# Some recent studies about fitness and exercise



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Outdoor workouts left women in a better mood and kept them exercising longer than counterparts who exercised indoors

Older Women Who Exercise Outdoors More Likely to Stick with It - Scientific American

This was also interesting too: Running may reverse aging in certain ways while walking does not

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/run-to-stay-young/?_r=2


----------



## supersedona (Dec 17, 2012)

Good stuff. Running/jogging makes a good cross-train in the winter as well. Certainly makes me feel younger than my strength-only coworkers


----------



## mtbxplorer (Dec 25, 2009)

I've only tried a few times in my life to do indoor exercise, and they were pretty much dismal failures for me. There's something about being out there in touch with the weather and environment that feels great and is habit-forming.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Fresh air, sunshine, sensory stimulation.... makes sense why outdoors is better


----------



## supersedona (Dec 17, 2012)

Exactly. I fix gym equipment all day but will not have an indoor membership because I ride outside.


----------



## Guest (Dec 8, 2014)

Don't mind me interloping in the lounge. I think the mental stimulation aspect can't be overlooked. In a gym you workout, but you're brain does not. It impacts (I think) the quality of your workout and doesn't provide any mental relaxation or stimulation. I get pumped up for work on my ride in and use the ride home to switch gears so I can be present for my family. Just one opinion.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Forster said:


> Don't mind me interloping in the lounge. I think the mental stimulation aspect can't be overlooked. In a gym you workout, but you're brain does not. It impacts (I think) the quality of your workout and doesn't provide any mental relaxation or stimulation. I get pumped up for work on my ride in and use the ride home to switch gears so I can be present for my family.  Just one opinion.


If you are doing an exercise correctly... thinking through the movements and you are pushing yourself accordingly it does require good concentration. Visualization of the movement or activity is a form of stimulation.

And on that note: Exercise will help cognitively in the long run.

Data show just how much exercise can lower Alzheimer?s risk - The Globe and Mail

I'm a firm believer that exercise will improve cognition and QoL because I've seen improvement in patient's where dementias like Alzheimer slows down when exercise (as simple as pole walking takes balance and physical mental coordination) is introduced I want to keep riding or do some other form of exercise for as long as possible


----------



## catsruletn (Dec 7, 2013)

Going to the gym just usually puts me in a worse mood than I was before I got there lol.


----------



## Guest (Dec 8, 2014)

cyclelicious said:


> If you are doing an exercise correctly... thinking through the movements and you are pushing yourself accordingly it does require good concentration. Visualization of the movement or activity is a form of stimulation.
> 
> And on that note: Exercise will help cognitively in the long run.
> 
> ...


 I should probably write more specifically the first go round. Not suggesting that the mind is idle in the Gym, just that there are fewer surprises and less changing sensory stimuli (differing sights, sounds, smells...) inside than out. I do think pushing the same pace on a stationary bike or treadmill requires much higher total concentration than riding or running outdoors. Not sure why, but it's easier for me to lose focus on my workout goal inside than out.


----------



## supersedona (Dec 17, 2012)

I think running on a treadmill is harder than natural running because it is more reactive and less momentum feel than real running. Not less workout but a different control regime that takes an art to master. 

One type of treadmill I saw a while ago(I see a lot of them) actually had a speed calibrated visual on the screen in front of you for a choice of your "running environment' like city or farmland or beach. Even pictured pedestrians and cars. Novel.


----------



## petey15 (Sep 1, 2006)

I agree with mtbexplorer - I just cannot get myself motivated to go to the gym. I've tried but I just get bored and I would use any excuse available not to go. But, even when I'm sick and it's bitter cold outside, I still want to be out on my bike. I love the fresh air and the challenge and solitude.


----------



## jeffscott (May 10, 2006)

petey15 said:


> I agree with mtbexplorer - I just cannot get myself motivated to go to the gym. I've tried but I just get bored and I would use any excuse available not to go. But, even when I'm sick and it's bitter cold outside, I still want to be out on my bike. I love the fresh air and the challenge and solitude.


biking with out other exercise will lead to some pretty severe muscle imbalances. These imbalances will result in some very painful conditions. To alleviate these imbalances specific exercises are required. Normally more than three times a week.

I encourage all serious bikers to engage in a serious strengthing program.


----------



## formica (Jul 4, 2004)

Anyway who has ever done a Sufferfest vid will know that it takes intense concentration and mental exercise to get through it.

I'm not a gym fan either, or didn't used to be, until I found a program/class that I really connected with. It's changed up all the time, it's fun, it's challenging, it makes me stronger for all my other sports and in a lot of cases takes less time than getting out to a trail ride. No, it's not Crossfit.

Balance is good.


----------



## targnik (Jan 11, 2014)

jeffscott said:


> biking with out other exercise will lead to some pretty severe muscle imbalances. These imbalances will result in some very painful conditions. To alleviate these imbalances specific exercises are required. Normally more than three times a week.
> 
> I encourage all serious bikers to engage in a serious strengthing program.


+1


----------



## kinsler (Sep 13, 2011)

supersedona said:


> I think running on a treadmill is harder than natural running because it is more reactive and less momentum feel than real running. Not less workout but a different control regime that takes an art to master.
> 
> One type of treadmill I saw a while ago(I see a lot of them) actually had a speed calibrated visual on the screen in front of you for a choice of your "running environment' like city or farmland or beach. Even pictured pedestrians and cars. Novel.


I agree running on a treadmill is harder... it's mind numbingly boring.


----------



## Legbacon (Jan 20, 2004)

kinsler said:


> I agree running on a treadmill is harder... it's mind numbingly boring.


This!


----------



## Osco (Apr 4, 2013)

After a getting off my dirt bike (Motorcross) in a very bad way the therapy at the YMCA fixed me up. I stuck with it for a year, the people were nice but everyone was plugged into something and most never said a word. So many just wen't through the motions and got no where.

Had a stationary bike once, hated it, it's gone.

Outside, Intense, point of failure workouts test my metal and help me fight off the grave without putting me to sleep


----------



## MtbRN (Jun 8, 2006)

I bought myself a membership to the YMCA thinking that the spin classes was where I would spend my time in the winter months. I realized that I get plenty of "spin time" on my bike, even some days in the winter when the weather is pleasant. So I mostly attend classes like "Boot Camp" and "Athletic Conditioning" and Yoga that offer workouts that focus on working the whole body. Classes are where it's at for me- exercising with a group and mixing it up keeps the boredom away. If I just went to the gym to walk on the treadmill or used the weight machines I would never be able to force myself to go.
But I put my membership on hold this summer, because if the weather is nice I am outside hiking or biking.


----------



## Last Tuesday (Apr 9, 2015)

catsruletn said:


> Going to the gym just usually puts me in a worse mood than I was before I got there lol.


Just yesterday, my trainer and I were talking about how awful the other local gym is.

I work with her in a very tiny, but very clean facility with big windows, and we get outside a lot during training sessions. Usually it's just the two of us. Makes a huge difference. I think I'd feel the same way (worse mood after) if I went to any of the other gyms around here.


----------



## Crankyone (Dec 8, 2014)

I saw a group of women (mostly pregnant) pushing strollers walking fast down a local street and stop at the corner and do a full stretch routine and then continue on. I was struck by the ability of these women to put this social group together to support their desire for fitness. It gets harder as you age to develop this relationship that allows you to be active as a group. When you are young, almost everyone is active to some degree, but as your group becomes more time constrained or fragile it seems like you can't find anyone to ride/hike/climb/ski with. Forums are a good way to take care of that problem. Cheers


cyclelicious said:


> Outdoor workouts left women in a better mood and kept them exercising longer than counterparts who exercised indoors
> 
> Older Women Who Exercise Outdoors More Likely to Stick with It - Scientific American
> 
> ...


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Good read about the importance of balance...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/finding-the-right-balance.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Some significance:

Improving coordination, agility and balance aka "gross motor skills" -you also enhance cognitive performance because it rewires your brain in ways that are fundamentally different from straightforward aerobic activity or strength training.


----------



## mtbxplorer (Dec 25, 2009)

^^Interesting article, cyclelicious, thanks for sharing. I was pretty surprised by the results of the small study involving xc skiers.


----------



## verslowrdr (Mar 22, 2004)

FWIW I use the gym in shoulder seasons/bad weather to work on stuff that doesn't get as much work during bike season, like upper bod and leg adductor/abductor exercises. May as well make lemonade....

Ideally I'm XC skiing in the winter, but this year in the NW we really didn't have winter.  So it was all gym or rollers for months. It really sucked not having snow but I think being a little worried I overcompensated to some degree and I'm having a pretty strong season this year so far.

Anyway, I notice in a lot of these examples you've got groups of people exercising together. Bluntly: I HATE that. Working out is my alonetherapy, be it in the gym or on skis or on my bike, and I feel profoundly refreshed after breathing hard with only my own brain's frantic flail slowly whittling down to 60 cycle hum to keep me company. So... as usual, YMMV.


----------



## Sarah Ireland (Jun 13, 2015)

I can not do indoor gyms they bore me and I don't fit in with the people that use them. Outdoor activities are the best by far. When I am MTB, Climbing, or snowboarding I am only thinking about what is going on NOW living in the NOW. It's a really good way to destress. 

Even Yoga is better done outside. Eating an apple is better outside. Life is better spent outside.


----------



## H0WL (Jan 17, 2007)

jeffscott said:


> biking with out other exercise will lead to some pretty severe muscle imbalances. These imbalances will result in some very painful conditions. To alleviate these imbalances specific exercises are required. Normally more than three times a week.
> 
> I encourage all serious bikers to engage in a serious strengthening program.


I'm 66 and started weight training in February, with a trainer. He's been lifting for over 30 years, is a massage therapist and teaches anatomy. It has been a slow, steady progression. No injuries, total emphasis on correct form and knowing how to keep this correct form while transitioning to harder moves and heavier weights and WHEN to move to the harder moves and heavier weights -- because he has an amazing knowledge of how the body works.

I can't even imagine where I would be if I'd tried this on my own.

I tried running on a treadmill once. When I felt my soul attempting to leave my body after about 30 seconds, I knew it wasn't for me.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

More proof that physical activity as you age is a very good thing 

Can Everyday Biking Keep Us Young? | Momentum Mag


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Recent article on how to succeed at interval training









http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/...ev&kwp_0=32104&kwp_4=199148&kwp_1=177284&_r=0


----------



## verslowrdr (Mar 22, 2004)

cyclelicious said:


> Recent article on how to succeed at interval training
> 
> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/...ev&kwp_0=32104&kwp_4=199148&kwp_1=177284&_r=0


Good article!

However, imma be laughing at that while I'm toiling up the local ridge system. Interspersed 25-30% grades = 'natural intervals'.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Fitter legs are linked to fitter brain .

Researchers at King's College London have found that muscle fitness as measured by power in the legs is strongly associated with an improved rate of aging in the brain.

Fitter legs linked to a 'fitter' brain

The tl;dr version



> Generally, the twin who had more leg power at the start of the study sustained their cognition better and had fewer brain changes associated with aging measured after ten years.
> 
> Previous studies have shown that physical activity can have a beneficial effect on the aging of the brain with animal studies showing that exercising muscles releases hormones that can encourage nerve cells to grow.
> 
> More studies are needed to better understand the relationships between measures of fitness such as leg power or aerobic capacity and brain changes, and the specific cause-and-effect of physical activity on brain structure and cognition.


----------



## Fuzzle (Mar 31, 2015)

Thanks for the artical! My brain needs all the help it can get...lol!


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Fuzzle said:


> Thanks for the artical! My brain needs all the help it can get...lol!


I hear you! I totally wrote my most in-depth post on MTBR after a strenuous crossfit class then going for a good bike ride. If I continue with the training maybe my posts will become more and more in depth until I spend more time posting then living. eek!


----------



## mtbxplorer (Dec 25, 2009)

Good stuff, cyclicious! Visited my 84yo Dad last week, he's doing well but having some memory issues, so this one interested me.


----------



## H0WL (Jan 17, 2007)

cyclelicious said:


> Recent article on how to succeed at interval training
> 
> View attachment 1009926
> 
> ...


Thank you! So much awesomeness in that article! Even tho I don't have dogs, I loved this:


> You can undertake the program solo, too, or, as I have, with dogs. They are likely to be enthusiasts. This is how they always have run.


We don't really have too much relentless winter in Texas, but I'm going to add this workout into my ride or on my trainer on rainy days.

I also had a Chris Carmichael video that came with my Cycle Ops trainer, maybe 13 years ago and I really loved to do this workout on the exercise bike at the gym. It was designed for mountain bike racers, to simulate those max efforts where you don't quite get full recovery.

The first part is a 5-4-3-2-1 cycle. So to start, 5 minutes, alternating each 30 seconds with heavy effort, then 30 seconds of lighter effort, but harder than a recovery effort, then one minute easy spin recovery.

Then 4 minutes alternating 30 seconds hard effort with 30 seconds of relatively lighter effort, then 1 minute easy recovery spin and so on for 3 minutes, then 2 minutes, then one minute.

Then take about two minutes (or more) easy spin for a nice recovery.

Part 2 is 2 minutes hard effort and 2 minutes relatively easier effort, but slightly harder than a recovery effort. I think there were 5 of those efforts, but the total workout time for the whole thing was between 50 and 60 minutes. At the end, easy recovery spin for however long it takes to get your hard rate low.

Harder effort and greater than recovery effort is determined by being able to complete the workout. If you go out too hard at the beginning, you won't be able to sustain when called on for hard efforts through out the workout, so I had to work on finding what level of hard effort I could sustain when called on to do so throughout the workout.

There are various ways to tweak this workout. You might want to use higher RPMs, lower RPMs or however you want to use it.

The point of the workout is to stimulate the hard efforts in mountain biking when you don't really get recovery afterwards. This is typical in racing efforts but true as well for a day on the trail.


----------



## H0WL (Jan 17, 2007)

Stripes said:


> Now, just to fix the bloody diet..


Stripes, MyFitnessPal.com and done. Tracks calories and exercise.


----------



## formica (Jul 4, 2004)

June Bug said:


> Stripes, MyFitnessPal.com and done. Tracks calories and exercise.


yep.
I was amazed at what I found out about what I thought was my "healthy" diet.


----------



## formica (Jul 4, 2004)

Well sure it's not going to offer healthy alternatives. All it gives is data. But if you are trying to learn how to eat better you are armed with information. How much protein am I eating ? What is my salt intake? What is my fat intake? If one can see that your diet is 40% fat, one has that info to do something with. 
My gym had a little class on nutrition and fitness. I came out of it with a lot of simple guidelines on fat, carbs, proteins with tips on how to eat before and after working out. I could then take that info and directly correlate it into the info from MFP. 

The app is not going to tell me when I make bad choices. It's up to me to evaluate portion size and nutritional value. It will just tell me that the bowl of ice cream with hot fudge sauce (or a turkey and cheese sandwich on whole wheat) may blow my daily desired intakes out of the water -with numbers. 

And just because I earned an extra 3500 calories with a 70 mile road ride doesn't mean I should pig out at dinner, either.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Leg Cramps*

A leg cramp (or any cramp for that matter) can be caused by a variety of internal issues. They are not caused by an outside force, unlike cuts and bruises.

There are cases when leg cramps can only indicate that one needs more water or certain nutrients. However, there are situations when these indicate some more serious problems, like a kidney infection. What is important to consider is that although cramping happens to everyone, all of our bodies are different, so in case of frequent cramps, you should consult your doctor.

People engaged in moderate or intense activities for long periods of time are simply dehydrated, and can avoid cramps by simply drinking some warm water. Warm water is recommended because its temperature closely resembles the temperature of our blood, and can be absorbed into dehydrated muscles much quicker the cold water.

Moreover, if one experiences frequent leg cramps, the consumption of an increased amount of electrolytes is recommended. Electrolytes give almost immediate results. Namely, they are like mini masseuses in the body that work with warm water to loosen up tight muscles.

*How to Prevent Leg Cramps*

Hydration can be a great start in cases of cramps, but sometimes our bodies need more than just water. The body requires specific nutrients and minerals that cannot be provided by water and electrolytes.

Leg cramps that are caused by dehydration are usually a result of low potassium or high sodium. Potassium is a mineral that is great for preventing cramps, for it interacts with sodium in the body to direct and control liquids. Apart from being able to protect you from cramps, potassium can also act as a cramp relieving agent.

The consumption of foods that are rich in potassium while your leg (or any part of your body) is cramping, can provide a quick relief. When potassium enters the digestive system it helps by directing the fluids to the affected area.

In addition, one of the best minerals for preventing leg cramps is magnesium. If electrolytes are the masseuse, then magnesium is the massage oil. One should consume about 250-300 milligrams of magnesium a day to avoid cramps, for the human body uses magnesium rapidly.

Fish, quinoa, dark chocolate, spinach, molasses, nuts, lentils, pumpkin seeds and prepared potatoes, are all foods high in magnesium.

Sauce: How To Prevent Leg Cramps, And How To Never Get Leg Cramps Again - Healthy Food House


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

I run between 5 to 10km in total per week (weather permitting). On average, my runs are relatively short but usually intense so this article about recent studies peaked my interest.

Ask Well: How Many Miles a Week Should I Run?

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/...31&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=IntlAudDev&_r=0


----------



## smilinsteve (Jul 21, 2009)

Why Doing Squats Might be Good for Your Brain

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 11, 2015 (HealthDay News) - Having powerful legs might empower your brain as you grow older, researchers report.

A 10-year British study concluded that leg strength is strongly linked with healthier brain aging. Also, the King's College London team said the findings suggest that simply walking more to improve leg force and speed could help maintain brain function as you age.

The study included 324 healthy female twins, aged 43 to 73, in the United Kingdom. Their thinking, learning and memory were tested at the start and end of the study.

The researchers found that leg strength was a better predictor of brain health than any other lifestyle factor looked at in the study. Generally, the twin with more leg strength at the start of the study maintained her mental abilities better and had fewer age-related brain changes than the twin with weaker legs, the study found.

"Everyone wants to know how best to keep their brain fit as they age. Identical twins are a useful comparison, as they share many factors, such as genetics and early life, which we can't change in adulthood," study lead author Claire Steves, a senior lecturer in twin research, said in a college news release.

"It's compelling to see such differences in cognition [thinking] and brain structure in identical twins, who had different leg power 10 years before," Steves added. "It suggests that simple lifestyle changes to boost our physical activity may help to keep us both mentally and physically healthy."

The results were published Nov. 9 in the journal Gerontology.

Previous research has shown that physical activity can help brain health as people get older. And, animal studies have found that exercise releases hormones that can encourage nerve cell growth, the study authors noted.

The mechanisms behind this association aren't clear and could involve other factors such as age-related changes in immune function, blood circulation or nerve signaling, the researchers said.

Also, the research did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship between leg strength and brain health.

Further studies are needed to learn more about the potential link between leg strength and healthy brain aging, and to determine if the findings also apply to men, Steves said.

Why Doing Squats Might be Good for Your Brain - Health News and Views - Health.com


----------



## Crankyone (Dec 8, 2014)

Over all, Dr. Lavie says, the best advice based on the latest science is that for most of us, “running for 20 to 30 minutes, or about a mile-and-a-half to three miles, twice per week would appear to be perfect.”
What is "running"? Anyone want to tell me the where "running" turns to "jogging" turns to "walking" event horizon is? No experiential BS, just minutes per mile (and maybe your total body mass). 
I probably fit the "crawling" definition! but a "fit" crawling like the pub run specialists. Try to run a 6 minute mile with 5 pints of ale aboard.
Same with squats. How many honest squats/period with % of body mass? I don't understand how you can do publish a study and not include that empirical data. 
Twin studies are over rated. i recently read an article whereby identical twins separated early grew in different environments to become a fascist and a communist. 
who dove thunk it?


----------



## Crankyone (Dec 8, 2014)

i think jumping is the key, even with a squat or lunge movement. 
They should do a study of dancing and non-dancing twins!


----------



## smilinsteve (Jul 21, 2009)

Stripes said:


> Great! I'll keep squatting. Even body weight squats are awesome  If you want a challenge, hold your squat at the bottom for 5 seconds and then see how many body weight ones you can do (trust me, that will change it).
> 
> It's my go to leg exercise since the leg press hurts my back, and it's something I can do anywhere with limited space.
> 
> ...


I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms, and body weight squats are a great part of a hotel room workout. And burpies.

I'm the opposite. When squats are in my workout, I figure its a matter of time before I tweak my back. After it's tweaked, I go to leg presses, which I can do even with a hurt back.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Squats use almost the entire body.

The muscles engaged in squats are mainly:
Gluteus Maximus (glutes), Quadriceps (quads), Hamstrings
Secondary Muscles (Synergists/Stabilizers)
Erector Spinae, Transverse Abdominus, Gluteus medius/minimus (Abductors), Adductors, Soleus, Gastrocnemius

For back squats, holding a heavy bar in place on your shoulders will engage almost every muscle in your arms to keep it steady. ... Back squats, don't work the chest much, but isometric contraction of the upper back, shoulders and lats are required to hold the bar in place. Shrug the weight when you stand up. You will engage the chest and shoulders.

Front squats engage the core more. Make sure elbows are up, and the bar stays high on your rack. Go deep

I've been doing a lot of squat variation exercises while recovering from severe injuries. The overall results are remarkable and as I'm getting closer to my pre-injury PRs (C&J, snatch, deadlifts, etc) My form, core strength, balance etc have improved


----------



## formica (Jul 4, 2004)

> When squats are in my workout, I figure its a matter of time before I tweak my back. After it's tweaked, I go to leg presses, which I can do even with a hurt back.


If you are tweaking your back with squats -
you are overdoing it or
you need to be _lots_ more core work or
you are doing them wrong.


----------



## smilinsteve (Jul 21, 2009)

formica said:


> If you are tweaking your back with squats -
> you are overdoing it or
> you need to be _lots_ more core work or
> you are doing them wrong.


Or I'm too old.

I was a competitive powerlifter for a long time. Now I'm 55. I'm still strong, but my spine isn't keeping up with my muscles any more. So I guess you could call that over doing it.


----------



## formica (Jul 4, 2004)

I'm 55. I regularly do supersets/pyramids (1-10-1) of body weight squats, burpees, pushups, and other stuff. I typically don't hurt myself. The trick is to quit before you hurt. No, I'm not a crossfitter.


----------



## jeffscott (May 10, 2006)

smilinsteve said:


> Or I'm too old.
> 
> I was a competitive powerlifter for a long time. Now I'm 55. I'm still strong, but my spine isn't keeping up with my muscles any more. So I guess you could call that over doing it.


Probably lack of core strength...specifically the erector spinae and the abs.


----------



## sooshee (Jun 16, 2012)

Stripes said:


> Not everyone's joints can handle the impact from jumping.


I fall into this category. I have super bad knees. That's why honestly cycling is my only sport because it doesn't hurt my knees. I do do some core work and body weight squats for those other muscles that aren't involved in cycling. But definitely no jumping. 8 years of gymnastics and alpine skiing did my knees in.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

For those who run, or crosstrain and run

How many miles a week should I run? Surprisingly few, according to a new review of studies related to running and health, jogging. The studies found five or six miles per week ( 8 to 10 km) could substantially improve someone's health.

One study Effects of Running on Chronic Diseases and Cardiovascular and All-Cause Mortality. - PubMed - NCBI Over all, Dr. Lavie says, the best advice based on the latest science is that for most of us, "running for 20 to 30 minutes, or about a mile-and-a-half to three miles, twice per week would appear to be perfect."

NewYorkTimes sauce: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/...29&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=IntlAudDev&_r=0


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Not research per se... but a simple nifty, info graph (click to enlarge if necessary) showing what happens to your body when you ride


----------



## jeffscott (May 10, 2006)

On a somewhat more scientific level

http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/sgr/pdf/chap3.pdf


----------



## ryetoast (Jan 24, 2016)

jeffscott said:


> On a somewhat more scientific level
> 
> http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/sgr/pdf/chap3.pdf


Ew, look at the chart on pg 75! I always thought puberty was an enormous ripoff, glad someone has scientifically proven that I was right!


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Is Your Workout Not Working? Maybe You're a Non-Responder











> Is your workout getting you nowhere?
> 
> Research and lived experience indicate that many people who begin a new Exercise program see little if any improvement in their health and fitness even after weeks of studiously sticking with their new routine.
> 
> ...


If you have access to NewYorkTimes or subscription here's the link including comments
Sauce:

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/w...-not-working-maybe-youre-a-non-responder.html


----------



## verslowrdr (Mar 22, 2004)

Great article, cyclelicious! :thumbsup:


----------



## Guest (Jan 5, 2017)

At the risk of seeming like I'm hanging out at the women's lounge: With men it's not being a non-responder it's a mainly being a beer aficionado that gets in the way.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Think about the children 











> For children, exercise may help stave off depression
> 
> One more reason to make your kids put down screens and go play outside.
> 
> ...


Sauce: For children, exercise may help stave off depression - The Globe and Mail


----------



## Guest (Feb 4, 2017)

National Public Radio just had an article about how working at a computer all day used sugar from the bloodstream making people hungry constantly. That effect can be offset by walking vigorously on a regular basis (causing the body to convert more sugar for use by the brain). Since most work places are not set up for this, I suspect the health trend in offices won’t change any time soon.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Exercise Proves Key to Preventing Breast Cancer Recurrence

(Physical activity can reduce the risk by 40 percent, new research shows)

This is great news. As a breast cancer survivor , myself, this research supports my efforts to heal, recover and stay active and healthy. I was diagnosed and treated at Sunnybrook Hospital and participated in a few research studies so naturally I strongly believe and trust in this research 



> It's safe to say that any breast cancer survivor who's been through treatment wants to avoid having to go through it again. The risk of breast cancer recurrence is highly individual and varies according to the type and the stage of breast cancer you had. But a new research review published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, or CMAJ, sheds light on how various lifestyle changes may be able to improve anyone's odds of preventing a breast cancer recurrence.
> 
> The most important one: exercise. The review authors found it can reduce a breast cancer recurrence by 40 percent. According to the study authors, "physical activity has the most robust effect of all lifestyle factors on reducing breast cancer recurrence."
> 
> ...


Sauce:Prevent Breast Cancer Recurrence - Consumer Reports


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

I wasn't sure where to post this... not a research study per se but more a helpful guidelines for all us badass women 



> 15 Things All Badass, Fearless Alpha-Women Do Differently from Other Types of Women
> 
> *1. They make maximizing enjoyment in life a top priority*
> 
> ...


sauce: http://seizepositivity.com/badass-f...l&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer


----------



## formica (Jul 4, 2004)

Lots of good rules for healthy living.

Meanwhile, on the ACL recovery front, I've lost 8# of muscle.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

formica said:


> Lots of good rules for healthy living.
> 
> Meanwhile, on the ACL recovery front, I've lost 8# of muscle.


I have no doubt you'll get your strength back... and you'll be stronger than before :thumbsup:


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

formica said:


> Lots of good rules for healthy living.
> 
> Meanwhile, on the ACL recovery front, I've lost 8# of muscle.


I have no doubt you'll get your strength back... and you'll be stronger than before :thumbsup:


----------



## stripes (Sep 6, 2016)

formica said:


> Lots of good rules for healthy living.
> 
> Meanwhile, on the ACL recovery front, I've lost 8# of muscle.


You'll get it back. Keep pedaling as much as you can. It took me 10 months post op to get back the muscle.

Also when you get into PT, work on hips as much as you can. The one mistake I made is I didnt put in as much hip work has I should have post op and I'm undoing that now (6 years later after my ACL replacement).


----------



## streem26 (Apr 14, 2016)

Lordy, how I hate running. Always have. Wish I could get into it, but it's just not going to happen, especially since where I live, I'd have to drive some distance to find a safe, non-concrete/asphalt running surface (or join a gym, which is expensive and oppressive). So I ride and downhill ski use elliptical--although I gather that doesn't count--and try to keep moving as often and as much as I can. I *hope* that'll do the trick for me.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

This is an interesting study. The sample is small and needs to be replicated for validity, but the results are significant, that regular exercise (and diet) maintains weight loss.



> A Lesson From the Biggest Losers: Exercise Keeps Off the Weight
> 
> It is a question that plagues all who struggle with weight: Why do some of us manage to keep off lost pounds, while others regain them?
> 
> ...


Sauce: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/...=blitzpush&ad-keywords=IntlAudDev&subid1=TAFI

Some takeaways relevant to this article:

1) New fat cells do not go away, they shrink, and they forever release hormones asking to be filled up again.

2) Our bodies adjust to whatever amount of calories we eat vs what we burn. In order to lose weight, we have to keep decreasing caloric intake and increasing caloric output. To maintain weight loss, we have to maintain roughly the intake/output that got us to our goal weight.

