Conditioning Research

Two studies that say how best to recover from repeated sprints....basically rest / passive recovery rather than active recovery. Effect of Recovery Mode on Repeated Sprint Ability in Young Basketball Players. - The results of this study show that during repeated sprinting, passive recovery enabled better performance, reducing fatigue . Consequently, the use of passive recovery is advisable during competition in order to limit fatigue as a consequence of repeated high intensity exercise. Performance and metabolism in repeated sprint exercise: effect of recovery intensity - In summary, peak power indices during the repeated-sprint test were inferior in the MI (moderate intensity) and LI (low intensity) active recovery trials, compared to passive (total rest?) . The minimal differences in performance and muscle metabolites between the MI and LI trials suggest that any low-to-moderate level of muscle activation will attenuate the resynthesis of PCr and the recovery of power output duri...

More of this research as discussed previously Growth of human gastric cancer cells in nude mice is delayed by a ketogenic diet supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids and medium-chain triglycerides Background : Among the most prominent metabolic alterations in cancer cells are the increase in glucose consumption and the conversion of glucose to lactic acid via the reduction of pyruvate even in the presence of oxygen. This phenomenon, known as aerobic glycolysis or the Warburg effect, may provide a rationale for therapeutic strategies that inhibit tumour growth by administration of a ketogenic diet with average protein but low in carbohydrates and high in fat enriched with omega-3 fatty acids and medium-chain triglycerides (MCT). Methods : Twenty-four female NMRI nude mice were injected subcutaneously with tumour cells of the gastric adenocarcinoma cell line 23132/87. The animals were then randomly split into two feeding groups and fed either a ketogenic diet (KD group; n=12) or a standar...

Back in January I pointed out that the Guardian had a thought-provoking piece on fruit, saying that the current focus on fruit in the diet is not necessarily healthy: The myths of fruit I was thinking of this reading Dr Briffa's latest post: Study links fruit juice consumption with increased risk of diabetes

In the past I've posted lots of thoughts on functional training , including some research on appropriate training for football . Dr Craig Duncan is currently the director of The Academy of Athletic Development and Head of the Sport and Fitness department at the South Western Sydney Institute of TAFE. He completed his PhD in Sport and Exercise Science at The University of Sydney and has numerous published papers on the effect of exercise on the human body. Craig has worked with a number of sporting organisation including NSW Institute of Sport, Football Federation Australia, Sydney Olympic Football Club and International Goalkeeping Acadamy. Craig's special interest is in Total Athletic Condioning and applying a systematic approach to training. Craig comments occasionally on this blog - which I find quite humbling. He is a proper scientist and I am an amateur in all this. I find diet and training fascinating, but my degrees are in other disciplines. Anyway, Craig has a blog ...

Stuart has highlighted an interesting piece of research from back in 1973 in a post he has put up called Starve a Fever . In previous posts I have highlighted how f asting turns on autophagy : Autophagy as I said before: . .......... (literally self-eating) a process in which your cells consume and recycle damaged internal material. The process seems to be triggered when the energy content of the cell declines so that the cell literally consumes itself. It goes after the damaged materials first, so there is a strong link between repair of damaged tissues and fasting or low energy state in the cell. So, it you are over-fed you down regulate cellular repair. You want to go hungy episodically to turn on cellular autophagy and repair those damaged tissues. Stuart has highlighted another immunological process phagocytosis that is limited by eating simple carbs (sugar) but promoted by fasting! Thanks for pointing that out Stuart

The standard low carb dogma is that carbs (and to a lesser extent protein) stimulate insulin secretion which activates LPL (lipoprotein lipase) and LPL stores fat. That is true as far as it goes, but I've been learning - primarily through readng Lyle McDonald's Stubborn Fat Loss Solution that there is more to it that this. Apparently LPL is not the only - or the most important - enzyme associated with fat storage. Acylation Stimulating Protein ( ASP ) appears - in rats at least (and how applicable this is to humans I'm not sure ) - to be even more critical for fat storage than LPL. It is worth doing a pubmed search on ASP (e.g. here ) I'm still thinking through what all this means for my own fatty diet. Anyway, that is tangential to what I wanted to post. This popped up in three sources today: NSAID Improves Insulin Secretion in Obesity Aspirin-like compounds increase insulin secretion in otherwise healthy obese people Aspirin-like compounds (salicylates) can cla...

