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
cardiovascular
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
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
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
Athletes’ hearts, Lean Obesity and Single-payer Healthcare
You’re probably thinking I was trying to get a bunch of keywords into the title so Google will spot me. You’re probably thinking, how in the hell is he going to link three disparate health and fitness issues into one coalesced blog post? And you’re probably thinking I’ve been drinking. But you must read thisRead More
Are All Fats Risky?
It has been a while since a research article slapped me – and the rest of the fitness community – in the face. However, today via HealthNews Canal, a site that posts p.r. pieces on research being done worldwide, came out with a headline that bursts – or could burst – a lot of fitnessRead More
An Hour a Day Keeps Early Death Away???
Much has been written in the news, the research world, and in my blogs and newsletters about sedentary living and how it impacts morbidity and mortality. There have been credible studies showing that even if you exercise regularly, if you sit more than 8 hours a day, you virtually negate the benefits of all thatRead More
A Little Dark Chocolate Helps You Go a Looong Way
Are you an endurance athlete looking for an edge? Would you like a way to get more oxygen to the working muscles, and the heart, that is legal, safe and tasty? Would you believe that dark chocolate, which has already been shown to be beneficial to health if eaten in modest amounts, can enhance oxygenRead More