Understanding How You Were Made To Run

The BLUF:  gravity is the most important factor in skilled running, so to run with skill, do not oppose gravity.  To work with gravity and not against her, use the hamstring to pull the weighted foot towards the hip, let gravity and your nervous system do the rest.
NOTE:  if you stick your foot out by extending the knee in front of you with dorsiflexion of the foot, which is the way to make your heel strike first, your sins will be punished by slow running and more injury.
NOTE 2: if you forget about the foot that is not in contact with the ground and focus on pulling your weighted foot, your body will do a better job of putting your foot in the right place than you can with conscious effort.  Your mind does not know where the foot should go, but your highly evolved nervous system does.

Watch BMack's video clips and see if you agree.
http://www.iamunscared.com/hamstrings-vs-hip-flexors/

Yawn - Another Epidemiological Study

A new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers finds a strong association between the consumption of red meat—particularly when the meat is processed—and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. The study also shows that replacing red meat with healthier proteins, such as low-fat dairy, nuts, or whole grains, can significantly lower the risk.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2011-releases/red-meat-type-2-diabetes.html

Another junk observational study, another foolish conclusion, yawn.

I joined a chorus of others who have written ad nauseum about this process of having to get funding to do research to be relevant in the field, and about how the only types of studies that are cheap enough to fund are these observational studies, and how observational studies are a tool to find statistical relationships worthy of further study - but cannot be used to determine causation.  Given the incentives in place, these studies and these kinds of results will not cease. 

My advice to the study publishers is - go for it.  Eliminate the processed meat and the red meat and eat all the whole grains and low fat milk you can find.  Many people like to eat that way.  You may even thrive that way, and I hope you do. 

Let me know how that goes for you, in the mean time, I'm betting on red meat and less than 100g of carbs per day, and there's no available measure of health that indicates this is a problem.  I'll take that over another cheap observational study any day.

Hero WOD: Santora

Fair winds and following seas on your journey warrior!

Santora
Three rounds for reps of:
155 pound Squat cleans, 1 minute
20' Shuttle sprints (20' forward + 20' backwards = 1 rep), 1 minute
245 pound Deadlifts, 1 minute
Burpees, 1 minute
155 pound Jerks, 1 minute
Rest 1 minute


U.S. Army Sergeant Jason A. Santora, of Farmingville, New York, assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, based out of Fort Benning, Georgia, died in Logar province, Afghanistan on April 23, 2010, from wounds sustained during a firefight with insurgents. He is survived by his parents Gary and Theresa, and sister Gina.

Thanksgiving - Give Thanks and Enjoy What You Like

Aside from the unquestionable health benefits (in my humble as ever opinion) of being able to experience gratitude, my advice to you today dear reader is to enjoy any food you like.  Give yourself a day of no restrictions at all on food quantity or quality. 

Notice which foods you enjoy, and if that selection has changed as you have trained yourself to eat food, vice a bunch of high carb crap.  For me, over the last few years, eating is different.  The cakes, pies, cookies, doughnuts, and sugary "ice cream like junk" I used to pound down like there was no tomorrow no longer thrills me and rarely tempts me.  When I eat it, I don't get a fraction of the satisfaction that I used to get - oh, the high price of losing one's addiction.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Taubes on Food Reward/Palatability, IIc

One point I’ve been making in my posts and in my books is that it’s possible to find evidence in favor of virtually any idea – including the Flying Spaghetti Monster as the ruling force in the universe. More important to the validation of an idea or a hypothesis is the strength of the evidence that seems to refute it. Can the hypothesis survive more or less intact our best attempts to refute it?

This is one of the points I was trying to get across at the Ancestral Health Symposium: that the foods we eat today during our current obesity epidemic might have a high reward value, and that diets consumed by lean populations in faraway locales might not, isn’t particularly interesting. Yes, it supports the hypothesis, but how do we explain epidemics of obesity in populations that  eat diets that don’t appear to have a high reward value? Do we need an entirely different hypothesis for them? That would be unfortunate.

Catching up on lost time – the Ancestral Health Symposium, food reward, palatability, insulin signaling and carbohydrates… Part II(c)

I think this is Taubes' most compelling post yet, but taken together, the series is enough to convince me that "food reward" is a compelling but incomplete explanation for population obesity.

Another element of the carb hypothesis that is compelling is the studies which show that low fat, low calorie diets (~1200 kcal/day) lead rather rapidly to the symptoms of starvation (folks feel cold, lethargic, irritable, think about food all the time, and are inactive), whereas folks on a high protein/fat diet at the same number of kcal/day will continue to lose weight and feel relatively good.  Presumably, those on a low protein/fat, low cal diet would naturally eat more food so that they can stop feeling bad - they would also not lose weight, and if they did, they would not feel better and so might wonder "what's the point of losing weight if I still feel like dirt?"  In short, based on physiological reality, one could predict that low fat/protein and low calorie would be a losing proposition - which it usually is.  Even worse, it does not improve the measurable markers of health very speedily, or as dramatically, as does carb restriction.

I await the next series when Taubes discusses the evidence in opposition to the "carbohydrate hypothesis" of obesity.

Part IIb In Taubes' Rebuttal of the Palatability Conjecture

What can we take away from these studies? Well, these three papers certainly support the contention that the sugars consumed in western diets have very specific deleterious metabolic effects, and that maybe these sugars are the, or at least a proximate cause of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, and so, we can assume, obesity and type 2 diabetes and perhaps all the other chronic diseases that associate with these two conditions (cancer anyone?). This was the thesis of my April New York Times Magazine cover article “Is Sugar Toxic.”
http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%e2%80%93-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates%e2%80%a6-part-iib/

Look, I know we're all going to have some sugar in our lives, I'm not deluded that a purist diet of no sugar is either easy or necessary.  I would suggest, though that increasing your intake of fructose from 5% to 20% of your total caloric intake is problematic for your health.  Further, if you are the average American knocking back close to 150 pounds of sugar per year, you shouldn't be surprised if you are as weak, fat and sick as the average American is - and just as subject to the diseases of the West (gout, cancer, heart disease and stroke, obesity, diabetes, etc). 

Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch and no sugar/wheat. 

The Last Mile ...

Two dead as they finish the Philly marathon, and in doing so are just like the original marathoner, who died upon arrival and delivery of the warnings of war.  Marathoners are not likely to die in the marathon, but when they do it is almost always during the last mile.

Tragedy for their families, and it makes it makes one ponder what internal drivers make humans wish to test themselves in ways such as this.

http://espn.go.com/olympics/trackandfield/story/_/id/7261093/two-runners-die-collapsing-philadelphia-marathon