Browsing All Posts filed under »Miscellaneous«

When exercise becomes socially accepted self-harm

December 29, 2020

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The fitness world has an extreme segment. One we tend to either give intense praise, or be dismissive of. CrossFit: it tends to either bring about exuberant cheers or cavalier jeers. This is in large part because the fitness and exercise world tends to draw extreme personalities, I’d argue to a greater extent than most […]

Can you avoid exercise if you play chess?

October 26, 2020

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ESPN ran an article on grandmaster chess players that got a lot of internet buzz, due to this paragraph, “Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a […]

Why sleep can help or hurt your joints

October 2, 2020

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Much has been made the last few years about non-biological factors affecting pain. Psychological and sociological ones. What’s referred to as the BioPsychoSocial approach to pain management. For instance, if you’re someone who is prone to depression, or in poverty, that can influence your chronic pain susceptibility. This has had times of being incredibly overblown, […]

Picking a fitness goal- relative weight over absolute weight

September 17, 2020

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This heavily depends on a person’s age, as most goals do. When older, many are content to have their fitness goal be “fend off gravity for another day.” Where being at a reasonable weight and comfortably going through daily life is enough. You know, like you’re not avoiding stairs because you have a meeting to […]

My 33 mile day hike in the Great Smoky Mountains

August 18, 2020

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About 3 years ago, –How I trained for the steepest day climb in America The past year I’d been biking for the majority of my exercise. I put my kids in a trailer and tow them along. I was doing this mainly when taking them to school, to help with time management. With no school […]

Briefly looking at excess mortality from COVID-19 and implications for personal behavior

July 10, 2020

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How many more people are dying than usual? –Excess Deaths From COVID-19 and Other Causes, March-April 2020 “Between March 1, 2020, and April 25, 2020, a total of 505 059 deaths were reported in the US; 87 001 were excess deaths, of which 56 246 (65%) were attributed to COVID-19.” I wrote about this idea in March: “it’s […]

Help learning anatomy? Try less flashcards

July 8, 2020

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One of the most common remarks I’ve gotten is something related to difficulty learning and understanding anatomy. Learning is obviously quite individual. So, this post is clearly biased from my experience, but maybe it’ll still be helpful. – Flash cards might help, but that’s an arduous, incomplete, approach Based on what I’ve witnessed college classmates […]

Can your wearable device be a COVID tracker?

July 6, 2020

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This is rather clever: –Germany’s heart rate and step count data aggregator to track COVID-19 The idea is millions of people have a smart watch or Fitbit on them, which tracks their heart rate and step count. Symptoms of having the virus, or something flu like, are an increased heart rate and decreased step count […]