefits-of-weight-training-for-kids/
"Somewhat improbably, from that scientific finding and other similar reports, as well as from anecdotes and accreting myth, many people came to believe “that children and adolescents should not” practice weight training, said Avery Faigenbaum, a professor of exercise science at the College of New Jersey."
"But a major new review just published in Pediatrics, together with a growing body of other scientific reports, suggest that, in fact, weight training can be not only safe for young people, it can also be beneficial, even essential."
The bottom line - their subjects benefitted from weightlifting.  The caveat - I did not consult the study to see what training they did, but I don't need to look.  I know what works for my kids, and what will work for your kids.  The same thing that works for Olympic athletes, scaled the ability and experience of your kids.

The article continues:  "Consequently, many experts say, by strength training, young athletes can reduce their risk of injury, not the reverse. “The scientific literature is quite clear that strength training is safe for young people, if it’s properly supervised,” Dr. Faigenbaum says."
When should they start?
“Any age is a good age. But there does seem to be something special about the time from about age 7 to 12. The nervous system is very plastic. The kids are very eager. It seems to be an ideal time to hard-wire strength gains and movement patterns.” And if you structure a program right, he added, “it can be so much fun that it never occurs to the kids that they’re getting quote-unquote ‘strength training’ at all.”"
This last quote is absolutely spot on, and is the basis of CrossFit Kids (www.crossfitkids.com).

How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck - or Crunch

http://articles.elitefts.com/articles/training-articles/two-reasons-for-throwing-out-crunches-and-sit-ups/

The definition of core strength is the ability the athlete has to resist deflection when the spine is under a load.  So how many crunches do you have to do in order to be able to hold your spine erect under a heavy barbell?  If you did 1000 crunches a day, would you have a strong core?

Obviously, the answer is no.  To have a strong core, you have to lift weight and support it with your spine, using the deadlift, squat, press, clean, snatch, overhead squat, or the kettlebell/dumb bell/sandbag/Atlas stone variants of the same movements.  This is why everyone - grandmothers, grandchildren, moms, dads, schoool teachers, cops, elite warriors or plain old folks - benefits from training in the basic lifts more than they will benefit from cardio, crunches, machine training and pec deck work.

Got Pain? Get Moving!

The article linked below is worth a full read, but the excerpts that follow relate most directly to exercise and pain.  Exercise is also preventive for depression - thus, to me the treatments for depression are not as important as the fact that exercise is in and of itself a means to having a better life experience.

Another thought - as you read this article, think of the previous posts you've seen about the connection between joint pain and mental dis-function and wheat consumption.  What if many the patients described in this piece could be treated effectively simply through wheat restriction?   Dr. Weston Price, in his fascinating book describing his thoughts on studying many paleolithic peoples, considered mental disorders a function of the mal-nutrition inherent in the western world. 

"Everyone experiences pain at some point, but for those with depression or anxiety, pain can become particularly intense and hard to treat. People suffering from depression, for example, tend to experience more severe and long-lasting pain than other people.
The overlap of anxiety, depression, and pain is particularly evident in chronic and sometimes disabling pain syndromes such as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, low back pain, headaches, and nerve pain. Psychiatric disorders not only contribute to pain intensity but also to increased risk of disability.
Researchers once thought the relationship between pain, anxiety, and depression resulted mainly from psychological rather than biological factors. Chronic pain is depressing, and likewise major depression may feel physically painful. But as researchers have learned more about how the brain works, and how the nervous system interacts with other parts of the body, they have discovered that pain shares some biological mechanisms with anxiety and depression.
Treatment is challenging when pain overlaps with anxiety or depression. Focus on pain can mask both the clinician's and patient's awareness that a psychiatric disorder is also present. Even when both types of problems are correctly diagnosed, they can be difficult to treat.