I will have to try these.....

I've had a few posts up in the past looking at some ideas on treating caner with a ketogenic diet. Here is a related story : Calorie restricted diet prevents pancreatic inflammation and cancer Prevention of weight gain with a restricted calorie diet sharply reduced the development of pancreatic lesions that lead to cancer in preclinical research reported today by researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting. While calorie restriction has been shown to have an anti-cancer effect in multiple species and for a variety of tumor types, its impact had not been well-studied in a model of pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death and remains mostly intractable to existing treatments.

I've had things in the past on the benefits of going barefoot . New York Magazine online suggests that despite your innate ability to walk, years of walking in shoes has got you doing it all wrong. This results in more aches and pains in your body than you should naturally encounter. The article makes the case that - despite the great lengths shoe manufacturers have taken to bring comfort to your step - most shoes are doing more harm than good. Credit to Lifehacker for pointing out the story

Matt Metzger's blog is always worth reading as it records his developing thoughts on exercise and eating. He has recently been thinking more about intermittent fasting and particularly a model of alternate day eating - The Alternate Day Diet - where the off day is a low calories day rather than a total fast. This is similar in pattern to the QOD diet or but one of the things that Matt refers to is the Up Day Down Day work of Dr Johnson : What is the Johnson UpDayDownDay Diet™? It is an adaptation of an experimental model used in animal research. For 70 years scientist have recognized that animals fed 30 – 40% less calories than normal live 40% longer. In May 2003, an article was published showing that mice fed every other day had profound health effects which exceeded those seen in mice fed 40% less than normal every day. Dr. Johnson invented a method which achieved these results in humans with the UpDayDownDay Diet™. Humans are generally unable to restrict their caloric in...

This study has received a fair amount of interest in the press - Recall of recent lunch and its effect on subsequent snack intake for example Think yourself thin, recall lunch in the Daily Telegraph. ....researchers have found that “actively remembering your last meal suppresses appetite and reduces the desire to snack on junk food”. It also says the study found that concentrating on food while eating makes you less likely to get hungry later on. As usual, NHS Choices have a good analysis of the research which indicates that things may not be as simple as that. This was a small study that looked at the effect of recent meal recall on snacking. There are a number of limitations to consider: All of the participants were healthy young people, with BMIs in the normal range. It’s not clear whether the same effect would be seen in older people or children, people who were less healthy, or people outside of the normal BMI range. This study only looked at the effects of meal recall on snack...

This one popped out of Pubcrawler the other day. I'm not sure if this is applicable to real life training....eating while training? Protein co-ingestion stimulates muscle protein synthesis during resistance type exercise. In contrast to the impact of nutritional intervention on post-exercise muscle protein synthesis, little is known about the potential to modulate protein synthesis during exercise. ............... We conclude that, even in a fed state, protein co-ingestion stimulates whole-body and muscle protein synthesis rates during resistance type exercise.

I mentioned this paper when it first came out - I even bought the whole thing so that I could read it hopefully learn something and attempt to say something useful. Metabolic Adaptations to Short-term High-Intensity Interval Training: A Little Pain for a Lot of Gain? I enjoyed reading the paper, but never got around to posting anything about it. Which in some ways is a blessing since I would probably have embarrassed my self with the some poor analysis. Anyway, Lyle McDonald - author of the Stubborn Fat Loss Solution that I have reviewed - has saved me the bother with an excellent post on his blog: Research review: Metabolic adaptations to short-term high-intensity interval training Summing up: There’s no doubt (and I haven’t intended to suggest otherwise) that high intensity interval training can have benefits. It’s time effective and may induce similar performance adaptations to longer duration traditional cardio. With regards endurance athletes, it’s clear that even short pe...

What do you think? You can read more here .

