No variation in sleep patterns during the year in northern europe

One sent to me by Jorgen.  Interesting given the shange in the length of hte days up at this lattitude.  Even here in Scotland at the moment it is light until well past 10 pm.

people there report no difference in insomnia between winter, when there are only 3 hours of daylight, or in summer, when there are 21 hours of daylight.

The researchers were surprised because earlier studies have indicated that darkness
during winter might accentuate depression and the sleeplessness that derives from it.

Seasonal Variations in Sleep Problems at Latitude 63°–65° in Norway The Nord-Trøndelag Health Study, 1995–1997

Most studies on seasonal variability in sleep have asked participants if they think their sleep quality varies with the seasons, which reveals the research hypothesis to the participants. To date, the hypothesis of seasonal variation in sleep has not been tested in a large population-based fully blinded study. The aim of the current study was to investigate monthly variations in sleep problems in a geographic region of Norway with large seasonal differences in daytime light. Using data from a general health survey, the authors had access to information on sleep in the general population, collected across the seasons over 2 years without linking sleep to seasonal variation. In all, 43,045 participants (mean age, 44.6 years) of the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study, 1995–1997 (referred to as “HUNT-2”), provided reports of insomnia symptoms and time in bed in all months except July. The mean prevalence of insomnia symptoms was 12.4%. No evidence of a seasonal variation on reports of insomnia symptoms or time in bed was found. These null findings are in marked contrast to previous seasonality studies of sleep. Previous studies reporting seasonal variations in sleep and insomnia might have been subject to publication biases and lack of blinding to the research hypothesis.

Tim Ferriss on "The 4-Hour Body"

Love him or hate him?

Sleep loss lowers testosterone.....

I'm off to bed

Cutting back on sleep drastically reduces a healthy young man's testosterone levels, according to a study published in the June 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Eve Van Cauter, PhD, professor in medicine and director of the study, found that men who slept less than five hours a night for one week in a laboratory had significantly lower levels of testosterone than when they had a full night's sleep. Low testosterone has a host of negative consequences for young men, and not just in sexual behaviour and reproduction. It is critical in building strength and muscle mass, and bone density.

More here, but I can't get the full thing.

Melissa takes down Leo

Zen Habits had a post yesterday saying that there was no evidence that soy was harmful.   Melissa has taken him to task pretty well.

Zen Habits - Stupid about Soy

Goblet Squats

Dan John has talked a lot about Goblet Squats and their value in patterning the squat. 

I found this video of a strong set.


Deep, straight back. (but crap shoes as Pieter points out in the comment below)

EDIT - For what it is worth the video below is what Dan John himself in his new book (Dan has just posted a link to a free ebook  - The Coyote Point Kettlebell Club) points to to explain the move.  You will see it is more of a mobility move / stretch.

Barefoot Running Update–Q&A With Biomechanist Irene Davis, Ph.D.

Runners World have put up an interesting interview with Biomechanist Irene Davis, Ph.D., a leading researcher in the running field for more than 20 years.

She is very much in favour of barefoot running:

Davis is an unabashed promoter of barefoot running and barefoot-like running form.

“I believe there is a compelling body of evidence that suggests we need to consider a paradigm change," she told me yesterday. "But paradigm changes are risky, and younger scientists may be more tentative."

The whole thing is worth reading but I liked this bit:

Why isn't anyone studying barefoot running and landing styles on different surfaces? We've got a lot of hard asphalt out there today.

There have been numerous studies that have looked at how runners react to different surfaces. We now know that runners will change their form in just one or two strides when they hit a hard surface like concrete or a soft surface like sand. They'll adapt a softer landing on concrete, and a stiffer landing on sand. This applies to shoes as well. It has been shown that runners stiffen their knee when landing in cushioned shoes compared to bare feet, even though those shoes reduce impacts when tested in a lab. Things change dramatically when you interface the shoes with a runner who has a complex, well-honed, sensory feedback system.

I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but when I talk to evolutionary biologists,like Dan Lieberman, they tell me that we did evolve to run on hard surfaces, and that  the African savannah was quite hard. It may not be as hard as pavement, but I believe we have an innate ability to adapt to whatever surfaces we come in contact with. So, with reasonable time to adapt, I think we have the potential to run well on hard surfaces. Every stride you take running barefoot on a hard surface will give you a lower loading rate than running with a rearfoot strike in shoes. In addition, you don't want to take away the sensory feedback mechanism, and that's what shoes do.