3) Find something that is worth the time and discipline required to lose weight, and it becomes so much easier to stay consistent and focused. Obviously it won't be running, crossfit and / or riding for everyone, (or becoming vegan  ) but something will likely do it for you. Find it! It's not enough to want to avoid something - I found I needed to be moving towards something.


----------



## verslowrdr (Mar 22, 2004)

I saw an Ars Technica article on this the other day. Kind of depressing to realize some of us are just naturally gonna be more padded than others, but at least I enjoy the exercise I do. Recently I decided to up my weekly average time to 7-8+ hrs/week and keep more regular weight lifting in the mix*, which with my schedule typically requires twice a day workouts at least a couple weekdays. I feel like I'm finally starting to climb out of a permanent exhaustion hole after ~6 weeks to better strength... Yay?

* I do upper body focused lifting up until XC skiing becomes a regular thing. The dumb ideas I execute on the boards take care of that just fine, lol.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Even a Tiny Bit of Exercise Will Help You Not Die, Study Says



> The two women who sit across from me at work are similar in many ways. They're both young, whip smart, and wicked chic, but they couldn't be less alike when it comes to their personal philosophies on healthy living. While Callie has told her colleagues time and again how she happily subsists on cheesy potatoes and loathes the notion of aerobics, Gabby has become something of a health goddess, addicted not to cheese but boiled eggs and the stairclimber at her gym. Gabby is certain to outlive us all, but the workout-averse could save themselves from heart attacks, too. A new study suggests that even the most mild of physical movements could keep your body from killing you.
> 
> A study titled "Frequency, Type, and Volume of Leisure-Time Physical Activity and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Young Women" was recently published in the Circulation medical journal. It followed more than 97,000 women between the ages of 27 and 44 for twenty years. These women were pulled from the Nurses' Health Study II, an ongoing research project looking at chronic illness in women. A biannual survey including questions about physical activity was used to determine the effect of exercise on young women's heart health.
> 
> ...



























Sauce: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/arti...-says?utm_campaign=global&utm_source=vicefbuk


----------



## mtbxplorer (Dec 25, 2009)

^^Holy smokes that looks heavy! Bada**!


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Get out there! Go ride your bike, run, lift something heavy... and don't eat crap 

*Anxiety and Stress Are Messing With Your Good Looks*

Your worries can lead to weight gain and rapid aging.

The research is clear: Stress does ugly things to us. For example, one study found that women who experience high stress are 11 times more likely to experience hair loss than women with moderate or low stress. Work stress, too, is associated with weight gain over five years. And 74 percent of acne patients say that stress exacerbates their condition. We see the same sorts of effects in animals: Anxious dogs grey earlier, and stressed mice age faster.

But how does stress actually affect physical appearance? There are two big ways.

First, when we're stressed we do things that hurt how we look. For example, we furrow our brows or purse our lips, which can cause wrinkles over time. Or we anxiously, absentmindedly pick our skin or bite our nails. Lots of stress often means too little time, so we also tend to make hasty, unwise eating decisions and gain weight. "You're busy, so you might rely on preprepared foods, which tend to be high in sugar and fat," says Susan Torres, an Australian researcher who studies the relationship between mental health and dietary intake. In short, stress can incite self-sabotage.

The other way stress affects appearance is more complicated and systemic. When stress hormones like cortisol interact with other hormones and neurotransmitters, physiological changes occur that sometimes manifest externally.

For instance, stress hastens our hair's natural growth cycle, which can expedite hair loss, and prolongs the hair-loss stage in the cycle. It can also cause premature greying, since each hair follicle has a finite amount of pigment; when our hair cycle speeds up due to stress, the pigment drains sooner. Alternatively, sometimes stress signals the hair follicles to stop producing color, which can make hair duller and finer.

In contrast, stress slows the skin's monthly cell renewal process. Wrinkles, dry skin and delayed healing of acne scars can result. Meanwhile, excess cortisol sets off a hormonal chain reaction that stimulates excess oil production and can instigate, or at least exacerbate, breakouts. Indeed, in one study, increased stressed levels during college exams were significantly associated with increased acne severity. Perhaps most alarmingly, stress may impede digestion, thereby inhibiting absorption of vitamins that are essential for healthy teeth, skin, and hair.

Chronic life stress is also causally linked to weight gain. When we're stressed, our bodies release cortisol, which then interacts with two hormones called neuropeptide Y and leptin to stimulate our appetite for high sugar and high fat food. Moreover, when we're stressed, good food stimulates an opioid release-your body's natural version of heroin. An addicting reward cycle ensues: We get stressed, and comfort food quite literally, physiologically, comforts us, and then we indulge in it to alleviate our stress. Stress "increases the reward value of highly palatable food," one study explains. The more stressed we get, the more we crave and love high sugar, high fat food, and the more weight we gain. Stress also affects a stress response system called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which may promote fat storage particularly in the abdominal region.

Stress can even trigger premature aging on a cellular level. Research suggests that stress is associated with shorter telomere length. Telomeres are those little pieces of DNA on the ends of chromosomes, which effectively tell researchers how old a cell is. Shorter telomeres are associated with, among other things, reduced lifespan, decreased physical capacity to recover from stresses like wounds and reduced skin elasticity. In one study, women with the highest perceived stress had telomeres the same lengths as women who were a decade older. In other words, stress ages us not just psychologically but also biologically.

Finally, stress affects our attractiveness in subliminal, instinctual ways. In one Finnish study, men judged the faces of women who had higher levels of cortisol to be less attractive than women with lower levels. Stress plays a critical role in this phenomenon: High cortisol levels make individuals appear less fertile, thereby reducing their attractiveness. This makes sense, says the study's lead researcher, Markus Rantala. Stress inhibits sex hormones, and sex hormones influence physical attractiveness.

There are better reasons to avoid stress than pure aesthetics. But the point is our bodies don't wait for us to "just get through this" or "learn to manage." In manifest ways, our bodies begin to degrade. Perhaps, once we notice these superficial effects, we'll realize the whole of what we sacrifice to stress.









sauce: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/a3kvv8/anxiety-and-stress-are-messing-with-your-good-looks


----------



## mtbxplorer (Dec 25, 2009)

Women Cyclists Prone to Common Gynecologic Issues But Not Serious Urinary Dysfunction
Some Female Bikers May Have Better Sex than Non-Cyclists

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/4...mon-gynecological-problems-not-serious-sexual

NOTE: Rude comments will be deleted and the poster subject to suspension


----------



## verslowrdr (Mar 22, 2004)

BTW I somehow stumbled into this website yesterday and wound up spending hours reading various articles... just a great approach on darn near every aspect of everything fitness related. Lots of love here for us Mere Mortals™ who have to search for kid shoes and clean dog barf off the floor when we'd planned on doing something else after work. :thumbsup:

https://www.niashanks.com/


----------



## stripes (Sep 6, 2016)

I started strength training barefoot. Holy cow—it changed everything.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Are Female Athletes More Prone to Sports Injury Than Males?

On a positive note, women are tougher  I believe females have a higher pain threshold and are much more likely to work through pain and injury. Plus add in the cultural aspect that a female athlete does not want to let her teammates and coaches down.


----------



## Guest (May 4, 2018)

cyclelicious said:


> Are Female Athletes More Prone to Sports Injury Than Males?
> 
> On a positive note, women are tougher  I believe females have a higher pain threshold and are much more likely to work through pain and injury. Plus add in the cultural aspect that a female athlete does not want to let her teammates and coaches down.


 I think recent of research for women deploying into direct support roles overseas will provide a lot of insite into this issue. When I worked at the VA I noticed that Female Veterans who worked in environments where they carried a combat load and especially when they were deployed to mountainous terrain had an extremely high rate of hip and knee issues after deployment. In addition to the steps mentioned in the article, I think getting the best possible footwear and properly fitting gear (for any sport) is super inportant. Additionally, I think it's important to scale the loads we place on our bodies. If a 200# individual carries a 60# load, they're carrying an additional 30%, for a 120# individual that load is an extra 50% of body mass. Ignoring that fact with the other physiological issues compounds the problem and likelihood of injury. Sorry for the intrusion, i'll get out of the lounge now.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Exercise beats genetics in determining amount of body fat



> With obesity now a global epidemic, there is increased focus on risk factors that contribute to weight gain, especially in postmenopausal women. Although many women may blame genetics for their expanding waistlines, a new study shows that as women age they are more likely to overcome genetic predisposition to obesity through exercise. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS).
> 
> Previous studies have suggested that the genetic influence on body mass index (BMI) increases from childhood to early adulthood. However, there has been little research on the effect of obesity genes later in life and whether they can be overcome through lifestyle modification, including exercise. In the article "Physical activity modifies genetic susceptibility to obesity in postmenopausal women," results are published from the linear regression analysis of more than 8,200 women from the Women's Health Initiative. Those results suggest that physical activity reduces the influence of genetic predisposition to obesity, and this effect is more significant in the oldest age group (women aged 70 years and older).
> 
> ...


sauce https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180516102300.htm


----------



## H0WL (Jan 17, 2007)

Thanks for the reminder! I've somewhat lost my ability to jump and will be adding it in at the gym. It's an important skill while hiking; leaping across small streams and whatnot! I'm blown away by people who can jump up four feet or more. It's like levitation and they make it look effortless, as do you!


----------



## H0WL (Jan 17, 2007)

stripes said:


> I started strength training barefoot. Holy cow-it changed everything.


I go to two gyms. I get a Gold's Gym membership through my health insurance and the trainer I work with works at an old school gym, with a high funk factor and some serious heavy lifters. At Gold's, ya gotta wear closed toe shoes. At the other gym, you wear whatever you want. I noticed some of the people lifting heavy wear relatively minimal foot wear.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

This question often comes up

*I Have A Cold: Should I Work Out?*

A recent study sponsored by the American College of Sports Medicine indicates that exercising moderately while you have a common cold doesn't affect the severity or duration of the symptoms.

It's a widely accepted notion that exercising and keeping in shape will reduce your risk of getting sick, but nothing has been previously documented to demonstrate whether working out while suffering from a cold would reduce or intensify the symptoms.

The Common Cold
The common cold affects us all, with the average American getting sick up to six times a year, but will exercising when you're not feeling well, increase or decrease your ability to battle the illness, and reduce symptoms?

The study, headed by Thomas G. Weidner, Ph.D., Ball State University in Munice Indiana, involved 50 moderately fit student volunteers, who were divided randomly into two groups: exercising and non-exercising.

Each volunteer was injected with the cold germs, and tracked for a ten-day period.

The subjects all kept a daily log of physical activity. The exercise group worked out either by running, biking or using a step machine for 40 minutes every day, at no more than seventy percent of their maximum capacity (measured by heart rate reserve).

Upon completion of the study and after analysis of exercise data, symptom severity, and actual mucous weight measurements, there was shown to be no significant difference in symptom severity or duration in the exercise group or in their inactive counterparts.

The study revealed that exercising at a moderate intensity level does not intensify cold symptoms or compromise the immune system. It seems that a moderate level of intensity is not enough to alter immune response.

Reader beware, high intensity exercise such as heavy weight lifting or high intensity aerobic training has been shown to have a negative impact on the immune system during a cold or any respiratory infection.

Symptom To Exercise Guidelines
If you have a:

Runny nose
Sneezing
Scratchy throat only then:
It is safe to exercise at low intensity levels.

If you have a:

Fever
Dry cough
Sore muscles
Vomiting
Diarhrea then:
Exercise not recommended, resume more intense physical activity when cold, or infection is gone.

sauce: https://www.bodybuilding.com/conten...um=social_media&utm_campaign=content_training

My general rule is: if symptoms are above the neck... it's ok


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Physical activity in the evening does not cause sleep problems


----------



## mtbxplorer (Dec 25, 2009)

^^ Good stuff, thanks for sharing.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

In sum" Stay hydrated after a workout"



> f you've spent any time learning about how to maximize your workout, you've probably heard about the anabolic window. This is the idea that you must consume the right amounts of carbs and proteins within 45 minutes of finishing a workout. According to the theory, if you miss this window you can kiss your gains goodbye.
> 
> Thanks to research published over the past few years, that concept has been debunked. But, other research has shown that post-workout hydration plays a major role in helping you retain your hard-won gains.
> 
> ...


sauce https://www.bodybuilding.com/conten...m=social_media&utm_campaign=content_nutrition


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Good to know!



> *How to Properly Warm Up Prior To Exercise: Static vs. Dynamic Stretching*
> 
> People all too often continue to warm up prior to exercise, or an athletic competition, with static stretching. Static stretching means that you hold a stretch for a prolonged period of time, such as 30 to 60 seconds. In past decades, it was believed that static stretching prior to exercise was necessary in order to help prevent injury and improve performance. However, research over the past 20 years has demonstrated that this prior belief was incorrect and that a dynamic warm-up, or dynamic stretching, is necessary in both preventing injury as well as improving performance.
> 
> ...


sauce https://liftbigeatbig.com/how-to-pr...fUHbsmpBjhI-QW1oC8GjA7rFtsZ15NEBe9_V8yb4WV0NM


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Exercise really does seem to help with depression*

_Question: Does physical activity have a potential causal role in reducing risk for depression?_









Scientists and the public alike have long suspected that exercise can reduce depression, but the problem with proving it is the same as with many long-held general associations: it's just an association. Researchers have shown repeatedly that people who move more tend to have fewer depressive symptoms-but what if people who are less depressed have more motivations to get up and move? Or what if the people who have enough time to stay active tend to have lifestyles less prone to triggering depression?

Questions like these have plagued research on physical activity and depression for years, but now we're starting to have tools that can help us tease out this complex relationship. *One new study, published in JAMA Psychiatry on Wednesday, suggests that there really is a causal relationship: Exercising helps alleviate depression.*

To figure this out, researchers working for the Major Depressive Disorder Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium used a clever new method called Mendelian randomization, which allows us to understand causal relationships between modifiable behaviors, such as exercise, and health outcomes. The basic idea goes something like this:

It's hard to know whether exercise influences depression or whether depression influences exercise (or both!) because there are lots of other factors associated with each that could influence the other. People who exercise more might have higher incomes, for instance, and be better able to access therapy and medication. Those with worse depression might be less motivated to move around, or they might have physical pain associated with their depression that makes exercising less appealing. It could even be reverse causation-getting less exercise could make you more prone to depression. These extra associations muddy the picture. But your genes are a lot less prone to these problems. They're assigned to you before birth in a relatively random way, which mitigates some environmental associations (like having a higher socioeconomic status) as well as eliminating the reverse causation issue.

That means we can use natural genetic variation as an experimental tool. We know that some gene variants make you more likely to exercise, so if physical activity is causing a decrease in depression it follows that people with those variants should be less prone to depression since they'll tend to exercise more.

Of course, that's assuming that those genes don't influence anything else. As an editorial accompanying this study points out, this is an important caveat for all Mendelian randomization studies. "For example," psychiatrist Adam Chekroud writes, "if the exercise gene variants also relate to low energy, and low energy relates to depression, this relationship would represent another path through which exercise gene variants might affect depression risk." But he goes on to note that the study authors were aware of this potential misstep and did everything they could to minimize it. Even after removing genes associated with traits like body mass index or education level from the equation, their finding still held.

According to their study, for every one standard deviation increase in physical activity, depressive symptoms reduced by 26 percent. "One standard deviation" is an unhelpful measure of exercise, and though it's difficult to draw direct parallels the researchers note that it's approximately equal to one hour of moderate activity like walking, or replacing 15 minutes of sedentary behavior with vigorous exercise like running.

They also decided to measure subjects' activity level using accelerometers (on top of asking them to report their own activity levels). By looking at how much actual exercise differed from reported exercise, they could figure out whether self-reporting is reliable. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it's not. The reduction in depressive symptoms-that 26 percent number-only held true for people who actually exercised more.

The study authors themselves note that this is just one piece of evidence supporting a causal role. More research is always going to help strengthen the hypothesis. But in his editorial, Chekroud makes an interesting note: "The reality is that more findings linking exercise and mental health offer diminishing marginal returns. Given that exercise is beneficial, the key clinical question is how we increase the uptake and adherence to exercise and help individuals to measure and monitor their mental health alongside their exercise efforts."

In other words, we already have a lot of evidence that exercise seems to improve depression (and helps a whole host of other health issues, from obesity to cancer)-enough that researchers suggest we prescribe it as a way to alleviates the symptoms. What we don't have are many great ways to help people exercise more. Roughly 80 percent of Americans don't get enough physical activity. That means pretty much everyone could benefit from working out a little more. And as the study authors note, people at risk for developing depression would be doubly helped by getting started on an exercise program early.









_Summary: Findings strengthen empirical support for physical activity as an effective prevention strategy for depression.
_
sauce https://www.popsci.com/exercise-dep...YTuJynPZ08fRv1E4IDRYGw-7QIQnzQG2_0BmcYwarKRHk


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

A nice summary of the results of a recent published study on the effects of artificially sweetened drinks.



> *What we know about diet soda's connection to heart disease, stroke, and early death*
> 
> Since the introduction of Diet Coke in 1982, artificially sweetened drinks have become increasingly ubiquitous in the American diet. In fact, according to a 2018 consumer survey, more than half of all Americans age 18 to 49 drank at least one Diet Coke at some point in the past four weeks. So it's hardly surprising that epidemiologists are studying the effects the zero-calorie sweeteners have on our health. The most recent study, published this week in the journal Stroke, drew conclusions that sound worrying: In postmenopausal women, drinking two or more of these beverages a day were linked to an earlier risk of stroke, heart disease, and early death.
> 
> ...


https://www.popsci.com/diet-sodas-s...8Vv1ygBN4fzlsVXOVLygVpAI5Szay_VEU9QudI#page-2


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Sharing this article from The Economist (due to it's paywall)

*What Caster Semenya's case means for women's sport*



> Few athletes have been as blessed and cursed as Caster Semenya. All that the 28-year-old South African has ever done is run as fast as her legs could carry her-fast enough to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals over 800 metres. But her remarkable body has also drawn ridicule, speculation and a decade of investigation.
> 
> In 2009, when she breezed to a World Championship title, the International Association of Athletics Federations (iaaf), the sport's governing body, began examining whether she might be intersex-an umbrella term for people with developmental conditions affecting the genitalia and gonads. To protect her privacy, the findings are unpublished. The iaaf has since been in a regulatory tussle about whether Ms Semenya must adjust her testosterone levels to compete as a woman. On May 1st the Court of Arbitration for Sport (cas), an international court for sports, ruled against her. Its decision covers only athletes with one of a group of syndromes known as 46,xy, which means that a person with a male y chromosome and high testosterone does not develop male genitalia. The ruling has implications far beyond Ms Semenya's sport-and indeed, beyond sport itself.
> 
> ...


Sauce https://www.economist.com/international/2019/05/11/what-caster-semenyas-case-means-for-womens-sport


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

I knew it! And this makes me happy 

*Exercise makes you happier than money, according to Yale and Oxford research*

It's clear exercise has health benefits both physical and mental. But what if we could show it was more important to your mental health than your economic status?

According to a study from researchers at Yale and Oxford, we may have done just that.

In the study, published in The Lancet, scientists collected data about the physical behavior and mental mood of more than 1.2 million Americans.

Participants were asked to answer the following question: "How many times have you felt mentally unwell in the past 30 days, for example, due to stress, depression, or emotional problems?"

The participants were also asked about their income and physical activities. They were able to choose from 75 types of physical activity - from mowing the lawn, taking care of children, and doing housework to weight lifting, cycling, and running.

People who stay active tend to be happier
The scientists found that while those who exercised regularly tended to feel bad for 35 days a year, nonactive participants felt bad for 18 days more, on average.

In addition, the researchers found that physically active people feel just as good as those who don't do sports but who earn about $25,000 more a year. Essentially, you'd have to earn a lot more to get you the same happiness-boosting effect that sport has.

But it doesn't mean the more sport you do the happier you are.

Too much exercise can be detrimental to your mental health
Exercise is clearly good for you, but how much is too much?

"The relationship between sport duration and mental load is U-shaped," said study author Adam Chekroud of Yale University in an interview with Die Welt. The study found that physical activity contributes to better mental well-being only when it falls within a certain time frame.

According to the study, three to five training sessions, each lasting between 30 to 60 minutes, are ideal per week. The mental health of those participants who exercised for longer than three hours a day suffered more than that of those who weren't particularly physically active.

The scientists also noticed that certain sports that involve socializing - such as team sports - can have more of a positive effect on your mental health than others.

Despite the fact that neither cycling nor aerobics and fitness technically counts as team sports, these activities can also have a considerable positive effect on your mental health.

sauce https://www.businessinsider.com/exe...UaYue5q3qEYtvfFQ4Pxyurhpni6n2tAUJAStCzATiueac


----------



## H0WL (Jan 17, 2007)

Interesting BBC article about women rocking the ultra endurance scene:

Are women better ultra-endurance athletes than men?

<snip>


> "One of the reasons why women tend to be able to compete with men and sometimes outperform them, is that the greater maximal capacities exhibited by men aren't as important in an ultra-endurance event," Dr Tiller, who is also an ultra-marathon runner, said.
> 
> He said that in ultra-endurance races, athletes are never working close to their maximum capacity. It is much more about peripheral conditioning, oxygen efficiency and *mental toughness*.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*4 Mind-Boggling Ways Fitness Whips Your Brain Into Shape*

It's not uncommon today for many people to believe that exercise can affect things like their mood, their feelings of happiness, and their ability to take tests and perform other intellectual tasks. What has been missing, though, is evidence that this interrelationship is any more than just that-a belief, without any basis in fact.

New research into the relationship between the mind and the body is revealing the actual physical mechanisms by which the body affects the brain. After more than seven million years of evolution, almost half of the physical structure of the human brain is now devoted to the actions of the body, leaving the other half responsible for perceptions of the outside world. With so much of the brain focused on the physical body, it makes sense that the body, and what we do with it, would have a profound impact on our brains.

The brain dictates every thought and belief we have, every physical action we take, and every decision we make. But what about the opposite: How does the body dictate the functioning of the brain? It should come as no surprise that the way the brain determines these nonphysical parts of life is closely correlated with physical activity.

*Exercise: Fertilizer For Your Brain*
Our brains function through the activity of networks, each composed of single brain areas and their connections. It was once believed that these complex networks were fixed or static once we entered adulthood. We now know that our brain structures remain "plastic" throughout our lives, capable of being shaped by learning, experience, and-as we now understand-by exercise. This ability of the brain to change its shape is known as neuroplasticity.

Research has shown that physical exercise has both short-term and long-term effects on neuroplasticity, enabling the brain to rewire itself to improve mood and happiness, scholastic performance in children, executive control in adults, and even the speed at which the brain itself processes information.

Physical activity also seems to improve the body's ability to create new brain cells, called neurons. It was previously thought that humans were born with all of the brain cells they would ever have. So if someone suffered an injury or illness that killed neurons, their body would never replace them.

We now know this isn't true. In certain areas of the brain-particularly those involved in motor and cognitive control, learning and memory, and reward-the body is perfectly capable of growing completely new neurons, a process known as neurogenesis. This is due to the effect exercise has on a particular brain hormone, brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF). BDNF has been likened to fertilizer for the brain. Several studies have clearly demonstrated that exercise significantly increases BDNF production. It has been shown in animal models that the more BDNF the brain can create, the greater the capacity to remember, learn new information, improve mood, and improve "inhibitory control."

Inhibitory control, related to self-control, refers to our ability to delay gratification. Exercise improves our inhibitory control, which then improves our ability to change a habit or a learned behavior. This, in turn, enables us to refocus ourselves to complete goals that lead to better long-term outcomes. It may be as simple as developing more willpower to start your day with a workout rather than delaying it until after work, which may not always happen.

*The Impact Of Various Forms Of Exercise On Brain Function*
Research has examined the role that four kinds of exercise play in neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. In each case, results underscore new insights that exercise has a very direct-and very physical-impact on the brain itself.

*Cardiovascular Exercise*: All forms of exercise seem to have a positive impact on the brain, but cardiovascular exercise in particular has a profound impact on blood flow to key areas. A study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that women with a higher level of fitness (as measured by VO2 max) scored better on measures of executive brain function.In particular, researchers found that these women had more cerebral blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain involved in decision making, future planning, goal-directed behavior, and emotions.

*Resistance Training: *A study published in the journal Neuroscience Letters suggests that regular resistance training can have a positive impact on brain health in women. Researchers found that women who engaged in strength training at least once per week exhibited significantly greater blood flow to the brain compared to women who did not. Declines in blood flow that occur with normal aging are linked to detriments in both physical and mental health, including fatigue, stroke, depression, and declines in cognitive function.

*Yoga:* A study published in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice reviewed multiple studies examining the impact of yoga on brain activity and structural changes.The review concluded that yoga and postural-based exercises significantly increased brain activity. The authors suggested this may improve mood, focus, and overall sense of well-being.

*HIIT Training:* Additionally, emerging research suggests that short bursts of vigorous activity, known as high-intensity interval training (HIIT), may improve blood flow in the brain, which can provide more nourishment to neurons, resulting in improved brain activity.

Many of the studies cited above are preliminary and come from a relatively new field of brain research. Even so, researchers are now discovering many of the very real, very tangible physical changes that take place on a cellular level within our brains when we engage in physical activity. While more research needs to be done, what was once thought to be no more than a belief is becoming accepted science.

sauce https://www.bodybuilding.com/conten...ZPxxOSq3DjAQWZAkTfqcMM3BugNyWEGruPqj4sj7h1kzs


----------



## mtbxplorer (Dec 25, 2009)

^^ Nice! I believe it!


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Is there a limit to human endurance? Science says yes*

From the Ironman triathlon to the Tour de France, some competitions test the limits of even the toughest endurance athletes. Now, a new study of energy expenditure during some of the world's longest, most grueling sporting events suggests that no matter what the activity, everyone hits the same metabolic limit-a maximum possible level of exertion that humans can sustain in the long term.

When it comes to physical activities lasting days, weeks and months, the researchers found, humans can only burn calories at 2.5 times their resting metabolic rate.

Not even the world's fastest ultra-marathoners managed to surpass that limit, the researchers found.

"This defines the realm of what's possible for humans," said study co-author Herman Pontzer, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University.

Beyond the threshold of 2.5 times a person's resting metabolic rate, researchers found, the body starts to break down its own tissues to make up for the caloric deficit.

One explanation for this limit may be the digestive tract's ability to break down food, said team leaders Pontzer and John Speakman of Scotland's University of Aberdeen and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In other words, eating more won't necessarily help someone make Iditarod history. "There's just a limit to how many calories our guts can effectively absorb per day," Pontzer said.

The results will appear online June 5 in the journal Science Advances.

For the study, the team measured daily calories burned by a group of athletes who ran six marathons a week for five months as part of the 2015 Race Across the USA, a 3,000-mile race from California to Washington, D.C. The team also considered other feats of human endurance, including punishing 100-mile trail races and pregnancy.

When they plotted the data over time, they found an L-shaped curve. The athletes' energy expenditure started out relatively high, but inevitably plunged and flattened out at 2.5 times their basal metabolic rate for the remainder of the event.

Co-author Caitlin Thurber analyzed urine samples collected during the first and final legs of Race Across the USA. After 20 weeks of running back-to-back marathons, the athletes were burning 600 fewer calories a day than expected based on their mileage. The findings suggest that the body can "downshift" its metabolism to help stay within sustainable levels.

"It's a great example of constrained energy expenditure, where the body is limited in its ability to maintain extremely high levels of energy expenditure for an extended period of time," Thurber said.

"You can sprint for 100 meters, but you can jog for miles, right? That's also true here," Pontzer said.

All the endurance events followed the same L-shaped curve, whether the athletes were hauling 500-pound sleds across Antarctica for days in sub-freezing temperatures, or cycling the Tour de France in summer. That finding challenges the idea, proposed by previous researchers, that human endurance is linked to the ability to regulate body temperature.

One limiting factor for endurance events, researchers found, lies in the digestive process-the body's ability to process food and absorb calories and nutrients to fuel bodily processes.

Interestingly, the maximum sustainable energy expenditure found among endurance athletes was only slightly higher than the metabolic rates women sustain during pregnancy. This suggests that the same physiological limits that keep, say, Ironman triathletes from shattering speed records may also constrain other aspects of life too, such as how big babies can grow in the womb.