.......that is proper (association) football. This is really following on from the last post and also continuing the theme of functional training - training in a way that mimics the motions and movement patterns/frequencies of your sport. These studies are about football and look at how to set up optimal and appropriate conditioning routines. Both these look at how training can replicate what goes on in a match. A 10k run will not cut it, but these ideas will. (by the way blogger is annoying me and keeps on messing up the formatting when I try to format these abstracts....) Effects of a new experimental training program on V.O2max and running performance. - .....the main intervention was performed in the conditioning phase where the control group performed traditional conditioning (straight-line running, with stretching exercises in the break) and the experimental group underwent a conditioning training program on designed polygon, very much akin to a real game situation; sprint-...

Vern Gambetta recently had a good post on his blog . It was short so I'll reproduce it fully here: Everything is connected. Impossible to isolate one system of the body, when one is working then all are working. You may designate a workout as having a metabolic emphasis or a neural emphasis, but there will be profound effects on all systems of the body not just the “targeted” system. I particularly enjoy swim coaches who have all these neat color coded charts with workouts in very specific heart rate zones designed to target specific energy systems – the body is so much smarter than that, it is always seeking to adapt and preserve homeostasis. It is IMPOSSIBLE to isolate one energy system or for that matter one system of the body whether it is neural, cardio vascular, muscular, or endocrine hormonal. Recognize that there is always a spillover effect, for example 3 x 150 meter sprints at 95% with full recovery will maximally tax all systems of the body. You will be working at grea...

I just wanted to expand a bit more on yesterday's post on getting older. It prompted some useful comments and emails from readers that I wanted to share a little more widely. Rannoch Donald helpfully pointed me to this article The Shape of 40+ : The Science: Riding the Storm - which has some great insights into the maintenance of fitness and peak performance as we age. ..........older athletes don't perform as well as they used to partly because they don't train as hard as they used to. They work out less, in turn, not because of bodily limitations, but because of psychological and societal factors. At this point, the contradictory knot starts to unravel: While age-related physical decline from peak performance stands as scientific fact, athletic extinction proves to be a layered story open to a host of culturally influenced interpretations and different endings. It is a useful and inspiring read with several good insights like that. Also related to these ideas, a re...

Here is a good one for those of us who are getting older. I'm 40 now - which used to seem old but now doesn't! Anyway this study looked at older cyclists (old? over 35 isn't old!) . It seems that as you age, exercise might make you more sore and give you greater feelings of fatigue..... but your performance might not be affected. You feel worse, but your performances may not similarly decline. Altered perception and report of fatigue and recovery in veteran athletes. AIM : This study investigated whether ageing effects perceived and reported ratings of fatigue and total quality of recovery following high-intensity training in athletes. We hypothesized that veteran (V) athletes would report greater changes in perceived measures of fatigue and recovery than training-matched younger athletes. METHODS : Perceptions of muscle soreness (SOR), fatigue, and recovery were recorded in young (Y) and V (>35 years) well-trained cyclists in response to 3 days of repeated cycli...

There is an interesting article here on the history of medicine balls . There is actually a fair bit of research out there on the functional / sport specific value of medicine ball training - especialy with respect to rotational srength. For example: Effect of twelve weeks of medicine ball training on high school baseball players . - These data indicate that performing a 12-week medicine ball training program in addition to a stepwise periodized resistance training program with bat swings provided greater sport-specific training improvements in torso rotational and sequential hip-torso-arm rotational strength for high school baseball players. Comparison of trunk kinematics in trunk training exercises and throwing . - Incorporating trunk training exercises ( the study included medicine ball throws) that demonstrate sufficient trunk ranges of motion and velocities into a strength and conditioning program may help to increase ball velocity and/or decrease the risk injury. Can't resis...

This site looks like it could be useful: Fitness Spotlight is a site dedicated to giving you even more information on all things health and fitness from around the internet. We decided that with all the information that we come across daily from our research, and the amount that we can only personally blog on….

I thought that this was an interesting story about vision in sports . The visual system is more than just ‘what’s the smallest line on the chart you can see,’” Gee said. “The visual system consists of many things, but specifically for sports, depth perception, color, speed and accuracy of movements and contrast sensitivity – or the ability to detect an object off a background.” It reminded me of some of the fuss a few years ago when the then England Rugby coach, Clive Woodward employed a peripheral vision coach for the team. There is a good story here - Woodward focuses on 'extra 1%' with enlistment of vision expert from World Cup staff - from the Guardian, which reviews the work of this visual awareness coach" When Sir Clive Woodward was in charge of the England rugby team, his employment of Sherylle Calder, the world's leading visual awareness coach, was a hallmark of his style. Nineteen months into his job as elite performance director for the British Olympic Ass...

