Conditioning Research

This is an interesting report of a study looking at how teaching people to eat at maintenance - neither gaining nor losing - can have big benefits for long term weight control. Mastering weight-maintenance skills before embarking on diet helps women avoid backsliding women who spent eight weeks mastering weight-maintenance skills before embarking on a weight-loss program shed the same number of pounds as women who started a weight-loss program immediately. More importantly, the study showed that the "maintenance-first" women had regained only 3 pounds on average a year later, compared to the average 7-pound gain for the immediate dieters. Very interesting.  A lot of this chimes with Lyle McDonald's ideas . So much of weight control is psychological, learning habits....

This is worth watching.... Skyler Tanner, of Efficient Exercise , discusses shoulder and hip mobility exercises. These exercises can be useful to anyone but especially those in sedentary desk jobs.

I posted somethings earlier this year after seeing a talk by Nesa Carey .   Here is a story I spotted the other day, which talks about some of the implications of this areas of discovery.   new research published in BioMed Central's open access journal  BMC Medicine  demonstrates that nicotine exposure also causes asthma in the smoker's grandchildren The report points to an open access study: Perinatal nicotine exposure induces asthma in second generation offspring Conclusions Germline epigenetic marks imposed by exposure to nicotine during pregnancy can become permanently programmed and transferred through the germline to subsequent generations, a ground-breaking finding that shifts the current asthma paradigm, opening up many new avenues to explore. For those who are parents, or wil be,  this gives an awesome responsibility - your actions will be having  an impact on your children and grandchildren that you cannot even understand. ...

In keeping with the last post on simplicity , I thought I'd post this.  Remember that Einstein adage that we need to keep things as simple as possible but no simpler. I went back to John Little's article - Done in One   and I wanted to pull out some of the key principles that he stated there that might keep us on track: What is the purpose of exercise? the purpose of exercise is to recruit and stimulate as many muscle fibers (in all categories – slow twitch, intermediate twitch and fast twitch) as possible for this to occur, a muscle or group of muscles must be given a load sufficient (but not excessive) enough to initiate a sequential recruitment of fibres, and given a time frame that permits such fibres to be recruited. All that is illustrated in the parable that I wrote on the Size Principle . Why are we doing this?  To get certain benefits to stimulate your body to grow stronger ;  getting stronger makes everything easier; t...

From Marcus at Krav Maga Edinburgh

You might have noticed that my frequency of posting has diminished a bit recently.  There are various reasons -  busy work, other commitments - but one thing is a degree of realisation of how much we try to complicate things.  So much of exercise / health / fitness at root is pretty simple and straight forward. However we often seek novelty, look for the new secret exercise, protocol or diet that will transform us.  Basic persistence and patience on the fundamentals gets too boring. There is a great value in Occam's Razor: Plurality must never be posited without necessity    or  "Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler." (allegedly Einstein) This happens so much with exercise.  Making it complicated, using esoteric language, creating the secret gnostic priesthood who really understand and have the knowledge.   Lets keep it simple.

Of course.  Build some muscle so that they sugar you are eating has somewhere safe to be stored.... "Exercise professionals should strongly encourage the activity of lifting weights among adults of all ages to promote metabolic health," Drs Magyari and Churilla conclude. These efforts should focus on groups with lower rates of weight lifting: women, older adults, Mexican Americans, and lower-income people.  Lifting Weights Protects Against Metabolic Syndrome, Study Suggests

apparantly it is something to do with farting

Amid all of the current drama about Lance Armstrong, I just wanted to point to this post from the Sock Doc about Drugs in Sport. ...It is an interesting perspective. The question you should ask yourself is just how natural you want to be.  How clean do you want to be?  And in turn – how healthy do you want to be? By no means am I saying that moderate caffeine, alcohol, or even sugar use is a problem (for most). But if you’re on a drug, for a medical condition or not, realize that you’re almost always altering some physiological function in your body that you shouldn’t be messing around with. If you’re better with it – what’s wrong so you can’t do without it? Why can’t you wake up, sleep, think, or perform in  every way without it? I must admit to some confusion about the whole area of drugs in sport.  Sometimes I think that we should just hold up our hands and let the athletes do whatever they want.  The one that always gets me is altitude trainin...