As far as the researchers know, no one's ever sustained levels beyond this limit. "So I guess it's a challenge to elite endurance athletes," Pontzer said. "Science works when you're proven wrong. Maybe someone will break through that ceiling some day and show us what we're missing."

sauce https://phys.org/news/2019-06-limit...mBhBRN2-S96rfSKRGpr2ba0WqFOJOBMy-6MxDwYnZLjjg


----------



## mtbxplorer (Dec 25, 2009)

^^Interesting, thanks for sharing. If they are right, it sounds like the key will be easily absorbable nutrition during these endurance events.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Want to create a healthier country? Start by creating fitter cities*

Every January, people resolve to lose weight, eat healthy and be more active. Yet, by the end of the month, most people who started the year with the best of intentions have given up, usually having failed in the behaviour changes they had planned to make.

At the same time, provincial health-care budgets across the country have been rapidly rising because of our current non-communicable disease (NCD) epidemics such as diabetes, cancers, cardiovascular diseases and mental-health issues. Childhood obesity has risen even more rapidly and we are now seeing chronic diseases previously unseen until middle and old ages, conditions such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, in children and young adults. Complications such as heart disease and strokes, blindness, kidney failure requiring transplants or dialysis, now likely await these children in early adulthood. Rapidly rising health-care costs across Canada are increasingly affecting available budgets for other critical provincial areas such as education and municipal infrastructure. Aging populations and air pollution also affect rates, complications and mortality from these diseases.

Much has been done around health education. But the epidemics of obesity and diabetes in Canada - and the health-care and societal costs from them - continue to rise. The need for solutions is dire.

The good news is there are solutions.

Indeed, there are jurisdictions that can serve as examples of what can be done, places that have managed to reverse their childhood obesity epidemics and improve chronic disease outcomes. New York during Michael Bloomberg's administration is one such case study. During a mere 12 years of his tenure, decades-long rising childhood obesity trends were reversed and life expectancy in the city grew to 2.2 years longer than the rest of the country in large part because of improved chronic disease outcomes.

How did New York do it and what can we in Canada learn from its example? As it turns out, many of the solutions to our health epidemics and costs lie not just within our health-care system, but outside of it.

The solutions to creating fitter individuals and health-care systems today lie in creating "fit cities." When I arrived in New York in 2006 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the city was in the midst of an obesity and diabetes epidemic.

Policy and environmental work to decrease smoking was already focused on creating smoke-free workplaces and public spaces, increasing tobacco taxes, restricting access for youth and increasing access to free nicotine replacement therapies. Previously stagnant smoking rates were declining.

In contrast, obesity and diabetes were the two health conditions getting worse. With scientific evidence growing for the importance of supportive environments to accompany individual efforts, and inspired by its own successes in tobacco reduction, the city's health department embarked on a policy and environmental approach to healthier diets and active living.

Among the interventions were: daycare regulations for healthier food and beverages; imposing a maximum TV-allowed time and a minimum 60-minutes daily physical activity; improving school foods and beverages as well as physical activity time and increased spaces for children's physical education and recess; and introducing labelling on restaurant menus so people could have calorie information, among many other initiatives.

We in Canada are learning from examples such as this. In 2018, the Public Health Agency of Canada approved a grant to the University of Alberta called Housing for Health where more than 100 partners from different departments of government, private sector, non-profit and community sectors, and the academic sector are working together to create healthier housing developments and surrounding neighbourhoods.

But more is needed across Canadian jurisdictions to support people in their attempts to be healthy and to sustain our highly valued healthcare system for future generations.

sauce https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opi...hier-country-start-by-creating-fitter-cities/


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Can we, as adults, grow new neurons? Neuroscientist Sandrine Thuret says that we can, and she offers research and practical advice on how we can help our brains better perform neurogenesis-improving mood, increasing memory formation and preventing the decline associated with aging along the way.

Very interesting TED talk. Positive activity (running, biking, strength training ) is very beneficial!

https://ed.ted.com/on/1KY07tYL?fbcl...zRRmNHSOklg7yhNX3bOvBhXxfc4fM-fpy4wPdj-6Pqcts


----------



## chazpat (Sep 23, 2006)

^ watched!

I've watched a lot of Ted Talks while doing my PT exercises. There are a lot on bicycles and how beneficial they are in so many ways.

We are slowly adding bike lanes and multiuse paths around me. Naturally, some people complain about "their" tax dollars being spent on such frivolous things that they won't use. Mostly the same people also complain about the increasing traffic. And cyclist in the road. And cyclist on the sidewalks.

Got in another run this morning. Here's a shot of the mill ruins I ran by.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Way to go Chaz! cool pic


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

We know this anecdotally  It's been my drug of choice, and fountain of youth. It can be a neighborhood park, a trail or forest, or your own back yard. Just get out there and feel it.

*Spending time in nature reduces stress, research finds*

New research from an interdisciplinary Cornell team has found that as little as 10 minutes in a natural setting can help college students feel happier and lessen the effects of both physical and mental stress.

The research, published Jan. 14 in Frontiers in Psychology, is part of a larger examination of "nature therapy" and aims to provide an easily-achievable dosage that physicians can prescribe as a preventive measure against high levels of stress, anxiety, depression and other mental health issues college students face.

"It doesn't take much time for the positive benefits to kick in - we're talking 10 minutes outside in a space with nature," said lead author Gen Meredith, associate director of the Master of Public Health Program and lecturer at the College of Veterinary Medicine. "We firmly believe that every student, no matter what subject or how high their workload, has that much discretionary time each day, or at least a few times per week."

Meredith and her co-authors reviewed studies that examined the effects of nature on people of college age (no younger than 15, no older than 30) to discover how much time students should be spending outside and what they should be doing while they're there. They found that 10-50 minutes in natural spaces was the most effective to improve mood, focus and physiological markers like blood pressure and heart rate.

"It's not that there's a decline after 50 minutes, but rather that the physiological and self-reported psychological benefits tend to plateau after that," said co-author Donald Rakow, associate professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science.

To enjoy the positive effects of being outside, students need only to be sitting or walking, the two primary activities the researchers examined in an effort to provide accessible recommendations.

"We wanted to keep this access to nature as simple and achievable as possible," says Rakow. "While there is a lot of literature on longer outdoor programs, we wanted to quantify doses in minutes, not days."

For Cornell students, there are a multitude of options for escaping into nature. For urban universities, research suggests that adding green elements to a built space can produce the same results. It is the time spent in nature, not necessarily nature itself, that's beneficial.

"This is an opportunity to challenge our thinking around what nature can be," says Meredith. "It is really all around us: trees, a planter with flowers, a grassy quad or a wooded area."

The impetus for this work is a movement toward prescribing time in nature as a way to prevent or improve stress and anxiety, while also supporting physical and mental health outcomes. The researchers wanted to consider what "dose" would need to be prescribed to college-age students to show an effect. They are hoping that when it's applied at universities, it becomes part of a student's routine and is consumed in regular doses, like a pill.

"Prescribing a dose can legitimize the physician's recommendation and give a tangible goal" says Meredith. "It's different than just saying: 'Go outside.' There is something specific that a student can aim for."

sauce Spending time in nature reduces stress, research finds | Cornell Chronicle


----------



## chazpat (Sep 23, 2006)

cyclelicious said:


> We know this anecdotally  It's been my drug of choice, and fountain of youth. It can be a neighborhood park, a trail or forest, or your own back yard. Just get out there and feel it.
> 
> *Spending time in nature reduces stress, research finds*


We have a thread for that! 

https://forums.mtbr.com/riding-passion/%91forest-bathing%92-great-your-health-1077269.html


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

chazpat said:


> We have a thread for that!
> 
> https://forums.mtbr.com/riding-passion/%91forest-bathing%92-great-your-health-1077269.html


From 2018! We have been saying and practicing this for years... I'm glad more studies reconfirm the benefits


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

All I can say is keep moving... cycle, run swim .... you'll live longer and stay healthier 

*ONE TYPE OF EXERCISE "REVERSES" AGING'S EFFECT ON STEM CELLS - STUDY*

As people age, they lose muscle mass and the risk of heart disease, dementia, and reduced immune function increases. As the years tick by, it becomes harder for people to bounce back from a workout, injury, or illness.

Consistent exercise can slow down this degenerative process - but a new study suggests we may not have to settle for slowing down. According to new research in mice, aerobic exercise may actually REVERSE AGING'S EFFECT on essential muscle stem cells involved with tissue regeneration.

If the research translates to humans, it means jogging, swimming, cycling, and other aerobic activities can help older people recover as quickly and efficiently as their younger selves. In the far future, these results could inform the creation of a drug that de-ages muscle stem cells.

This finding was published Monday in the journal Nature Metabolism.

Researchers have known for a long time that exercise promotes healthspan, giving people extra disease-free years.

This discovery is "VERY DIFFERENT," co-author Thomas Rando, a neurology researcher at Stanford University, tells Inverse.

"This is like taking, in a sense, a person who has already aged and acquired these diseases, and then reversed that process," Rando explains.

This study suggests that aerobic exercise can cause old cells to behave more like - and gain the characteristics of - young cells. To get there, the scientists rounded up young and old mice and gave them access to a running wheel for three weeks. Then, with a battery of tests, they analyzed how the mouse's muscle stem cells and muscle tissue responded.

They compared the mouse runners to a group of non-exercising mice who were given a locked wheel and no opportunity to run.

Within a single week, both young and old mice with the running wheels established a routine, running about 10 and 4.9 kilometers per night, respectively.

The human equivalent to the mice running wheel regime would likely be regular, aerobic exercise- swimming, running, cycling, Rando says. Not strength training or weight lifting.

After three weeks of voluntary wheel running, the mice were moved to cages without any wheels. Then, the researchers injured certain muscles and analyzed how the mice rebuilt the injured tissue.

They also transplanted muscle stem cells from old mice into other injured mice, and saw how well the cells functioned. Compared with young donor muscle stem cells, old donor muscle stem cells formed smaller and fewer fibers in the injured mice. But old muscle stem cells from exercising mice performed like young muscle stem cells, forming more fibers than non-exercising old muscle stem cells.

Overall, older mice who exercised experienced IMPROVED MUSCLE STEM CELL FUNCTION and ACCELERATED MUSCLE TISSUE REPAIR.

The active, older mice didn't produce more muscle stem cells. Instead, exercise had a "rejuvenating" effect on old cells, Rando says. It triggered a Benjamin Button-effect and helped mice operate more like their younger selves.

These benefits disappeared one week after the mice stopped running, suggesting that what causes the rejuvenating effect is sustained exercise.

This implies that voluntary aerobic exercise may have benefits "above and beyond" the prevention of age-related diseases, and may actually improve tissue function directly, Rando says.

"The idea would be that that older individuals would recover faster and more efficiently like young people do in response to an injury," he explains

Surprisingly, young mice who ran the wheel did not experience improved muscle repair. This puzzled Rando and his team.

"It's as if young mice have already kind of plateaued," Rando explains. "They lose function with age and they can get back to that baseline, but it's hard to make them still better with more exercise."

Exercise's effects on muscle stem cells and tissue repair come down to a tiny protein called cyclin D1, the study explains. Voluntary aerobic exercise restored cyclin D1 levels in dormant stem cells back to youthful levels, effectively accelerating muscle stem cell regeneration.

Discovering cyclinD1's critical role means researchers may be able to TARGET THE PROTEIN THERAPEUTICALLY or develop a DRUG THAT CREATES THESE POSITIVE DE-AGING EFFECTS, the researchers say.

But before any kind of anti-aging pill or prescribed exercise-regime comes down the pipeline, more research in humans is needed.

Sauce :https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/e...te4Nmw8Xxl-yCL1fBFKDP6O85YvC5d62hmRJY43oxD9ho


----------



## mLeier (Oct 17, 2017)

Great article! I definitely recover better/faster now that I am in good shape even though I am older.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Peak Anxiety? Here Are 10 Ways to Calm Down*









Can't concentrate? Losing sleep? Binge-eating your feelings?

In a year of unprecedented stress, the nation collectively appears to be heading toward peak anxiety this week. People are sharing stories of stress eating, clearing their calendars (who could sit through a Zoom meeting during a time like this?) and threatening to stay in bed for a week.

The stress has consumed both sides of the political aisle. A poll released by the American Psychological Association showed that 76 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of Republicans are finding the 2020 election to be a significant source of stress.

"We've had this unending momentum of a steady stream of stuff just going wrong since the beginning of March," said the Rev. angel Kyodo williams, a meditation teacher and author of the book "Radical Dharma." "The groundlessness that people feel is not really something the human body was meant to sustain over long periods of time."

While there's nothing you can do to speed election results or a coronavirus vaccine, you do have the power to take care of yourself. Neuroscientists, psychologists and meditation experts offered advice about the big and small things you can do to calm down. Here are 10 things you can try to release anxiety, gain perspective and gird yourself for whatever comes next.

*Interrupt yourself*
As you feel your anxiety level rising, try to practice "self interruption." Go for a walk. Call a friend. Run an errand. Just move your body and become aware of your breathing.

"Interrupt yourself so you can shift your state," said Ms. Williams. "Get your attention on something else. Focus on something that is beautiful. Get up. Move your body and really shift your position. I think people really need to move away from wherever it is they are and break the momentum."

*Focus on your feet*
When you feel your stress level rising, try this quick calming exercise from Dr. Judson A. Brewer, director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University:

Take a moment to focus on your feet. You can do this standing or sitting, with your feet on the ground. How do they feel? Are they warm or cold? Are they tingly? Moist or dry? Wiggle your toes. Feel the soles of your feet. Feel your heels connecting with your shoes and the ground beneath you.

"It's a different way to ground yourself," said Dr. Brewer. "Anxiety tends to be in your chest and throat. Your feet are as peripheral as you get from your anxiety zones."









*Move for 3 minutes*
It just takes a short burst of exercise - three minutes to be exact - to improve your mood, said Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University whose latest book is "The Joy of Movement." Do jumping jacks. Stand and box. Do wall push-ups. Dance.

"If you give me three minutes, it works, as long as you're moving your body in ways that feel good to you," said Dr. McGonigal, who suggests picking an inspiring song to get you moving. "Anytime you move your muscles and get your heart rate up, you'll get a boost in dopamine and sense yourself as alive and engaged. Movement for me is a way I sense my own strength and feel connected to hope and joy."









*Tackle a home project*
Get rid of clutter, make a scrapbook, get a new comforter, hang artwork.

"It's not frivolous to do something like declutter, organize or look around your space and think about how to make it a supportive place for you or anyone else you live with. It's one of the ways we imagine a positive future," said Dr. McGonigal, whose TedTalk on stress has been viewed nearly 24 million times. "Anything you do where you take an action that allows you to connect, whether consciously or not, with this idea that there's a future you're moving toward, that's like a hope intervention. It's something you're doing now to look after your future self."

*Try five-finger breathing*
This simple practice is easy to remember and is often taught to children to help them calm themselves in times of high stress. (I tried this the other day in the dentist chair, and it helped a lot!) Dr. Brewer has created a video explaining the technique, which works by engaging multiple senses at the same time and crowding out those worrying thoughts.



> Step 1. Hold your hand in front of you, fingers spread.
> 
> Step 2. Using your index finger on the opposite hand, start tracing the outline of your extended hand, starting at the wrist, moving up the pinkie finger.
> 
> ...


*Connect with nature*
Spend time outside. Watch birds. Wander amid the trees. Take a fresh look at the vistas and objects around you during an "awe walk"
Recent research shows that consciously taking in the wonders of nature amplifies the mental health benefits of walking.

Numerous studies support the notion that spending time in nature and walking on quiet, tree-lined paths can result in meaningful improvements to mental health, and even physical changes to the brain. Nature walkers have "quieter" brains: scans show less blood flow to the part of the brain associated with rumination. Some research shows that even looking at pictures of nature can improve your mood. Our brains, it seems, prefer green spaces. One small study found that exercisers exposed to the color green found it easier to exercise and were in a better mood than exercisers exposed to gray or red.









*Rediscover your diaphragm*
Many of us are vertical breathers: When we breathe, our shoulders rise and fall, and we're not engaging our diaphragm. To better relax, learn to be a horizontal breather. Inhale and push your belly out, which means you're using your diaphragm. Exhale and your middle relaxes.

For a deep (and somewhat complicated) dive on belly breathing, grab a tape measure and take this "breathing IQ" self-exam from Belisa Vranich, a clinical psychologist and author of "Breathing for Warriors."

"If you're breathing with your shoulders, you're using auxiliary muscles, and you'll have a higher heart rate, higher blood pressure and higher cortisol," Dr. Vranich said. "If you breathe diaphragmatically, you're more apt to be calmer."

*Enjoy distractions*
Give your mind a break by watching this cat comfort a nervous dog, or check out the jellyfish cam at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. You'll find more fun diversions on our new interactive Election Distractor, including a digital stress ball, a virtual emotional support dog and Donald J. McNeil Jr., the Times's infectious disease reporter, giving you optimistic news about the coronavirus vaccine.









*Unleash the aromatics*
Take a lavender foot bath, burn a scented candle or spritz the air with orange aromatherapy. It's only a temporary reprieve, but it just might help get you through election night.

A study of 141 pregnant women found that rubbing or soaking feet with lavender cream significantly reduced anxiety, stress and depression. Another study of 200 dental patients found that orange or lavender aromatherapy helped them relax before treatment. Lavender baths lower cortisol levels in infants. Even antidepressants work better when combined with lavender therapy.

Why does aromatherapy, particularly lavender, appear to have a calming effect? Some research suggests that lavender reaches odor-sensitive neurons in the nose that send signals to the parts of the brain related to wakefulness and awareness.

*
Accept the present moment*
Accepting the result of the election doesn't mean giving up if things don't go your way. In fact, you'll be more effective at pursuing change if you accept the situation. "Our anxiety comes from the desire to have things be different," said Ms. Williams. "There's going to be the day after the election. And the day after that. We need to be present to what is, regardless of the outcome you want."

Thinking about history and those who have faced seemingly insurmountable hardship in the past can help you gain perspective, accept current events and make plans to pursue change.

"My ancestors had to prepare themselves, over and over again, for moving toward a freedom that was nowhere in sight," said Ms. Williams, referring to Black Americans. "We prepare for life as it unfolds, not our ideal image of it. That is, literally, the only path forward."

sauce https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/...te=1&user_id=c57a238e515a775a5a2886440eb9cf77


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*The 'Omics' of Exercise*
When we exercise, even for a few minutes, hundreds of molecules related to our metabolic health rise and fall in our bloodstreams.

While we exercise, we raise and lower the levels of hundreds of molecules in our bloodstreams that are related to our metabolic health, even if we work out for only a few minutes, according to a complex and encouraging new study of the molecular effects of being active. The study, which involved more than 1,000 men and women, adds to growing evidence that exercise improves our health in large part by transforming the numbers and types of cells inside of us.

There is at this point, of course, no reasonable debate about whether exercise is good for us. It is. Countless studies show that people who are active are less likely than more-sedentary people to develop or die from a host of health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, obesity and many others. Active people also tend to live longer and feel happier.

But we still know surprisingly little about just how exercise changes us for the better. What are the many, interconnected biological steps and transmutations that allow a walk today to add to our life span decades from now?

That question has been driving considerable interest recently in research looking at exercise "omics" - the study of all of the molecules in our blood or other tissues that are part of a particular biological process. Genomics, for instance, quantifies the many, many molecules involved in genetic activities. Proteomics does the same for proteins, microbiomics for the multiple contents of our microbiomes and metabolomics for molecules related to metabolic processes. (There can be overlap between various 'omics, obviously.)

Understanding how exercise affects the levels of the various molecules within us is important, because these changes are likely to be the preliminary step in a complex cascade of further biological actions that contribute to better health. Increase some molecules, decrease others, and you jump-start inter-organ messaging, gene expression and other processes that subsequently alter how we make and use insulin, burn or store fat, respond to cholesterol and so on.

A number of important recent studies have delved into the 'omics of exercise, including a fascinating experiment showing that a short workout rapidly changes the levels of 9,815 molecules in people's bloodstreams. But that study, like most other examinations of exercise and 'omics, involved relatively few volunteers - 36, in that case - and did not link molecular changes with subsequent health outcomes.

So, for the new study, which was published in September in Circulation, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and other institutions decided to up the number of exercisers whose 'omics would be parsed and also try to find connections between the 'omics data and later health.

Conveniently, they had access to a large group of potential volunteers among men and women already enrolled in the long-term Framingham Heart Study, which is overseen primarily by researchers at Boston University. The scientists now asked 411 middle-aged volunteers enrolled in the study to visit the lab and exercise, by pedaling to exhaustion on a stationary bicycle. Most riders' efforts lasted for a little less than 12 minutes. The researchers drew blood before the ride and afterward, within about a minute of when, worn out, the cyclists quit.

The scientists then ran the blood samples through a mass spectrometer, a machine that counts and quantifies molecules. The researchers focused on metabolites, which are molecules related to metabolic processes. The label "metabolite" is somewhat arbitrary, but for this study, the researchers focused mostly on molecules that could affect people's insulin, fat burning, cholesterol, blood sugar and other aspects of cellular fueling.

They found plenty. Of 588 metabolites checked, the levels of more than 80 percent generally grew or dropped during the short rides. To reinforce those findings, the scientists repeated the experiment with another 783 Framingham volunteers, checking their blood before and after exercise for changes in about 200 of the molecules that had been most altered in the first group. Again, these metabolites changed in the same ways as before.

Last and perhaps most intriguing, the researchers created what they called molecular "signatures" of the levels of a few, representative metabolites that changed with exercise. They then looked for these same patterns of metabolites in stored blood samples gathered decades before from past Framingham participants, while also checking to see if and when any of these volunteers had passed away.

The relevant signatures popped up in some of the blood samples, the researchers found, and these samples tended to be from people who had not died prematurely, suggesting that the kinds of metabolite changes that occur with exercise might influence and improve health well into the future.

That idea is "speculative," though, says Dr. Gregory Lewis, the section head of the heart failure program and director of the cardiopulmonary exercise laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, who oversaw the new study. The decades-old blood samples were drawn during standard medical testing, not after exercise, he says, so some people with desirable metabolite signatures might have been born that way and not needed workouts to remodel their metabolites.

Even among the current volunteers, he points out, different people's molecules responded somewhat differently to their exercise. Over all, people with obesity developed fewer changes than leaner riders, suggesting they might somehow resist some of the benefits of exercise. Men and women, as groups, also showed slightly discordant molecular signatures, but age did not influence people's molecular responses.

Larger future 'omics studies should help scientists tease out how and why we each react as we do to exercise, Dr. Lewis says, and enable researchers to define more-precise molecular signatures that might indicate, with a blood test, how fit someone is or how their bodies may respond to different types of exercise.

But for now, the current study underscores just how pervasive and immediate the effects of exercise can be. "This was barely 10 minutes of exercise," Dr. Lewis says, "but it shifted so much" inside people.

sauce https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/...te=1&user_id=c57a238e515a775a5a2886440eb9cf77


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Yes, Many of Us Are Stress-Eating and Gaining Weight in the Pandemic*

_A global study confirms that during the pandemic, many of us ate more junk food, exercised less, were more anxious and got less sleep._

Not long ago, Stephen Loy had a lot of healthy habits. He went to exercise classes three or four times a week, cooked nutritious dinners for his family, and snacked on healthy foods like hummus and bell peppers.

But that all changed when the pandemic struck. During the lockdowns, when he was stuck at home, his anxiety levels went up. He stopped exercising and started stress eating. Gone were the hummus and vegetables; instead, he snacked on cookies, sweets and Lay's potato chips. He ate more fried foods and ordered takeout from local restaurants.

"We were feeding the soul more than feeding the stomach," said Mr. Loy, 49, who lives in Baton Rouge and is the executive director of a tech incubator. "We were making sure to eat things that made us feel better - not just nutritional items."

Now a global survey conducted earlier this year confirms what Mr. Loy and many others experienced firsthand: The coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns led to dramatic changes in health behaviors, prompting people around the world to cut back on physical activity and eat more junk foods. It drove anxiety levels higher and disrupted sleep. And those who are obese, who already face increased health risks, may have fared the worst, the researchers found. While they tended to experience improvements in some aspects of their diets, such as cooking at home more and eating out less, they were also the most likely to report struggling with their weight and mental health.

The findings, published in the journal Obesity, offer a cautionary lesson for many of us as coronavirus cases continue to surge and renewed calls for lockdowns and other restrictions again take hold. With months to go before a vaccine becomes widely available and we can safely resume our pre-pandemic routines, now might be a good time to assess the healthy habits we may have let slip and to find new ways to be proactive about our physical and mental health.

The study, carried out by researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, surveyed almost 8,000 adults across the globe, including people from 50 different countries and every state in America. The researchers found that the decline in healthy behaviors during the pandemic and widespread lockdowns was fairly common regardless of geography.
"Individuals with obesity were impacted the most - and that's what we were afraid of," said Emily Flanagan, an author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. "They not only started off with higher anxiety levels before the pandemic, but they also had the largest increase in anxiety levels throughout the pandemic."

The findings shed light on exactly how people altered their routines and behaviors in response to the lockdowns that were implemented in countries around the world this year to slow the spread of the virus. The pandemic disrupted everyday life, isolated people from friends and family, and spawned an economic crisis, with tens of millions of people losing jobs or finding their incomes sharply reduced.

Dr. Flanagan and her colleagues assumed many people were experiencing enormous levels of stress. But they were not sure how the pandemic and stay-at-home orders were impacting how people slept, how much they exercised and what they ate. So they designed an extensive survey and recruited people on social media to answer questions about how their mental and physical health had been affected.

"This was such a drastic and abrupt change to everyone's daily life that we needed to see what was going on," said Dr. Flanagan. "We wanted to put some data to the anecdotal behaviors we were seeing."

From April through early May, about 7,750 people, most of them from the United States but also from countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain, completed the survey. The average age of the respondents was 51, and a majority were women. Based on their body mass indexes, about a third of the people were overweight, a third were obese, and a third were considered normal weight.

The researchers found that most people became more sedentary, which they said was probably related to less daily commuting and more time spent indoors. But even when people did engage in structured exercise, it tended to be at lower intensity levels compared to before the pandemic. Many people also said they had given in to their food cravings: Consumption of sugar sweetened beverages and other sugary snack foods, for example, went up.

That might explain another finding: About 27 percent of people said they had gained weight after the initial lockdowns went into effect. The figure was even higher among people classified as obese: About 33 percent said that they had gained weight, compared to 24.7 percent of people considered normal weight. People who gained weight also had the largest declines in physical activity.

There were some bright spots in the findings. About 17 percent of the study population actually lost weight during the pandemic; perhaps not surprisingly, they tended to be people who increased their physical activity levels and improved their diets. And despite snacking on more junk foods, many people showed an increase in their "healthy eating scores," a measure of their overall diet quality, which includes things like eating more fruits and fewer fried foods. The researchers said that the overall improvements in diet appeared to be driven by the fact that the lockdowns prompted people to cook, bake and prepare more food at home. Other recent surveys have also shown a sharp rise in home cooking and baking this year, with many people saying they are discovering new ingredients and looking for ways to make healthier foods.

But social isolation can take a toll on mental wellness, and that was evident in the findings. On average, people reported significantly higher anxiety levels. About 20 percent said that their symptoms, such as experiencing dread and not being able to control or stop their worrying, were severe enough to interfere with their daily activities. About 44 percent of people said that their sleep had also worsened during the pandemic. People on average reported going to bed about an hour later than usual and waking up roughly an hour later than usual. Only 10 percent of people said that their sleep had improved since the pandemic began.

The greatest spikes in anxiety occurred among people who are obese. It was unclear why exactly, but one reason may have been concerns about the virus. The survey took place at a time when studies were first beginning to show that excess weight puts people at a much higher risk of being hospitalized with Covid-19. "We don't have data to back this up, but our hypothesis is there was a lot more anxiety about their own health," Dr. Flanagan said. "A heightened fear of the virus would most certainly increase their anxiety levels."

Dr. Flanagan said it was perhaps not surprising that people tended to engage in less healthful habits during the pandemic, as so many aspects of health are intertwined. Stress can lead to poor sleep, which can cause people to exercise less, consume more junk foods, and then gain weight, and so on. But she said she hoped that the findings might inspire people to take steps to be more proactive about their health, such as seeking out mental health specialists, prioritizing sleep and finding ways to exercise at home and cook more, in the event of future lockdowns.

"Being aware of how our health behaviors change during these stay-at-home orders could help us combat that if another lockdown is enforced," she said. "Being aware is really the No. 1 thing here."

sauce https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/...38e515a775a5a2886440eb9cf77#commentsContainer

I've personally found the lockdown and the need to engage in social distancing to help me focus on my health and fitness goals--and therefore less social stress.