I bought a pair of Vibrams yesterday - the first time I'd seen them in a shop in Edinburgh.  After a long time, barefoot running and minimal shoes are becoming trendy.   It made me laugh that while I was buying these FiveFingers, there were people in the shop being sold fancy supportive shoes to correct their "pronation".  I challenged the shop assistant.  He was a podiatry student though so his job will be predicated on sellign orthotics.  Telling folk to spend more time barefoot to sort out their problems will not cut it!

Colin Gordon on Posture

My pal Colin - from Edinburgh Deep Tissue Massage -  has posted a superb new piece in his series on posture:

Improving your posture Pt2

Excellent ideas which I will steal when I come to write a future article on the dangers of sitting too much.

One of the quickest ways of getting big improvements is to target the hip flexors and superficial fascia of the pelvis. Tight hip flexors inhibit the glutes, hip extensors, and through our largely sedentary life styles are one of the big contributors to disrupting our posture and this is also a big issue in athletic performance where the glutes are the powerhouse of so many activities. This inhibition of the glutes makes it difficult to recruit them to pull the pelvis posteriorly and back into balance. The anterior tilt also makes it difficult to recruit the musculature of the lower abdominals so you can see why when you are asked to bring your pelvis back to neutral by contracting both these groups it is possible to do but difficult to hold and as such simply trying to strengthen either of them may be a challenge for some and even for those who can still isn’t going to cut it since there is still a downward pull on the pelvis.

Read the rest

Warm ups limit performance.

Well long drawn out tough warm ups seem to.   It makes sense - you get knackered warming up and can't perform as well in the event.  (abstract here)

I reckon they coudl have got even better results with even less of a warm up.

"Our study compared a standard warm-up, with what we termed an experimental warm-up," explains Tomaras. "We interviewed a number of coaches and athletes to come up with the traditional warm-up."

The experiment involved high performance sprint cyclists performing a traditional warm-up lasting about 50 minutes with a graduated intensity that ranged from 60 to 95 per cent of maximal heart rate before ending with several all-out sprints. The experimental warm-up was much shorter at about 15 minutes, and was performed at a lower intensity, ending with just a single sprint. The researchers conducted a number of tests following each warm-up to accurately measure the athlete's power output and fatigue.

"What we found, was that the shorter warm-up resulted in significantly less muscle fatigue and a peak power output that was 6.2 per cent higher. This represents a substantial improvement for an elite athlete," says Tomaras. "On the basis of this study I would suggest that sprint athletes should start thinking about adopting a shorter and less strenuous warm up for better performance.

From here

The single best exercise

I thought that this was an interesting article.  The journalist asked what different experts considered to be the single best exercise.   The conclusion seems to be hill sprints or at least sprints up stairs. 

The approach seems promising, since most of us have minimal time to exercise each week. Gibala last month published a new study of H.I.T., requiring only a stationary bicycle and some degree of grit. In this modified version, you sprint for 60 seconds at a pace that feels unpleasant but sustainable, followed by 60 seconds of pedaling easily, then another 60-second sprint and recovery, 10 times in all. “There’s no particular reason why” H.I.T. shouldn’t be adaptable to almost any sport, Gibala said, as long as you adequately push yourself.

Of course, to be effective, H.I.T. must hurt. But a study published last month found that when a group of recreational runners practiced H.I.T. on the track, they enjoyed the workout more than a second group of runners who jogged continuously for 50 minutes. The H.I.T. runners, the study’s authors suspect, were less bored.

The only glaring inadequacy of H.I.T. is that it builds muscular strength less effectively than, say, the squat. But even that can be partially remedied, Gibala said: “Sprinting up stairs is a power workout and interval session simultaneously.”Meaning that running up steps just might be the single best exercise of all.

That is the view of Martin Gibala.  He is the guy who has been doing a lot of research recently on the imapct of interval training, generally finding that short sprints can have the same effects as endurance exercise and that you also do not need to be flat out in the sprints to get the benefits.

The full paper for that last one is here.

Hip Pain Relief - Martha Peterson

I've just ordered this lady's DVD after seeing it mentioned by Dan John.  It will be interesting to see what she has to say.

Kids are getting weaker

This research is quite disturbing, but not surprising.    Playing on computers is displacing outdoor activity such that even since 1998 the ability to do some pretty basic movements and activities has declined markedly.   Certainly a worry for the future functioning of society.

We are training people to sit indoors at desks and we will reap the consequences in poor health both physical and psychological.

Academics led by Dr Gavin Sandercock, a children's fitness expert at Essex University, studied how strong a group of 315 Essex 10-year-olds in 2008 were compared with 309 children the same age in 1998. They found that:

■ The number of sit-ups 10-year-olds can do declined by 27.1% between 1998 and 2008

■ Arm strength fell by 26% and grip strength by 7%

■ While one in 20 children in 1998 could not hold their own weight when hanging from wall bars, one in 10 could not do so in 2008.

