Conditioning Research

I just wanted to point towards Adelfo Cerame a bodybuilder with a disability.  I've been reading about him and following his contest prep for a while via the prolific Suppversity blog (I have no idea how Prof Andro has the time to prepare posts of the depth that he achieves almost every day, he is amazing) Adelfo is inspirational. 

So we have been saying this for a while.... One of the key themes of my book Hillfit is that getting stronger will make you more fit for "cardio" activities such as hillwalking or hiking.  The theme is how to get stronger.  Indeed I had one client ask for a refund because I didn't tell her how to improve her cardiovascular fitness!  I need to send her this new paper: Resistance Training to Momentary Muscular Failure Improves Cardiovascular Fitness in Humans: A Review of Acute Physiological Responses and Chronic Physiological Adaptations A detailed, peer reviewed academic survey of the literature and previous studies which demonstrates that proper resistance training...to failure...improves all the standard measures of cardiovascular fitness. This is a proper scientific paper, long and in depth.  The writers have been through all the relevant previous work on this and have demonstrated that getting stronger gets you fitter! The full paper is available on line...

The psychological benefit of exercise in the outdoors, particularly in natural environments, is something that I've mentioned before (e.g. here ).  I also had a piece in TGO on the subject:  Hills not Pills (the reference material for that is here ) It is also something that I mention in the Hillfit book . Alex Hutchinson has a good article on this in the Globe and Mail - Why is walking in the woods so good for you? which focusses on recent science looking at the some of the reasons for this, highlighting the role of your perception, the call on your attention that is made by your environment: The ability to direct voluntary attention is crucial in daily life (and for cognitive tasks like remembering random digits), but it’s easily fatigued. Dr. Berman and his colleagues believe that going for a walk in the park gives voluntary attention a break, since your mind has a chance to wander aimlessly and be engaged – involuntarily but gently – by your surroundings. “In a l...

Spotted this yesterday and thought it worth posting.  If you read around the topic of obesity there are various hormones that get mentioned - leptin, insulin, Peptide YY and others.  Ghrelin is another one that pops up occasionally: a hunger stimulating hormone. Ghrelin Levels Increase After Pictures Showing Food With a background of regular meals, these researchers showed various photos to the subjects: food and "neutral" images.  The findings suggest that sight of food elevates ghrelin levels. Interesting but obvious too?  Seeing food makes you hungry.  I wonder if all this has something to do with the obesity epidemic too.  Images of food are everywhere.  Appetites through the roof.  People are eating more and getting fatter. Be careful what you spend your time looking at.

Thanks for all the comments on the last post.  It is nice to have such supportive readers. I took the advice of some of you yesterday and just did something that made me happy - a 10 mile walk in the Scottish mountains.  The weather was perfect and the day left me feeling tired but energised. (There are more photos here ) I took a video on the top because I was blown away by the views: This morning I was up early and into my local hills where I was lucky enough to experience a cloud inversion.  The cloud and mist hung low across the city but I soon climbed above it into blue skies.  It is stunning to look down on this carpet of white cloud with the blue skies above. Certainly a weekend that has been proper re-creation.  Tiring but worth it for what I saw and did.

I'm struggling bit with this blog. I'm feeling pretty down anyway with the loss of my Dad, but I'm finding it hard to get much motivation to post here.  Partly I think I am learning that it is the basics that are important anyway.  I am tired of all the fads and the personalities, the drama and the seeking after novelty.  Eat real food, get enough sleep, do some strength training, walk lots.   Diet - I used to think it was all about low carb, or high fat, or paleo....now I am not so sure.  I avoid wheat because it makes my stomach unhappy, but otherwise I eat all sorts. Exercise - some basic, safe strength training goes a long long way to promoting all sorts of health.  However, there are so many fads and crazes out there.  So much too which is written as if we are all elite athletes or physiotherapy patients. 

This one reminds me of the stuff that showed chocolate milk to be the ideal post workout snack - it puts the everyday food into focus. You don't need the fancy products....nanas are fine. Full text Bananas as an Energy Source during Exercise: A Metabolomics Approach This study compared the acute effect of ingesting bananas (BAN) versus a 6% carbohydrate drink (CHO) on 75-km cycling performance and post-exercise inflammation, oxidative stress, and innate immune function using traditional and metabolomics-based profiling. Trained cyclists (N = 14) completed two 75-km cycling time trials (randomized, crossover) while ingesting BAN or CHO (0.2 g/kg carbohydrate every 15 min). Pre-, post-, and 1-h-post-exercise blood samples were analyzed for glucose, granulocyte (GR) and monocyte (MO) phagocytosis (PHAG) and oxidative burst activity, nine cytokines, F2-isoprostanes, ferric reducing ability of plasma (FRAP), and metabolic profiles using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Bloo...

Interesting looking study. ( Full Text ) They take the obligatory swipe at saturated fat, but the thrust seems to be to avoid excess omega 6 poly unsaturated fats.  Of course all this is called Mediterranean....whatever that means in reality. New insights into the health effects of dietary saturated and omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids Cardiovascular diseases and cancers are leading causes of morbidity and mortality. Reducing dietary saturated fat and replacing it with polyunsaturated fat is still the main dietary strategy to prevent cardiovascular diseases, although major flaws have been reported in the analyses supporting this approach. Recent studies introducing the concept of myocardial preconditioning have opened new avenues to understand the complex interplay between the various lipids and the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The optimal dietary fat profile includes a low intake of both saturated and omega-6 fatty acids and a moderate intake of omega-3 f...