Of course if this report was saying the opposite the paleo world would be criticising it because it relies on food survey questionnaires  which are notoriously dodgy.  Be that as it may, this indicates that diets higher in protein and fat fare better in preventing cognitive decline....Who knows, it is all correlation and questionnaires, but is very interesting: Researchers tracked 1,230 people ages 70 to 89 who provided information on what they ate during the previous year. At that time, their cognitive function was evaluated by an expert panel of physicians, nurses and neuropsychologists. Of those participants, only the roughly 940 who showed no signs of cognitive impairment were asked to return for follow-up evaluations of their cognitive function. About four years into the study, 200 of those 940 were beginning to show mild cognitive impairment, problems with memory, language, thinking and judgment that are greater than normal age-related changes. Those who reporte...

The debate on this one seems to go on and on. Here is a new study which recommends moderate protein every 3 hours rather than something less frequent. We conclude that the pattern of ingested protein, and not only the total daily amount , can impact whole-body protein metabolism. Individuals aiming to maximize NB would likely benefit from repeated ingestion of moderate amounts of protein (~20g) at regular intervals (~3h) throughout the day. Daytime pattern of post-exercise protein intake affects whole-body protein turnover in resistance-trained males The whole paper is available to read, so it will be interesting to go through it and see what they are really saying.

I am finding it harder sometimes to keep finding things to post here. I am no scientist or expert and I hope you realise this.  If you want a good analysis of the science and the new studies, check out Suppversity or Chris Beardsley's site . There is so much information out there now on blogs and we are all so often searching for the new and the novelty.  The basics are what really matter and they are not actually that complicated.  I've been guilty of this myself, always looking for the secret knowledge.  I've come full circle in many ways with respect to diet for example.  The whole paleo thing has gone mental and I have found success basically in an old fashioned sensible diet - as Lyle McDonald recommends.  There is some tracking of calories and macros but with simple rules it is not too hard. Not sure what I am getting at here! Oh well, I am still getting into the hills on a nice autumn day....which is what matters.

Sleep is magic and good sleep is even better: It helps you solve tough problems It makes you optimistic  ( or perhaps the optimistic are able to sleep?)

This is a very interesting one!  Exercise in a depleted state seems to look like it could lead to more mitochondria in the muscle and therefore more capacity to burn fuel and create energy and movement.....  So one up for fasted training? Exercise with low glycogen increases PGC-1α gene expression in human skeletal muscle. Recent studies suggest that carbohydrate restriction can improve the training-induced adaptation of muscle oxidative capacity. However, the importance of low muscle glycogen on the molecular signaling of mitochondrial biogenesis remains unclear. Here, we compare the effects of exercise with low (LG) and normal (NG) glycogen on different molecular factors involved in the regulation of mitochondrial biogenesis. Ten highly trained cyclists (VO(2max) 65 ± 1 ml/kg/min, W (max) 387 ± 8 W) exercised for 60 min at approximately 64 % VO(2max) with either low [166 ± 21 ...

An interesting study here....while DOMS might be due to damage to a particular muscle, in the brain it looks like the pain is mapped all over the body.... Central Projection of Pain Arising from Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) in Human Subjects Using event-related fMRI, the temporal evolution of brain activity during the subacute pain state DOMS was mapped in the human brain. We located strongest and widespread pain-related activations in the primary motor and sensory cortex that affected the area somatotopically related to the thigh and also adjacent areas reminiscent of the transient cortical remodelling described in chronic pain states, such as CRPS or phantom limb pain. Further pain-related activation was located in the SMA, IPL, STG, bilaterally in the insula and the cingulate cortex. Activation in the cerebellum was most widespread when pain from DOMS occurred in combination with limb movement. Our study demonstrated that defined stimulation or repea...

