Conditioning Research

In the theme of the last one.... Bosses Who Work Out Are Nicer We also find that the relationship between supervisor stress and abusive behaviour can be diminished when supervisors engage in moderate levels of physical exercise.  (from a study here)

A few months ago I wrote a post about the way in which spending time with my Dad who has dementia had caused me to reassess bits of my life.  It placed so much in perspective, work and relationships but also all the time I spend thinking about diet and training.  In many ways none of this matters....but in other ways this is so important, so vital to live and experience this world.  Take all that it has to offer. I was with him again this weekend.  It was so good just to sit with him in his confusion.  Family is a constant for him - he recognises us and while he is not sure where or when he is, our presence calms him and gives him an anchor.  I held his hand for a couple of hours while he talked or slept, my mum holding the other.  When his eyes opened and he saw me and smiled, sighed and said "You're a good lad." I melted.  I  want to look after and protect him to carry this burden.  Yet I have to leave and return to a different worl...

Sorry to return to this subject, especially with the pumped up and  over-hyped video, but I think this guy makes good points on the impact of stretching before exercise.  Once you get past the music at the start, it is pretty solid stuff too.   As we have said before, static stretching pre-exercise tends to lead to a poorer performance (the Sock Doc has said this in a great article )

Just a couple of quick links connected by glutes..... Martin Berkhan (you must have heard of him) posted this on Twitter and Facebook, and it is interesting as a study: Low load exercises targeting the gluteal muscle group acutely enhance explosive power output in elite athletes. It is this idea of activating the glutes as a warm up and it now seems to have some support from research. I put a glute exercise in the Hillfit exercise routine - a hip extension / glute bridge - because I think that it is important to get the glutes firing, especially given that our habitual sitting posture tends to see those muscles under activated.  I was really focussing on a big 3 - squat (wall sit), pushup and row - but wanted to add a hip hinge/glute move. Interestingly I saw this post today from Mike Reinold on the kneeling hip thrust as a simple glute exercise.  I was messing with this tonight using bands

Thanks to Adam Dean for pointing this out. Almost a year ago I had a couple of posts ( here and here ) about a Harvard Professor who was doing research into barefoot running.  The research continues, and Wired Magazine had a feature on his two latest studies which have been published just this month.  Their piece is called More Evidence Supports Barefoot Running and points to Daniel Lieberman's latest work: If you’re a runner, start striking with your forefoot. And wear those goofy minimalist shoes while you’re at it. Your body will thank you. Those are the findings of a pair of studies by Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. He found runners who use a forefoot strike face a significantly lower risk of repetitive stress injuries, and barely there running shoes produce more efficient movement than conventional kicks. The two studies are: Foot Strike and Injury Rates in Endurance Runners: a retrospective study. PURPOS...

I've had stuff here before on the health impact of spending too much time sitting down.  Lifehacker had a good piece on it today too: Do you sit in an office chair or on your couch for more than six hours a day? Then here are some disturbing facts: Your risk of heart disease has increased by up to 64 percent. You're shaving off seven years of quality life. You're also more at risk for certain types of cancer. Simply put, sitting is killing you. That's the bad news. The good news: It's easy to counteract no matter how lazy you are. Their prescription was: Happily, you only need to do two things to counter the effects of sitting all day: Remember to stand once an hour. Get about 30 minutes of activity per day. Whether you're a couch potato watching marathons of Firefly or an office worker sitting in front of a computer, an Australian study suggests short breaks from sitting once an hour can alleviate most of the problems described above

Here is another one on sleep that I saw today in my trawl of the new research.   Nothing that we have not seen before but this is a review that tries to pull together some of the studies: Does inadequate sleep play a role in vulnerability to obesity? The prevalence of obesity is increasing rapidly worldwide, which is cause for concern because obesity increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, reduces life expectancy, and impairs quality of life. A better understanding of the risk factors for obesity is therefore a critical global health concern, and human biologists can play an important role in identifying these risk factors in various populations. The objective of this review is to present the evidence that inadequate sleep may be a novel risk factor associated with increased vulnerability to obesity and associated cardiometabolic disease. Experimental studies have found that short-term sleep restriction is associated with impaired glucose metabolism, dys...