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