Exercise. There's an abundance of research that regular physical activity boosts mood and alleviates anxiety, but less evidence about its impact on pain.
The Cochrane Collaboration reviewed 34 studies that compared exercise interventions with various control conditions in the treatment of fibromyalgia. The reviewers concluded that aerobic exercise, performed at the intensity recommended for maintaining heart and respiratory fitness, improved overall well-being and physical function in patients with fibromyalgia, and might alleviate pain. More limited evidence suggests that exercises designed to build muscle strength, such as lifting weights, might also improve pain, overall functioning, and mood.
http://view.mail.health.harvard.edu/?j=fe64167471640479711d&m=febb15747d630d7a&ls=fde81d737062077c7d12757c&l=fe57157677630c7b7217&s=fe28167076600174771278&jb=ffcf14&ju=fe1d16777c6203787d1575&r=0

From Conditioning Research, Low Carb Benefit

Source link here:  Low carb diet plus interval training benefits fat loss.....

High-intensity exercise and carbohydrate-reduced energy-restricted diet in obese individuals
BLUF:  Diet alone had impact on metabolic factors, diet and exercise had additional benefits but on different parameters.  "You cannot out-train a bad diet."

Train Like An Olympian

Jump higher
Jason Hartman likes to wow new bobsledders with his magical jumping drill. First, he tests their maximum vertical leap. Then he has them do a set of heavy squats before jumping again. Without fail, they'll jump several inches higher after blasting their legs with the squats.

"It's called post-activation potentiation," Hartman explains. The theory is that the squat activates bands of last-resort muscle fibers called "high-threshold motor units." Your body keeps HTMU fibers in reserve for emergencies and only the most strenuous jobs, so the trick is to recruit them voluntarily.
Unlike with the training regimen Hartman typically uses, you don't want a lot of reps here. "I tend to make sure the resistance is high but not maxed out. Just do a small amount of volume to wake up your muscles." And once you've recruited that HTMU oomph to leap those extra inches, Hartman says, the gains remain; after your body learns that it can jump 32 inches instead of 30, you can do it all the time, even without the squat-rack warmup.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35239197/ns/health-fitness/?ns=health-fitness&pg=2#Health_MH_GoldStandard

Intensity Trumps Duration, Part 2

The piece that follows is still too lukewarm to satisfy me, but at least the basic point is correct - intensity trumps duration when it comes to cultivating fitness. There is an exception to that rule of course - if you want to be able to work not-very-hard for hours, you will have to suffer long, low intensity workouts. Good luck, hope you enjoy them.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35581793/ns/health-fitness/
""High-intensity interval training is twice as effective as normal exercise," said Jan Helgerud, an exercise expert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. "This is like finding a new pill that works twice as well ... we should immediately throw out the old way of exercising."
Intense interval training means working very hard for a few minutes, with rest periods in between sets. Experts have mostly tested people running or biking, but other sports like rowing or swimming should also work.
Helgerud recommends people try four sessions lasting four minutes each, with three minutes of recovery time in between. Unless you're an elite athlete, it shouldn't be an all-out effort.
"You should be a little out of breath, but you shouldn't have the obvious feeling of exhaustion," Helgerud said.""

Are You Fit If You Can Run a 4 Minute Mile?

"Keep your 500 pound bench press, keep your four minute mile, give me the capacity to bench moderate weights at screaming heart rates and come back and do it again and again." Coach Greg Glassman

"Intensity is the independent variable most commonly associated with maximizing favorable adaptation to training." Coach Greg Glassman

Specialists need to run a 4 minutes mile or better to compete internationally, but they pay a price in reduced fitness.  A specialist may want to bench press more than 500 pounds, but will pay a price in reduced fitness. 

Athletes, parents, brothers, sisters, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, firefighters, police officers, home makers ... in other words, the vast majority of Americans ... need to have a balanaced capacity of athletic adaptation.  The generalists of the world will fare far better on average than the specialists when it comes to combat, sport, and life.  http://www.crossfit.com/

Cycling Bones

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/is-bicycling-bad-for-your-bones/?em

Most of us won't face this no matter how much we cycle - but if you cycle or swim a lot, balancing your fitness with resistance training is a common sense matter for bone health.

The old saying goes "any strength to excess becomes weakness."

Loading bones via moving weights is a demonstrated benefit to improved bone density.