"I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do."

This guy's changing the world.  CrossFit!

Kstar Breaking It All Down with a Jump Rope

If you can stay with this for the whole video, you can see in 10 minutes exactly where CrossFit is going - towards virtuosity in human movement.  In something as basic as jumping rope, we learn how to see about six very common movement and positioning flaws, even in this very fit and well conditioned athlete.  Each of the flaws would have significant impacts over a lifetime of loading, but just using the jump rope as a diagnostic tool, this athlete will have a chance to identify and correct several movement and positioning errors.  

Scaling MU and PU for Individuals

Hang the bottom of your gymnastics rings right at your outstretched finger tips. [Assuming you've got overhead clearance*]

Position the squat rack directly under the rings

Set your J-Cups at shoulder level to start

Our resistance bands stretch perfectly between the J-Cups.  Use that band as a platform for your feet or knees.

To increase the amount of assistance, either add bands or raise the level of the J-Cups.

http://hammerheadfit.blogspot.com/2013/12/jumping-muscle-ups-best-progression.html

Excellent technique for scaling for garage gym folks.

Hammerhead Fitness on Double Unders

Get a Fitted Jump Rope - Nothing makes the Double Under more difficult that when you constantly change equipment.  Grabbing one of the jump ropes off the Wall at the local box is only going to take you so far.  Too short a jump rope and the rope won’t make it under your feet.  Too long and the cable hits too far in front slowing the speed of the rope.  Here's a quick guide for cable length:  For those at 5'6" height and less, add 2'10" to your height.  For those over 5'6", add 3'0".  With proper hand and arm position, these cable lengths will get you off and running.  We list this step first because it's the most important.  Do everything else right but have a too short or too long a rope and it won't matter.  

http://hammerheadfit.blogspot.com/2014/04/7-steps-to-mastering-double-under.html

Epigenetics Doesn't Last 7 Generations

Of particular concern is the idea that mammalian health can be affected by epigenetic tags received from parents or grandparents. For example, one group reported that pre-diabetic mice have different epigenetic tag patterns in their sperm and that their offspring have a higher chance of contracting diabetes. (Virginia Hughes has written an excellent article summarizing this and other related epigenetic studies.) A flurry of other biomedical and epidemiological research has strongly hinted that a susceptibility to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease can be passed on through epigenetic tags.

However, Heard & Martienssen are not convinced. In their Cell review, they admit that epigenetic inheritance has been demonstrated in plants and worms. But, mammals are completely different beasts, so to speak. Mammals go through two rounds of epigenetic "reprogramming" -- once after fertilization and again during the formation of gametes (sex cells) -- in which most of the chemical tags are wiped clean.

They insist that characteristics many researchers assume to be the result of epigenetic inheritance are actually caused by something else. The authors list four possibilities: Undetected mutations in the letters of the DNA sequence, behavioral changes (which themselves can trigger epigenetic tags), alterations in the microbiome, or transmission of metabolites from one generation to the next. The authors claim that most epigenetic research, particularly when it involves human health, fails to eliminate these possibilities.

It is true that environmental factors can influence epigenetic tags in children and developing fetuses in utero. What is far less clear, however, is whether or not these modifications truly are passed on to multiple generations. Even if we assume that epigenetic tags can be transmitted to children or even grandchildren, it is very unlikely that they are passed on to great-grandchildren and subsequent generations. The mammalian epigenetic "reprogramming" mechanisms are simply too robust.

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/03/end_the_hype_over_epigenetics__lamarckian_evolution.html

This is an oft discussed topic in books about the paleolithic model, first discussed I suspect by Weston A. Price.  Price noticed that populations that have the best health on the planet (at the time that he prowled the world to find them) had several things in common:  very low incidence of dental carries, very good dental structure, very good bone structure overall, and a very low incidence of chronic disease (heart disease, cancer and their precursors) - In other words, as Denise Minger put it in her excellent book "Death By Food Pyramid", you are what you eat, what your parents ate, what their parents ate, and what you food ate/was fed.  

Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link - NYTimes.com

The set up:

Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events.

The new findings are part of a growing body of research that has challenged the accepted wisdom that saturated fat is inherently bad for you and will continue the debate about what foods are best to eat.

For decades, health officials have urged the public to avoid saturated fat as much as possible, saying it should be replaced with the unsaturated fats in foods like nuts, fish, seeds and vegetable oils.

But the new research, published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, did not find that people who ate higher levels of saturated fat had more heart disease than those who ate less. Nor did it find less disease in those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including monounsaturated fat like olive oil or polyunsaturated fat like corn oil.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/study-questions-fat-and-heart-disease-link/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=2

The rest of the article includes interviews of so called experts, recitations of opinions, and very little analysis of where yet another epidemiological study falls in terms of the scientific value.

Let's face it - epidemiological studies show everything causes everything.

Why anyone reports on this silliness is a mystery.  If there were any good science of the topic - that would be newsworthy.  Eat meat, vegetables, nuts/seeds, little fruit/starch, no sugar/wheat.

Correlation or Causation?

To summarize, back in the 80s and 90s, because scientists had noted a correlation between estrogen replacement therapy and a decreased risk of heart disease, many women were put on estrogen replacement by their doctors.

Twenty years later, a controlled randomized study showed that in fact, estrogen replacement was very bad for heart disease! Oops.

How could a mistake of this magnitude occur?

It turned out that women of higher socioeconomic status who were more interested in their health (or better positioned to do something about it) were much more likely to ask for or agree to take estrogen than poorer women who had less access to health care.

And while on the surface it may have looked as if hormone replacement therapy reduced a woman’s risk of heart disease, in fact, it was a woman’s socioeconomic class that actually predicted that risk.

Middle and upper class women were less likely to suffer from heart disease – despite the fact that more of them were on hormone replacement therapy, not because they were on hormone replacement therapy.

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/research-review-fish-oil-prostate

Filed under "epidemiology has a 100% track record - it has always been wrong."