As an essential professional, I continued to work (stressful environment) and commute. To balance this, my down time was spent on ways to improve mentally and physically. Not only am I riding and running more but I became more connected to nature, developed and sharpened my creative brain and ate clean (vegan... 6 years  )

Life is 10% what happens to you,
90% how you react to it.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Sharing this interesting article of a recent study on bone heath. Whether your goal is to lose weight, increase energy get fitter.... your diet and choices will impact your body and the outcome may or may not be the best in the long run. Fitness starts with diet , choose wisely

*Could a Keto Diet Be Bad for Athletes' Bones?*

A low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet could alter bone health in athletes, according to a thought-provoking new study of elite race walkers and their skeletons. The study, one of the first to track athletes during several weeks of intense training, finds that those following a ketogenic diet developed early signs indicative of bone loss.

The study adds to the considerable existing evidence that how we eat can affect how exercise affects us. It also raises concerns about possible, long-term health impacts from popular diet plans, including a high-fat, ketogenic diet.

Anyone interested in health, wellness, weight loss, exercise, food or best seller lists is familiar, by now, with ketogenic diets. Known more familiarly as keto diets, they are extremely low-carbohydrate, high-fat regimens, with as much as 90 percent of daily calories coming from fats.

Ketogenic diets, if followed scrupulously, reshape how our bodies fuel themselves. Because carbohydrates can be rapidly metabolized, our bodies typically turn to them first for energy, whether the carbohydrates come from our diets or stored sources in our muscles and livers.

But if people follow a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet, they soon burn through their stored carbohydrates and their bodies start relying on fat for energy. The fat must be broken down first, however, and, as part of that process, the liver creates substances known as ketone bodies that can be converted into energy.

Ketogenic diets are popular now - as they have been off and on in the past - among people hoping to lose weight, control blood sugar or otherwise regulate their health. Some athletes also follow the diet, hoping that it will improve performance, since fat, as fuel, is ample, slow-burning and long-lasting.

Some studies have suggested, though, that low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets might change bone metabolism. Children with epilepsy who use the keto diet to control their condition tend to have low bone density, for instance. And in athletes, going for a day or two without carbohydrates can change some blood markers related to bone health.

But no experiments had tracked bone metabolism in competitive athletes on ketogenic diets for longer periods of time. So, for the new study, which was published in January in Frontiers in Endocrinology, researchers in Australia decided to ask a group of world-class race walkers if they could fiddle with their food for a few weeks.

Thirty of the athletes, all of whom were about to embark on intense training for upcoming world championships and other competitions, agreed. The athletes then sorted themselves into two groups, based on whether they were willing to try a keto diet or not.

About half said that they were and subsequently began a strict low-carbohydrate, high-fat routine. The other men and women continued with a high-carbohydrate diet. Everyone's meals were matched in terms of how many calories, relative to body weight, they ate.

Before the diets kicked off, though, the researchers drew blood from the athletes before and after a workout, to establish their baseline bone health and other markers of their health and fitness. (The experiment was designed to look at many elements of the ketogenic diet in sports.)

Bone is an active tissue, constantly breaking down slightly and remodeling itself in response to the demands we place on it. Knowing this, the researchers checked for the levels of specific substances in the athletes' blood known to be associated with bone breakdown, rebuilding and overall metabolism.

Then the athletes embarked on three and a half weeks of intense training, while eating mostly fat or mostly carbs. Afterward, the researchers again drew their blood and rechecked the markers of bone health.

They found differences. The markers of bone breakdown were higher now among the athletes on the keto diet than at the start of the study, while those indicating bone formation and overall metabolism were lower. These same markers were generally unchanged in the high-carb athletes. The athletes on the ketogenic diet, in other words, showed signs of impaired bone health.

How their bones might have been affected by their eating is still unclear, says Louise Burke, the head of sports nutrition at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra and one of the lead authors of the new study.

"We believe that the keto diet may affect bone metabolism due to the downstream effects of low-carbohydrate availability on certain hormones, along with other factors," she says. But more study, of course, is needed.

The researchers also did not look directly at changes, if any, in the athletes' bone density or follow them beyond three and a half weeks. Whether any worrisome effects on bone health would linger, intensify or disappear after a longer period of high-fat eating remains unknown, as does the question of whether those of us who are not world-class race walkers would be similarly affected, if we work out while eschewing carbs.

But the study does remind us that the interplay of nutrition and exercise is intricate and we do not yet fully understand its implications for our health.

Dr. Burke and her colleagues plan to study the longer-term effects of ketogenic diets and exercise in future studies.

sauce Could a Keto Diet Be Bad for Athletes' Bones?


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*The Secret to Longevity? 4-Minute Bursts of Intense Exercise May Help








*

If you increase your heart rate, will your life span follow?

That possibility is at the heart of an ambitious new study of exercise and mortality. The study, one of the largest and longest-term experimental examinations to date of exercise and mortality, shows that older men and women who exercise in almost any fashion are relatively unlikely to die prematurely. But if some of that exercise is intense, the study also finds, the risk of early mortality declines even more, and the quality of people's lives climbs.

Scientists have known for some time, of course, that active people tend also to be long-lived people. According to multiple past studies, regular exercise is strongly associated with greater longevity, even if the exercise amounts to only a few minutes a week.

But almost all of these studies have been observational, meaning they looked at people's lives at a moment in time, determined how much they moved at that point, and later checked to see whether and when they passed away. Such studies can pinpoint associations between exercise and life spans, but they cannot prove that moving actually causes people to live longer, only that activity and longevity are linked.

To find out if exercise directly affects life spans, researchers would have to enroll volunteers in long-term, randomized controlled trials, with some people exercising, while others work out differently or not at all. The researchers then would have to follow all of these people for years, until a sufficiently large number died to allow for statistical comparisons of the groups.

Such studies, however, are dauntingly complicated and expensive, one reason they are rarely done. They may also be limited, since over the course of a typical experiment, few adults may die. This is providential for those who enroll in the study but problematic for the scientists hoping to study mortality; with scant deaths, they cannot tell if exercise is having a meaningful impact on life spans.

Those obstacles did not deter a group of exercise scientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, however. With colleagues from other institutions, they had been studying the impacts of various types of exercise on heart disease and fitness and felt the obvious next step was to look at longevity. So, almost 10 years ago, they began planning the study that would be published in October in The BMJ.

Their first step was to invite every septuagenarian in Trondheim to participate. Mortality studies involving older people are the most likely to return useful data, the scientists reasoned, since, realistically, there will be more deaths among the elderly than the young, making it possible to compare differences in longevity between study groups.

More than 1,500 of the Norwegian men and women accepted. These volunteers were, in general, healthier than most 70-year-olds. Some had heart disease, cancer or other conditions, but most regularly walked or otherwise remained active. Few were obese. All agreed to start and continue to exercise more regularly during the upcoming five years.

The scientists tested everyone's current aerobic fitness as well as their subjective feelings about the quality of their lives and then randomly assigned them to one of three groups. The first, as a control, agreed to follow standard activity guidelines and walk or otherwise remain in motion for half an hour most days. (The scientists did not feel they could ethically ask their control group to be sedentary for five years.)

Another group began exercising moderately for longer sessions of 50 minutes twice a week. And the third group started a program of twice-weekly high-intensity interval training, or H.I.I.T., during which they cycled or jogged at a strenuous pace for four minutes, followed by four minutes of rest, with that sequence repeated four times.

Almost everyone kept up their assigned exercise routines for five years, an eternity in science, returning periodically to the lab for check-ins, tests and supervised group workouts. During that time, the scientists noted that quite a few of the participants in the control had dabbled with interval-training classes at local gyms, on their own initiative and apparently for fun. The other groups did not alter their routines.

After five years, the researchers checked death registries and found that about 4.6 percent of all of the original volunteers had passed away during the study, a lower number than in the wider Norwegian population of 70-year-olds, indicating these active older people were, on the whole, living longer than others of their age.

But they also found interesting, if slight, distinctions between the groups. The men and women in the high-intensity-intervals group were about 2 percent less likely to have died than those in the control group, and 3 percent less likely to die than anyone in the longer, moderate-exercise group. People in the moderate group were, in fact, more likely to have passed away than people in the control group.

The men and women in the interval group also were more fit now and reported greater gains in their quality of life than the other volunteers.

In essence, says Dorthe Stensvold, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who led the new study, intense training - which was part of the routines of both the interval and control groups - provided slightly better protection against premature death than moderate workouts alone.

Of course, exercise was not a panacea, she adds. Some people still sickened and died, whatever their workout program. (No one died while exercising.) This study also focused on Norwegians, who tend to be preternaturally healthy, and most of us, perhaps regrettably, are not Norwegians. We also may not yet be in our 70s.

But Dr. Stensvold believes the study's message can be broadly applicable to almost all of us. "We should try to include some exercise with high intensity," she says. "Intervals are safe and feasible for most people. And adding life to years, not only years to life, is an important aspect of healthy aging, and the higher fitness and health-related quality of life from H.I.I.T. in this study is an important finding."










sauce The Secret to Longevity? 4-Minute Bursts of Intense Exercise May Help


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Can 4 Seconds of Exercise Make a Difference?*

In what is probably the definitive word on how little exercise we can get away with, a new study finds that a mere four seconds of intense intervals, repeated until they amount to about a minute of total exertion, lead to rapid and meaningful improvements in strength, fitness and general physical performance among middle-aged and older adults.

The study relied on a type of specialized stationary bicycle that is not widely available, but, even so, the results suggest that strenuous but super-abbreviated workouts can produce outsize benefits for our health and well-being, a timely message as we plan our New Year's exercise resolutions.

I have often written about the potential benefits of brief, high-intensity interval training, or H.I.I.T., an approach to exercise that consists of quick spurts of draining physical effort, followed by rest, with the sequence repeated multiple times. In studies, short H.I.I.T. workouts typically produce health gains that are equal to or more pronounced than much longer, gentler workouts.

But the ideal length of the intervals in these workouts has been unsettled. Researchers studying H.I.I.T. agree that the optimal interval span should stress our muscles and other bodily systems enough to jump-start potent physiological changes but not so much that we groan, give up and decline to try that workout ever again. In practice, those dueling goals have led H.I.I.T. scientists to study intervals ranging from a protracted four minutes to a quickie 20 seconds.

But Ed Coyle, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas in Austin, and his graduate assistant Jakob Allen suspected that even 20-second spurts, performed intensely, might exceed some exercisers' tolerance. So, he decided to start looking for the shortest possible interval that was still effective.

And in the new study, which was published this week in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, he and his colleagues settled on a blink-swift four seconds.

They arrived at that number by first working with competitive athletes at the university's human performance lab. Muscular and fit, the athletes generated enormous speed and power on specialized stationary bicycles that feature a heavy flywheel and no resistance. During fitness testing on these bikes, most of the athletes would reach their maximum power output and all-out aerobic effort after about two seconds of hard pedaling. (Dr. Coyle has equity in the company that manufactures the bicycles, but says this monetary involvement does not affect research results from his lab.)

The rest of us, Dr. Coyle and his colleagues reasoned, probably would require twice as long - or about four seconds. By that point, the researchers thought, most people should have massively stimulated their muscles and aerobic systems but not yet exhausted them. If the riders then rested for a minute or so before sprinting again, they should be able to repeat the all-out efforts again and again.

To test that idea, the researchers turned initially to eight healthy college students, asking them to sprint on the bikes for four seconds periodically throughout the day, to see if these short, strenuous workouts would counteract some of the undesirable metabolic effects of sitting all day and eating poorly. They did, as I wrote about in April.

But that study focused on robust, young adults and repeated, if diminutive, workouts sprinkled throughout the day. The scientists now wondered if a more practical, single session of four-second sprints would be enough exercise to improve health and fitness in out-of-shape adults well past their college years.

So, they recruited 39 of them, men and women aged 50 to 68 who were sedentary but had no other major health concerns. They tested the volunteers' current aerobic fitness, muscular power and mass, arterial flexibility, and ability to perform what are called "activities of daily living," such as getting up out of a chair.

The volunteers began visiting the performance lab three times a week. There, they completed a brief workout of repeated four-second intervals on the lab's specialized bikes. At first, they sprinted for four seconds, with Dr. Allen calling out a second-by-second countdown, followed by 56 seconds of rest, repeating that sequence 15 times, for a total of 60 seconds of intervals.

Over two months, though, the riders' rest periods declined to 26 seconds and they increased their total number of sprints to 30 per session.

At the end of eight weeks, the scientists retested everyone and found substantial differences. On average, riders had increased their fitness by about 10 percent, gained considerable muscle mass and strength in their legs, reduced the stiffness of their arteries and outperformed their previous selves in activities of daily living, all from about three to six minutes a week of actual exercise.

A majority of the volunteers also told the researchers during follow-up interviews that they enjoyed the workouts and would continue them, if possible, Dr. Coyle said.

The upshot, he said, is that these intervals, despite being as brief as possible, effectively boosted health and fitness in ordinary adults.

*Of course, most of us do not have access to the kind of specialized stationary bicycles used in this study. Nor do we have a researcher helpfully hollering out four-second countdowns for us. To reach similar, all-out efforts in more typical workouts, Dr. Coyle said, we might need to sprint up a hill or staircase as hard as possible or run and jump in place vigorously or furiously pedal our spin bike.*

In these situations, the time needed to achieve all-out effort is likely to be more than four seconds, he said. But even if the time commitment is doubled, most of us probably could resolve to exercise in 2021 often and intensely for eight seconds at a time.









Can 4 Seconds of Exercise Make a Difference? (Published 2020)


Four seconds of intense intervals, repeated until they amount to a minute of total exertion, led to rapid improvements in strength and fitness in middle-aged and older adults.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Only men in the groups again! Quel surprise! First any sustained movement that raises the HR is better than none. Second any sustained movement that raises the HR and burns calories is better. Third calories in and energy out. Fourth You still can't exercise away a bad diet 

*The Benefits of Moderate Exercise*
The best exercise for many of us may not be the briefest, according to a provocative new study comparing the head-to-head health benefits of short, intense, interval training with those of longer, gentler workouts. The study, published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, finds that each approach to exercise has advantages, but the impacts on blood pressure, body fat and other aspects of metabolism may be greater after standard, half-hour, moderate workouts than eyeblink-quick interval training.

As those of us who follow fitness know, high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, is alluring, trendy and a frequent topic of this column, as well as of exercise science. A mix of extremely short spurts of intense exercise followed by a minute or two of rest, HIIT is quick and potent, with studies showing that a few minutes - or even seconds - of interval training can improve people's health and longevity over time.

But many questions remain unanswered about the relative merits of quick intervals versus those of more-traditional sustained aerobic workouts, such as brisk walking, jogging or bike riding, especially if someone engages only in one type of exercise and not the other.

So, recently, exercise scientists at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, began to consider looking into how people's bodies change if they train exclusively with intervals or standard, moderate workouts, while following current exercise guidelines.

Interestingly, many past studies comparing brief HIIT routines and longer, moderate workouts did not hew to formal exercise recommendations, because scientists wished to match the workouts' frequency or other measures. So, volunteers in these studies typically worked out three times a week, whether completing a few minutes of HIIT or half an hour of brisk walking.

But the exercise guidelines for each type of activity differ. Medical and sports groups suggest we interval train no more than three times a week, to avoid over-straining muscles and cardiovascular systems, meaning if we exercise only with HIIT, we are inactive four days a week or so. Comparable guidelines for moderate exercise suggest getting out and moving at least five times a week and for at least 30 minutes each time.

So, the Guelph scientists thought, what happens if people HIIT three days a week and do not otherwise exercise on the other four, or train moderately five times a week?

To find out, they first recruited 23 sedentary, overweight, adult men. (They did not include women, because of concerns about menstrual cycles affecting metabolic results, but hope to involve women in any larger, future experiments.) They invited these men to the lab, measured their fitness, body compositions and blood pressures, and asked them to down shakes laden with big glops of fat to see how their metabolisms responded to the nutrient. They also fitted them with blood-sugar monitors to wear at home for a week to gauge their everyday blood-sugar control, a measure of metabolic health.

Then they asked half of the men to start interval training three times a week on stationary bicycles at the lab, riding as hard as possible for 30 seconds, resting for two minutes, and repeating that sequence four to six times.

The other men began a typical moderate-exercise program, riding bikes at the lab five times a week at a pace they could comfortably sustain for 30 to 40 minutes.

Over the course of the next six weeks, the HIIT group pedaled intensely for a grand total of less than an hour, while the moderate-intensity group worked out for at least 2.5 hours each week for the same period.

At the end of the six weeks, both groups returned to the lab for re-testing, after which the scientists combed through their results for disparities. They found plenty.

The men almost all were fitter, and to about the same extent, however they had exercised. But only those in the moderate-exercise group had shed much body fat, improved their blood pressures or become better able to metabolize the extra fat from the unctuous shake.

Perhaps most interesting, everyone's blood-sugar control at home was best only on the days when they exercised, meaning three times a week for the HIIT riders and five for the moderate group. On the remaining days, blood sugar levels tended to rise.

Taken as a whole, the results indicate that intervals and traditional exercise alter our bodies in divergent ways, and we may want to consider what we hope to achieve with exercise when choosing how best to exercise, says Jamie Burr, a professor at the University of Guelph, who conducted the new study with his graduate student Heather Petrick and other colleagues.

"All exercise is good," Dr. Burr says. But "there are nuances." Frequent, almost-daily moderate exercise may be preferable for improving blood pressure and ongoing blood-sugar control, compared to infrequent intervals, he says, while a little HIIT is likely to get you in shape as effectively as hours and hours of easier cycling or similar exertion.

Of course, this study was small-scale and short-term and involved only overweight, out-of-shape men, so we cannot be sure the findings apply to the rest of us. But the primary lesson seems widely applicable. "Move often," Dr. Burr says, meaning if you HIIT today, walk tomorrow, and repeat.









The Benefits of Moderate Exercise (Published 2021)


High-intensity workouts get a lot of attention and can be great for health. But moderate physical activity may have metabolic advantages.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

In general, greater fitness seems to aid immunity to most colds and flus. For example, in August, two studies suggested that athletes may have a greater immune response to flu shots than people who don't work out. I gotten a seasonal flu shot every year... for decades and I have never had the flu. I have had sinus infections or head colds but never influenza. On Dec 23 and Jan 13 I got the first and second doses of the Covid vaccine and I have been ok. No side effects except for a sore spot on my arm at the injection site. I hope exercise also helps with the response to the Covid vaccines.

*Exercise May Boost Your Vaccine Response*

If you are an athlete, you may gain greater immunity from a flu shot than people who are less active, according to two complementary and timely new studies of exercise and vaccinations. The two studies, which involved the same group of elite runners, swimmers, wrestlers, cyclists and other athletes, suggest that intense training amplifies our vaccine response, a finding with particular relevance now, as the flu season looms and scientists work to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.

Having an immune system primed to clobber infections and respond robustly to vaccinations is obviously desirable now, during the ongoing pandemic. And in general, exercise aids immunity, most science shows. People who work out often and moderately tend to catch fewer colds and other viruses than sedentary people. More immediately, if you exercise your arm in the hours before a flu shot, you likely will develop a stronger antibody response than if you rest that arm, a few small studies indicate.

But there have also been suggestions that under certain circumstances, exercise may dampen the immune response. Some epidemiological research and personal stories from athletes hint that intense, exhausting exercise might be detrimental to immunity in the short term. Marathon racers, for example, report catching colds at disproportionately high rates soon after a race, although some physiologists suspect these post-race respiratory problems are inflammatory, not infectious.

The upshot, though, is that many questions have remained unanswered about whether and how strenuous workouts affect immunity and our bodies' ability to respond favorably to a vaccination, such as the seasonal flu shot.

So, for the new studies, scientists from Saarland University in Germany and other institutions decided to convince a large group of competitive athletes to get vaccinated, an effort more difficult than most of us might expect. In surveys, elite athletes tend to report relatively low rates of vaccination for the flu and other conditions, since many worry the shot will cause side effects that affect their training.

But the researchers managed to recruit 45 fit, young, elite athletes, male and female. Their sports ranged from endurance events, like the marathon, to power sports, including wrestling and hammer throw, to team sports, such as basketball and badminton. All of the volunteers were in the middle of their competitive seasons during the studies.

For the first of the two experiments involving these athletes, which was published in January in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, the researchers hoped to establish whether being an athlete and having an athlete's outsized fitness would goose or impede the young people's immune reaction to a flu shot. So, the scientists also recruited an additional 25 young people who were healthy but not athletes to serve as a control group. They drew blood from everyone.

Afterward, all of the young people received a flu shot and kept notes about any side effects they felt, such as a sore arm. The groups returned to the lab for follow-up blood draws a week, two weeks and six months after the vaccination. Then the researchers checked their blood for anti-influenza immune cells and antibodies.

They found significantly more of those cells in the athletes' blood, especially in the week after the shot, when everyone's cellular reactions peaked. The athletes showed a "more pronounced immune response," with presumably better protection against flu infection than the other young people, says Martina Sester, an immunologist at Saarland University and study co-author.

The researchers speculate that the athletes' immune systems had been strengthened and fine-tuned by the daily physical demands and damages of training, allowing them to respond so effectively to the vaccine.

But those results, while notable, did not look at the acute effects of exercise and whether a single, intense workout might alter the body's reactions to a vaccine, for better or worse. So, for the second of the new studies, which was published in July in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the scientists returned to the same data, but focused now only on the immune reactions of the athletes.

They compared the numbers of immune cells and antibodies in those athletes who happened to have gotten their flu shot within two hours of their most recent training session against those of athletes whose shot had come a day after their last workout. If intense training blunted immune reactions, then the first group of athletes would be expected to show fewer new immune cells than those who had gotten their shot after a longer rest.

But the researchers found no differences. Whether the athletes' inoculations came almost immediately after training or a day later, their immune reactions were the same. A strenuous workout beforehand had not lowered - or boosted - the response.

Together, the two studies tell us that being in shape is likely to increase our protection from a vaccination, no matter how intensely or when we work out before the shot, Dr. Sester says.

Of course, these studies focused on elite, competitive athletes, which most of us are not. But Dr. Sester believes even more-casual recreational athletes are likely to mount better flu-vaccine responses than sedentary people. Likewise, she and her colleagues expect high fitness should improve immune responses to other vaccines, including, potentially, a Covid-19 shot.

"The basic principles of vaccine response are probably the same," she says. Future studies will have to confirm that possibility, though, if and when a vaccine becomes available.

sauce Exercise May Boost Your Vaccine Response


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Old, "joke." If you don't live right, you'll need an internist. If you do live right, you'll need an orthopedist. 

Mix it up. Different modes of exercise produce different results. Walking, biking, tennis or pickle ball, swimming. each one has its own benefits. It also gives you something different to look forward to.

*How Much Exercise Do You Need for Better Heart Health?*

If you want a healthy heart, the more you exercise, the better, according to an encouraging new study of the links between physical activity and cardiovascular disease. It finds that people who often exercise and stay active are much less likely to develop heart disease than people who rarely move, whether that exercise consists of a few minutes a day of jogging or multiple hours a week of walking.

The large-scale study, which relied on objective data about exercise from more than 90,000 adults, bolsters the growing evidence that almost any amount of physical activity seems to be good for cardiovascular health, with no apparent upper limit to the benefits.

For generations, of course, we have known that active people tend to have strong hearts. Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jeremy Morris, a British epidemiologist, famously found that British bus conductors, who spent their days strolling aisles and climbing steps on the double-decker vehicles, were about half as likely to have a heart attack as the buses' drivers, who sat all day.

Since then, countless epidemiological studies have uncovered similar links between physical activity and cardiovascular problems. In most, greater amounts of physical activity aligned closely with less risk of heart disease. In other words, people who moved a lot tended also to be people with sound hearts and arteries.

In some of those and other studies, though, there was a limit. As the amounts and intensities of people's exercise rose, the benefits for their hearts plateaued or even plummeted. In a few studies, prolonged intense workouts over the course of years seemed to contribute to an increased risk for heart problems, suggesting that too much exercise may damage the heart. But those studies generally were small and focused on specific groups of people, such as male masters athletes.

Even the larger-scale, epidemiological studies of exercise and heart health, though, often relied on people's memories and self-reports about their exercise habits, which are not always accurate.

So, some aspects of the relationship between physical activity and cardiovascular health have remained opaque. Can we work out too much for the sake of our hearts? Do men and women get the same cardiovascular-disease risk reductions from the same amounts of physical activity? How much do we actually move around during the day?

Those questions interested Dr. Terence Dwyer, an emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of Oxford in England, and his colleagues, who long had studied the interplay of lifestyle and disease risk. And they knew of a potential source of increased clarity about possible answers, in the U.K. Biobank.

The U.K. Biobank is an impressively large database of health and lifestyle information about more than 500,000 adult men and women in the United Kingdom. Beginning in 2006, these volunteers provided blood, urine and saliva samples for genetic and medical testing, answered lengthy questionnaires about their lives and completed full health and medical screenings. More than 100,000 of them also agreed to wear activity trackers for a week, to carefully measure how much they moved.

Dr. Dwyer and his colleagues now drew the records for more than 90,000 of the men and women who had worn the trackers, skipping anyone with a known history of heart disease when they joined the study. They divided them into four groups, depending on how many minutes, in total, they moved every week, and how much of this activity was moderate, such as walking, or relatively vigorous, like jogging, as verified by their trackers.

Finally, the researchers gathered data from hospitals and death records about who, among the 90,000 volunteers, developed heart disease in the years after joining the study, and began crosschecking their diagnoses against their activity habits.

To no one's surprise, being active was protective against heart disease. People in the least-active group, who rarely walked around or formally exercised, were more than twice as likely to have heart disease now as the most-active men and women. Just moving from the least-active group to the not-quite-as-inactive group dropped the risk of heart disease by almost 30 percent, even when the researchers controlled for body composition, smoking, socioeconomic status and other factors.

The researchers also found no upper limit to the benefits. The men and women who moved the most, walking as much as 1,100 minutes a week, or more than two hours a day (a total that included both their actual exercise and everyday activities like grocery shopping or doing housework), while also often working out intensely for 50 minutes or more a week, showed no increased risk for heart problems. Instead, this group enjoyed the greatest risk reductions, with both men and women showing about equal benefits.

The results "provide even stronger evidence than has been available previously" that "physical activity, including vigorous physical activity, is important for reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease," Dr. Dwyer says. The benefits were "about double what had been found with most self-report studies."

This study is associational, though, showing that active people happen also to be people with healthy hearts. It does not prove that walks and other activities directly strengthen people's hearts, only that the two are linked. Dr. Dwyer also points out that the number of people in the study who completed extremely high amounts of intense activity was small, so it remains conceivable that long-term, intense exercise might, at some point, stop being good for hearts. That possibility requires more scrutiny, he says.

But for most of us, he says, increasing our exercise "to much higher levels or more vigorous levels" should substantially reduce our chances, later, for heart disease









How Much Exercise Do You Need for Better Heart Health? (Published 2021)


The more you do, the better, but even mild exercise like walking produces benefits for cardiovascular health, a large new study found.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Some helpful information about winter exercise in cold temps. I usually wear a buff over my mouth when the temps go below -12c but somethings to consider.

*Why winter exercise can be especially hard on the lungs*
Canadian Olympic hopeful Katherine Stewart-Jones can't remember when she first started experiencing a cough she and other cross-country skiers call "race hack," but she said it was probably when she started competing in her early teen years.

"Sometimes, it goes like all the way into your back ... it's just this burning sensation," she said. "I'll lean over and just don't want to get up for a while because it hurts.

"Generally, I'll get a race hack pretty much every race I do, but for sure, if it's cold out, it's affected me a bit more."

The 25-year-old skier from Chelsea, Que., says she slows down on cold days when she's training but on race days, she pushes herself hard, sometimes so hard it can take weeks for the post-race coughing to subside.

"It would be interesting to do some more research on it ... Like, are we ruining our lungs for the rest of our lives?"

Michael Kennedy, an associate professor in kinesiology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, has been interested in the effects of cold weather on lungs for more than a decade.

His curiosity comes from working as a wax technician for Canadian elite cross-country skiers in the early- to mid-2000s while he was still getting his PhD. He travelled with teams for months and noticed how breathing issues would worsen as the ski season wore on.

"By the time you got to national or the spring season races in March, they were hacking all the time, so they basically had chronic cough," he said. "It's not healthy to have chronic cough."

The condition for some can lead to problems such as interrupted sleep or speech, and yet, a chronic cough is sometimes normalized in Canadian cross-country ski culture, he said.

Kennedy's last study on cold-weather exercise, published in 2019 in the journal _Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology,_ looked at the effects of running a five-kilometre race outdoors in -15 C weather on 16 physically fit men and women compared to a lab-controlled test. All the participants exercised regularly in the cold, whether it was running outside, cross-country skiing or ski mountaineering.