"This is probably due to changes in activity patterns among English 10-year-olds, such as taking part in fewer activities like rope-climbing in PE and tree-climbing for fun," Sandercock said. "Typically, these activities boosted children's strength, making them able to lift and hold their own bodyweight."

The fact that 10% could not do the wall bars test and another 10% refused to try was "really shocking", he added. "That probably shows that climbing and holding their own weight was something they hadn't done before."

READ MORE

KStarr on sitting

I love this guy

Not my definition of protein rich

This raised a smile!

Researchers are recommending a protein rich breakfast for a range of reasons

"Incorporating a healthy breakfast containing protein-rich foods can be a simple strategy for people to stay satisfied longer, and therefore, be less prone to snacking," Leidy said. "People reach for convenient snack foods to satisfy their hunger between meals, but these foods are almost always high in sugar and fat and add a substantial amount of calories to the diet. These findings suggest that a protein-rich breakfast might be an effective strategy to improve appetite control and prevent overeating in young people."

however, their definition of protein rich is a bit strange:

For three weeks, the teens either continued to skip breakfast or consumed 500-calorie breakfast meals containing cereal and milk (which contained normal quantities of protein) or higher protein meals prepared as Belgium waffles, syrup and yogurt.

The abstract is here

Obesity may mean your muscles are less able to cope with your body weight....

or as the headline says:  obesity creates wimpy rats

"These results may explain why muscle strength and locomotion are impaired in obese humans, and hence perhaps why it is so difficult to lose excess weight and recover from obesity," said Schilder.

The researchers first demonstrated that troponin T expression varied with body weight during normal growth. Then they artificially increased the body weight of one group of rats by 30 percent using a custom-made weighted vest. Externally applied weight caused a shift in the muscle troponin T expression, matching that of animals whose actual body weight was 30 percent higher. In contrast, troponin T expression did not respond to a similar increase in body weight in the obese rats.

Sitting is killing you

Via: this link

Neck Packing?

I saw this on Bret Contreras' blog the other day.  Interesting concept and worth some thought and tinkering.

Improving your posture

My pal Colin (Edinburgh Deep Tissue massage) has written a great piece on posture

Improving your posture

We see a lot of talk about having good posture and what to do to achieve it but what is good posture?

It’s probably easier to think of it as how you would stand if you didn’t sit at a desk for 8 hours a day or hadn’t picked up any injuries from playing your chosen sport. You’re spine has natural curves that get disrupted if you don’t pay attention to how you are sitting and the effects of long periods of doing so even with good posture and what happens to how you move when you get injured. Your hips, knees, ankles, shoulders are all affected by the sitting for long periods and obviously can all be injured playing sport. If your pelvis is not constantly pulled forward and down by overly tight tissues will sit relatively level, your shoulder girdle would sit comfortably back if it wasn’t being pulled forward by your tight pec’s etc (this is simplifying it but you get the point) .

All the need for holding yourself in “good posture” would be gone because it would happen on it’s own and a what you may find difficult to do at the moment would be happening without any conscious thought on your part because the imbalances you are trying to counter wouldn’t be there.......

READ THE REST

New Paleo / EvFit blogs

Well they are new to me but I just came across these  excellent blogs.   They have gone straight into the RSS reader!

Robert Paterson's Weblog - has a lot of paleo material on it as Robert charts his discoveries.  He is finding much of the same material that I am, and presenting it well.

His paleo discoveries have prompted him to found another site  The Missing Human Manual

Do you want to age well? Most of us do. If you are my age, 60, this is more important a question that if you are 30. But most of us would not wish to have heart disease, cancer, dementia when we get old.

Most of us think it is normal that we will get ill like this.

But science today tells us that this is not "Normal". Our evolutionary past designed us to be active and fit until we drop dead. Why? Because raising human children takes so long. Mature adults had to do most of the hard work enable us to invest up to 25 years in our kids.

We are designed by our evolution to reach a plateau of fitness in mid life. So why do most of us not live like this?

We don't because, we have strayed away from the best way of living that fits our evolution best. Our culture has got too far ahead of our biology. We eat foods that make us ill. We have lost our social identity and power and that makes us ill. And we have lost touch with the circadian rhythms of the Natural World, and that has made us ill too.

We have lost our fit with our true nature.

This site will be a Manual. It will show you what the best fit is. It will show you the science behind this. It will share with you some methods for getting your fit back with your true human nature.

A lot of his writings are prompted by the superb Michael Rose's 55 Theses   His propositions remind me of Wittgenstein....

