Conditioning Research

Not sure how much this tells us.    Basically standing one arm presses cause more activation of the "core" than doing them seated with both arms. Muscle activity of the core during bilateral, unilateral, seated and standing resistance exercise Little is known about the effect of performing common resistance exercises standing compared to seated and unilaterally compared to bilaterally on muscle activation of the core. Thus, the purpose of this study was to compare the electromyographic activity (EMG) of the superficial core muscles (i.e. rectus abdominis, external oblique and erector spinae) between seated, standing, bilateral and unilateral dumbbell shoulder presses. 15 healthy males performed five repetitions at 80% of one-repetition maximum of the exercises in randomized order. Results were analyzed with a two-way analysis of variance and a Bonferroni post hoc test. The position × exercise interaction was significantly different for rectus abdominis (P = 0.016), bu...

"Strength is a skill".  That has almost become a cliche, particularly around the kettlebell community, but there is much truth in this simple sentence.  I first same across this idea when Clarence Bass introduce Pavel's idea of synaptic facilitation , that so much of strength is neurological, an idea that Pavel expounded in his article Greasing the Groove (pdf) Of course this is related to the ideas of Z health too (check out the material here ) and Todd Hargrove had a great post the other day on the brain's impact on strength.  Linked to all of this I received a fascinating email this morning from Bill who often comments on the blog.  It explains his experience of how practice makes him stronger.  I'll post it all here and would be really interested in your comments of thoughts: Your recent articles on Z-Health and other neurological aspects of improving performance reminded me of an experiment I did about 6 months ago.  First a little background...

Is this how we were meant to live?

 The report that he is talking about is here by the way by the way, I wonder if neck packing works do to the arthokinetic reflex? mc has a post here that makes me think that that may be so The interview that I did with mc has a good overview of Z Health too

I was reading recently about the amazing Captain Barclay .  His most famous exploit was the walking of 1,000 miles (1,600 km) in 1000 hours for 1000 guineas in 1809.  There is good analysis here. I thought that the way in which his gait was described was interesting.  It is essentially POSE walking. Walter Thom attributes Captain Barclay's pedestrian powers to his great strength and his walking style that involved bending the body forward to throw the weight on the knees, taking short steps and raising his feet only a few inches from the ground. (from here ) When walking, the Captain took com paratively short steps and had an air of leaning more than slightly forward . ( from this book )

In the past I've posted a few things about exercise and brain health, not least the work of John Ratey , and his book Spark .   I can't remember if I've posted it but there is also the work of Kelly Lambert who looks tmovement in terms of addressing depression. Anyway, I saw this mentioned on Twitter the other day: Exercise Training Increases Mitochondrial Biogenesis in the Brain. Exercise training increases brain mitochondrial biogenesis which may have important implications, not only with regard to fatigue, but also with respect to various central nervous system diseases and age-related dementia that are often characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction.

I've mentioned the barefoot running research of Prof Daniel Lieberman before but here is a great interview with him explaining some of his ideas . While he is known mainly for his ideas on running, given some of the things I've been thinking about recently I thought his bit on sitting was interesting: Q. People with bad backs often blame evolution for their pain. They say, “My back aches because man was not meant to walk on two feet.” Are they right? A. If that were true, natural selection would have its toll and we’d be extinct. What is more likely is that many people sit in chairs all day, get no exercise, and thus have weak backs. We did not evolve to sit in chairs all day.