Just walking will do you a lot of good. Note that intensity - walking pace - is also important. Walking and primary prevention: a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies Objective : To quantify the association between walking and the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality in healthy men and women. Data sources: Medline, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Web of Science databases were searched to May 2007. Study selection: Prospective epidemiological studies of walking and CVD and all-cause mortality. Results : 18 prospective studies were included in the overall analysis, which incorporated 459 833 participants free from CVD at baseline with 19 249 cases at follow-up. From the meta-analysis the pooled hazard ratio of CVD in the highest walking category compared with the lowest was 0.69, (95% CI 0.61 to 0.77, p Conclusions : The results suggest walking is inversely associated with clinical disease endpoints and largely support the current guidelines ...

I suppose this one is pretty obvious - when you are tired your skill levels decrease. The study here is related to football. A conclusion - applicable to lots of sports - is that without sufficient conditioning, all the skill in the world will not help you perform and win. You can have great skills (boxing, rugby or whatever) , but if your fitness is such that these skills are eroded through tiredness, the fitter but possibly less skilled team will win. Effect of Match-Related Fatigue on Short-Passing Ability in Young Soccer Players. Abstract : Purpose : To examine whether the fatigue accumulated during match play or determined by short bouts of high-intensity intermittent activities affect short-passing ability in junior soccer players. A further aim was to examine the influence of physical fitness as measured using the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test (YYIRT) on the changes in short-passing ability after a 5-min simulation of high-intensity activities (HIS). Methods : Sixteen pla...

I know a few of you out there practice Intermittent Fasting (e.g. Eat Stop Eat or Leangains ) and also train in various ways. If you do IF you may be a little worried about training on days you haven't eaten. I've done it and haven't found it a problem even after a 24 hour fast. There is all sorts of science about training in a fasted state (or a carbohydrate restricted state which is similar.......) In any case this study might be of interest - short-term training elicits similar adaptations in peak O2 whether carried out in the fasted or carbohydrate-fed state. Obviously normal caveats - e.g. the abstract doesn't explain what "fasted" means. Matt had some posts a while ago reflecting on the fact that for a hunter exercise would generally be in the fasted state - i.e., when you ran out of food and got hungry you had to exercise (hunt) to get some food. Hence exercise would often be in the fasted state - so it is something we should be adapted to. E...

Sometimes, in the interest of functional fitness, I will use a sledgehammer in my conditioning work outs. Originally inspired by this guy , I like the way that there is a lot of rotational work in chopping motions, a plane of motion often ommitted from many routines, but a movement pattern that is important to many motions from throwing to punching (as explained by Chek here ) Anyway, I saw this video the other day on Straight to the Bar and will try this sometime, as much as a shoulder mobilisation move as anything. I think there is some similarity there to the Halo that the RKC system of kettlebell training teaches as a warm up for the shoulders.

Readers in the UK will be aware of Quorn , a heavily marketed pseudo food used often as a meat substitute for vegetarians. It is marketed as high in protein, low in fat, zero in cholesterol.... After criticising it in a newspaper piece as having"no great nutritional value", Dr Briffa found the Quorn company in touch with keen to explain the nutritional and "natural" nature of their product. In a great post on his blog, Dr Briffa reproduces the email exchanges . It is science versus dogma and marketing and very revealing! Wikipedia has an interesting bit on Quorn referring to some of the controversies associated with this weird product quoting: complaints with advertising and trading-standards watchdogs in Europe and the USA, claiming that the labelling of Quorn as "mushroom based" was deceptive.[citation needed] The CSPI, observing that while a mushroom is a fungus, fusarium is not a mushroom, and they quipped, "Quorn's fungus is as close...

