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-
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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.”
Konstantinos
April 18, 2016
Hey there,
As always interesting stuff. I was reading the abstract of the rats study. It mentions they had been tracking their neurogenesis for 6-8 weeks. Surely, if the rats that jogged for prolonged periods of time had a lot more training volume that the other groups (not the same intensity but the overall repetitions of the same movement were a lot more).
I was wondering if the the other groups would show similar results if they were allowed more time (enough to match the training volume in terms of repetitions).
Konstantinos
reddyb
April 19, 2016
Good question!
If we think of this in terms of weight lifting, where it’s something like 10 sets of 3 vs 3 sets of 10, hypertrophy wise, that gives similar results. However, it takes wayyyy longer to get the 10 sets of 3, and it’s just a brutal way to do an exercise routine, as to basically not be practical for the majority of trainees. So in a way, while volume is equal between the routines, the answer is made for you.
In terms of heart rate response, weight lifting gives ~50% that of aerobic exercise. Let’s just say heart rate response is the variable we’re basing things on. So viewed this way, if you do “cardio” for an hour to get X results, that means you need to weight lift for two hours to get the same X. We again start getting into a situation where it may not be practical e.g. six hours of weight lifting a week vs three hours of cardio. Or another example, if interval training gave the same type of response as weight lifting in this example, good luck getting someone to do interval training for two hours.
It’s referenced in the link on the rat study that it could very well be other forms of training are beneficial for the brain in other ways. And it’s certainly not that weight training is bad e.g. having more muscle on your frame can really help quality of life and lifespan; it’s more the shunning of cardio that’s the negative. Another example is heart health- It’s recommended to get 10,000 steps per day for optimal heart health. How is one going to get this without any long duration exercise, like walking? And it can’t be long duration walking is great, but going for a run is bad.
Going to have some more about this and cancer in another post soon.
Link: “Can Resistance Training Contribute to the Aerobic Components of the Physical Activity Guidelines?” http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1618&context=ijes