Conditioning Research

I have previously pointed to the works of Esther Gokhale and Kathleen Porter .  Here are a couple of new videos from Kathleen.  Good Stuff.

Bill pointed me to this really good piece by Paul Ingraham: Less is Not Less Go to the gym much less frequently and still gain strength just as quickly This article thoroughly summarizes scientific research on the question of strength training frequency, and it is a rare example of consensus in exercise science. There is no controversy here: 20+ years of evidence is overwhelmingly clear that most people train more often than they need to. Read the rest of the article here. It is interesting in the light of what Doug McGuff wrote last week: The Adaptive Time-Course This experience has got me thinking that we really have everything about the HIT approach well worked out, except our understanding of the time course of the adaptive process. Ed Garbe discussed his observations that clients always perform better when they come back from vacation and have been off for 14 days. His guess was that for hard-training clients every 9-10 days might be optimal. John Little’s BodPod data sh...

I've probably said before that I have another blog which mainly chronicles my adventures on the hills - usually in the Scottish mountains.  It is just my record of days out really and a place for my photos.  Anyway I got my first real material benefit of being a blogger recently when I was sent a pair of walking boots to review.  Now I am really a minimalist footwear guy as you will have picked up from this blog but I was happy to get a free pair of boots to try on the hill. Boots I was sent to review! The review is here if you are interested. 

Colin (of Edinburgh Deep Tissue Massage )  has a great post up on daily mobility moves:  Getting your 5-a-day We all know the importance of getting our 5 portions of fruit and veg every day well this is my take  on the idea applied to some simple mobility/flexibilty work that we would all benefit form on a daily basis. Most people now have sedentary jobs and find themselves being in front of a computer either all day or a substantial part of  it. The effects of this sedentary lifestyle on the body are often create a more kyphotic posture, flattening the lumbar curve and exaggerating both the thoracic and cervical curves. The musculature of the back, as a generalisation, gets lengthened whilst that on the front gets shortened and the joints of the spine start to stiffen and lose their mobilty. Along with this the hips also stiffen and the glutes get over stretched and switch off. The hamstrings shorten and the quads lengthen and so on it goes through the body. So ...

I saw on Facebook that Robb Wolf had pointed to this.  ( Robb's new book is absolutely superb by the way) Estimated macronutrient and fatty acid intakes from an East African Paleolithic diet Abstract Our genome adapts slowly to changing conditions of existence. Many diseases of civilisation result from mismatches between our Paleolithic genome and the rapidly changing environment, including our diet. The objective of the present study was to reconstruct multiple Paleolithic diets to estimate the ranges of nutrient intakes upon which humanity evolved. A database of, predominantly East African, plant and animal foods (meat/fish) was used to model multiple Paleolithic diets, using two pathophysiological constraints (i.e. protein < 35 energy % (en%) and linoleic acid (LA) >1·0 en%), at known hunter-gatherer plant/animal food intake ratios (range 70/30-30/70 en%/en%). We investigated selective and non-selective savannah, savannah/aquatic and aquatic hunter-gatherer/scavenge...

Apologies that this is off topic....but indulge me on this one.  Normal service will be resumed. Sorry that this blog has been quiet for a week - I've been on holiday, getting some sun, exercise and relaxation.  We went to Southern Spain, hillwalking in the mountains of Andalucia, mainly in the Sierras de Trajeda.  What a superb area. We had a great week of walking in some stunning scenery - often up over 1200 meters round some amazing limestone peaks.   It was an organised trip  with Pure High Walking Holidays - a really good company.  The accommodation was fantastic in a beautiful little village. Each walk was  challenging enough to make you feel you had achieved something at the end of the day while we had confidence from being with a guide who knew the area well and who was a qualified Mountain Leader.  I'd thoroughly recommend Pure High if you are looking for a walking holiday in Europe. I'll write the trip up in detail on my o...

The BBC News has picked up on the paleo diet. Our ancestors in the palaeolithic period, which covers 2.5 million years ago to 12,000 years ago, are thought to have had a diet based on vegetables, fruit, nuts, roots and meat. Cereals, potatoes, bread and milk did not feature at all. It was only with the dawn of agriculture (around 10,000 years ago) that our diets evolved to include what we think of as staple foods now. But why do they put meat at the bottom of that list??  Good quote though:  "Palaeolithic man may have died earlier than we do now, but he didn't die of bad nutrition."