At last we are moving away from the idea of eating 6 times a day.....Forget grazing and eat more protein. The influence of higher protein intake and greater eating frequency on appetite control in overweight and obese men. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of dietary protein intake and eating frequency on perceived appetite, satiety, and hormonal responses in overweight/obese men. Thirteen men (age 51 +/- 4 years; BMI 31.3 +/- 0.8 kg/m(2)) consumed eucaloric diets containing normal protein (79 +/- 2 g protein/day; 14% of energy intake as protein) or higher protein (138 +/- 3 g protein/day; 25% of energy intake as protein) equally divided among three eating occasions (3-EO; every 4 h) or six eating occasions (6-EO; every 2 h) on four separate days in randomized order. Hunger, fullness, plasma glucose, and hormonal responses were assessed throughout 11 h. No protein x eating frequency interactions were observed for any of the outcomes. Independent of e...

That old area of dispute about the post exercise impact of exercise in terms of calorie burn has popped up again: In a new study, researchers show that exercisers can burn as many as 200 extra calories in as little as 2.5 minutes of concentrated effort a day -- as long as they intersperse longer periods of easy recovery in a practice known as sprint interval training. Analyzing results from the room calorimeter system showed that the volunteers burned an average of an extra 200 calories on the sprint interval workout day, despite spending just 2.5 minutes engaged in hard exercise. Though the researchers can't yet speculate on whether such efforts could translate into weight loss, Sevits and his colleagues suggest that engaging in intense, but brief, bursts of exercise could aid in weight maintenance. "Burning an extra 200 calories from these exercises a couple of times a week can help keep away that pound or two that many Americans gain each year,"  

I have often posted on here about the importance of sleep.  If you have not yet got the message then please listen to Chris Kresser's latest podcast on Revolution Health Radio where he interview s  Dan Pardi who is a scientist researching sleep and its importance for health.   Dan is also behind the superb Dan's Plan   Anyway you can listen to the podcast or read the transcript on the site, either way it is full of some really useful and important information. Why Most People Are Sleep-deprived and What to do About it Best of all Dan gives some ideas for improving sleep.  Nothing about this is rocket science, but it is all good stuff.    The thing is, I have written about this before, but my own sleep routine is not great.  I tend to get to bed too late and have been waking up in the night stressing about things.  One thing that I need to address is the internet.  I am getting too addicted to checking, checking a...

If you take the rest intervals out of an interval session.....you get a single all out sprint.  Why do we assume you need to do lots of separate sprints?  Just because Tabata has become a training cliche? Would we get the same effects from a single hard sprint?  Why not? Well at last scientists are starting to look at this idea.  If we want to keep things simple, lets start with one hard sprint before we start to add complexity. Check out what James Steele has to say about this idea and the recent new research. Simply Single Bout Sprinting ....and of course if a single sprint works, why not just do hard resistance training, working to sequentially recruit as many fibres as possible, taking the exercises to failure?

I've not had a big jump video on here for a while.  This is stunning......

I've not put anything on here for a few days.  I've been busy with work and then I've been trying to write up some stuff on my other blog about recent walks, in Austria and then on the West Highland Way . Austria The West Highlands I should have a bit more time now though to put things up here.  The other thing that is going on in the back ground is a little more work on Hillfit , which might see a new expanded version of the book in a few months, with some other services around it, but it is early days. Follow me on Twitter I used to use a widget on this blog to share links to interesting things that I was reading via Google Reader, but they took that functionality off.  I often tweet links to things that I have come across that are of interest, so you might want to follow me on Twitter @chrishighcock if you miss that service.  I am pretty broad in my interests - fitness, diet, hillwalking......

The way in which movement affects and effects brain development is something that fascinates me.  I have nothing much to say here other than to record my wonder at how something so mundane is of such importance!  Moving, practicing new skills generates new growth in the brain, new connections new specific intelligence. I have previously pointed to Ratey's book Spark !  but there is more out there on this topic.  Tim Anderson - Becoming Bulletproof - has developed some cool ideas around applying simple tactics, like crawling.  Tim also expose me to the book Smart Moves  by Carla Hannaford, which was the foundation for some of his ideas, again a very useful read. Todd Hargrove also has a huge wealth of thinking on this topic. Anyway, I was prompted to think about this again by this report of how  Exercise improves memory, thinking after stroke However, Ms. Marzolini says, "these results provide compelling evidence ...