Take a look at this excellent post from Rannoch . He makes some superb points about the value of functional exercise, which he expands in a comment: There is a truism in MA (martial arts) and SD (self defence) that says "You fight the way you train". You could simply say you perform the way you train, whatever the activity. I for one do not want to fight lying on my back with my hips and core immobile and using only my chest, tri's and shoulders to get out of there. I'm loathe to recommend any particular exercises in a sport specific context. Want to punch effectively? Go Punch! That said, when we training movements we create patterns that can be replicated with force and power in our chosen activity. When we train msucles...we train muscles. We do not live and move in isolation. Why train that way? This is simple but really important stuff. I've pointed to a few ideas on functional training in the past and quoted Vern Gambetta who has this same principle: Tr...

I think I have written before that a (the?) major purpose of this blog is that it allows me to index things that I find of interest in this area. So, without much commentary here are three things I wanted to get recorded: A potential sugar fix for tumours - more on the stuff I had up yesterday about treating cancer with a ketogenic diet Vitamins 'may shorten your life' - here is another study (well a review of studies) that is pointing out the potential dangers of taking antioxidant supplements. We have touched on this before - e.g. antioxidants do more harm than good and Vitamin E supplements to be discouraged . I wonder what this will do for the sales of Snapple the new "Antioxidant Water"??? Read more on this: Antioxidant users don't live longer, analysis of studies concludes - The vitamin industry has long touted antioxidants as a way to improve health by filling in gaps in diet, but a new review of studies found no evidence that the nutrition supplemen...

Ok, I know there are those out there that can go heavier or use different (!) weights . But from a woman this is pretty impressive (especially when I still struggle with the 24kg) Credit to Dr Mark (and Rannoch )

Ketogenic Diets in Medicine I've had a few posts in the past about the potential for a ketogenic diet in treating cancer . Peter also has a post today that looks at the same topic. On the same tack of therapeutic uses for ketogenic diets there was an article in the Guardian today on the use of this diet to treat epilepsy , a practice that has been around for a long time. Emma has had some interesting posts on this in the past. UPDATE - Richard has gathered some of this together too . Cholesterol.....is it bad after all ? (No) I've just spotted this article by Chris Masterjohn in which he reviews a book which tries to explain why cholesterol is bad. Chris explains some of the errors and omissions in the book. An instructive read.

Wow. Davie is training his boys well!

What do you make of this? (my understanding of this science is still developing, but Lyle McDonald's Stubborn Fat Loss Solution is helping a lot) The study indicates that a short term high carb diet leads to a decrease in the amount of fat that is burned and an increase in the amount of fat that is stored in muscle and liver. That is not good. UPDATE - thinking about it, I suppose this does make sense since (from Lyle) insulin impairs fat mobilisation and carbs drive insulin. So if the fat is not getting out of the fat cells you can't burn it. Reduced oxidation of dietary fat after a short term high-carbohydrate diet. BACKGROUND : Short-term high-carbohydrate (HC) diets induce metabolic alterations, including hypertriacylglycerolemia, in both the fasting and postprandial states. The underlying tissue-specific alterations in fatty acid metabolism are not well understood. OBJECTIVE : We investigated alterations in exogenous and endogenous fatty acid metabolism by using sta...

We have touched on this before . Here is another study which indicates that rather than giving blanket advice to people to drink x amount of fluid - e.g. 8 glasses a day - thirst is the best guideline to intake. Of course people trying to sell sports drinks would have you believe something different! Drinking policies and exercise-associated hyponatraemia: Is anyone still promoting overdrinking? OBJECTIVES : The purpose of this review is to describe the evolution of hydration research and advice on drinking during exercise from published scientific papers, books and non-scientific material (advertisements and magazine contents) and detail how erroneous advice is likely propagated throughout the global sports medicine community. DESIGN : Hydration advice from sports-linked entities, the scientific community, exercise physiology textbooks and non-scientific sources was analyzed historically and compared with the most recent scientific evidence. CONCLUSIONS : Drinking policies during e...

Ok I am a just a sucker for videos of big jumps :

I've pointed to Phil Maffetone before with respect to his thoughts on shoes and on the dangers of synthetic vitamins He is a good guy, slightly different perspective from a lot of what I post here, but that is OK. Anyway, I just spotted another article - a booklet really - he has put up on his site about inflammation. It is a pdf: The ABCs of Chronic Inflammation a thought-provoking read Incidentally, reduced inflammation was one of the things first mentioned by Dr Eades back when he was promoting IF .