All participants reported having some type of respiratory symptom after running in the cold (most said they had a cough), and breathing tests revealed that nine out of the 16 showed symptoms of bronchoconstriction, or narrowing of the airways, consistent with levels that would be considered exercise-induced asthma.

*What happens to lungs in the cold*
A main issue with exercising in the cold, especially in temperatures -15 C and colder, is the lack of moisture in the air.

When dry air hits the lungs, especially when someone is breathing heavily, it can provoke the lungs to react as if they were under threat. The airways essentially constrict to protect themselves.

Kennedy has compared the effects of room temperature dry air against cold dry air, and his findings suggest that dry air that's also cold can provoke even more of a reaction, which may explain why chronic cough is so common among winter athletes, he said.

Some research from around the world is beginning to suggest people who spend years exercising in cold, dry conditions might become more sensitive to lung irritants over time, according to Kennedy, although he cautions more data in this area is still needed.

"Over time, if you repeat that irritation or that provocation, the lung just becomes less capable of healing itself," said Kennedy.

*Ways to protect your lungs*
Gordon Giesbrecht, the director of the Laboratory for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, agrees the cold, dry air can be an issue for anyone who engages in heavy cardiovascular activity on a regular basis in the winter. He likens the experience of lung constriction to trying to take a deep breath through an ever-narrowing straw.

"You can't freeze your lungs," he said. "You're not going to cause any damage although it is possible that continuous long-term training in the cold actually does make you more susceptible to this (bronchoconstriction)."

Both Giesbrecht and Kennedy say a simple face covering, such as a fabric mask, neck warmer or scarf, can go a long way to protecting the lungs from being irritated.

"If you cover your mouth, you're essentially warming the air and humidifying the air in a very productive manner," said Kennedy. "So essentially, your lung has to deal with less cold, dry air."

He also suggests that athletes take time to warm up before they exercise and take it easy on very cold days by slowing down their pace.

He hopes his work helps to change the culture of winter sport in Canada so that athletes take steps to prevent symptoms such as chronic cough, lung pain and wheezing.

"One of the things I want to do in the next 10 years is try to prevent some of this acute dysfunction from happening by improving the behaviours of younger skiers or winter sports athletes," Kennedy said.

Later this month, he plans to begin his next study - a survey of cross-country skiers and biathlon athletes asking them to elaborate on any respiratory symptoms they have so researchers have a better sense of the scope of the issue. He plans to expand the study to winter runners and other recreational athletes as well.

For now, Stewart-Jones brushes off the concerns about cold-weather exercise on her breathing. No serious athlete, including herself, would turn down a race because it's -18C, she said. As far as face coverings go, she wears them if her skin is at risk of freezing but she avoids them otherwise - neck warmers, like masks, can make it slightly more difficult to breathe.

"I guess it's so normal and common for people to have irritated lungs that it's not something I think about," she said between a couple, short bursts of coughing after competing in Oberstdorf, Germany, at the World Championships in late February.

"For sure it feels like it's probably not great for my lungs long term."



https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/winter-exercise-lungs-1.5936703?fbclid=IwAR1_Q43qzEZpw3HuJ3X5IfrYqtvEiPse-6mN1cNByYMN9YLLbaRf4kTa5Sw


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

This is a small study but ...

*How Much Weight Did We Gain During Lockdowns? 2 Pounds a Month, Study Hints*

Soon after the pandemic started over a year ago, Americans started joking about the dreaded "quarantine 15," worried they might gain weight while shut in homes with stockpiles of food, glued to computer screens and binge-watching Netflix.

The concern is real, but assessing the problem's scope has been a challenge. Surveys that simply ask people about their weight are notoriously unreliable, and many medical visits have been virtual.

Now a very small study using objective measures - weight measurements from Bluetooth-connected smart scales - suggests that adults under shelter-in-place orders gained more than half a pound every 10 days.

That translates to nearly two pounds a month, said Dr. Gregory M. Marcus, senior author of the research letter, published on Monday in the peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open. Americans who kept up their lockdown habits could easily have gained 20 pounds over the course of a year, he added.

"We know that weight gain is a public health problem in the U.S. already, so anything making it worse is definitely concerning, and shelter-in-place orders are so ubiquitous that the sheer number of people affected by this makes it extremely relevant," said Dr. Marcus, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.

While it is almost impossible to make generalizations based on the study - which included fewer than 300 people scattered across the United States - all participants were tracking their weight regularly.

Many of these people were losing weight before shelter-in-place orders were issued in their states, Dr. Marcus noted. "It's reasonable to assume these individuals are more engaged with their health in general, and more disciplined and on top of things," he said. "That suggests we could be underestimating - that this is the tip of the iceberg."

Excess weight has been linked to a greater risk of developing more severe Covid-19 disease, and the United States already has among the highest rates of overweight and obesity in the world. Some 42 percent of American adults over age 20 have obesity, as defined by body mass index, while another 32 percent of Americans are simply overweight.
The risk of severe illness has been documented among young adults who are overweight or have obesity, as well. Many states are prioritizing Americans with obesity for vaccination, along with those who have other chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension.

The new study analyzed data obtained from 269 participants who were involved in an ongoing cardiology study, the Health eHeart Study. They volunteered to report weight measurements from Bluetooth-connected smart scales and weighed themselves regularly; the researchers gathered 7,444 weight measurements over a four-month period, an average of 28 weight measurements from each participant.

The group was not nationally representative, by any means, so the results are not generalizable: About three-quarters were white, and just 3.5 percent identified as Black or African-American; about 3 percent identified as Asian-American. The average age was 51, and they were split almost evenly among men and women.

The participants were from 37 states and the District of Columbia. The researchers analyzed weight measurements taken between Feb. 1, 2020, and June 1, 2020, in order to look at weight changes both before and after shelter-in-place orders were issued for each state.

While the participants mostly had been losing pounds before the orders were issued, their weights rose steadily at a rate of about six-tenths of a pound every 10 days after the orders were issued, regardless of where they were in the country and regardless of chronic medical conditions.

The lockdowns have certainly had an effect on dietary patterns, on what people eat and how often they eat. But the restrictions also curtailed the humdrum physical activity that is part and parcel of daily living, the researchers said.
"If you think about people commuting, even running to the subway or bus stop, or stepping in at the post office to mail a letter, or stopping at the store - we burn a lot of calories in non-exercise activities of daily living," said Leanne Redman, a professor of clinical physiology at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, part of Louisiana State University.

Her research had found that people were eating a healthier diet during the initial days of the shutdown but were more sedentary.

An earlier study by U.C.S.F. researchers looked at daily step counts, as tracked by smartphones, among nearly half a million people in nearly 200 countries. The number of steps people took declined by 27 percent a month after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic.

The concern about exercise also extends to children, who are known to pack on unhealthy pounds during the summer recess months when they are not in school. The risk is even greater for Hispanic and Black children than for white children, said Andrew G. Rundle, an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, author of a recent paper that expressed concern that school closings would exacerbate existing racial health disparities.

"We argued that being out of school, which we thought would go on for six months and has gone on longer, was going to be like the summer recess but even worse, because everyone would be loading up on shelf-stable calorie-laden food, and staying indoors and not going out," he said. "Everything that makes the summer dangerous for kids would be magnified by the lockdown."









How Much Weight Did We Gain During Lockdowns? 2 Pounds a Month, Study Hints (Published 2021)


Many Americans know they’ve put on weight during the pandemic, but it’s been difficult for experts to detail the scope of the problem.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Can Wearing a Mask Reduce My Allergy Symptoms?*

As we head into our second pandemic spring, many of us may be itching to give up our masks. But for the 19.2 million American adults suffering from seasonal allergies, there's another reason to keep wearing your mask.
While cloth and medical masks do a good job of protecting us from viral particles, studies show masks also can be effective at filtering common allergens, which typically float around in much larger sizes, making them easier to block. Pine tree pollen, for example, is about 800 times larger than the coronavirus, said Dr. David Lang, an allergist at Cleveland Clinic. Even before the pandemic, he advised patients with severe allergies to wear a mask outside, especially for prolonged activities like gardening or yardwork.

Using masks to alleviate allergy symptoms can require a bit of "trial and error," said Dr. Purvi Parikh, an allergist and immunologist at N.Y.U. Langone Health. But over all, "if there's less pollen going into your nose and mouth, you're less likely to have an allergy attack," she said.

Israeli researchers recently studied how much difference wearing a mask could make for allergy sufferers with mild, moderate and severe symptoms. Using data collected from 215 nurses who used surgical masks or N95 masks during a two-week period, they found that among the 44 nurses with severe allergy symptoms, nearly 40 percent experienced less sneezing, runny nose and stuffy nose when they wore either a surgical or N95 mask. Among the 91 nurses with moderate symptoms, 30 percent improved when they wore a surgical mask; that rose to 40 percent when they wore an N95. Among the 80 nurses who started the study with mild symptoms, 43 nurses, or about 54 percent, felt their symptoms improved while wearing a surgical or N95 mask, said Dr. Amiel Dror, a physician-scientist at Galilee Medical Center and Bar-Ilan University Azrieli Faculty of Medicine and the lead author on the study.

Mask use was also more effective for the nurses with seasonal allergies than those with year-round symptoms. Wearing a mask did not solve the problem of itchy eyes, according to the September report, published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.

Although the findings suggest that wearing a mask can reduce allergy symptoms for some people, the researchers noted that more study is needed. It could be that the nurses experienced fewer symptoms because, when they weren't working, they were staying home and avoiding crowds during lockdowns, and thus had less exposure to allergens in the environment. But the fact that mask wearing, which covers the nose and mouth, was associated with improvements in nasal symptoms, but not eye irritation, suggests that masking probably did help reduce many allergy symptoms.

In addition to filtering out allergens, wearing a mask also makes the air in our nasal cavities warmer and more humid, said Dr. Dror. "We know that dry air and cold air sometimes has the ability to elicit a reaction in the nose," he said. "This is an extra benefit of wearing a mask. With all the bad, you can find some good."
Protection varies mask to mask, depending on the fit and, for cloth masks, the weave of the fabric. And unless you wear a mask at all times, you may still be affected by indoor allergens such as dust mites or pollen carried through open windows on spring breezes.

"It can help, but it's not necessarily going to take away all your symptoms," said Dr. Sandra Lin, a professor of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "Pretty much everyone's wearing masks most of the time now, and people are still getting allergy symptoms."

Here are some more tips to reduce your symptoms during allergy season.

*Protect your eyes. *Dr. Lang recommends people who suffer from allergies wear glasses or sunglasses when they're outside, which helps block allergens like tree pollen from making direct contact with eyes.
*Wash and change your mask frequently. *"The last thing you want is allergen getting trapped in it," Dr. Parikh said. She recommends patients change their clothes when they get home and shower before sleep, to ensure that pollen doesn't stick to their skin, and wash reusable masks frequently. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends washing a cloth mask after each use.
*Find a mask that doesn't irritate your skin. *Choosing the right mask for an allergy-prone wearer can also be important. People with sensitive skin may react to dyes in some fabric masks and should use perfume-free detergents. Or choose a surgical or medical grade mask, which are less likely to irritate skin. "My allergy sufferers have very sensitive skin because the same critters that make them sneeze or cough also can irritate their skin," Dr. Parikh said.
*Talk to a doctor if your allergy symptoms are severe. *"If people are continuing to have symptoms that interfere with normal activity - if they're missing work, missing school, their sleep is disrupted at night - see a physician," Dr. Lang said. "There are other ways we can help. You shouldn't be suffering needlessly."









Can Wearing a Mask Reduce My Allergy Symptoms? (Published 2021)


Research shows that wearing masks outdoors can protect against more than Covid-19 for people who suffer from seasonal allergies.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*What Bears Can Teach Us About Our Exercise Habits*
Scientists have found that grizzlies, like people, seem to choose the path of least resistance.









(_Not a Grizzly but a young brown bear. I snapped this photo at Silverstar Bike park British Columbia 2009._ )

Grizzly bears move across landscapes in much the same way as most people do, favoring flat paths over slopes and gentle speeds over sprints, according to a remarkable new study of grizzlies and how their outdoor lives compare to ours.

The study, which involved wild and captive bears, a specialized treadmill, apple slices and GPS trackers, expands our understanding of how a natural drive to save energy shapes animals' behavior, including ours, and could have implications for health and weight management. The findings also help explain why, in the great outdoors, the paths of bears and people so often intersect, providing useful reminders about wilderness planning and everyone's safety.
Biologists and other scientists have become increasingly interested in recent years in how we and other creatures make our way through our surroundings. And while some preliminary answers have begun to emerge about why we choose to move and navigate as we do, the findings are not, on the whole, especially flattering.

Accumulating research suggests that we humans, as a species, are apt to be physically lazy, with a hard-wired inclination to avoid activity. In a telling 2018 neurological study, for example, brain scans indicated that volunteers were far more attracted by images of people in chairs and hammocks than of people in motion.

This apparently inborn preference for not moving made sense for us once, long ago, when hunting and gathering demanded hard effort and plentiful calories and resting under a tree did not. Being inactive is more problematic now, with food everywhere.

But the extent to which we share this penchant for physical ease with other species and whether these predilections affect how we and they traverse the world has remained unclear.

So, cue grizzlies, particularly those living at the Washington State University Bear Center, the nation's primary grizzly bear conservation and research center. University biologists affiliated with the center study how the animals live, eat and interact with humans.

Now, for the new study, which was published recently in the Journal of Experimental Biology, they decided to explore precisely how much energy grizzlies expend when they move in different ways and how those and comparable numbers might affect real-life behavior, not only of bears but of us and other animals.

To start, they constructed a sturdy enclosure around a treadmill originally built for horses. With modifications, it could tip up or down by as much as 20 percent, while handling the size and weight of a grizzly. At the front of the enclosure, the scientists added a feeding box with a built-in rubber glove.

Then they taught the center's nine male and female grizzlies - most of them resident at the center since birth and sporting names like John, Peeka and Frank - to clamber onto the treadmill and walk, while sedately accepting slices of hot dogs and apples as a reward.

"Grizzlies are very food driven," says Anthony Carnahan, a doctoral candidate at Washington State University who led the new study.

By measuring changes in the composition of the air in the enclosure, the researchers could track each bear's energy expenditure at varying speeds as they walked uphill and down. (The bears never ran on the treadmills, because of concerns for their safety.) Using this data, the researchers determined that the most efficient pace for the bears, physiologically - the one at which they used the least oxygen - was about 2.6 miles per hour.

Finally, the scientists gathered available information about the movements of wild bears, using GPS statistics from grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park, along with mapping data and comparable numbers from past studies of people and other animals wandering through natural landscapes.

Comparing the data, the scientists found that wild grizzlies, like us, seem born to laze. The researchers had expected the wild bears to move at their most efficient speed whenever possible, Mr. Carnahan says. But in reality, their average pace traveling through Yellowstone was a pokey and physiologically inefficient 1.4 miles per hour.

They also almost invariably chose the least-steep route to get anywhere, even when it required extra time. "They did a lot of side-hilling," Mr. Carnahan says.

Interestingly, these speeds and routes resembled those of people when picking routes through wildlands, the researchers noted.

Taken as a whole, the findings suggest that the innate urge to avoid exertion plays a greater role in how all creatures, great and small, typically behave and navigate than we might imagine.

The study does not rule out, however, that grizzlies, like other bears, can move with sudden, staggering speed and ferocity, when they decide to, Mr. Carnahan points out. "I've seen a bear run across a mountain meadow in six or seven minutes, when it took me all afternoon," he says.

The results likewise do not tell us that we humans are fated always to hike slowly, sticking to the flats, but only that it may require mental as well as physical effort and goal setting to avoid defaulting to the easiest routes.

Finally, the study is a bracing reminder that we share the outdoors with large apex predators who may naturally pick the same pathways as us. You can find useful information about remaining safe in grizzly country at the website of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee.









What Bears Can Teach Us About Our Exercise Habits (Published 2021)


Scientists have found that grizzlies, like people, seem to choose the path of least resistance.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Need a reason to exercise today? Physical activity can promote a sense of purpose in life, and our sense of purpose may affect how much we exercise, according to an interesting new study

*The bidirectional relationship between sense of purpose in life and physical activity: a longitudinal study*

*Abstract*
People with a greater sense of purpose in life may be more likely to engage in physical activity. At the same time, physical activity can contribute to a sense of purpose in life. The present research tests these hypotheses using a cross-lagged panel model in a nationally representative, longitudinal panel of American adults (_N_ = 14,159, _Mage_ = 68). An increase in sense of purpose in life was associated with higher physical activity four years later, above and beyond past activity levels. Physical activity was positively associated with future levels of sense of purpose in life, controlling for prior levels of purpose in life. Results held in a second national panel from the US with a nine-year follow-up (_N_ = 4,041, _Mage_ = 56). The findings demonstrate a bidirectional relationship between sense of purpose in life and physical activity in large samples of middle-aged and older adults tracked over time.









The bidirectional relationship between sense of purpose in life and physical activity: a longitudinal study - Journal of Behavioral Medicine


People with a greater sense of purpose in life may be more likely to engage in physical activity. At the same time, physical activity can contribute to a sense of purpose in life. The present research tests these hypotheses using a cross-lagged panel model in a nationally representative...




link.springer.com


----------



## smilinsteve (Jul 21, 2009)

Bro I give you a thousand virtual internet hugs for posting this type of wonderful information. Please don't stop!


----------



## smilinsteve (Jul 21, 2009)

cyclelicious said:


> *Can Wearing a Mask Reduce My Allergy Symptoms?*
> 
> As we head into our second pandemic spring, many of us may be itching to give up our masks. But for the 19.2 million American adults suffering from seasonal allergies, there's another reason to keep wearing your mask.
> While cloth and medical masks do a good job of protecting us from viral particles, studies show masks also can be effective at filtering common allergens, which typically float around in much larger sizes, making them easier to block. Pine tree pollen, for example, is about 800 times larger than the coronavirus, said Dr. David Lang, an allergist at Cleveland Clinic. Even before the pandemic, he advised patients with severe allergies to wear a mask outside, especially for prolonged activities like gardening or yardwork.
> ...


We live on a ranch where I got to the point that I convinced my wife I could not feed the horses as the hay would give me such a severe allergic reaction I would be stuffed up and miserable the rest of the day. Then I found that my covid mask allowed me to feed with hardly a side effect. Good and bad news as I am now responsible for more work. .


----------



## Ms Lucy (May 25, 2021)

jeffscott said:


> biking with out other exercise will lead to some pretty severe muscle imbalances. These imbalances will result in some very painful conditions. To alleviate these imbalances specific exercises are required. Normally more than three times a week.
> 
> I encourage all serious bikers to engage in a serious strengthing program.


This makes me feel better about my outdoor gym. I live in a small studio but wanted to keep lifting so I purchased a bench with weights and put it on the patio. At first, I was not happy with how the weather will rust everything. Reading the benefits of exercising outdoors makes a Lil rust worthwhile. Thanks for posting!


----------



## Gideon Diaz (Feb 17, 2021)

cyclelicious said:


> *Peak Anxiety? Here Are 10 Ways to Calm Down*
> 
> View attachment 1375781
> 
> ...


Very interesting information, thank you!


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Ageing process is unstoppable, finds unprecedented study*

Immortality and everlasting youth are the stuff of myths, according to new research which may finally end the eternal debate about whether we can live for ever.

Backed by governments, business, academics and investors in an industry worth $110bn (£82.5bn) - and estimated to be worth $610bn by 2025 - scientists have spent decades attempting to harness the power of genomics and artificial intelligence to find a way to prevent or even reverse ageing.

But an unprecedented study has now confirmed that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints.

The study, by an international collaboration of scientists from 14 countries and including experts from the University of Oxford, set out to test the "invariant rate of ageing" hypothesis, which says that a species has a relatively fixed rate of ageing from adulthood.

"Our findings support the theory that, rather than slowing down death, more people are living much longer due to a reduction in mortality at younger ages," said José Manuel Aburto from Oxford's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, who analysed age-specific birth and death data spanning centuries and continents.

"We compared birth and death data from humans and non-human primates and found this general pattern of mortality was the same in all of them," said Aburto. "This suggests that biological, rather than environmental factors, ultimately control longevity.

"The statistics confirmed, individuals live longer as health and living conditions improve which leads to increasing longevity across an entire population. Nevertheless, a steep rise in death rates, as years advance into old age, is clear to see in all species."

The debate over how much longer we can live has divided the academic community for decades, with the search for extended life and health particularly active in the UK, where at least 260 companies, 250 investors, 10 non-profits, and 10 research labs are using the most advanced technologies.

The UK government has even prioritised the separate sectors of AI and longevity by including both of them in the four industrial strategy grand challenges, which aim to put Britain at the forefront of the industries of the future.

But what has been missing from the debate is research comparing lifespans of multiple animal populations with humans, to work out what is driving mortality.

This study plugs that gap, said Aburto. "This extraordinarily diverse collection of data enabled us to compare mortality differences both within and between species."

David Gems, a professor of biogerontology at UCL's Institute of Healthy Ageing, said that the summary of the report suggested the research was "a very high-powered study proving something contentious and surely right".

All the datasets examined by Aburto's teams revealed the same general pattern of mortality: a high risk of death in infancy which rapidly declines in the immature and teenage years, remains low until early adulthood, and then continually rises in advancing age.

"Our findings confirm that, in historical populations, life expectancy was low because many people died young," said Aburto. "But as medical, social, and environmental improvements continued, life expectancy increased.

"More and more people get to live much longer now. However, the trajectory towards death in old age has not changed," he added. "This study suggests evolutionary biology trumps everything and, so far, medical advances have been unable to beat these biological constraints."


----------



## WHALENARD (Feb 21, 2010)

cyclelicious said:


> [
> 
> "Our findings support the theory that, rather than slowing down death, more people are living much longer due to a reduction in mortality at younger ages," URL], who analysed age-specific birth and death data spanning centuries and continents.
> 
> individuals live longer as health and living conditions improve which leads to increasing longevity across an entire population.




Nothing new here. I've been citing these stats to people who's arguments about the advancements in medicine for years and years. Usually it's a blank stare and a glossed over look that I don't know what I'm talking about. Kind of funny that when you factor out deaths under the age of 14 we don't really live much longer today than we ever did. Likewise, plumbing, clean water, and the understanding of pathogens corresponding with a declining death rate from infectious diseases predates vaccines.

Sent from my Pixel 4a (5G) using Tapatalk


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

This article is written with a runner perspective however the science and principles also apply to mountain biking. The workout suggested can be adjusted for bikes. If you are also a runner (like me) Then this workout is aces for cardio and endurance

*The Science Is In, and Hills Are Absolutely Worth the Burn*

While hill repeats have been a staple on the workout rotation for runners for decades, there actually hasn't been much academic research on the training practice until relatively recently. A slew of new research over the last few years, however, has proven that, yes, hills really are worth the burn.

*Improvements in VO2 Max, Heart Rate, and Race Performance *
In a 2017 study published in the _International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, _a team of Ethiopian researchers investigated the effect of hill training on the performance and physiological fitness markers of competitive club-level middle and long distance runners who competed between 800m and 10,000m.

In the study, 32 athletes were divided randomly into a control group and experimental group. The control group was only given endurance training, while the experimental group was trained on both endurance and two sessions of hill workouts per week for 12 weeks. The subjects were evaluated as being similar in all fitness aspects being measured (VO2 max scores, resting heart rate, speed endurance, and race times) prior to the experiment. At week 6 and 12, the group that was trained on hills showed significant improvement in their VO2 max, resting heart rate, and speed endurance, while the control group did not.

"A general strength orientated hill training program is an appropriate and efficient method for improving both strength and speed endurance ability in distance runners," wrote the authors. "To enhance the performance of middle and long distance events athletes, the coaches have to include hill training workouts in their training plan." The study also found that the improvements in speed endurance were attained without increasing injury risk.

Another study, published in _International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance_ in 2013, had a group of runners perform six weeks of high-intensity uphill running intervals. They discovered that not only were the athletes' running economy (energy expenditure) enhanced, but they were also 2 percent faster, on average, in 5K time-trial performances. "Runners can assume that any form of high-intensity uphill interval training will benefit 5-km time-trial performance," concluded the authors.

More recent research conducted in 2018 has suggested that uphill sprint training at a 10 percent incline greatly enhances aerobic metabolic and cardiovascular response, which lead to physiological changes that the authors opined may have a correlation with muscular endurance. Meaning you can go at your max speed for longer.

*How Hills Enhance Training*
USATF certified coach Tom Schwartz, former coach of the Tinman Elite racing team, explains that hill training is beneficial because, when going uphill, you have more engagement of motor units - the bundles of muscle fibers that ignite while running. This enhances muscular strength and endurance. You also likely engage a portion of your core more when running uphill because every time you push your legs harder into the ground, your core must stabilize to compensate for the tilt.

Schwartz adds that pushing yourself up a hill helps you to produce more power as opposed to sprinting on flat surfaces. Running fast on a track requires more than just strength: form matters - it's why world class sprinters spend so much time perfecting drills. It's hard to be coordinated when you're running at a high speed, but, since you aren't running as fast up a hill, Schwartz explains, "You don't need to have as much coordination, and therefore you can generate more power." So though you may not have as much "form skill" as a sprinter, you can generate a similar amount of force when pushing yourself up a hill.

As a bonus, Schwartz notes that there is less of a risk of injury when doing high intensity hill repeats than when doing the same repeats of a flat surface because your body takes less of a beating when going uphill.

"You get more injuries when you're running at a high effort doing repeat 200s on the track than you would going up hill," he says. "[Hills are] an awesome way to build muscle strength and power, without pounding your body."

Because what matters is time exposed to the bioenergetic stimulus of hill training, Schwartz typically prescribes repetitions based on time rather than distance.

*Hill Repeat Training Plan*
According to the research, just six weeks of hill repeat sessions can make a significant difference in running performance. Here is a sample workout progression that can be done on a treadmill or outside once per week. Don't worry too much about calculating the gradient if you're not using a treadmill, eyeball a hill with a slight slope for the first few weeks and move over to a relatively steeper hill somewhere between weeks 4 and 6.

Begin the repeats at the effort of a 5K tempo run, increasing the intensity on each next rep to end at a 5K race effort by the last hill if you're feeling good. (Go easier than you think you need to on the first rep!) Remember to start with a very easy warm-up of 10-15 minutes.

*Week 1*

Jog 10-15 minutes to warm-up.

Find a hill with a 4% grade and do 4-5 x 60-second repeats, jog or walk down taking a 2 minute recovery between each interval. (Or however long you need.)

Jog a 10-20 minute cool-down.

*Week 2*

Jog 10-15 minutes to warm-up.

Do 5-6 x 60-second repeats on a 4% grade hill, taking a 2 minute jog recovery between each.

Jog a 10-20 minute cool-down.

*Week 3*

Jog 10-15 minutes to warm-up.

4-6 x 90-second repeats on a 4-5% grade hill, taking a 2-3 minute jog recovery between each.

Jog a 10-20 minute cool-down.

*Week 4*

Jog 10-15 minutes to warm-up.

4-6 x 2 minute repeats on a 5% grade hill, taking a 3 minute jogging recovery between each. (Or, however long it takes you to fully recover before the next rep.)

Jog a 10-20 minute cool-down.

*Week 5*

Jog 10-15 minutes to warm-up.

6-8 x 2 minute repeats on a 5-6% grade hill, jogging a full recovery between each.

Jog a 10-20 minute cool-down.

*Week 6*

Jog 10-15 minutes to warm-up.

8-10 x 2-3 minute repeats on a 5-6% grade hill, taking a full jogging recovery between each.

Jog a 10-20 minute cool-down.









The Science Is In, and Hills Are Absolutely Worth the Burn


All the physiological proof you need that you should definitely be doing hill repeats if you're trying to become a more efficient, faster, and injury-free runner.




www.podiumrunner.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

I don't know if time of day matters, as much as we continue to keep active.

*The Best Time of Day to Exercise*
Men at risk for diabetes had greater blood sugar control and lost more belly fat when they exercised in the afternoon than in the morning.










Is it better for our bodies to work out at certain times of day?

A useful new study of exercise timing and metabolic health suggests that, at least for some people, the answer is a qualified yes. The study, which looked at men at high risk for Type 2 diabetes, found that those who completed afternoon workouts upped their metabolic health far more than those who performed the same exercise earlier in the day. The results add to growing evidence that when we exercise may alter how we benefit from that exercise.

