Emptying out the mailbag and clearing the history #13

(Last Updated On: April 15, 2016)

Other mailbags can be found here. Keep in mind a lot of this is email conversations, comment replies, or some random interesting things I’ve found. By their nature they are not as thorough or complete as a post on one topic.

Here’s what’s covered in this installment:

Why aren’t fighter jets painted blue to hide in the sky? Really cool answers.

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Stephen Curry’s warm up routine, with commentary from him and his trainers:

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I have a running joke with my girlfriend and guy friends how terrible I tend to be at recognizing implants. In certain parts of Vegas California, you’re going to see a good deal of them, yet I tend to not know it.

I can’t remember how I came across this, but somehow I stumbled upon a plastic surgeon’s Instagram, where he posts some of the work he’s done. It’s amazing how real these implants look and move. If you work in an industry which at all has an aesthetic influence (like personal training), it’s worth being aware of what Hollywood has access to. With people -that means men too- looking leaner and leaner yet still as busty / muscular, it’s worth knowing how often these looks are attained with “assistance.” I’m sure it’s no coincidence this plastic surgeon is based out of Beverly Hills.

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There are now more obese people than skinny people, and the number of obese people has gone up by more than 500 million in the last 40 years.

We can do any and every permutation of healthcare; if we don’t get this under control, it’s not going to matter. Costs will still go up.

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Good to see Lyle McDonald still writing regularly-

–Do Drugs Only Help A Little?

–The Hypertrophy Zone

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I‘m no political insider, but I see this as one of the most divisive issues in America. I don’t think it’s a coincidence an immigrant wrote this:

The food industry may fit in here. For example, food marketing. In a country suffering dearly from its obesity issues, should free market principles / profit be allowed to be the primary motivator behind say, food commercials? There is a very real possibility America’s market principles has gotten us to where we are, but to keep going, we’re going to need to change some things. (Will have a quick post examining this soon.) Whenever you try to make one principle fit every issue, you at some point run into limitations of that principle.

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The most common reason for youth knee injuries is overuse. What’s the overuse threshold end up coming to? Performing the sport more than twice per week. 

Reminiscent of my youth activity series.

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Which type of exercise is best for the brain?

“The researchers injected the rats with a substance that marks new brain cells and then set groups of them to an array of different workouts, with one group remaining sedentary to serve as controls.

Some of the animals were given running wheels in their cages, allowing them to run at will. Most jogged moderately every day for several miles, although individual mileage varied.

Others began resistance training, which for rats involves climbing a wall with tiny weights attached to their tails.

Still others took up the rodent equivalent of high-intensity interval training. For this regimen, the animals were placed on little treadmills and required to sprint at a very rapid and strenuous pace for three minutes, followed by two minutes of slow skittering, with the entire sequence repeated twice more, for a total of 15 minutes of running.

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They found very different levels of neurogenesis, depending on how each animal had exercised.

Those rats that had jogged on wheels showed robust levels of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue teemed with new neurons, far more than in the brains of the sedentary animals…

There were far fewer new neurons in the brains of the animals that had completed high-intensity interval training. They showed somewhat higher amounts than in the sedentary animals but far less than in the distance runners.

And the weight-training rats, although they were much stronger at the end of the experiment than they had been at the start, showed no discernible augmentation of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue looked just like that of the animals that had not exercised at all.”

The fitness industry had quite the love affair with telling everyone to stop doing “cardio” and only weight train and do intervals. Men’s Health, T-Nation, all the authors of T-Nation. This has seemed to die down a bit, with a big exception of CrossFit strongly carrying it on. It needs to stop.

“But b b b b bro. I’m tryna come straight out the cave. Like paleoman did.”

Paleoman ran. A lot. Like a cross country runner.