Unconventional advice fitness pros won’t tell you
Bryan Krahn first tells this story in an article titled, “Survivorship Bias in Fitness,”
When planes began returning to base riddled with bullet holes during WWII, the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) knew it had a problem.
How could they shore up the planes to better protect the crew?
The brightest minds at the USAAF immediately began looking for ways to reinforce the damaged areas.
They studied the areas riddled with bullet holes, particularly the wings and tail.
That is until Abraham Wald, a statistician and mathematician, made a key observation — they were only looking at the damage on…
What you should know when the scale makes you say WTF
It’s that time of year when millions of us renew our focus on health and lifestyle changes we want to make for the coming year. Whether you choose to go on a diet, start exercising, exercise more, or some combination of new habits, the start of a new year is a great time to approach your goals with enthusiasm and vigor.
As with any goal, you’ll need to measure your progress. For those interested in losing weight, the bathroom scale often becomes a torture device — one that can make or break your day in a matter of seconds.
As…
Hint: intermittent fasting helps, and you don’t need to give up carbs
You may have heard the term metabolic flexibility recently. The concept isn’t new, but the idea has gained more traction on popular websites, as being metabolically flexible is becoming a key marker of health.
Metabolic flexibility’s formal definition is the ability of an organism to respond or adapt according to changes in metabolic or energy demand, as well as the prevailing conditions or activity. That’s a lot of scientific speak to say metabolic flexibility is how well your body can switch from using carbohydrates to fats for energy depending on what you’re asking from it at the moment (i.e., …
#6 something called optic flow
By this point in our evolutionary history, we all know walking is good for us. Yet, many of us still leave this fundamental component of health up to whatever we manage to squeak in while walking around the house, to and from work (if that’s even happening), or while running errands.
We may think we counteract the amount of time we spend sitting with a 30–60-minute gym session, but our bodies weren’t designed to sit all day and then push as hard as possible for a brief amount of time.
According to a study in Diabetes,
The average non-exercising person…
Effortless performance is a terrible way to learn.
Most of the time, we think of learning as a relatively simple process. We realize we don’t know something we want to know, so we take a class, study a subject, do research, or watch a series of Youtube videos, and bam, we’re good. We believe we can go from ignorant to informed the way a room can go from dark to light with the flip of a switch.
As a society, we value this kind of effortless mastery. We see the athlete win the medal, the start-up makes it big on Wall Street, or the young investor who ends…
A performance-based model for losing fat and gaining muscle
This may sound odd coming from a fitness professional, but I’m agnostic about what foods you choose to eat when it comes to meeting your health and fitness goals. I don’t believe in “good” and “bad” lists, eating “clean,” or eliminating entire food groups. Those who work with me are encouraged to eat whatever they want when they want as long as it fits their goals.
That’s not to say I’m not a proponent of eating protein, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains most of the time. …
If it weren’t for the pandemic, I don’t know where we’d be
Late one afternoon, after a painful day of remote learning, I texted my daughter’s third-grade teacher. “Do you think she has dyslexia,” I asked? The thought came out of nowhere. I’d spent all afternoon trying to explain how to round a number to the nearest ten, and she still couldn’t do it. She kept mixing up the numbers. I knew nothing about dyslexia but thought it had something to do with flipping letter (and maybe number) placement.
“I don’t know, but you’re right to be concerned,” came the reply.
My heart skipped a beat. I burst into tears. Not because…
No lab equipment required
If you’ve participated in aerobic training, you’re likely familiar with the term VO2 max. For years, only professionals went through the process of knowing their VO2 max to improve athletic performance. However, no matter how fit, any individual can benefit from understanding what VO2 max means and how improving your score can help you train longer, harder and faster.
For starters,
VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen the body can utilize during exercise. It’s a combination of how much oxygen-rich blood your heart can pump and the heart’s efficiency in extracting and utilizing oxygen. ~ Runnersconnect.net
You’re putting in the time; here’s why it doesn’t show
Let’s face it. Exercise, no matter how much we enjoy it afterward, usually sucks in the moment. Your muscles burn, your face turns red, sweat pours from your glands, and you may fight an overwhelming urge to quit. We know exercise is good for us, but mostly we keep going because we hope to reap some reward, like weight loss, a stronger heart, or rock-hard muscles.
The number one complaint I hear from clients is that they spend an awful lot of time exercising but don’t look like they work out. Perhaps you know the feeling. …
A new study says eating out can shorten your lifespan, but look closely before you panic
Remember eating indoors like the picture above? Remember the feeling of sitting close together talking to your friends with the din of happy diners chatting all around you? We’re at a moment in history where we’re so close to getting back to those times. I know most of us are itching for the normalcy of a restaurant meal.
Yet, a new study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics provides a stark warning against eating out. The research “included 35,084 adults aged 20 years or older from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey 1999–2014, who…