Scientists have known for some time that the chronology of our days influences the quality of our health. Studies in both animals and people indicate that every tissue in our bodies contains a kind of molecular clock that chimes, in part, in response to biological messages related to our daily exposure to light, food and sleep.

These cellular clocks then help to calibrate when our cells divide, fuel up, express genes and otherwise go about their normal biological work. Tuned by our lifestyles, these clocks create multiple circadian rhythms inside of us that prompt our bodies' temperatures, hormone levels, blood sugar, blood pressure, muscular strength and other biological systems to dip and crest throughout the day.

Circadian science also shows that disrupting normal, 24-hour circadian patterns can impair our health. People working overnight shifts, for instance, whose sleep habits are upended, tend to be at high risk for metabolic problems such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes. The same is true for people who eat late at night, outside usual dinner hours. More encouraging research suggests, though, that manipulating the timing of sleep and meals can improve metabolic health.

But much of this research focused on when we eat or go to bed. Whether, and how, exercise timing might influence metabolic health has been less clear, and the results of past experiments have not always agreed. Some suggest that morning workouts, for instance, amplify fat burning and weight loss.

But those experiments often manipulated the timing of breakfast and other meals, as well as exercise, making it difficult to tease out the particular, circadian effects of workouts. They also typically involved healthy volunteers, without metabolic problems.

A much-discussed 2019 study, on the other hand, found that men with Type 2 diabetes who completed a few minutes of high-intensity interval sessions in the afternoon substantially improved their blood-sugar control after two weeks. If they did the same, intense workouts in the morning, however, their blood-sugar levels actually spiked in an unhealthy fashion.

Patrick Schrauwen, a professor of nutrition and movement sciences at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, read that 2019 study with interest. He and his colleagues had been studying moderate exercise in people with Type 2 diabetes, but in their research, they had not considered the possible role of timing. Now, seeing the varying impacts of the intense workouts, he wondered if the timing of moderate workouts might likewise affect how the workouts changed people's metabolisms.

Fortuitously, he and his colleagues had a ready-made source of data, in their own prior experiment. Several years earlier, they had asked adult men at high risk for Type 2 diabetes to ride stationary bicycles at the lab three times a week for 12 weeks, while the researchers tracked their metabolic health. The scientists also, incidentally, had noted when the riders showed up for their workouts.

Now, Dr. Schrauwen and his colleagues pulled data for the 12 men who consistently had worked out between 8 and 10 a.m. and compared them with another 20 who always exercised between 3 and 6 p.m. They found that the benefits of afternoon workouts decisively trumped those of morning exercise.

After 12 weeks, the men who had pedaled in the afternoon displayed significantly better average insulin sensitivity than the morning exercisers, resulting in a greater ability to control blood sugar. They also had dropped somewhat more fat from around their middles than the morning riders, even though everyone's exercise routines had been identical.

"I believe that doing exercise is better than not doing exercise, irrespective of timing," Dr. Schrauwen says. "However, this study does suggest that afternoon exercise may be more beneficial" for people with disrupted metabolisms than the same exercise done earlier.

The study, in Physiological Reports, involved only men, though. Women's metabolisms might respond differently.

The researchers also did not delve into why the later workouts might affect metabolism differently than earlier ones. But Dr. Schrauwen says he believes moderate afternoon exercise may have an impact on the foods we consume later in the evening and "help to faster metabolize people's last meals" before they go to sleep. This effect could leave our bodies in a fasted state overnight, which may better synchronize body clocks and metabolisms and fine-tune health.

He and his colleagues hope to explore the underlying molecular effects in future studies, as well as whether the timing of lunch and dinner alters those results. The team also hopes to look into whether evening workouts might amplify the benefits of afternoon exertion, or perhaps undercut them, by worsening sleep.

Ultimately, Dr. Schrauwen says, the particular, most effective exercise regimen for each of us will align "with our daily routines" and exercise inclinations. Because exercise is good for us at any time of day - but only if we opt to keep doing it.

Now, Dr. Schrauwen and his colleagues pulled data for the 12 men who consistently had worked out between 8 and 10 a.m. and compared them with another 20 who always exercised between 3 and 6 p.m. They found that the benefits of afternoon workouts decisively trumped those of morning exercise.

After 12 weeks, the men who had pedaled in the afternoon displayed significantly better average insulin sensitivity than the morning exercisers, resulting in a greater ability to control blood sugar. They also had dropped somewhat more fat from around their middles than the morning riders, even though everyone's exercise routines had been identical.

"I believe that doing exercise is better than not doing exercise, irrespective of timing," Dr. Schrauwen says. "However, this study does suggest that afternoon exercise may be more beneficial" for people with disrupted metabolisms than the same exercise done earlier.

The study, in Physiological Reports, involved only men, though. Women's metabolisms might respond differently.

The researchers also did not delve into why the later workouts might affect metabolism differently than earlier ones. But Dr. Schrauwen says he believes moderate afternoon exercise may have an impact on the foods we consume later in the evening and "help to faster metabolize people's last meals" before they go to sleep. This effect could leave our bodies in a fasted state overnight, which may better synchronize body clocks and metabolisms and fine-tune health.

He and his colleagues hope to explore the underlying molecular effects in future studies, as well as whether the timing of lunch and dinner alters those results. The team also hopes to look into whether evening workouts might amplify the benefits of afternoon exertion, or perhaps undercut them, by worsening sleep.

Ultimately, Dr. Schrauwen says, the particular, most effective exercise regimen for each of us will align "with our daily routines" and exercise inclinations. Because exercise is good for us at any time of day - but only if we opt to keep doing it.

Now, Dr. Schrauwen and his colleagues pulled data for the 12 men who consistently had worked out between 8 and 10 a.m. and compared them with another 20 who always exercised between 3 and 6 p.m. They found that the benefits of afternoon workouts decisively trumped those of morning exercise.

After 12 weeks, the men who had pedaled in the afternoon displayed significantly better average insulin sensitivity than the morning exercisers, resulting in a greater ability to control blood sugar. They also had dropped somewhat more fat from around their middles than the morning riders, even though everyone's exercise routines had been identical.

"I believe that doing exercise is better than not doing exercise, irrespective of timing," Dr. Schrauwen says. "However, this study does suggest that afternoon exercise may be more beneficial" for people with disrupted metabolisms than the same exercise done earlier.

The study, in Physiological Reports, involved only men, though. Women's metabolisms might respond differently.

The researchers also did not delve into why the later workouts might affect metabolism differently than earlier ones. But Dr. Schrauwen says he believes moderate afternoon exercise may have an impact on the foods we consume later in the evening and "help to faster metabolize people's last meals" before they go to sleep. This effect could leave our bodies in a fasted state overnight, which may better synchronize body clocks and metabolisms and fine-tune health.

He and his colleagues hope to explore the underlying molecular effects in future studies, as well as whether the timing of lunch and dinner alters those results. The team also hopes to look into whether evening workouts might amplify the benefits of afternoon exertion, or perhaps undercut them, by worsening sleep.

Ultimately, Dr. Schrauwen says, the particular, most effective exercise regimen for each of us will align "with our daily routines" and exercise inclinations. Because exercise is good for us at any time of day - but only if we opt to keep doing it.









The Best Time of Day to Exercise (Published 2021)


Men at risk for diabetes had greater blood sugar control and lost more belly fat when they exercised in the afternoon than in the morning.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*What We Think We Know About Metabolism May Be Wrong*









Everyone knows conventional wisdom about metabolism: People put pounds on year after year from their 20s onward because their metabolisms slow down, especially around middle age. Women have slower metabolisms than men. That's why they have a harder time controlling their weight. Menopause only makes things worse, slowing women's metabolisms even more.

All wrong, according to a paper published Thursday in Science. Using data from nearly 6,500 people, ranging in age from 8 days to 95 years, researchers discovered that there are four distinct periods of life, as far as metabolism goes. They also found that there are no real differences between the metabolic rates of men and women after controlling for other factors.

The findings from the research are likely to reshape the science of human physiology and could also have implications for some medical practices, like determining appropriate drug doses for children and older people.

"It will be in textbooks," predicted Leanne Redman, an energy balance physiologist at Pennington Biomedical Research Institute in Baton Rouge, La., who also called it "a pivotal paper."

Rozalyn Anderson, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies aging, wrote a perspective accompanying the paper. In an interview, she said she was "blown away" by its findings. "We will have to revise some of our ideas," she added.

But the findings' implications for public health, diet and nutrition are limited for the moment because the study gives "a 30,000-foot view of energy metabolism," said Dr. Samuel Klein, who was not involved in the study and is director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He added, "I don't think you can make any new clinical statements" for an individual. When it comes to weight gain, he says, the issue is the same as it has always been: People are eating more calories than they are burning.

Metabolic research is expensive, and so most published studies have had very few participants. But the new study's principal investigator, Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, said that the project's participating researchers agreed to share their data. There are more than 80 co-authors on the study. By combining efforts from a half dozen labs collected over 40 years, they had sufficient information to ask general questions about changes in metabolism over a lifetime.

All of the research centers involved in the project were studying metabolic rates with a method considered the gold standard - doubly labeled water. It involves measuring calories burned by tracking the amount of carbon dioxide a person exhales during daily activities.

The investigators also had participants' heights and weights and percent body fat, which allowed them to look at fundamental metabolic rates. A smaller person will burn fewer calories than a bigger person, of course, but correcting for size and percent fat, the group asked: Were their metabolisms different?

"It was really clear that we didn't have a good handle on how body size affects metabolism or how aging affects metabolism," Dr. Pontzer said. "These are basic fundamental things you'd think would have been answered 100 years ago."

Central to their findings was that metabolism differs for all people across four distinct stages of life.


There's infancy, up until age 1, when calorie burning is at its peak, accelerating until it is 50 percent above the adult rate.
Then, from age 1 to about age 20, metabolism gradually slows by about 3 percent a year.
From age 20 to 60, it holds steady.
And, after age 60, it declines by about 0.7 percent a year.
Once the researchers controlled for body size and the amount of muscle people have, they also found no differences between men and women.










As might be expected, while the metabolic rate patterns hold for the population, individuals vary. Some have metabolic rates 25 percent below the average for their age and others have rates 25 percent higher than expected. But these outliers do not change the general pattern, reflected in graphs showing trajectory of metabolic rates over the years.

The four periods of metabolic life depicted in the new paper show "there isn't a constant rate of energy expenditure per pound," Dr. Redman noted. The rate depends on age. That runs counter to the longstanding assumptions she and others in nutrition science held.

The trajectories of metabolism over the course of a lifetime and the individuals who are outliers will open a number of research questions. For instance, what are the characteristics of people whose metabolisms are higher or lower than expected, and is there a relationship with obesity?

One of the findings that most surprised Dr. Pontzer was the metabolism of infants. He expected, for example, that a newborn infant would have a sky-high metabolic rate. After all, a general rule in biology is that smaller animals burn calories faster than larger ones.

Instead, Dr. Pontzer said, for the first month of life, babies have the same metabolic rate as their mothers. But shortly after a baby is born, he said, "something kicks in and the metabolic rate takes off."

The group also expected the metabolism of adults to start slowing when they were in their 40s or, for women, with the onset of menopause.

But, Dr. Pontzer said, "we just didn't see that."

The metabolic slowing that starts around age 60 results in a 20 percent decline in the metabolic rate by age 95.

Dr. Klein said that although people gain on average more than a pound and a half a year during adulthood, they can no longer attribute it to slowing metabolisms.

Energy requirements of the heart, liver, kidney and brain account for 65 percent of the resting metabolic rate although they constitute only 5 percent of body weight, Dr. Klein said. A slower metabolism after age 60, he added, may mean that crucial organs are functioning less well as people age. It might be one reason that chronic diseases tend to occur most often in older people.

Even college students might see the effects of the metabolic shift around age 20, Dr. Klein said. "When they finish college they are burning fewer calories than when they started."

And around age 60, no matter how young people look, they are changing in a fundamental way.

"There is a myth of retaining youth," Dr. Anderson said. "That's not what the biology says. In and around age 60, things start to change."

"There is a time point when things are no longer as they used to be."


















What We Think We Know About Metabolism May Be Wrong


A new study challenges assumptions about energy expenditure by people, including the idea that metabolism slows at middle age.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

A study in mice raises intriguing questions about the ways that hormones influence the brain and motivate the body to move.

*What Scientists Are Learning About Estrogen and Exercise*


Estrogen may change brain activity in ways that could affect how physically active we are, according to a remarkable new study in mice that looked at DNA, hormones and brain cells. Using advanced technology to pinpoint and reprogram specific genes and neurons in living animals, the study found that surges of estrogen jump-started processes in the mouse brain that prompted the animals — even males — to become more active.

The study, which was published recently in Nature, involved mice. While humans share many of the same relevant hormones, genes and neurons, we are not mice and cannot yet say whether our brains and physiological systems work the same way. But the findings may open intriguing avenues of inquiry into why women so often become inactive after menopause, when estrogen fades. The results also underscore how the brain and internal biological processes work together to play an unexpected and substantial role in whether the body gets up and moves or remains mostly still.










*Moving and mating*
For close to a century, since a famous 1924 study involving rats, scientists have known that female mammals tend to be most physically active just before they ovulate, when they are also most sexually receptive. This behavior makes evolutionary sense, since female animals presumably need to be on the hunt then for a mate. In the intervening decades, researchers began to speculate that estrogen must play a driving role in this behavior, with subsequent studies indicating that female lab animals’ daily skitterings typically would surge and wane in tandem with their estrogen levels.

But how could estrogen, which primarily controls ovulation and other aspects of reproduction, influence physical activity? That physiological puzzle recently drew the attention of Holly Ingraham, the Herzstein Endowed Professor of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, who has a longstanding research interest in women’s physiology and metabolism. She and her collaborators wondered if estrogen might somehow shape genetic activity in the brain, which would then activate brain cells in ways that could set in motion, well, motion itself.

To investigate that possibility, the scientists first gathered a crowd of healthy adult female mice and chemically blocked estrogen uptake in some of them, while tracking how much all of the animals moved. Almost immediately, the animals without estrogen became noticeably more sedentary than the other females, confirming that estrogen somehow affects physical activity.

*Finding the movement cells*
Next, the researchers examined the activity of a number of genes in the animals’ brains, noting that one, in particular, enthusiastically pumped out extra proteins when the animals’ brains were bathed in estrogen but became almost quiet when estrogen was absent. This gene, melanocortin-4, or Mc4r, previously had been linked in people to food intake and regulation of body weight. But the scientists now guessed it might also be the bridge between estrogen and the impulse to be physically active, an idea they substantiated by using high-tech genetic mapping techniques refined by one of the study’s authors, Jessica Tollkuhn, an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory School of Biological Sciences in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

These techniques showed, in real time, estrogen binding to Mc4r genes in certain neurons, especially those in a part of the mouse brain involved in energy expenditure. These brain cells also shared connections with other neurons elsewhere in the brain that control the speed at which animals move. Taken together, this experiment showed estrogen firing up a particular gene that turns on certain brain cells that then should be expected to nudge an animal to move.

But the scientists had not yet seen these genes and neurons in action, so, as a final aspect of the study, they used a sophisticated technique known as chemogenetics to directly galvanize the relevant neurons in female mice that had been bred to produce no estrogen. Once physically sluggish, these mice now explored, stood, played and ran far more than they had before.

Similarly, when the scientists used a form of the gene-editing technology CRISPR to gin up activity of the Mc4r gene in female animals’ brains, the mice became almost twice as active as before, a physical surge that persisted for weeks. Even male mice moved more when their Mc4r gene activity was dialed up by CRISPR, although not as much as the peripatetic females.

These results highlight the “complexity of physical activity behavior,” Dr. Ingraham said, and how the willingness to spontaneously move — or not — for any animal likely involves an intricate interplay between genetics, endocrinology and neurology, along with conscious deliberation.

The study also raises the intriguing possibility that the “timing of exercise, to have its most beneficial impact for women, might be fine-tuned by considering the changing hormonal milieu,” including the hormonal changes of menopause, said Dr. Tamas Horvath, a professor of neuroscience and obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine and chairman of the school’s department of comparative medicine.

“Of course, all these observations in mice need to be confirmed to operate in us, humans,” said Dr. Horvath, who was not involved in the current research. “However, the fact that this mechanism is found in an ancient part of the brain suggests that it will be applicable for most mammals, including humans.”

*‘Knowledge is power’*
Dr. Ingraham agreed. “We assume this circuit is working in humans, too,” she said and, if so, the new study and any subsequent, related research could help to explain, in part, why inactivity is so common in women after menopause and also offer some potential strategies for overcoming the pull toward lassitude. Increasing estrogen levels in older women, for instance, might, in theory, encourage more movement, though estrogen replacement therapy remains a complicated subject because of heightened cancer risks and other health concerns.

The study does hint, however, that it could, eventually, be possible to bypass estrogen and recreate its effects with new therapies that would directly target the Mc4r gene or the relevant neurons in people’s brains and mimic the effects of estrogen without the hormone itself. Any such medical advances are years in the future, Dr. Ingraham said.

Already, though, by delving into “the interrelationship between hormones and physical activity in females, this study has significant implications for human research studying the menstrual cycle and hormonal contraceptives and also menopause,” said Paul Ansdel, a lecturer in exercise physiology at Northumbria University in England, who was not involved with the study but has extensively studied menstruation and physical performance. “We know the importance of exercising in later life for promoting and maintaining health,” he continued, “so the challenge for us now is to understand the best ways to stay active throughout the major hormonal transition that is menopause.”

“Knowledge is power,” Dr. Ingraham concluded. She noted that because so many of us are living longer now, better understanding of why — and whether — we choose to move can help make those years healthier. For example, knowing that biology might angle us toward the couch if we are women and aging, we could use fitness trackers or training diaries to help us compare our activities from year to year. Or, just honestly assess whether we are as active now as we would like to be, whatever our age (or gender). The brain is a complex organ and our motivations for exercise varied and deep, but we always have the option “to decide to be active,” Dr. Ingraham said, to make the choice to get up and move.



















What Scientists Are Learning About Estrogen and Exercise


A study in mice raises intriguing questions about the ways that hormones influence the brain and motivate the body to move.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Your Workout Burns Fewer Calories Than You Think*
Our bodies compensate for at least a quarter of the calories we expend during exercise, undermining our best efforts to lose weight by working out.











For every 100 calories we might expect to burn as a result of working out, most of us will actually net fewer than 72 calories burned, according to an eye-opening new study of how physical activity affects our metabolisms.

The study finds that our bodies tend to automatically compensate for at least a quarter of the calories we expend during exercise, undermining our best efforts to drop pounds by working out. The results also show that carrying extra pounds unfortunately compounds calorie compensation, making weight loss through exercise even more elusive for those who are already overweight.

But the study suggests, too, that calorie compensation varies from person to person, and that learning how your metabolism responds to workouts may be key to optimizing exercise for weight control.

In theory — or in a kindlier, alternative universe — exercise would aid substantially in weight loss. When we move, our muscles contract, requiring more fuel than at rest, while other organs and biological systems likewise expend extra energy. Thanks to past laboratory studies, we know approximately how much energy these processes demand. Walking a mile, for instance, burns approximately 100 calories, depending on someone’s body size and walking speed.

Until recently, most people, including exercise scientists, assumed that this process would be additive — that is, stroll a single mile, burn 100 calories. Stroll two, burn 200, and so on, in logical, mathematical fashion. If we do not then replace those calories with extra food, we should wind up burning more calories than we consume that day and start dropping pounds.

But that rational outcome rarely happens. In study after study, most people who begin a new exercise program lose less weight than would be expected based on the number of calories they burn during their workouts, even if they strictly monitor their diets.


So, some scientists began speculating that energy expenditure might be less elastic than we had thought. In other words, it might have limits. That possibility gained traction in 2012, with the publication of an influential study of African hunter-gatherers. It showed that, although the tribespeople regularly walked or jogged for hours, they burned about the same number of total daily calories as relatively sedentary Western men and women. Somehow, the study’s authors realized, the active tribespeople’s bodies were compensating, dialing back overall calorie burning, so that they avoided starvation as they stalked their food.


Other small studies since have reinforced the finding that more activity does not necessarily result in greater daily calorie expenditure. But few large-scale experiments have tried to pin down just how much our bodies compensate for the calories burned while moving, since measuring metabolic activity in people is complex and expensive.

As part of an ambitious new scientific initiative, however, dozens of researchers recently pooled their metabolic data from multiple studies involving thousands of men and women. These studies involved drinking doubly labeled water, the gold standard in metabolic research. It contains isotopes that allow researchers precisely to track how many calories someone burns throughout the day.

For the new study, which was published in August in Current Biology, some of the scientists involved in the initiative set out to see what happens to our metabolisms when we move. They pulled data for 1,754 adults that included their doubly labeled water results, as well as measures of their body compositions and basal energy expenditure, which is how many calories they burn simply by being alive, even if they otherwise are inactive. Subtracting basal numbers from total energy expenditure gave the researchers an approximation of people’s energy expenditure from exercise and other movement, such as standing, walking and general fidgeting.

Then, using statistical models, the researchers could tally whether calories burned during activity increased people’s daily energy expenditure as expected — that is, whether people burn commensurately more total daily calories when they move more. But, the researchers found, they did not tend to burn more calories. In fact, most people seemed to be burning only about 72 percent as many additional calories, on average, as would be expected, given their activity levels.

“People appear to be energy compensating for additional calories burned through activity by at least a quarter,” said Lewis Halsey, a professor of life and health sciences at the University of Roehampton in London and one of the lead authors of the new study.

Unexpectedly, the researchers also found that energy compensation levels increased among people with relatively high levels of body fat. They tended to compensate for 50 percent or more of the calories they burned by being active.

It is important to point out that the study did not look at people’s food intake. It concentrated solely on energy outlay and how our bodies seem able to offset some of the calories burned during exercise by reducing biological activity elsewhere in the body. Just how we unconsciously orchestrate this feat, though, and which internal systems could be most affected remain unclear, Dr. Halsey said. He and his colleagues speculate that immune system operations, which require considerable energy, may get dialed down somewhat. Or we could unknowingly fidget less or otherwise grow more sedentary, over all, on days we exercise. Perhaps, too, some of the inner workings of our cells may slow, reducing our bodies’ overall energy expenditure.

But the new science of exercise and calorie compensation is not completely discouraging. Even people whose bodies compensate for 50 percent or more of the calories they expend during physical activity will burn more calories per day than if they remain still, Dr. Halsey pointed out. A more intractable problem with using exercise for weight loss, he continued, is that exercise realistically burns few calories, period. To drop pounds, we also will have to eat less.

“Half a cookie or half a can of cola” after a half-hour walk, and you will have taken in more calories than you burned, he said, however much or little you compensate.



















Your Workout Burns Fewer Calories Than You Think


Our bodies compensate for at least a quarter of the calories we expend during exercise, undermining our best efforts to lose weight by working out.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*The sexy secrets of body fat storage*
We’re talkin’ bout hormones, baby.










We’re a little obsessive about how we measure body fat and try to move it around. And no, we’re not talking about stealing bags of liposuction leftovers to make soap. 

As a society, we seem perpetually unhappy with wherever our body chooses to store its fat cells. Pop music keeps telling us we should exercise enough to get “little in the middle” while maintaining, as they say, “much back.” Countless workouts and fad diets promise to target only “problem areas.” And then there are the more drastic means of fat reallocation: The Kardashians move it from their stomachs to their butts, while others take it from their thighs and stick it in their breasts. They turn to these surgeries because nature is just too good at stashing away our excess energy in the form of flab.

And it’s hard to fight nature.

If you tend to pack the pounds on your tummy or your butt or your upper arms, you’ll continue to tend to put fat there. Forever. Sit-ups and squats can help shape our bodies differently, but no amount of diet or exercise will turn you into a person who naturally stores lipids in a different place. In fact, there’s really only one way to do it: change your hormones.

Specifically, your sex hormones. Testosterone and estrogen are two of the biggest drivers of fat storage—they’re the whole reason that men and women tend to have different body shapes when it comes to chub. Biologically female bodies stash the stuff in thighs and butts, whereas male bodies tend to pack pounds onto the stomach. This is also partly why men tend to have more cardiovascular problems. Abdominal fat exacerbates metabolic issues and triggers all kinds of metabolic changes that have a negative impact on your cardiovascular system.

But it’s not as straightforward as “testosterone makes you put fat in your belly.” In fact, it’s men with _low_ testosterone who start storing lipids there, which is why, as they age and their natural testosterone levels decrease, they generally start getting that potbelly look.

Both testosterone and estrogen actually promote leanness overall, and androgens (that’s the class of sex steroids including testosterone) seem to have very different effects depending on sex. It’s a complex system, and is made only more complicated by the fact that it’s very hard to study differences like this—the majority of people in the world remain either biologically male or biologically female for their entire lives. This means there are only a few windows where we can see how a significant change in sex hormones impacts body fat.

The most obvious is puberty. As teenagers’ hormones kick into high gear, they undergo all kinds of bodily changes because testosterone and estrogen (and, to a lesser degree, progesterone) are responsible for a lot of our secondary sex characteristics. Women develop wider hips and breasts. Men can suddenly put on muscle, especially in their chests, and their voices deepen as their testicles mature. Everyone starts growing body hair and experiences confusing new feelings of lust and romance that inevitably lead to some heartbreak.

And during this time, we also start to develop body fat in those characteristic places: men in the stomach, women in the thighs and butt. This is because adipose tissue in different parts of our bodies have receptors for different kinds of hormones. The fat in our stomachs, especially that visceral fat that surrounds our organs, seems to respond well to androgens (i.e. testosterone), and researchers think that’s because visceral fat cells have androgen receptors. Subcutaneous fat, which is the stuff you develop just under the skin, has estrogen receptors.

As a fun bonus, subcutaneous fat also produces and stores estrogen, so the more fat you have, the higher your overall estrogen levels tend to be. This is part of why people with very low body fat percentages can stop menstruating—without enough estrogen around to control things, their hormonal cycles get screwed up.

This might be part of why women start having a higher body fat percentage when they hit puberty: More estrogen prompts the growth of more fat cells.

The same thing seems to happen in transgender people who undergo hormone therapy to assist their transition. Those assigned female at birth who begin taking testosterone also switch to growing visceral fat in their abdomens, rather than subcutaneous fat in their thighs and bums. They even develop a higher risk of heart disease, since that adipose tissue is what strains their metabolic systems. People assigned male at birth who take estrogen therapy have the opposite experience. It’s from these studies that we get a lot of our best information about how sex steroids influence body fat, since it’s the only time that people actually switch their prevailing hormones rather than ramping the levels of their innate hormones up or down.

As we age, though, we do undergo a slower transition from high to low hormone levels. Men have lower amounts of testosterone as they age, and since testosterone promotes leanness _and_ abdominal fat, this lessening seems to have the overall effect of adding a potbelly. But confusingly, drugs that artificially bring down testosterone (like the androgen-blocking meds that some men with prostate cancer get) tend to shift body fat away from the stomach and towards a more feminine distribution.

Oddly, it’s also true that having _too much_ testosterone makes you more likely to have belly fat. There’s a kind of perfect zone where most men fall for most of their lives, but going too far outside it in either direction causes many of the same metabolic symptoms. Men with hypogonadism, who have too-low testosterone, slim down when given supplements. But male athletes who abuse those same supplements increase their risk of heart disease and have a higher tendency to accumulate fat in their stomachs (it’s just not apparent because most of them are fit).

Menopause causes a much more drastic drop. As estrogen levels plummet, women get to experience puberty in reverse as their bodies adjust to a new balance of hormones. There’s a whole host of symptoms that come along with this transition, among them a shift to storing fat in the stomach and an overall tendency to gain weight in the first place. This is why postmenopausal people have more of what we call an apple shape than a pear—fat moves to the abdomen. Interestingly, those who get hormone therapy to ease symptoms also tend to delay the body-fat shift. Cardiovascular disease risk also increases around this time. It may be that the drop in estrogen allows natural androgen levels to have a larger impact on the body.

You can see a similar pattern in those with polycystic ovary syndrome, who have elevated androgen levels and also tend to store fat in their abdomens. In fact, most diseases that affect sex hormones also affect body fat. Women with Turner syndrome, who have just one X chromosome, have a different fat distribution than women with two X’s. Men with Klinefelter syndrome, who are XXY, have a fat distribution much more in line with biologically female bodies.

But it doesn’t necessarily take a genetic abnormality, disease, or transition to shift hormone levels. Some women simply have higher testosterone, and some men have a naturally lower level. There’s a huge, totally normal range that can affect your fat distribution, at least to some degree, which is part of why you can’t pick where you store lipids. You’re stuck with what you’ve got, barring surgery or hormone therapy, so learn to accept your flab now. You can lose weight for your health or for your self-esteem, but you’re never going to make your body stop giving you those cute love handles. They’ll be with you through thick and thin, so you might as well learn to love them back.