Good stuff from Bret Contreras

This was interesting.  A study on "cheating" - swinging the weights, using poor form, whatever you want to call it.  They used a computer simulation of a lateral raise, adding a little momentum to the move to see what would happen.  The idea seems to be that added momentum (cheating) increases the torque on the muscles. I'm not sure what I think of this...but I can't get past the idea that this is a computer simulation. Does cheating pay: the role of externally supplied momentum on muscular force in resistance exercise. Our work investigates the use of "external momentum" in the context of hypertrophy-oriented training. This is momentum supplied to the load (such as a dumbbell) used in an exercise by means of action of muscles not inherently involved in the exercise. We challenge the general consensus that the use of such momentum often described as "cheating" is counterproductive. We focus on the use of external momentum in the shoulder l...

Not sure that it is all about efficiency....what about injury prevention ..... but you might be interested in this from here . UPDATE - Someone pointed me to the comments to the Scientific American article and this one from Ken Schafer makes some excellent points, so I hope he doesn't mind me cutting and pasting: ..............I have read the study. This study had nothing to do with cushioned shoes. They took experienced barefoot runners. And compared how much energy they used running barefoot and how much energy they used running in very light weight minimalist running shoes (little to no cushion). The subjects used slightly more energy when running barefoot. It is important to understand that the subjects maintained the same "barefoot" running technique with and without shoes. So this was not a test of fore-footed running technique vs. heel striking running technique. Most of the evidence to date indicates that the technique used by barefoot runners is more...

via Science Daily In a paper published May 17 in Cell Metabolism, scientists from Salk's Regulatory Biology Laboratory reported that mice limited to eating during an 8-hour period are healthier than mice that eat freely throughout the day, regardless of the quality and content of their diet. The study sought to determine whether obesity and metabolic diseases result from a high-fat diet or from disruption of metabolic cycles. The abstract is at Time-Restricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet

I just spotted this paper and it is definitely worth a read.  The whole thing is there for free download as a pdf : Nutritional regulation of muscle protein synthesis with resistance exercise: strategies to enhance anabolism Provision of dietary amino acids increases skeletal muscle protein synthesis (MPS), an effect that is enhanced by prior resistance exercise. As a fundamentally necessary process in the enhancement of muscle mass, strategies to enhance rates of MPS would be beneficial in the development of interventions aimed at increasing skeletal muscle mass particularly when combined with chronic resistance exercise. The purpose of this review article is to provide an update on current findings regarding the nutritional regulation of MPS and highlight nutrition based strategies that may serve to maximize skeletal muscle protein anabolism with resistance exercise. Such factors include timing of protein intake, dietary protein type, the role of leucine as a key anabolic am...

This is an interesting one. Serum [25(OH)D] status, ankle strength and activity show seasonal variation in older adults: relevance for winter falls in higher latitudes. ankle dorsiflexor strength varied seasonally. Increased ankle strength in summer may be influenced by increased levels of outdoors activity over the summer months. Reduced winter-time dorsiflexor strength may predispose older people to increased risk of tripping-related falls, and warrants investigation in a multi-faceted falls prevention programme Interesting that strength is always key.

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Doug McGuff.  I interviewed him here a couple of years ago and he was kind enough to give me a very good review for Hillfit . There is an excellent interview with Doug at the Bulletproof Executive site that is very well worth listening to. Podcast #26: Body By Science with Dr. Doug McGuff, MD

So I am back to work and back to "normal" life after a tough couple of weeks.  For the last 6 months most of my life has been focussed on planning the elections in Edinburgh.  Polling on 3 May and the count on 4 May.  320,000 voters over 62,000 postal voters, 340 polling stations, 17 wards, 127 candidates.  Then on 2 May I was called to my Dad's bedside and I had to walk away from it all.  I drove south for 4 hours and then with my family sat with him for 48 hours until he died.  For most of that time I held his hand and talked to him.   When I arrived he was conscious and he saw me, smiled and tried to talk. When I visited he would always hate it when I left to return to Scotland.  This time when I got to the hospital I told him that I was not going to leave him anymore, ever.  I remained there with him then.  And he died.  Finally all the confusion, the weakness was gone.  He was at rest.  I was with him all the t...

The blog will be quiet for a while. My dad has died, released from his dementia at last.

interesting comment in the Guardian today from the artist David Hockney on obesity.... Is there a link between the decline of smoking and the rise of obesity and diabetes? It's been suggested that with a previous "health" scare of fat being bad for you, they took it out of a lot of food and thus the flavour, and then, to give it some flavour, added sugar. This was 30 years ago. It turned out some fat was not only essential, it was good for the heart after all, but they have now given a lot of people a sweet tooth. This is why it is so appalling that there is no debate at all about smoking. Some people might be much better off smoking instead of nibbling. There are still 10 million smokers, now treated like very naughty children. It seems there is no free lunch, and the media and political elite look like the cause of it all, exaggerating constantly to people they seem to despise.