Conditioning Research

In glorious Spanish weather - sunny but with a cooling breeze - yesterday we climbed La Maroma, a 2069m beast. The biggest hill I've ever been up, she was beautiful and gave us sights of ibex and eagles as we climbed. This is what it is all about. Get training and get out there. All this was with http://www.purehighwalkingholidaysspain.com/

I am really getting addicted to these shoes.

Andrew (Evolvify) tweeted this earlier tonight. I've not read the full text yet, but it looks interesting. The hormone leptin acts as an appetite suppressor. Some people see Obesity as being a result of leptin resistance - the body no longer reacts to leptin.....appetite is no longer suppressed. So this study suggests that sprinting kicks off the same cascade of signals as does leptin. It signals you to stop eating.... The conclusion is really provocative - restoration of leptin sensitivity via sprinting: In conclusion, this study shows that most of the signaling pathways activated by leptin in rodent skeletal muscle are also activated by sprint exercise in human skeletal muscle, despite a small reduction of leptin serum concentration after the sprint exercise. These findings imply that sprint exercise behave as a leptin mimetic and could be used to stimulate the leptin signaling pathways in human skeletal muscle. This opens the possibility of using sprint exercise ...

What do you think? tight psoas, dodgy QL......  I've been there  Sam has a good pdf on this topic for download too

Inner City Weightlifting .  This looks pretty inspiring. InnerCity Weightlifting Video from Jon Feinman on Vimeo .

The Talk Test and its relationship with the ventilatory and lactate thresholds Data showed that the Talk Test related best to the lactate threshold as compared to the ventilatory threshold "Everybody's thought that the Talk Test related well to the ventilatory threshold," Quinn says. "And it does, to a certain degree. But different physiological phenomena occur at each threshold, and it is the phenomena associated with the lactate threshold that relate better to the different levels of the Talk Test." Quinn says these findings on the relationship of the Talk Test to the lactate threshold make the Talk Test relevant to endurance athletes as well as beginning exercisers. "In order to enhance endurance performance, some training has to occur around the lactate threshold intensity level. When subjects in the study had difficulty talking, they were very close to that lactate threshold intensity. Because of this, athletes could gauge their intensity based o...

Golf Changes the Brain A mere 40 hours of golf training, by middle-aged novices, led to increases in gray matter in parts of the brain involved in visual processing and motor coordination, a new study has found. The experiment stood out, among other reasons, for the informal way test subjects were allowed to pursue the training—outside the lab, on their own schedule—and it reaffirmed the plasticity of the mature brain.  I am still finding the neuroplasticity work and its implications absolutely fascinating.  That is why I am trying to learn to juggle!   (There is a related idea here too - musicians have better hearing )

That Paleo Guy (Jamie) tweeted about the infographic below ( more here ). It is superb - great find Jamie. It got me thinking about stress, something I am going to write about in TGO. A friend was telling me recently about his experience as a guide taking a guy up a mountain. It wasn't really a tough route, more of a walk, but the fella got very scared. The various stress hormones did their jobs - sugar dump in the blood, elevated heart rate, worse digestion etc. He got immediately exhausted and had to be physically led down the hill on a short rope. The stress response actually got him into a very dangerous situation not in terms of location but because of how his body reacted. We need to think of strategies to deal with stress to improve performance. Of couse we are also at risk from long term chronic stress........but that is another issue.

Mike Reinold has posted this useful video on how to improve the basic bridge.  This move is something that I recommend for getting the glutes active and firing, something that we need to maintain and promote especially when we spend so much of our time sitting.

A record of some resources on balance / proprioception to which  I am referring  elsewhere. Below-knee cast or aircast best for faster recovery from severe ankle sprain Acute ankle sprain accounts for between 3% and 5% of all UK emergency department attendances: around 1-1.5 million per year.  Ankle Sprains: An Uphill Battle Interestingly, what makes a runner more likely to experience another sprain after the initial injury isn’t so much weakness, but a sensory issue. “After someone has suffered an ankle sprain, not only is the ligament structurally injured, the sensory receptors in the ligament are also damaged,” says Dr. Hertel. Those receptors are responsible for proprioception, which is a function of the nervous system that helps a runner sense where the foot is in relation to the ground. The Effectiveness of a Balance Training Intervention in Reducing the Incidence of Noncontact Ankle Sprains in High School Football Players Conclusion: The increased risk of...

Todd Hargrove posted this amazing video the other day and I just wanted to call attention to it and the things that it teaches.  Todd's own material on learning how to move is definitely worth buying and learning from, taking some of these basic principles and influenced very much by Feldenkrais. Note that Todd didn't do this video - it was created by Irene Gutteridge, a Feldenkrais practitioner and filmmaker . In the session I had with Erwan Le Corre last year there was a section on rolling and perceiving your weight and points of contact with the ground.  All this is very MovNat .  Watching this I can see where many of the ideas in Becoming Bulletproof came from.  They are big on rolling and crawling as foundational moves which also have profound impact on the brain. More and more recently I am becoming fascinated by the brain, neuroplasticity and its role in our movement, health and perception.  There is more to come on this.

I spotted an interesting study today about frowning. One of the things that I will be  writing about in my columns for TGO (a UK hillwalking magazine) is pace in hillwalking. Talk Test I've already mentioned the different metabolic / energy pathways.  It is all really simplified but in basic terms you either burn fat - virtually unlimited - or sugar, which is in limited supply.    Sugar needs more oxygen and burns dirty, producing lactic acid.  (I know this is all simplified too much).  In terms of endurance you need to stay aerobic / fat burning.  As you work harder the fat burning pathway can;t keep up - you do not take in enough oxygen, so you switch to sugar burning / anaerobic.  You will not be able to go for long, since you will run out of fuel and the muck produced by burning sugar will stop you.  Anaerobic - intense intervals etc - are good at making you more efficient and fitter, better at burning fat but they are for tra...

 I was visiting my cousin this weekend in Northeren Ireland.  Her son is 16 and a competitive swimmer, up every morning at 5am to hit the pool.  He is good and has been placing well in all - Ireland competitions. Anyway on the Sunday evening we all went to the pool to swinm some lengths then relax in the sauna.  It was the first time I'd been swimming in about 20 years and I had forgotten how hard it was! I think it is a real gap in my portfolio of survival skills.  I need to do more swimming, improving this fundamental MovNat skill

Clarence has been around for such a long time that I sort of assume that everyone knows of him and - like me - waits each month for his site update.  But I've found that lots of people still are not aware of him. He has a couple of good posts this month: Intensity, Failure, Rep Range, Muscular Endurance, Specificity    - A review of James Steele II article that I pointed to a while ago A nice piece on cross training -    Cross-Training Doesn’t Work—Unless it’s Weight Training