The sexy secrets of body fat storage


From arm fat to abdominal fat, we all have our so-called problem areas. But it doesn't always come down to diet and exercise.




www.popsci.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Healthy body = healthy brain (+heart)

This Isolated Bolivian Tribe Has The Healthiest Brains And Hearts On Earth 










The secret to good health may lie deep in the Bolivian Amazon. There, researchers have discovered that people of the Tsimané tribe have remarkably healthier hearts and brains than Westerners. 

Scientists already had a clue that the Tsimané, a tribe of about 16,000, had excellent health. A 2017 study demonstrated that they had the healthiest hearts in the world. Now, a 2021 study has confirmed that the Tsimané don’t only have healthier hearts — their brains are more robust, too.

The 2021 study examined 746 Tsimané adults between the ages of 40 and 94. The Tsimané — who traveled as long as two full days from their isolated villages to Trinidad, Bolivia — underwent CT scans so that researchers could look at their brains. Once researchers had the Tsimané brain scans, they compared them to scans of adults from Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands.

Their findings echoed the 2017 study — the Tsimané had substantially healthier brains than Westerners. When researchers looked at brain volume between the two populations, they found that the difference in brain volume between middle age and old age is 70 percent smaller in Tsimané brains than in Western ones.

Although some level of brain atrophy is normal, a rapid decline can lead to cognitive impairment, functional decline, and dementia. 











“The Tsimané have provided us with an amazing natural experiment on the potentially detrimental effects of modern lifestyles on our health,” said the study author Andrei Irimia, an assistant professor of gerontology, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. 

“These findings suggest that brain atrophy may be slowed substantially by the same lifestyle factors associated with very low risk of heart disease.”

In some ways, these most recent results aren’t that surprising. The Tsimané people are physically active and live by farming, hunting, and fishing. They eat a high-fiber diet that includes vegetables, fish, and lean meat. Meanwhile, Westerners are generally sedentary and consume more saturated fats

But researchers weren’t sure that the Tsimané people’s healthy lifestyle would necessarily translate to a healthier brain. Although the tribe eats well and exercises, they also lack modern health care and medicine. As such, they’re generally more vulnerable to infectious diseases and high levels of inflammation.

Because inflammation is associated with brain atrophy, researchers suspected that the Tsimané might have brains that atrophied quickly. Instead, they found the opposite was true.

That’s crucial — suggesting that cardiovascular health can outweigh the side effects of inflammation. But the type of inflammation is important, too.

Whereas inflammation in the Tsimané is generally caused by respiratory, gastrointestinal, and parasitic infections, inflammation in Westerners is triggered by obesity and metabolic causes.

“Our sedentary lifestyle and diet rich in sugars and fats may be accelerating the loss of brain tissue with age and making us more vulnerable to diseases such as Alzheimer’s,” said study author Hillard Kaplan, a professor of health economics and anthropology at Chapman University who has spent years studying the Tsimané.

“The Tsimané can serve as a baseline for healthy brain aging.”

However, some scientists think more research is needed. Rebecca Edelmayer, the senior director of scientific engagement for the Alzheimer’s Association, noted that the most recent study of the Tsimané’s brains did not assess their memory or thinking skills. Nor did it take into account factors like environmental exposure or genes, which can affect brain aging and dementia.

Nevertheless, the study seems to prove something fairly basic — eating well and moving often can lead to better health.

“The findings suggest ample opportunities for interventions to improve brain health,” noted Kaplan. “Even in populations with high levels of inflammation.”










Physical activity is a part of Tsimané life from a young age. 

And a world away from the Bolivian Amazon, in Chicago, researchers are working on a clinical trial to see if factors like diet and exercise can slow mental decline in older adults. They’re encouraged by what they see in the Tsimané.

Shannon Halloway, an assistant professor involved in the Chicago study, says that it might not take much for people in Western populations to reset their habits — and hopefully improve their brain health.

“Take walks and talk to your neighbors while you’re at it,” she said. “Make dinner with your loved ones. Find activities you enjoy and will keep up.”









Scientists Find That The Brains And Bodies Of This Amazon Tribe Don't Age Like Any Other Humans


Bolivia's Tsimané people have some of the healthiest hearts and brains in the world — and it likely has to do with their lifestyle.




allthatsinteresting.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Debunking Daylight Saving: How to Lessen Its Impact on Your Health*









Northern Hemisphere dwellers may be excited for “an extra hour” of sleep this weekend, but the reality of daylight saving time is much more complicated. Read on to learn why we started changing the clocks in the first place, and why your health could be at risk.

*The Purpose of Daylight Saving*
When daylight saving was first proposed in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin, he posited that by shifting the clocks forward in the summer, there would be less need for candles as daylight hours would be extended. Since that time, various other scientists and politicians have claimed that aligning our time to longer days would result in less energy use in one form or another.

In 1916, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire became the first countries to implement the system, and it has been used off and on by various nations around the world since then. During the energy crisis of the 1970s, the use of daylight saving time (DST) became much more widespread and permanent in Europe and North America.

Still, there are many who have questioned this practice and wonder if it should be continued. Farmers are often at odds with the system, as animals and crops need care based on the sun and not the clock. Various jurisdictions in large countries like the U.S. and Canada also take issue with the time change since doing so actually puts their local areas more out of sync with the sun by virtue of where they lie geographically within their time zone. Most importantly, numerous studies have demonstrated that the expected energy savings have never come to pass, making the original rationale for the whole thing somewhat dubious.

*Does Daylight Saving Affect Your Health?*
Though a one-hour change is seemingly minimal, the time change can cause some pretty dramatic impacts on our innate biological clocks, therefore affecting our sleep.

While common sense would suggest that we lose an hour of sleep in the spring and gain an hour in the fall, research has shown this not to be the case. In the spring, sleep is quite seriously disordered often for as long as five days from that small change in the time. In the fall, there is a much quicker recovery time but the notion that people gain an hour of sleep has proven to be a fallacy.

The aforementioned alteration to sleep cycles in the spring can cause some significant health impacts. Research has shown that in the week following the time change, the risk of heart attack is significantly higher than in the week before. Other studies have shown increased risks of stroke, vascular problems, and clotting issues.

*Other Time Change Impacts*
In addition to energy savings, proponents of daylight saving cite a reduction in motor vehicle collisions (MVCs) as another positive outcome of the time change. By using DST to prolong the hours of daylight further into the evening, it was posited that the roads would be safer during those otherwise darker and dangerous periods. Several studies have looked at this question and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, there is no compelling data to support it.

Among a large number of observational studies looking at road safety around the spring switch to DST, the data was inconsistent: some studies showed a decrease in collisions, some showed an increase, and nearly half showed no change. Interestingly, in those studies that did show an increase in collisions, the researchers were able to attribute the increase to disordered sleep patterns, but this finding simply did not persist across other studies. No effects were seen with the autumn time change.

One finding that really piqued my interest came from a group of nine studies that looked at the impact of the DST change on different types of road users. In those studies, there were no changes in the frequency of collisions for cars; however, there were significant decreases in incidents involving pedestrians and cyclists. One of those studies reported a 36% decrease in casualties amongst pedestrians and an 11% reduction for cyclists, no doubt attributed to improved visibility. This, one could argue, is the most positive effect that’s proven to stem from daylight saving.

*How to Lessen the DST Impact*
To minimize the impact of the change in time, you can employ many of the same tips and tricks that travelers use when crossing time zones in order to manage jet lag: 


Go to sleep and wake up based on your internal clock, not the mechanical one. It may be tempting to take advantage of one more hour of being awake but this can lead to problems. 
Practice good sleep hygiene on the night of the time change (better yet, always!). Suggestions include avoiding caffeine in the evening, keeping distractions like phones or televisions to a bare minimum, and avoiding working out late in the day or evening. 
Expose yourself to the bright morning sunlight on the morning after the time change. This can help reset your internal clock. 
Try to avoid napping. However, if you become very sleep-deprived over the course of two or three days after the change, napping is a good way to catch up on the deficit.
If the time change is particularly difficult for you, you can plan ahead. Shift your bedtime and waking hour by twenty minutes per day for the three days leading up to the time change and then, rather than a one-hour jump all at once, you will ease your body into the shift more gradually.

The abundance of evidence suggests that the DST change is unhealthy and unsustainable. But, for whatever reason, there remains no real political will to abandon it, though this hasn’t stopped people from trying. A group of scientists collated the data on the subject and published a paper in 2019 outlining their argument for abolishing the practice. And yet, here we are less than a week from the fall back to standard time — yet again.

Train hard, train healthy.









Debunking Daylight Saving: How to Lessen Its Impact on Your Health


The time change was originally implemented to save energy costs, but it's becoming clearer that DST has few benefits. Here's how it affects your health.




trainingpeaks.com


----------



## smilinsteve (Jul 21, 2009)

Arizonans do just fine without changing their clocks.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Why Do Women Gain Belly Fat in Midlife?*
And is there any way to target it through diet or exercise?













*Q: I’m a woman in my late 40s and for the first time I’ve developed belly fat. Is there any way to target it through diet or exercise?*
If you’re a middle-aged woman and you’re noticing that your midsection is expanding, the first thing to know is that you’re not alone.
“This is a physiological change that, unfortunately, really happens to virtually all women as we age,” said Victoria Vieira-Potter, an associate professor of nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Missouri. “It’s not something you did,” she added, or an indication that you’re letting yourself go, so to speak.
In the years leading up to menopause, Dr. Vieira-Potter said, levels of hormones like estrogen shift. And research suggests that these shifts likely lead to changes in body shape, she said — along with hot flashes, mood changes, irregular periods, trouble sleeping and more. This perimenopausal transition, which typically begins between 45 and 55 and lasts for about 7 years, officially ends one year after the last period. At that point, women are said to be in menopause.

Before the menopausal transition, women tend to store more of their body fat in the thighs and hips, resulting in a “pear-shaped” body, Dr. Vieira-Potter explained, while men tend to store more fat in the abdominal area, making them more “apple-shaped.”
But around menopause, there’s a striking change in where women store fat on their bodies, said Dr. Gail Greendale, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. In one 2021 study, for instance, Dr. Greendale and her colleagues tracked how the bodies of 380 middle-aged women in Boston and Los Angeles changed over 12 years, including the time before, during and after their transitions to menopause. While the results varied according to race and ethnicity, the overall outcome was that around menopause, the women started storing fat more like men — less around the thighs and hips and more around their midsections.
For example, among the white and Black women in the study, there was no net change in their hip and thigh fat over the 12 years, but their midsection fat increased, on average, by 24 and 17 percent, respectively. They gained midsection fat most quickly during the few years before and one year after their final period.
In other words, Dr. Vieira-Potter said, women “start to adopt that apple shape instead of the pear shape.”
It’s also common for men to gain more fat in their midsections as they age, but it is a slower and steadier change. “There’s no analogous thing in men where an organ just goes ‘Later!’ and shuts down,” Dr. Greendale said, referring to women’s ovaries during menopause.

According to Dr. Greendale, researchers don’t know exactly why these shifts in fat storage occur. But while normal, they are something to keep an eye on, she added. Increases in belly fat — and in particular, the type of visceral fat that sits deep inside the abdomen and surrounds the organs — have been linked to certain increased health risks, like of heart disease, diabetes and cancer. This fat, which can expand not only with menopause, but with stress, lack of exercise, poor diet and more, is the “troublemaker fat,” Dr. Greendale said. On the other hand, fat stored in the thighs and hips, creating the so-called pear shape, seems to protect against diabetes and heart disease.









Despite the ubiquitous internet ads claiming to hold the secret to shrinking belly fat, experts really don’t know how to address the waistline expansion associated with menopause, Dr. Greendale said. Researchers are only just beginning to understand how and why the body changes in this life stage, and she’s careful not to promote a solution without evidence that it works.

“What worries me is that women who are trying to do right by themselves and keep up their exercise habits and eat a good diet may feel defeated” if their belly fat doesn’t budge, she said. “They may be doing everything they can, and their central fat may just have a mind of its own.” Excessive dieting and exercising too much can also be harmful, she pointed out.


That said, getting at least 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate physical activity per week has been shown to help prevent heart disease and diabetes, both conditions associated with increased abdominal fat. Following a healthy diet — including one that incorporates plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and that prioritizes fish, legumes, nuts, low-fat dairy and lean meats as sources of protein — can help protect against these conditions, too.

Physical activity also helps to maintain healthy muscle and bone mass and improves insulin functioning, Dr. Vieira-Potter said. “Even if you’re exercising and not losing weight, you’re doing lots of good metabolically.” Exercise feels good, too, and might help counter some of the mood changes that can come with menopause.

It doesn’t need to be intense or strenuous to be beneficial, Dr. Vieira-Potter said. “Just find something you love.”

And, if you’re still feeling discouraged by your changing body, despite a good diet and exercise program, Dr. Greendale recommended a dose of self compassion. “If my middle is resistant, I’m going to understand that may be part of the life stage I’m in.”










Why Do Women Gain Belly Fat in Midlife?


And is there any way to target it through diet or exercise?




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*How Exercise May Tame Our Anxiety*










Covid-19 cases and so much else, you might want to get out and play in the snow, according to a new report. The large-scale study of almost 200,000 cross-country skiers found that being physically active halves the risk of developing clinical anxiety over time. The study, from Sweden, focused on skiing, but the researchers said almost any kind of aerobic activity likely helps protect us against excessive worry and dread, a cheering thought as we face yet another grim pandemic season.

Science already offers plenty of encouraging evidence that exercise can lift our moods. Experiments show that when people (and lab animals) start working out, they typically grow calmer, more resilient, happier and less apt to feel unduly sad, nervous or angry than before. Epidemiological studies, which often focus on the links between one type of activity or behavior and various aspects of health or longevity, likewise find that more exercise is linked with substantially lower chances of developing severe depression; conversely, being sedentary increases the risk for depression. A remarkable neurological study from 2013 even found that exercise leads to reductions in twitchy, rodent anxiety, by prompting an increase in the production of specialized neurons that release a chemical that soothes over-activity in other parts of the brain.

But most of these studies were small, short term or mainly relevant to mice, leaving open many questions about what kinds of exercise might help our mental health, how long mood enhancements might potentially last, whether men and women benefit equally and whether it is possible to work out too much and perhaps increase your likelihood of feeling emotionally worse off.

So, for the new study, which was published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, exercise scientists at Lund University in Sweden and other institutions decided it would be worthwhile to look into the long-term mental health of the thousands upon thousands of men and women who have raced Sweden’s famous Vasaloppet cross-country skiing event over the years.

The Vasaloppet, which celebrates its centenary this winter, is the largest series of cross-country ski races in the world, with crowds of racers annually lining up in the woods of central Sweden to whoosh, glide and pant through races ranging in length from 30 kilometers, or almost 19 miles, to the showcase distance of 90K, about 56 miles. Because this kind of endurance event requires abundant health, stamina and training, researchers previously have used data about Vasaloppet racers to study how exercise influences heart health, cancer risks and longevity.

“We use participation in a Vasaloppet as a proxy for a physically active and healthy lifestyle,” said Tomas Deierborg, the director of the experimental medicine department at Lund University and senior author of the new study, who has twice completed the 90K race.

To start, he and his colleagues gathered finishing times and other information for 197,685 Swedish men and women who participated in one of the races between 1989 and 2010. They then crosschecked this information with data from a Swedish national registry of patients, looking for diagnoses of clinical anxiety disorder among the racers in the following 10 to 20 years. For comparison, they also checked anxiety diagnoses during the same time period for 197,684 of their randomly selected fellow citizens who had not participated in the race and were generally considered relatively inactive.

The skiers, the researchers found, proved to be considerably calmer over the decades after their race than the other Swedes, with more than 50 percent less risk of developing clinical anxiety. These good spirits tended to prevail among male and female skiers of almost any age — except, interestingly, the fastest female racers. The top female finishers from each year tended to be more likely afterward to develop anxiety disorders than other racers, although their risk overall remained lower than for women of the same age in the control group.
These results indicate “the link between exercise and reduced anxiety is strong,” said Dr. Lena Brundin, a lead investigator of neurodegenerative diseases at the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich., who was another author on the study.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/...on=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending

And helpfully, you probably don’t need to cross-country ski for long distances in the snowy woods of Sweden to reap the rewards, Dr. Deierborg said. Earlier studies of exercise and mood suggest that following the World Health Organization’s recommendations of about 30 minutes of brisk walking or similar activities most days “has good effects on your mental health,” he said, and these benefits appear to apply to a “broader population” than just Swedes.

Still, it may be worthwhile to monitor your psychological response to intense training and competition, especially if you are a competitive woman, he said. The finding that the fastest women tended to develop anxiety more often than other racers surprised the researchers, he said, and suggests perhaps performance anxiety or other issues could be initiated or exacerbated in some people by racing.

“It is not necessary to complete extreme exercise to achieve the beneficial effects on anxiety,” Dr. Brundin said.

The findings have limitations, though. They cannot prove exercise causes people to enjoy better moods, only that highly active people tend to be less anxious than their more sedentary peers. The study also does not explain how skiing might reduce anxiety levels. The researchers suspect physical activity changes levels of brain chemicals related to mood, such as dopamine and serotonin, and reduces inflammation throughout the body and brain, contributing physiologically to stouter mental health. Getting outside among silent, snow-drenched pines and far from Zoom calls while training for a Vasaloppet probably does not hurt, either.
Any exercise in any setting likely should help us cope better this winter, the researchers said. “A physically active lifestyle seems to have a strong effect on reducing the chances of developing an anxiety disorder,” said Dr. Deierborg, who hopes to extend those benefits to the next generation. He plans to enter and train for another Vasaloppet in a few years, he said, when his young children are old enough to join him.










How Exercise May Tame Our Anxiety


Cross-country ski racers were less likely to develop anxiety disorders. The good news is less intense aerobic activities may provide similar benefits.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Is It Better to Exercise in the Morning or Evening?*


Morning exercise has very different effects on metabolism than the same workout later in the day, according to an ambitious new animal study of exercise timing. The study, which involved healthy lab mice jogging on tiny treadmills, mapped hundreds of disparities in the numbers and activities of molecules and genes throughout the rodents’ bodies, depending on whether they ran first thing in the morning or deeper in the evening.

Many of these changes related to fat burning and other aspects of the animals’ metabolisms. Over time, such changes could substantially influence their disease risks and well-being. And though the study featured rodents, its findings likely have relevance for any of us who wonder if it is better to work out before work, or if we might get as much — or more — health benefit from after-hours exercise.

As anyone with a body knows, our internal operations and those of almost all living creatures follow a well-orchestrated and pervasive 24-hour circadian rhythm. Recent studies in animals and people show that almost every cell in our bodies contains a version of a molecular clock that coordinates with a broader, full-body timing system to direct most biological operations. Thanks to these internal clocks, our body temperature, blood sugar, blood pressure, hunger, heart rate, hormone levels, sleepiness, cell division, energy expenditure and many other processes surge and slow in repeated patterns throughout the day.

These internal rhythms, while predictable, are also malleable. Our internal clocks can recalibrate themselves, research shows, based on complex cues from inside and outside of us. In particular, they respond to light and dark but are likewise affected by our sleep habits and when we eat.

Recent research suggests that the time of day that we exercise also tunes our internal clocks. In past studies in mice, running at different hours affected the animals’ body temperatures, cardiac function and energy expenditure throughout the day and altered the activity of genes related to circadian rhythm and aging.

Results in people have been inconsistent, though. In a small 2019 study of men who joined an exercise program to lose weight, for instance, those who worked out in the morning shed more pounds than those exercising later in the day, even though everyone completed the same exercise routine. But in a 2020 study, men at high risk for Type 2 diabetes who began exercising three times a week developed better insulin sensitivity and blood-sugar control if they worked out in the afternoon than in the morning. Those results echoed similar findings from 2019, in which men with Type 2 diabetes who worked out intensely first thing in the morning showed unexpected and undesirable spikes in their blood-sugar levels following the exercise, while the same workouts in the afternoon improved their blood-sugar control.

Few of these studies ventured deep beneath the surface, though, to look into the molecular changes driving the health and circadian outcomes, which might help to explain some of the discrepancies from one study to the next. Those experiments that did examine exercise’s effects on a microscopic level, usually in mice, tended to concentrate on a single tissue, such as blood or muscle. But scientists who study physical activity, metabolism and chronobiology suspected the impacts of exercise timing would extend to many other parts of the body and involve intricate interplay between multiple cells and organs.

So, for the new study, published this month as the cover article in Cell Metabolism, an international consortium of researchers decided to try quantifying almost every molecular change related to metabolism that occurs during exercise at different times of day. Using healthy, male mice, they had some jog moderately on wheels for an hour early in the day and others run the same amount in the evening. An additional group of mice sat on locked wheels for an hour during these same times and served as a sedentary control group.

Beginning about an hour after the workouts, researchers took repeated samples from each animal’s muscle, liver, heart, hypothalamus, white fat, brown fat and blood and used sophisticated machinery to identify and enumerate almost every molecule in those tissues related to energy usage. They also checked markers of activity from genes related to metabolism. Then they tabulated totals between the tissues and between the groups of mice.

Interesting patterns emerged. Since mice are nocturnal, they wake and grow active in the evening and prepare to sleep in the morning, a schedule opposite of ours (unless we are vampires or teenagers). When the mice jogged at the start of their active time — equivalent to morning for us — the researchers counted hundreds of molecules that increased or dropped in number after the exercise, and that differed from levels seen in mice running closer to their bedtimes or not exercising at all.

Furthermore, some of these changes occurred almost identically in different parts of the body, suggesting to the researchers that various organs and tissues were, in effect, communicating with one another. The rodents’ muscles and livers, for instance, shared many molecular changes when the animals ran in their morning, but fewer when they jogged soon before bed.

“It was quite remarkable” to see how extensively exercise timing affected the levels and activities of so many molecules throughout the animals’ bodies, said Juleen Zierath, a professor of clinical integrative physiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and executive director of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen, who oversaw the new study.

Overall, the differences in molecular profiles between morning workouts (in mouse terms) and those later in their days tended to signal greater reliance on fat than blood sugar to fuel the early exercise. The opposite occurred when the mice ran in their evening. If those patterns held true in people, it might suggest morning exercise contributes more to fat loss, whereas late-day workouts might be better for blood-sugar control.

But mice are not people, and we do not know yet if the molecular patterns hold true in us. The study’s researchers are working on a comparable experiment involving people, Dr. Zierath said.

This study was also limited in scope, examining a single session of moderate aerobic exercise in male mice. It does not show how other kinds of exercise in the morning or evening affect the inner workings of mice or people. Nor does it tell us if what we eat or the time of day we eat, and whether chronotypes — whether we tend to be morning or evening people — play into these effects, or if being female matters.

But even with its limitations, “this is a very important study,” said Dr. Lisa Chow, a professor of medicine and endocrinology at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in this research. It underscores the potency of exercise at any time of day.

It also suggests that, as additional studies build on this one’s results, we may become better able to time our workouts to achieve specific health goals. Follow-up studies likely will tell us, for instance, if an evening bike ride or run might stave off diabetes more effectively than a morning brisk walk or swim.
But for now, Dr. Chow said, “the best time for people to exercise would be whenever they can get a chance to exercise.”










Is It Better to Exercise in the Morning or Evening?


Working out at different times of the day might have unique benefits for health, an ambitious new study in mice suggests.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Too Young to Feel So Old*
I was 43 when the pandemic began. I am now 60.
That would seem to defy the laws of physics and common sense, but the rate of aging is not so simple as it was once thought to be. And pandemic burnout, though not a condition listed in Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, is a real thing, a sapping of spirit, if not the body.
An article published last month in the scientific journal Nature suggested that the pandemic has accelerated the aging process, not only for the millions who have contracted the virus, but also for those affected by the upheaval and isolation of remote life.
Others have noted wrinkled skin, graying hair, creaky joints and a chronic _blah_ feeling described by the psychologist Adam Grant as “languishing.”
For many people who have had Covid-19, the arduous recovery has left them feeling “older than they are,” said Alicia Arbaje, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. For others, there is an impression of being thrown off course.

“It’s the sense of disconnect from your purpose: ‘Why am I even here?’” said Dr. Arbaje, who specializes in geriatric medicine. “Once you begin to lose touch with that, it creates a sense of chronic stress, which can directly accelerate aging.”
At her workplace, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, Dr. Arbaje has noticed what she called a “moral distress” among her colleagues and herself. It manifests itself in weight gain, dark circles under the eyes, hair loss, a bone-deep tiredness.
“It’s this lack of brightness,” Dr. Arbaje said. “The full extent of their person isn’t showing. They’re weary.”
Partly because of my job as a writer, which can leave me sedentary even in the best of times, I’ve spent nearly two years sitting hunched at my desk. Sometimes I switch it up and take my laptop to the couch. Even as thoughts of exercise pester me, I find I can’t pull myself away from the screen.
My world has shrunk in the two years I’ve been working from home. I find myself looking forward to the mail and “PBS NewsHour.” My favorite sweater, so proud and fresh in 2019, has gone limp and fuzzy. Now I call it my house sweater.

I couldn’t bring myself to join the Peloton craze or the running boom, and my aerobic capacity has gone way down. While carrying my young son up a hill, I got so winded that I considered driving myself to the hospital.
I described my pandemic rut to Ken Dychtwald, a psychologist and gerontologist, mentioning that it had left me feeling like a 60-year-old. Dr. Dychtwald, who is 71, did not take kindly to that remark, saying it showed “a profound level of ageism.”
There are plenty of people in their 60s, 70s and 80s who lead active lives, he told me, and they haven’t allowed the pandemic to dampen their spirits or keep them from exercising.
Dr. Dychtwald is part of this group. In addition to running his research and consulting company, Age Wave, with his wife, Maddy, he has gone swimming every day during the pandemic. He and his wife have also adopted an anti-inflammatory diet.
“And I practice yoga every day,” he said.
Still, he acknowledged the pandemic has been hard on everyone.
“I do agree with you that we have all aged,” Dr. Dychtwald said. “We’ve all gotten older during Covid in dramatic ways.”

I asked him if he had any ideas about why I felt so tired all the time and couldn’t bring myself to exercise.
“It’s probably depression,” he said. “You associate that with aging. This will pass.”
The perspective I lacked, he suggested, may come along by the time I’m actually 60.
“Older people are more inclined to feel gratitude for what they have experienced and what they have,” Dr. Dychtwald said. “Emotional intelligence rises as we age.”
The other day, with some effort, I laced up my running shoes and went for a jog. But can you really call it a jog when you go 10 blocks before the fire in your lungs makes you pull up heaving? After two years in a computer crouch, moving upright felt odd, unnatural, and I wondered if my decline was irreversible.
Dr. Arbaje, of Johns Hopkins, told me that was not the case.
“As long as we can get the body back into alignment, it’s a matter of letting it do what it knows how to do,” she said, “which is regenerate and recover.”
But she had an unsettling caveat: “Now whether Covid made a permanent impact and really shaved off a few years, it’s hard to tell. We won’t know, maybe for a few decades.”










Too Young to Feel So Old


After nearly two years spent in a computer crouch, my favorite sweater and I have gone fuzzy.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Burnout is not a medical condition — it’s “a manifestation of chronic unmitigated stress,” a scientist said. 

Insomnia, exhaustion, and head or stomach aches? Your body is trying to tell you something.


