July 2018 How Hard Do You Really NEED to Exercise? Many national and international health bodies have determined how much exercise one needs to live a healthy if not longer life. In general, the exercise prescription for health – not athletic fitness or weight loss – is to accumulate 150 minutes of moderate physical activityRead More
achieve well-being
Standing Desks: Why All the Rage?
In several other posts here, here, and here, I have discussed exercise and health science’s efforts to find the least amount of activity necessary to confer benefits. This goes back to my early years in grad school – 1978 to be exact – and the American College of Sports Medicine’s (ACSM) efforts to home in onRead More
Of Mice and Men: Exercise boosts neurogenerative systems
Aging happens over time, and with it comes many changes to the mind and body. I know it sounds tautological and mundanely simplistic, but science is still investigating what and why things deteriorate as we age. While most of age-related research is on diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, etc, the one that mayRead More
REAL News April 2018
April 2018 New Thoughts on The Body’s Response to Exercise An Australian study published in Cell Metabolism (Jan. 2018) hypothesized that the cells communicate with each other in response to physical activity. Vesicles, tiny protein-filled packages, “contain genetic material and proteins that carry messages to other parts” of the body that all have connections toRead More
The “Athleticization” of Personal Training Clients
Santa Claus has settled into another 350 days of hard work in preparation for one very long night of delivering toys and gifts to kids, and adults, all around the world. This amazing feat, even with the aid of some fast-flying reindeer, requires that Santa be in peak condition. In fact, he really can’t haveRead More
Why Walk When You Can Sit?
I”m pretty sure by now that you can figure out where this blog post is going: Here he comes again talking about sedentariness vs being physically active. You’d be close in making that guess, but wrong. This week in national political news, Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican from Arizona, announced from the Senate floor why he’sRead More
From Music to Muscles
Many studies have explored the effects of music on human emotions and motions. We’ve all had some experience with songs that revive the soul, allowing certain memories or feelings from way back to reammerge. Music, about which I know so little, also has medicinal value. As this summary by Gracy Liura, a blogger who writes onRead More
King of Hearts: The One Bet That’s Well Worth It
Last summer I went to the American College of Sports Medicine (www.acsm.org) Annual Meeting in Denver where I sat in on a lecture about the dangers of overexercise. The doctor who presented it was from a Midwestern City University where he’d seen many patients come in with cardiac troubles from shoveling snow. His basic thesisRead More
How athletes age – like the rest of us
The NYT fitness writer added some more fodder to the aging well discussion with an article that summarized the results of a study of elite athletes from 50 years ago. As one might expect, these old coots were still pretty fit, retaining higher-than-average aerobic capacities compared to others in their now-older age group. But they stillRead More
REAL News September 2017
September 2017 Specificity: Neuromuscular Adaptions Depend on How You Train There are two main principles to fitness training that determine your outcomes: overload and specificity. Overload refers to making the body do more than it’s accustomed to doing, be it lifting, running, stretching or what not. Specificity refers toRead More