This is a pretty cool look at the difference between lifelong activity and sitting on your butt as far as your muscles are concerned. 

This is a somewhat dispiriting article in the NY Times Magazine about how hard it is to take off weight gain once it has been put on. Apparently the body wants to keep the extra weight on even though it’s bad for you. Your body actually works more efficiently during exercise so that you don’t burn as many calories. How cruel is that?

I do wonder how doing some more high intensity exercise at least once a week will help these results since nothing seems to mention that. 

I do like the conclusion to this article though:

So where does that leave a person who wants to lose a sizable amount of weight? Weight-loss scientists say they believe that once more people understand the genetic and biological challenges of keeping weight off, doctors and patients will approach weight loss more realistically and more compassionately. At the very least, the science may compel people who are already overweight to work harder to make sure they don’t put on additional pounds. Some people, upon learning how hard permanent weight loss can be, may give up entirely and return to overeating. Others may decide to accept themselves at their current weight and try to boost their fitness and overall health rather than changing the number on the scale.
For me, understanding the science of weight loss has helped make sense of my own struggles to lose weight, as well as my mother’s endless cycle of dieting, weight gain and despair. I wish she were still here so I could persuade her to finally forgive herself for her dieting failures. While I do, ultimately, blame myself for allowing my weight to get out of control, it has been somewhat liberating to learn that there are factors other than my character at work when it comes to gaining and losing weight. And even though all the evidence suggests that it’s going to be very, very difficult for me to reduce my weight permanently, I’m surprisingly optimistic. I may not be ready to fight this battle this month or even this year. But at least I know what I’m up against.

In then end the idea that knowledge of how hard it is to keep weight off is at least a good way to keep yourself from getting frustrated with the realities of weight loss. Hopefully, it will allow some obese people to focus more on maintaining physical fitness rather than on weight loss.

I actually thought there were some interesting ideas in this editorial. I think the most astute one is :

Gandhi would underscore that social transformation requires significant responsibility on the part of each of us. The world is not a static system or an unalterable one. Society exists in a certain way when we enter it, but it is our actions or our inaction that maintain the status quo, make things worse, or transform them for the better. Gandhi explained this most pointedly when he declared that the British Empire existed because Indians had let it exist. He would say the same thing about the drastic income inequality in America today: it is here because Americans collectively allow it to be here.

I think there is something to this. We have a system here in the US that we have all bought into to one extent or another and until a majority of people decided to take action, it will not change. 

This is an iPhone video I did with my roommate Shy a few weeks back. He did the writing. I did the crying… 

Apparently there may be new research that Dark Chocolate could help you work out better or even keep you healthier even if you don’t work out… the trouble is it’s in really small amounts… 

Looks like if you don’t eat before doing cardio in the morning, you’re going to loose muscle mass…

Kicking off her presidential campaign in Waterloo, Iowa, Michele Bachmann explained the geographic significance to Fox News: “Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa.  That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.”

This is problematic, the Washington Times explains, because “beloved movie star” John Wayne is not from Bachmann’s hometown of Waterloo. John Wayne Gacy, the “killer clown” who raped and murdered 33 teenage boys in the ’70s, is from Waterloo. Beloved movie star John Wayne is from Winterset, Iowa.

Some interesting findings about the effects of loneliness in rats. The transition to humans is a bit harder to show in this sort of study. It does make you think about how we interact as people and what the effects of group workouts might be.

Oh, the title doesn’t have much to do with the article. They don’t talk about long distance running. Just rats on wheels… 

Holy Crap! I’d heard that sitting around doing nothing wasn’t the best thing for you, but this takes it to new levels. Check this out:

The study followed 4,512 middle-aged Scottish men for a little more than four years on average. It found that those who said they spent two or more leisure hours a day sitting in front of a screen were at double the risk of a heart attack or other cardiac event compared with those who watched less. Those who spent four or more hours of recreational time in front of a screen were 50 percent more likely to die of any cause. It didn’t matter whether the men were physically active for several hours a week — exercise didn’t mitigate the risk associated with the high amount of sedentary screen time.

Ick! Click the here or the header to read the full article. 

So I’ve been reading the Well Blog on the NY Times site for a while now and they’ve had some pretty interesting articles on how all the research on exercise science is based mostly on male athletes. Only in recent studies have they started to look at the differences in the way men and women’s bodies deal with the stresses of exercise. Today I just read that the Max Heart Rate Calculation that we currently use 220 minus age is totally off for women. The new one is a little bit more complex (206 - .88% of age), but it basically means that a lot of women have overexerting themselves to reach heart rate zones that are completely off. From the Blog:

The number typically derived from the standard formula is far off the mark. Using the old formula of 220 minus age, a 40-year-old woman would achieve an average maximum heart rate of 180 beats per minute. That means her pulse should stay around 153 beats per minute during her workout to achieve a target heart rate of 85 percent.

But based on the new calculation, the same woman’s average maximum heart rate is 171 beats per minute, meaning her desired target heart rate is just 145 beats per minute, 8 beats a minute slower than under the old formula. Although the gap seems small on paper, it can be the difference between an exhilarating workout or a frustrating one that ends in exhaustion.

Here is another example of things they got wrong. This one based on the importance of ingesting protein to aid recovery after hard workouts: 

The women showed no clear benefit from protein during recovery. They couldn’t ride harder or longer. In fact, the women who received protein said that their legs felt more tired and sore during the intervals than did women who downed only carbohydrates. The results, Dr. Rowlands says, were “something of a surprise.”

Scientists know, of course, that women are not men. But they often rely on male subjects exclusively, particularly in the exercise-science realm, where, numerically, fewer female athletes exist to be studied. But when sports scientists recreate classic men-only experiments with distaff subjects, the women often react quite differently. In a famous series of studies of carbo-loading (the practice of eating a high-carbohydrate diet before a race), researchers found that women did not pack carbohydrates into their muscles as men did. Even when the women upped their total calories as well as the percentage of their diet devoted to carbohydrates, they loaded only about half as much extra fuel into their muscles as the men did.

Why women respond differently seems obvious. Women are, after all, awash in the hormone estrogen, which, some new science suggests, has greater effects on metabolism and muscle health than was once imagined. Some studies have found that postmenopausal women who take estrogen replacement have healthier muscles than postmenopausal women who do not. Even more striking, in several experiments, researchers from McMaster University in Canada gave estrogen to male athletes and then had them complete strenuous bicycling sessions. The men seemed to have developed entirely new metabolisms. They burned more fat and a smaller percentage of protein or carbohydrates to fuel their exertions, just as women do.