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."