Winter 2025
Cardio Fitness for Body and Brain
What’s a new year’s Winter Fit Happens without news about what’s happening in fitness news?
And so it is that a timely article in the Washington Post (Jan. 8) intersects with some snow-weather reading I’ve been up to.
A study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine (Nov. 2024) concluded that being fit – that is, being aerobically and cardiovascularly fit – is more critical for health and longevity than being lean. This has many precedents, one of which was addressed in a STEPS blog post from Sept. 27, 2018. At that time, based on a lecture at the American College of Sports Medicine Annual Meeting (2018), the concept of the Obesity Paradox was raising hackles. Several studies had shown that people who were overweight or obese, as defined by body mass index (BMI) of 25-34.9, were less susceptible to coronary heart disease and premature death if they were in good cardiovascular health. In fact, some studies suggested that being lean (BMI <24.9) but unfit due to sedentary living was actually dangerous to one’s health and longevity; this became known as being ‘skinny fat’.
As the WaPo article pointed out, having some extra pounds in and of itself is not such a risk to health as common perceptions would suggest. While obesity does increase the risk of premature death due to heart disease or Type 2 diabetes, those who exercise regularly reduce their risk by about 30% even if they did not lose weight; that is double the risk reduction people got from losing weight by dieting!
The BJSM study was unique in that it included more women and people from other nations. By combining data from 20 studies worldwide, and used objective measures of cardio fitness. This allowed the researchers to locate subjects into the ‘unfit’ category of those whose stress tests placed them in the bottom 20% of people of their same age and gender, and the ‘fit’, who were in the top 80% of people their age and gender. They compared BMI, fitness, and death rates.
They found a strong relationship of obesity with mortality if subjects were also unfit – a threefold risk of premature death compared to fit people with normal BMI. However, normal weight people who were unfit were about twice as likely to die prematurely as obese people who were fit.
It was estimated that some brisk walking a few times a week was sufficient to move people into the more-fit category than the unfit one.
The synchronicity with a review study on aerobic fitness and cognitive and brain health (ESSR, Jan. 2025) concluded something quite similar: “Regular aerobic exercise at moderate-to-vigorous intensity during midlife is associated with significant improvement in cardiorespiratory fitness, which may create a favorable brain microenvironment promoting neuroplasticity through enhanced vascular function….Brain structural analysis unveiled a significant enhancement of white matter microstructural integrity in aerobically trained middle-aged adults compared with age-matched sedentary adults.”
Or, “increasing the lifetime dose of aerobic exercise leads to cumulative neurocognitive benefits mediated by improved vascular function.”
In other words, isn’t it time you started the new year off with a boost of cardio fitness for body and mind health and longevity?
Exercise Fit-News
From the field of muscle recovery after knee injury and surgery comes this update. Something many people fail to recognize is that any joint injury, but in this case of the knee, causes muscles around the joint to atrophy. This neuromuscular action is like a fail-safe switch, a “neurophysiological phenomenon….defined as a protective inhibitory mechanism” called arthrogenic muscle inhibition (AMI). After a traumatic anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury and surgery, this could take up to 2 years to fully abate. Many young athletes can get their quadriceps strength up to 90% of the level of the uninjured leg within a year. Even with a novel therapeutic technique developed in Chattanooga, TN, using biofeedback while performing knee extensions and flexions (OPTIMAL PREP), some muscle strength imbalances remained, although less so for the quadriceps.
Trouble going to sleep sometimes? Try short exercise breaks after dinner. Most folks are pretty sedentary after the evening meal. A small study of 28 people had the subjects meet in the lab twice for 4 hours in the evening: once seated the whole time, the other taking 3-minute activity breaks every half hour. We’re talking chair squats, heel raises, and standing knee raises, easy stuff. When the subjects did the activity break session, they slept ~30 minutes longer than when they simply sat! Time to get up now…..
Harvard Women’s Health Watch Nov. 2024
Speaking of brain health and fitness levels, dementia risk is highly associated with possession of the e4 allele of the apoliprotein E (APOE) gene compounded by low levels of physical function. A group of researchers investigated whether a common subclinical measure of fitness – self-reported walking pace – interacts with the presence of APOE4 to predict all-cause dementia. Using a database from the UK Biobank
of 415,110 adults who did not have dementia initially, they found that slow walking pace and/or APOE4 allele had a 1.79 x risk of developing dementia. “Slow self-reported walking pace was associated with worse brain volume outcomes and these associations were not modified by APOE-ε4 genotype.” So pick up the pace since you can’t change your genes.
MSSE Jan. 2025
Honoring an Old Friend and Committed Client
On Monday, January 13, 2025, Dr. Bob Richie took his last breath. He struggled since his teenage years with respiratory problems, which led to the University of Louisville rejecting him from medical school, for fear that he wouldn’t live long enough. So, instead, he got his medical training at Vanderbilt. Eventually, he became one of Vanderbilt’s top kidney transplantation surgeons. He proved Louisville wrong as far as longevity is concerned, living beyond 91 years. (The rejectors have long been gone.) Despite his respiratory issues, his achy joints, and whatever other ailments which afflict older people, he was a regular 3/wk trainee with Amanda and a great source of medical and friendly discourse. Bob will be sorely missed here… and everywhere he’s ever trod.
Celebrating 35 years of YOU
In December 1989, Kathy Alexander, my colleague at the time, and I opened Nashville’s, Tennessee’s, and the South’s first exclusively by-appointment-only, personal fitness training center, S.T.E.P.S., Inc. The acronym stood for Scientific Training & Exercise Prescription Specialists. While Kathy left the business in the early 2000’s, and our acronym was shortened to STEPS Fitness in 2010, some things never changed: STEPS is for professional trainers to provide fitness services to people wanting and needing expertise and guidance in their pursuit of wellness and fitness. Using AI services, we are not simply the oldest personal training center in the South, we confirmed that we have outlasted all others throughout the US and, ostensibly, the world. Which means, because of you, we are now the longest-surviving personal training gym in the entire universe. That is, until Elon Musk puts one on Mars…..