Here are the last 3:

• Young people with significant agricultural ancestry can sustain their health with agricultural patterns of nutrition and activity, but not with an evolutionarily novel industrial lifestyle.
• 
  Older adults with significant agricultural ancestry cannot sustain their health with either agricultural or industrial patterns of nutrition and activity, and should instead switch to hunter-gatherer patterns of nutrition and activity in order to slow their later aging and possibly hasten its cessation.
• 
  Once this switch to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle among older adults has become widespread, further changes that would enhance human health at later ages can be discovered using evolutionary research tools, such as experimental evolution with model organisms and the molecular genetic analysis of human evolutionary history.

Fuelled by fat

Here is another quick one, heart function improves when fuelled by fat

Contrary to what we've been told, eliminating or severely limiting fats from the diet may not be beneficial to cardiac function in patients suffering from heart failure, a study at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine reports.

Results from biological model studies conducted by assistant professor of physiology and biophysics Margaret Chandler, PhD, and other researchers, demonstrate that a high-fat diet improved overall mechanical function, in other words, the heart's ability to pump,

Is bad cholesterol bad?

I have little faith in the whole cholesterol hypothesis and the labelling of something as "bad" just seems to be dumbing down to the extreme.

Anyway, this was interesting:

'Bad' cholesterol not as bad as people think, shows Texas A&M studyCOLLEGE STATION, May 4, 2011 – The so-called "bad cholesterol" – low-density lipoprotein commonly called LDL – may not be so bad after all, shows a Texas A&M University study that casts new light on the cholesterol debate, particularly among adults who exercise. .....

Mobility / Prehab with Dan John

The great Dan John has posted some new videos of mobility moves he is currently working on.    Birddogs, Can Openers and Tactical Frogs.....

Maffetone on walking

Phil Maffetone was ahead of the pack in some ways - he was talking about a low carb diet for endurance and getting barefoot years ago.

Anyway, still thinking of the upcoming Hillfit articles, he had a good piece on the walking gait the other day:

I'll copy all of it here but all his articles are worth checking out.

More on Gait
Dr. Phil Maffetone

The two-part article on gait (May 2011) was very popular. Among the reader’s questions were those about walking gait. Walking is an ideal workout for fat burning and overall fitness for millions of people. Runners often walk too, as warm up or cool down, as a method to develop more endurance (i.e., longer runs), and even during marathons, often unplanned. It’s actually not unusual to see the walking gait of runners as abnormal.

As discussed in the article on gait, there’s an obvious difference between walking and proper running, especially in how the foot strikes the ground (on the heel for walkers and more forward in runners). The walking body, which always has one foot in contract with the ground, functions like an inverted pendulum, swinging along step-by-step, literally vaulting over stiff legs with locked knees. Running should not involve locking the knee, as each is always slightly flexed while the foot is on the ground. Herein lies one problem with many runners who walk, and even those who don’t run. When walking, many people keep their knee slightly flexed instead of locked. It’s as if their knee is in a running gait pattern while the rest of the body is walking. This poses a potential physical problem—stress on the knee joint and in the muscles around it.

When walking, you should gently be locking your knee with each step, as you “vault over your foot and start pushing off. That doesn’t mean thrusting the knee joint into extension. But naturally allowing it to go into full extension and lock momentarily before continuing the normal gait cycle. This should never cause pain in the knee—if it does it means something is wrong somewhere (such as muscle imbalance, poor foot mechanics, or bad shoes).

In competitors performing the Olympic walk, in addition to making sure there is always contact with the ground, locking the knee is a requirement—otherwise they may be disqualified.

All other walkers need not be so concerned other than to avoid unnatural gait movements. Improper shoes promote this more than anything else. For runners, the problem may be they’re used to a slightly flexed knee during running and somehow this gets translated into a walking gait.

Many other factors discussed in the running gait article also apply to walkers. These include an upright posture, which promotes the use of the abdominal and gluteus maximus muscles, a slightly forward center of gravity (but not bending forward), allowing the pelvis to lead the way, and a level head. And, the wearing of flat shoes, which, while landing on your heels, you don’t remain there very long as your muscles and body’s forward motion quickly move you through the mid-foot and toe-off phase of gait.

Another question about gait was regarding children, and how shoes can interfere with it. This requires more discussion and is the topic of an upcoming article.

Phil's piece on hiking is also worth  reflecting on.

biophilia

I interviewed Frank here

Not there yet

the intercostals are there....the abs will follow.  This is coming off the back of little training coupled with a lot of stress from work.   For the rest of this summer my aim is to tighten up a wee bit and get the abs there.

Back to it

Now my work has quietened down I'll be turning back to this blog more seriously.

My focus for a while will be formulating ideas for my hillfit articles