Credit to Ross for spotting this one. Funny but painful!

Following on from the post the other day about the elderly body-builders , I saw this referred to on Lou Schuler's blog : 95-year-old muscles her way into power lifting - With 95 years of living under her belt, Symie Sermay is gearing up for a whole new challenge — competitive power lifting. The Las Crucen will take on all comers in the Natural Athlete Strength Association's New Mexico State Powerlifting and Power Sports competition in Rio Rancho on April 26. It will make her the oldest contestant ever to compete, according to her trainer, Richard Kahle, owner of Kahle's Gym, where Sermay trains three days a week. The previous record was an 88-year-old competitor, he said. Sermay can curl a cool 30 pounds, bench press 45 pounds, and in the deadlift (her favorite event) she can heft 60 pounds. She may face some competition from youngsters — she's entered in the 75-and-up division. I like a comment at the end of the article regarding her attitude to life: The worko...

For a while now Barry Groves has had an article on his site about the dangers of fructose There are many good reasons to avoid the fruit sugar, fructose, but all you need is one: type 2 diabetes. And even worse that fruit itself that ubiquitous additive to many processed foods — high fructose corn syrup. A recent study highlighted diabetes and all the other key reasons why it's a healthy idea to avoid this truly awful component of processed foods and soft drinks. I thought of his article when I saw this abstract that noted that: Long-term exposure of normal rats to a fructose-enriched diet or drinking water is currently used as an animal model for experimental insulin resistance. When scientists want to induce insulin resistance - a precursor to diabetes - they give rats lots of fructose. Scary. Barry Groves states: "Eat 5 portions of fruti and veg? Not if you want to avoid diabetes"

This is a weird story that popped up yesterday. Basically, a study has found that ..over-the-counter painkillers may promote muscle growth in older patients during weight training... In 24 patients with a mean age of 64, recommended daily doses of ibuprofen and acetaminophen were associated with gains of about 50% in muscle volume and strength compared with placebo after 12 weeks of resistance training, Chad Carroll, Ph.D., of Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., and colleagues reported at the Experimental Biology meeting here. "These results suggest that chronic consumption of ibuprofen or acetaminophen during resistance training induces intramuscular changes that enhance the metabolic response to resistance exercise," said Todd Trappe, Ph.D., also of Ball State. I really don't know what to make of this one! Have a look at the full story: OTC Painkillers Also Help Grandpa Get Buff (!) It is also reported by Eureka here . Maybe these guys need some? Talking of older p...

I must admit that I enjoy massage and try to get some work done on my back every couple of weeks either by Colin Gordon at the Edinburgh Physiotherapy Centre or Sheena Livinstone out in West Linton. Both use massage plus Muscle Energy Therapy (MET) to loosen up the tight muscles that plague me, especially my psoas. While I think a huge amount of back pain is due to stress - I have a lot of sympathy for the teachings of Dr John Sarno - massage can certainly loosen up a tightened muscle. I spotted this study which sort of bemused me. It notes that massage is relaxing. While that is true, in my experience it is much more than that. It can address specific muscle imbalances, when the length / tension relationships get messed up. Effects of myofascial release after high-intensity exercise: a randomized clinical trial. OBJECTIVE: The usefulness of massage as a recovery method after high-intensity exercise has yet to be established. We aimed to investigate the effects of whole-body mas...

I've posted a few times in the past about the science suggesting that a low carb / ketogenic diet may be a treatment for cancer. If you are interested in this topic there are several related articles here , e.g. Low Carb & Cancer Many aggressive cancers depend on anaerobic glycolysis for ATP production, as has been known since first described by Otto Warburg in the 1920’s. The remarkable success of modern PET scanning in the detection, staging and prognosis of many cancers using F-18 Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) reflects this dependence. Very low carbohydrate ketogenic (VLCK) diets have inhibited cancer growth in animal studies [1] [2] [3] and in a human case study [4]. Ketone bodies in culture media have inhibited cancer growth in cell culture studies [1], [5], [6]. While the mechanism of cancer inhibition is unlikely to be simple glucose deprivation, several plausible mechanisms have been proposed. VLCK diets cause tonic reductions in hormones that are supportive of tumor growth...