I haven't posted a big jump no here for a while.  How about this one:

The "Senobi" This one just looks weird!  It reckons that a basic breathing exercise can up regulate the output of certain hormones. The whole paper is available as pdf Here is the abstract: The "Senobi" breathing exercise is recommended as first line treatment for obesity. Sato K, Kawamura T, Yamagiwa S. Neuroadrenergic abnormalities, including a predominant activity of parasympathetic nerve and blunted hormone secretion, are recognized in the overweight patients. This study aimed to examine whether the "Senobi" breathing method, a stretch-breathing exercise that we have developed, could activate or recover sympathetic nervous system activity that leads to the loss of body weight. Forty pre-menopausal women, aged 40 to 50 years, participated in this study. Twenty were healthy and the other 20 were overweight (body mass index > 25 and body fat > 30%). Sympathetic nerve activity was assessed using equipment that analyzes cardiac-beat varia...

I am reading a book that would appeal to anyone with an interest in the paelo diet / evolutionary fitness.  It is called : Selected: Why Some People Lead, Why Others Follow and Why It Matters; What Evolutionary Psychology Tells Us About Leadership It is a really interesting read and well drafted as well (I like the way that there is an introduction that tells you chapter by chapter what is coming). The ideas are familiar if you have read arond hte ideas of evolutioanry fitness.  Two of the  basic ideas  put across are : The savannah hypothesis - we are built as if we hunters living on the african savannah, living in tight tribes of 50-150 with really active life styles. The mismatch hypothesis -   modern life does not align with this "ideal" context - i.e. we don't live or eat like hunters, we don't have active lifestyles and we don't live in tight tribes of 50 - 150.  Hence we face obesity, depression, etc etc That is all pretty familiar stuff i...

This is an interesting study.  The context is clinical, treating people with conditions that lead to muscle wasting.  Anyway rather than just try to feed these patients up, they are realising that they need resistance exercise in order to promote growth and put the food to use. Resistance exercise and appropriate nutrition to counteract muscle wasting and promote muscle hypertrophy. Abstract PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Loss of skeletal muscle mass is a common feature of a number of clinical scenarios including limb casting, bed rest, and various disorders such as HIV-AIDS, sepsis, cancer cachexia, heart failure, and uremia. Commonly, muscle disuse (hypodynamia) is the sole reason, or a large part, of why muscle mass is lost. The reduction in strength, or dynapenia, that accompanies these conditions is also a function of the degree of hypodynamia and is related to muscle loss. RECENT FINDINGS: The major and consistent finding in a number of human-based models of muscle wasting is...

Well, despite what you might have heard, the scientists are not sure:   (abstract below - does anyone have the full paper?) Is dietary fat "fattening"? A comprehensive research synthesis. Abstract The goal of this research synthesis was to separate and articulate questions that had clear meaning, were empirically addressable, and were germane to the broad question "Is fat fattening?" Four such questions addressing the effect of varying the proportion of dietary fat on body weight and body fat were formulated. A comprehensive review of electronic citation databases was conducted to identify studies that addressed each question. The results of the studies addressing each question were tabulated and summarized, and an answer for each question was formulated. The results indicated that whether "fat is fattening" depends on exactly what one means by the question. It is apparent that under conditions of energy deficit, high-fat diets lead to greater weig...

LAst year I put up a post on the double hip in a punch, with a video from Peter Consterdine . Anyway, i thought of that when I saw this piece of research.  It is about golf, but the principle is the same. "Up until now, the evidence for 'loading the hips' has all been anecdotal," says Dr Su Stewart , who led the research. "Coaches emphasise it, and certainly any golfer can feel the tension the movement creates. What we have shown is how closely this relatively small movement correlates with increased angular velocity at the club head. A great golf drive is not simply about creating torque by rotating the body around the spine, it is also about creating torque within the hips by rotating the pelvis around the right hip joint itself." In the study, eight right-handed male golfers with handicaps below five were tested in the laboratory with a variety of techniques including an array of 12 motion-capture cameras and 39 reflective markers (35 on the par...

The blog of daily mobility routines by Kelly Starrett has been gaining some exposure across the internet recently. You can check it out here.

I've mentioned this before - the importance of sleeping in the dark to our health . Here is more on the same idea: Artificial Light Suppresses Melatonin, Boosts Cancer University of Haifa researchers found evidence that Light At Night (LAN) has harmful health effects. Bright city lights might boost your risks of cancer by suppressing melatonin production. Update - Michael has more on this here .

I'm busy with work at the moment.  I'll be back posting more regulalrly when things quieten down a bit.