Of course lots of us know this already (if you are not yet in on the news check out Peter's blog or read Barry Groves ) Now there is more breaking news: University of Alberta researcher Flora Wang found that a diet with enriched levels of trans vaccenic acid (VA) -- a natural animal fat found in dairy and beef products -- can reduce risk factors associated with heart disease, diabetes and obesity........ Because VA is the major natural trans fat in dairy and beef products, comprising more than 70 per cent of the proportion of natural trans fat content in those products, the findings support a growing body of evidence that indicates natural animal-based trans fat is different than harmful hydrogenated trans fat created through industrial processing, Wang noted. As the VA results illustrate, some natural trans fats are not harmful and may in fact be very good for you," she said. Well there you have it....natural fats might be good for you! The full story is here: Natural Tran...

According to this study you are better off squatting and deadlifting than playing on a swiss ball...... (I think I've said something similar before) Trunk muscle activity during stability ball and free weight exercises. The purpose of this investigation was to compare trunk muscle activity during stability ball and free weight exercises. Nine resistance-trained men participated in one testing session in which squats (SQ) and deadlifts (DL) were completed with loads of approximately 50, 70, 90, and 100% of one-repetition maximum (1RM). Isometric contractions during 3 stability ball exercises (quadruped (QP), pelvic thrust (PT), ball back extension (BE)) were also completed. During all exercises, average integrated electromyography (IEMG) from the rectus abdominus (RA), external oblique (EO), longissimus (L1) and multifidus (L5) was collected and analyzed. Results demonstrate that when expressed relative to 100% DL 1RM, muscle activity was 19.5 +/- 14.8% for L1 and 30.2 +/- 19.3% fo...

Regina Wilshire points to this new review article by a number of doctors who see a benefit to a low carbohydrate diet: Dietary carbohydrate restriction in type 2 diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome: time for a critical appraisal Full Text (pdf) Abstract Current nutritional approaches to metabolism syndrome and type 2 diabetes generally rely on reductions in dietary fat. The success of such approaches has been limited and therapy more generally relies on pharmacology. The argument is made that a re-evaluation of the role of carbohydrate restriction, the historical and intuitive approach to the problem, may provide an alternative and possibly superior dietary strategy. The rationale is based on the accepted idea that carbohydrate restriction improves glycemic control and reduces insulin fluctuations which are primary targets. Experiments are summarized showing that carbohydrate-restricted diets are at least as effective for weight loss as low-fat diets and that substitution of fat ...

A couple of additional pieces about fasting : Fasting Can Reduce Brain-Injury Impact - Researchers at the University of Kentucky have found that fasting can help reduce the impact of a moderate traumatic brain injury. Fasting May Bolster Healthy Cells' Resistance to Chemo Toxins - Starving healthy cells helps to differentiate them from tumor cells, a trick that could make cancer treatments more effective That second one is based on the same science as I pointed to previously here and here UPDATE Art Devany also points to this second research here .

Ok, I'm now back after a few days off trying to learn cross-country skiing in Norway. We stayed in a very beautiful little village called Sjusjoen near Lillehammer. Fantastic. The skiing was fun, but a difficult skill to learn. Normal service will now be resumed! By the way, I've turned on the word verification thing on comments because I was starting to get some spam. I hope you keep commenting and don't find it in convenient.

Interesting study here, trying to identify an optimal exercise intensity for fat oxidation. They seem to say that continuous exercise training at this specific intensity can lead to greater improvements in fat oxidation and insulin sensitivity than an interval training program that burns the same calories. It is hard to tell much from the abstract - e.g. about what this intensity is or what the interval protocol used was. The results look funny too - no change in body fat %..... I wonder how this would line up with the ideas in the Stubborn Fat Loss book that I mentioned earlier Does anyone out there have access to the full study? UPDATE - Lyle McDonald - author of the Stubborn Fat Loss solution that I reviewed the other day - has commented on this study on his blog in a challenging series he is doing on intervals vs steady state cardio. Endurance training and obesity: effect on substrate metabolism and insulin sensitivity. PURPOSE :: Obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus are d...