*Your Body Knows You’re Burned Out*










Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis, knows she’s edging toward burnout when she wakes up, feels instantly angry at her email inbox and doesn’t want to get out of bed. It’s perhaps not surprising that a mental health professional who is trying to stem the rising tide of burnout could burn out sometimes, too. After all, the phenomenon has practically become ubiquitous in our culture.
In a 2021 survey of 1,500 U.S. workers, more than half said they were feeling burned out as a result of their job demands, and a whopping 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in December in what has come to be known as the “great resignation.” When people think of burnout, mental and emotional symptoms such as feelings of helplessness and cynicism often come to mind. But burnout can lead to physical symptoms as well, and experts say it can be wise to look out for the signs and take steps when you notice them.
Burnout, as it is defined, is not a medical condition — it’s “a manifestation of chronic unmitigated stress,” explained Dr. Lotte Dyrbye, a physician scientist who studies burnout at the Mayo Clinic. The World Health Organization describes burnout as a workplace phenomenon characterized by feelings of exhaustion, cynicism and reduced efficacy.
“You start not functioning as well, you’re missing deadlines, you’re frustrated, you’re maybe irritable with your colleagues,” said Jeanette M. Bennett, a researcher who studies the effects of stress on health at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

But stress can have wear and tear effects on the body, especially when it doesn’t ease up after a while — so it makes sense that it can incite physical symptoms, too, Dr. Bennett said. When people are under stress, their bodies undergo changes that include making higher than normal levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline, epinephrine and norepinephrine. These changes are helpful in the short term — they give us the energy to power through difficult situations — but over time, they start harming the body.
Our bodies were “not designed for the kinds of stressors that we face today,” said Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent her career studying burnout.
Here’s how to recognize burnout in your body and what to do about it.
*What to look out for*
One common burnout symptom is insomnia, Dr. Dyrbye said. When researchers in Italy surveyed frontline health care workers with burnout during the first peak of the pandemic, they found that 55 percent reported having difficulty falling asleep, while nearly 40 percent had nightmares.
Research suggests that chronic stress interferes with the complicated neurological and hormonal system that regulates sleep. It’s a vicious cycle, because not sleeping throws this system even more out of whack. If you’ve noticed you’re unable to sleep at night, that could be a sign that you’re experiencing burnout, Dr. Dyrbye said — and your sleeplessness could exacerbate the problem.
Physical exhaustion is another common sign. Dr. Gold said that one of her key symptoms of burnout was fatigue. “I realized I was sleeping every day after work — and I was like, ‘What is wrong with me?’ but it was actually burnout,” she said.

Changes in eating habits — either eating more or less than usual — can also be a sign of burnout: In the study of Italian health care workers, 56 percent reported changes in food habits. People might eat less because they’re too busy or distracted, or they might find themselves craving “those comfort foods that we all like to go to when we need something to make us feel better,” Dr. Bennett said. Research suggests, too, that stress hormones can affect appetite, making people feel less hungry than usual when they’re under a lot of stress, and more hungry than usual when that stress alleviates.
Headaches and stomachaches can also be incited by burnout, Dr. Gold said. One study of people in Sweden suffering from exhaustion disorder — a medical condition similar to burnout — found that 67 percent reported experiencing nausea, gas or indigestion, and that 65 percent had headaches. It’s also important to note that burnout can develop alongside depression or anxiety, both of which can cause physical symptoms. Depression can cause muscle aches, stomachaches, sleep issues and appetite changes. Anxiety is linked to headaches, nausea and shortness of breath.
*What to do*
If you’re experiencing physical symptoms that could be indicative of burnout, consider seeing your primary care doctor or a mental health professional to determine whether they are driven by stress or rooted in other physical conditions, Dr. Dyrbye said. Don’t just ignore the symptoms and assume they don’t matter.
“It’s really easy to blow off your own symptoms, especially in our culture, where we’re taught to work hard,” Dr. Gold said.
If it is burnout, then the best solution is to address the root of the problem. Burnout is typically recognized when it is job-driven, but chronic stress can have a variety of causes — financial problems, relationship woes, and caregiving burdens, among other things. Think about “the pebbles in your shoe all the time that you have to deal with,” Dr. Maslach said, and brainstorm ways to remove some of them, at least some of the time. Perhaps you can ask your partner to help more with your toddler’s bedtime routine, or get take-out when you’re especially busy so you don’t have to plan dinner, too.
Despite popular culture coverage of the issue, burnout can’t be “fixed” with better self care, Dr. Maslach said — in fact, this implication only worsens the problem, because it lays the blame and responsibility on those with burnout and implies that they should do more to feel better, which is not the case, she said. However, some lifestyle choices can make burnout less likely. Social support, for instance, can help, Dr. Gold said. This could include talking to a therapist or meeting with friends (even if over Zoom). It may also help to take advantage of mental health or exercise benefits offered by your employer. Sleeping more can help too — so if you’re suffering from insomnia, talk to a doctor about possible treatments, Dr. Bennett suggested.
When burnout stems from job-related woes, it may help to request better working conditions. Dr. Maslach suggested brainstorming with co-workers and presenting your employer with ideas that would help — like providing quiet areas for breaks and personal phone calls, creating “no meeting” days so that employees can have more time to focus, or ensuring that there’s always coffee in the break room. Even small changes like these can make a dent in the risk for burnout if they fix a problem people face at work every day. “It’s the chronic job stressors that drive people really nuts after a while — they don’t have the right equipment, they don’t have the things they need, they don’t have enough people to do the work,” Dr. Maslach said.

Taking time off work could also help, but it’s likely only a temporary Band-Aid, Dr. Gold said. She compares it to using a bucket to empty water out of a sinking ship. “It’s still sinking, right? You have to do more than just occasionally take the water out,” she said. Still, it is important to take time off regularly, Dr. Dyrbye said.
Ultimately, you want to ensure you have some freedom and autonomy in your job, Dr. Gold said. “Anything you can do to regain an element of control can be really helpful,” she said. That could mean doing your least favorite work activity right before your break, so you have something to look forward to during the task and time to recover from it afterward. Or it could be trading a dreaded task with a co-worker and, in return, picking up their most hated task, which might not be so difficult for you.
Finally, while you may not want to add more to your plate, try to make a bit of time each day for something you love, Dr. Dyrbye said. Her work has found that surgeons who make time for hobbies and recreation — even just 15 to 20 minutes a day — are less likely to experience burnout than surgeons who don’t.
“You have to have something outside of work that helps you de-stress, that helps you focus and helps you relax,” she said.









Your Body Knows You’re Burned Out


Here’s how to recognize the physical symptoms of work-related stress — and what to do about them.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

The simplest take-aways for weight loss in general: (1) It happens in the kitchen (2) CICO (calories in calories out) (3) The best exercise is the one you enjoy and are going to do consistently


*THE CALORIE COUNTER*

On a warm Wednesday morning in October, Herman Pontzer puts on a wrinkled lab coat, adjusts his mask, and heads into his lab at Duke University, hoping to stress out a student. An undergraduate named Christina is resting on a lab table with her head in a clear plastic hood. Pontzer greets her formally and launches into a time-honored method to boost her blood pressure: He gives her an oral math test.

“Start off with number 1022 and subtract 13 until you get to zero,” he says, speaking at full volume to be heard over a clanking air conditioner. “If you make a mistake, we’ll start over again. You ready to go?”

“1009, 997,” Christina says.

“Start over,” Pontzer barks.

Christina, who has signed up for a “stress test,” laughs nervously. She tries again and gets to 889, only to have Pontzer stop her. This happens again and again. Then Pontzer asks her to multiply 505 by 117, out loud. By this point, she is clenching her sock-clad toes.

Postdoc Zane Swanson and undergrad Gabrielle Butler monitor her heart rate and how much carbon dioxide (CO2) she exhales into the hood. Then Pontzer asks a set of questions designed to boost a student’s stress levels: What’s her dream job, and what exactly is she going to do after graduation?

It’s another day in the Pontzer lab, where he and his students measure how much energy people expend when they are stressed, exercising, or mounting an immune response to a vaccine, among other states. By measuring the CO2 in Christina’s breath, he is finding out how much energy she has burned while coping with math anxiety.

At 44, Pontzer’s life’s work as a biological anthropologist is counting calories. It’s not to lose weight—at 1.85 meters tall and about 75 kilograms (6 feet 1 inch and 165 pounds), with a passion for running and rock climbing, he is “a skinny to normal size dude,” in the words of an online reviewer of Pontzer’s 2021 book _Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy_.

Pontzer is happy to expound on weight loss on _The Dr. Oz Show_ and NPR, but his real mission is to understand how, alone among great apes, humans manage to have it all, energetically speaking: We have big brains, lengthy childhoods, many children, and long lives. The energy budget needed to support those traits involves trade-offs he’s trying to unravel, between energy spent on exercise, reproduction, stress, illness, and vital functions.

By borrowing a method developed by physiologists studying obesity, Pontzer and colleagues systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life. The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass.

Pontzer’s skill as a popularizer can rankle some of his colleagues. His message that exercise won’t help you lose weight “lacks nuance,” says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits.

But others say besides busting myths about human energy expenditure, Pontzer’s work offers a new lens for understanding human physiology and evolution. As he wrote in _Burn_, “In the economics of life, calories are the currency.”

“His work is revolutionary,” says paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello, past president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which has funded Pontzer’s work. “We now have data … that has given us a completely new framework for how we think about how humans adapted to energetic limits.”

THE SON OF TWO high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian hills near the small town of Kersey, Pennsylvania. His dad, who helped build their house, taught Pontzer to be curious about how things worked and to fix them. “No one ever called plumbers or electricians,” Pontzer recalls.

Those lessons in self-sufficiency and an outgoing nature helped him cope when his dad died when Pontzer was just 15. An older cousin also took him climbing, which taught him to be both brave and organized—skills he says later helped him take intellectual risks and challenge established ideas. “When you have a bad experience and life plucks you off your track, it’s scary,” Pontzer says. “You have to move forward, though, and that teaches you not to be scared of new things.”

Pontzer applied to a single college—Pennsylvania State University, whose football games were a highlight of his childhood. “I assumed I’d be my dad—go to Penn State, get my teaching degree, and stay in Kersey,” he says. But once at Penn State, he worked with the late, renowned paleoanthropologist Alan Walker and found himself considering grad school in biological anthropology.

After learning his promising student was choosing schools based on their proximity to mountains, Walker was blunt: He told Pontzer he was an idiot if he didn’t apply to Harvard University—and, once Pontzer was accepted, he’d be an idiot if he didn’t go.

Pontzer went. In the early 2000s, scientists knew little about humans’ total energy expenditure (TEE)—the number of kilocalories (the “calories” on food labels) a person’s 37 trillion cells burn in 24 hours. Researchers had measured the rate at which our bodies burn energy while at rest—the basal metabolic rate (BMR), which includes energy used for breathing, circulation, and other vital functions. They knew BMR was roughly the same among larger mammals, when adjusted for body size. So although BMR only captures 50% to 70% of total energy use, researchers figured that, kilo for kilo, humans burn energy at roughly the same rate as other apes.

But humans have an added energy expense: our big brains, which account for 20% of our energy use per day. Aiello had proposed that our ancestors had compensated for those expensive brains by evolving smaller guts and other organs. Others thought humans had saved energy by evolving to walk and run more efficiently.

At Harvard, Pontzer wanted to test those ideas. But he realized there weren’t enough data to do so: No one knew how much total energy primates use when they move, much less how differences in anatomy or trade-offs in organ size impact energy use. “We talked about locomotor adaptations in hominins, we talked about efficiency, power, and strength, but it [was] all sort of made up,” Pontzer says.

He realized he had to go back to basics, measuring the calories expended by humans and animals walking and running on treadmills. Mammals use oxygen to convert sugars from food into energy, with CO2 as a byproduct. The more CO2 a mammal exhales, the more oxygen—and calories—it has burned.

For his Ph.D. thesis, Pontzer measured how much CO2 dogs and goats exhaled while running and walking. He found, for example, that dogs with long legs used less energy to run than corgis, as he reported in 2007, soon after he got his first job at Washington University in St. Louis. Over time, he says, “What started as an innocent project measuring the cost of walking and running in humans, dogs, and goats grew into a sort of professional obsession with measuring energy expenditures.”

Pontzer still measures exhaled CO2 to get at calories burned in a particular activity, as he did with Christina’s stress test. But he found that physiologists had developed a better way to measure TEE over a day: the doubly labeled water method, which measures TEE without asking a subject to breathe into a hood all day.

Physiologist Dale Schoeller, now at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had adapted the method, first used in mice, to humans. People drink a harmless cocktail of labeled water, in which distinct isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen replace the common forms. Then researchers sample their urine several times over 1 week. The labeled hydrogen passes through the body into urine, sweat, and other fluids, but as a person burns calories, some of the labeled oxygen is exhaled as CO2. The ratio of labeled oxygen to labeled hydrogen in the urine thus serves as a measure of how much oxygen a person’s cells used on average in a day and therefore how many calories were burned. The method is the gold standard for total energy use, but it costs $600 per test and was out of reach for most evolutionary biologists.

Pontzer’s first of many breakthroughs with the method came in 2008 when, with $20,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, he got the chance to collect urine samples at what was then the Great Ape Trust, a sanctuary and research center in Iowa. There, primatologist Rob Shumaker poured isotope-laced sugar-free iced tea into the mouths of four orangutans. Pontzer worried about collecting the urine from a full-grown ape, but Shumaker reassured him the orangs were trained to pee in a cup.

Later that fall, when Pontzer got the urine results, he didn’t believe them: The orangutans burned one-third of the energy expected for a mammal their size. A retest returned the same results: Azy, a 113-kilogram adult male, for example, burned 2050 kilocalories per day, much less than the 3300 a 113-kilogram man typically burns. “I was in total disbelief,” Pontzer says. Orangs were perhaps the “sloths in the ape family tree,” he thought, because they suffered prolonged food scarcity in their past and had evolved to survive on fewer calories per day.

Subsequent doubly labeled water studies of apes in captivity and in sanctuaries shattered the consensus view that mammals all have similar metabolic rates when adjusted for body mass. Among great apes, humans are the outlier. When adjusted for body mass, we burn 20% more energy per day than chimps and bonobos, 40% more than gorillas, and 60% more than orangutans, Pontzer and colleagues reported in _Nature_ in 2016.

Pontzer says the difference in body fat is just as shocking: Male humans pack on twice as much fat as other male apes and women three times as much as other female apes. He thinks our hefty body fat evolved in tandem with our faster metabolic rate: Fat burns less energy than lean tissue and provides a fuel reserve. “Our metabolic engines were not crafted by millions of years of evolution to guarantee a beach-ready bikini body,” Pontzer writes in _Burn_.

Our ability to convert food and fat stores into energy faster than other apes has important payoffs, however: It gives us more energy every day so we can fuel our big brains as well as feed and protect offspring with long, energetically costly childhoods.

Pontzer thinks characteristically human traits in behavior and anatomy help us maintain amped-up metabolisms. For example, humans routinely share more food with other adults than do other apes. Sharing food is more efficient for the group, and would have given early humans an energy safety net. And our big brains created a positive feedback loop. They demanded more energy but also gave early humans the smarts to invent better tools, control fire, cook, and adapt in other ways to get or save more energy.

PONTZER GOT A LESSON in the value of food sharing in 2010, when he traveled to Tanzania to study the energy budgets of the Hadza hunter-gatherers. One of the first things he noticed was how often the Hadza used the word “za,” which means “to give.” It’s the magic word all Hadza learn as children to get someone to share berries, honey, or other foods with them. Such sharing helps all the Hadza be active: As they hunt and forage, Hadza women walk about 8 kilometers daily; men, 14 kilometers—more than a typical American walks in 1 week.

To learn about their energy expenditure, Pontzer asked the Hadza whether they’d drink his tasteless water cocktail and give urine samples. They agreed. He almost couldn’t get funding for the study, because other researchers assumed the answer was obvious. “Everyone knew the Hadza had exceptionally high energy expenditures because they were so physically active,” he recalls. “Except they didn’t.”

Individual Hadza had days of more and less activity, and some burned 10% more or less calories than average. But when adjusted for nonfat body mass, Hadza men and women burned the same amount of energy per day on average as men and women in the United States, as well as those in Europe, Russia, and Japan, he reported in _PLOS ONE_ in 2012. “It’s surprising when you consider the differences in physical activity,” Schoeller says.

One person who wasn’t surprised was epidemiologist Amy Luke at Loyola University Chicago. She’d already gotten a similar result with doubly labeled water studies, showing female farmers in western Africa used the same amount of energy daily when adjusted for fat-free body mass as women in Chicago —about 2400 kilocalories for a 75-kilogram woman. Luke says her work was not well known—until Pontzer’s paper made a splash. The two have collaborated ever since.

Pontzer is “very good at selling big ideas,” whether on social media or writing for general audiences, says his former postdoc, Sam Urlacher of Baylor University. “That ruffles some feathers, but he’s not afraid of being proven wrong.”

Studies of other hunter-gatherer and forager groups have confirmed the Hadza are not an anomaly. Pontzer thinks hunter-gatherers’ bodies adjust for more activity by spending fewer calories on other unseen tasks, such as inflammation and stress responses. “Instead of increasing the calories burned per day, the Hadza’s physical activity was changing the way they spend their calories,” he says.

He backed this up with a new analysis of data from another team’s study of sedentary women trained to run half marathons: After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train. In another study of marathoners who ran 42.6 kilometers daily 6 days per week for 140 days in the Race Across the USA, Pontzer and his colleagues found the runners burned gradually less energy over time—4900 calories per day at the end of the race compared with 6200 calories at the start.

As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs, Pontzer says. Conversely, if you’re a couch potato, you might still spend almost as many calories daily, leaving more energy for your body to spend on internal processes such as a stress response.

This is Pontzer’s “most controversial and interesting idea,” says Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman, who was Pontzer’s thesis adviser. “This morning I ran about 5 miles; I spent about 500 calories running. In a very simplistic model that would mean my TEE would be 500 calories higher. … According to Herman, humans who are more active don’t have that much higher TEE as you’d predict … but we still don’t know why or how that occurs.”

Pontzer’s findings have a discouraging implication for people wanting to lose weight. “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” says evolutionary physiologist John Speakman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s one of those zombie ideas that refuses to die.” Already the research is influencing dietary guidelines for nutrition and weight loss. The U.K. National Food Strategy, for example, notes that “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”

But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.

Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”

Meanwhile, Pontzer was laying the groundwork for other surprises. Last year, he and Speakman co-led an effort to assemble a remarkable new resource, the International Atomic Energy Agency Doubly Labelled Water Database. This includes existing doubly labeled water studies of almost 6800 people between the ages of 8 days and 95 years.

They used the database to do the first comprehensive study of human energy use over the life span. Again a popular assumption was at stake: that teenagers and pregnant women have higher metabolisms. But Pontzer found it was toddlers who are the dynamos. Newborns have the same metabolic rate as their pregnant mothers, which is no different from other women when adjusted for body size. But between the ages of 9 and 15 months, babies expend 50% more energy in a day than do adults, when adjusted for body size and fat (see graphic, above). That’s likely to fuel their growing brain and, perhaps, developing immune systems. The findings, reported in _Science_, help explain why malnourished infants may show stunted growth.

Children’s metabolisms stay high, when adjusted for body size, until about age 5, when they begin a slow decline until age 20, and stabilize in adulthood. Humans begin to use less energy at age 60, and by age 90, elders use 26% less than middle-aged adults.

Pontzer is now probing a mystery that emerged from his studies of athletes: There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy. He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.

Speakman thinks that limit is too low, noting that cyclists in the Tour de France in the 1980s and ’90s exceeded it. But they were injecting fat and glucose directly into their bloodstreams, a practice Pontzer thinks might have helped them bypass the physiological limits on converting food into energy. Elite athletes can push the limits for several months, as the study of marathoners showed, but can’t sustain it indefinitely, Pontzer says.

To understand how the body can fuel intense exercise or fight off disease without busting energy limits, Pontzer and his students are exploring how the body tamps down other activities. “I think we’re going to find these adjustments lower inflammation, lower our stress reaction. We do it to make the energy books balance.”

That’s why he wanted to know how much energy Christina burned while he grilled her in the lab. After the test, Christina said she “definitely was stressed.” As it went on her heart rate rose from 75 to 80 beats per minute to 115. And her energy use rose from 1.2 kilocalories per minute to as much as 1.7 kilocalories per minute.

“She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test and 30% in the interview,” Pontzer says. “Think about any other process that boosts your energy by about 40%.”

He hopes data points like hers will help reveal the hidden cost of mental stress. Measuring how stress and immune reactions amp up energy use could help reveal how these invisible activities add up and are traded off in our daily energy budgets. Pontzer knows he’s got his work cut out for him. “Until we can show how the levers get pulled to make these adjustments in energy use, people will always be skeptical. It’s on us to do the next generation of experiments.”









This scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories—and why


The work of evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer shows why humans are the fattest, highest energy apes




www.science.org


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Canadian study offers important clue to why some back pain becomes chronic*
A study conducted by researchers at McGill University and scientists from Italy suggests that blocking inflammation after injury might make that pain chronic — a finding that challenges the standard approach to treating pain.

Chronic pain — especially in the lower back — is a common ailment, but scientists don't know why some back injuries resolve themselves while others cause suffering for years.

In this study, researchers found that neutrophils, a type of white blood cell that helps the body fight infection and dominates the early stages of inflammation, play a key role in resolving pain. 

Jeffrey Mogil, researcher of the study and professor of psychology at McGill University, says standard medical practice for treatment of short lasting pain after injury might be the opposite of what we should be doing.

"We think that chronic pain develops because of inflammation so we think inflammation is bad and we should stop it. But what this study suggests is that yes, but at the cost of increasing your chances to develop chronic pain," Mogil said.

While the findings have not yet been tested on humans in a clinical trial, several pain experts that are not affiliated with the study say it suggests a new way to look at how the body heals.

*Testing blood cells and mice *
The study, which was published in Science Translational Medicine last Wednesday, was conducted by nearly two dozen researchers who examined pain in three phases, using human blood cells and mice trials 

They examined the blood cells of 98 patients with acute low back pain and looked for markers of inflammation. Three months later, they did the same test — comparing those who still had persistent pain and those who didn't. 

The patients whose pain had gone away showed more inflammation on the first visit, which seemed to be driven by neutrophils, a type of white blood cell. On the second visit, their blood cells showed a change in gene expression in several thousand genes.

"People who didn't resolve their pain, absolutely nothing happened in their blood," said Dr. Luda Diatchenko, another researcher of the study and professor of dentistry and medicine at McGill University. Both groups of patients used anti-inflammatory drugs, she said. 

Researchers tested on mice and confirmed that blocking inflammation using drugs relieved them of pain short term, as judged by their sensitivity to touch. But the drugs prolonged the resolution of their pain — turning the acute pain into something more chronic.

In the last phase of the study, they examined data of 500,000 people from the United Kingdom Biobank, a database of medical information obtained from half a million volunteers. 

Researchers found those taking anti-inflammatory drugs, like ibuprofen, naproxen, and diclofenac to treat their pain were much more likely to have pain two to 10 years later — a correlation that's consistent with their other findings, but can't determine what caused the ongoing pain.


They also found those who took other painkillers, such as acetaminophen (Tylenol), were less likely to have of chronic pain compared to those who took anti-inflammatory medication. 

*Study should be taken seriously, says pain doctor*
Dr. Hance Clarke, medical director of the pain research unit at Toronto General Hospital, says around 18 per cent of the population struggle with chronic back pain. 

Even without randomized clinical trials, Clarke said there are implications to understanding what happens differently between acute and chronic pain.

"This is a pretty landmark finding," he said in an interview with CBC News. 

"To find a molecular basis that relates to those who will go on to have a chronic pain problem versus those who are going to avoid that should be taken pretty seriously."

Clarke says the mainstay treatment for a back injury should be heat, physiotherapy, stretching, massage and then potentially medication. 

"What these researchers showed was that, you know, we could trial other medications other than anti-inflammatory first potentially," he said.

Clarke says there's a natural immune response that needs to occur after injury. 

"We still need to really figure out at what point in time we should be intervening in that natural process, because it's clearly shown that if you have a high number of these white cells … that you may actually do better in the long run," he said. 

But until the results are tested through human trials, Clarke still advises patients who can't get out of bed due to pain to take an anti-inflammatory drug to help themselves function again. 

"We don't want the message to be … you should be in intractable pain for an extended period of time because this is the natural process," he said. 

*Clinical trial coming *
Clarke says around 90 per cent of people with an acute injury will find their pain goes away. 

Steven Katz, who lives in Toronto, is in the other 10 per cent; he's been having pain in his lower back for years and an action as simple as picking up a pencil can cause a flare-up. 

"It's kind of like a stabbing pain and it gets to the point where I can't really walk," he said. 

Katz sees his physiotherapist, Lauren Roberts, frequently for exercise and acupuncture. But on days when he can't get out of bed, he reaches for medication like Robax and Advil. 

Now hearing about this study, Katz says he might wait longer before taking his painkiller medication. 

"I'm not surprised…. At the same time, I'm allergic to pain," he said. "It depends on the level of pain, frankly." 

Roberts, who founded the Running Physio clinic in Toronto, says she's not surprised by the study's findings either — especially since similar discussions were taking place in the sports medicine field in 2015.

"There might be perhaps a negative side effect of taking NSAIDs [non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs], especially earlier in that inflammatory cycle that happens in the body. But people tend to not like to hear that, Roberts said. 

"That first 24 to 48 [hours], I would say if you can get through it, try and see if you can." 

Mogil says the team is preparing to confirm their work through randomized controlled trials with humans.

"What we're saying here is pretty radical…. It overturns decades of standard practice and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," he said. 

"We used to care basically entirely about what produces pain and all the research was on that and now I think more people are realizing that maybe the better idea, is to try to figure out why pain goes away."



https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/mcgill-university-inflammation-chronic-pain-study-1.6458382


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*The Case Against Stretching*
Scientists are increasingly skeptical of the benefits of flexibility, but the fitness world doesn’t want to hear it



To be honest, writing another “stretching is useless” article feels a little bit like spiking the football. A decade ago, whenever I wrote about evidence suggesting that traditional static stretching doesn’t have any obvious benefits and might even impair performance, I’d get a stream of angry messages upbraiding me for my ignorance. These days, the battle is over. No one is obsessed with touching their toes anymore.

Or so I thought. But when I saw a new opinion piece in _Sports Medicine_ titled “The Case for Retiring Flexibility as a Major Component of Physical Fitness,” I couldn’t resist giving it a look. And one of the stats in the article caught my eye. According to a 2016 study of 605 personal trainers in the U.S.—virtually all of whom had certifications from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) or the National Strength and Conditioning Association—80 percent of them still prescribed traditional static stretching to their clients. The battle’s not over after all.

The main spur for the _Sports Medicine_ article, by exercise scientist James Nuzzo, is the fact that flexibility is still pegged as one of the five “major components” of physical fitness, alongside body composition, cardiovascular endurance, muscle endurance, and muscle strength, by the ACSM. The 2018 edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, from the Department of Health and Human Services, also lists flexibility among its big five (this time alongside cardiorespiratory fitness, musculoskeletal fitness, balance, and speed).

If you actually flip through these documents, you’ll experience a bizarre cognitive dissonance. The Guidelines state repeatedly that “flexibility activities are an appropriate part of a physical activity program, even though their health benefits are unknown and it is unclear whether they reduce risk of injury.” _Um… then why are we recommending them?_ That’s the question Nuzzo attempts to answer in a detailed review that cites over 300 references.

Let’s start with a definition: the paper focuses on static flexibility, as exemplified by the sit-and-reach test, in which you see how close you can come to touching your toes (or how far beyond them you can reach) while sitting on the floor with legs outstretched. The best way to improve static flexibility is with static stretching, which involves pushing to the edge of your range of motion and holding a position for, say, 20 to 30 seconds. This is quite different from dynamic stretching, which is more like a form of calisthenics that involves moving muscles through their typical range of motion.

So what does being flexible do for you? According to the research Nuzzo summarizes, greater flexibility as measured by the sit-and-reach test isn’t associated with longer life—unlike the ACSM’s other four “major components” of physical fitness. It also doesn’t predict more successful aging (like avoiding falls), except in ways that are better predicted by muscle strength.

Contrary to a half-century of locker-room wisdom, being flexible doesn’t seem to protect you from injury either. This topic is the focus of hundreds of studies, and there are admittedly a few that do find benefits. At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few that find that being too flexible is also associated with injury. But overall, it just doesn’t seem to make much difference. It’s also not associated with non-sports-related problems like low-back pain.

And finally, being flexible doesn’t improve your sports performance—unless you’re doing something where range of motion has a direct impact. If you’re a gymnast or a ballerina or a hockey goaltender, you’d better be flexible. Even as a cyclist, you need enough flexibility to be able to get into an aerodynamic riding position and still pedal comfortably. If you’re a runner, on the other hand, you’re highly unlikely to sustain an injury that has any connection to your inability to touch your toes. In fact, there’s some evidence that greater flexibility makes you a less efficient runner, presumably because having tight “springs” in your legs allows you to store and return more energy with each stride.

So flexibility itself doesn’t seem to be a big deal. Is there still a role for stretching as part of a warm-up or warm-down? A Cochrane Review back in 2007 concluded that stretching before, during, or after a workout doesn’t do anything to prevent subsequent muscle soreness. It doesn’t seem to reduce injury risk either.

I’ll acknowledge a caveat here. Most of these studies involve assigning an identical stretching program to a group of people, regardless of their initial level of flexibility and their individual idiosyncrasies and imbalances. That doesn’t seem to work. But what if you, personally, have an unusually tight left IT band, or a chronically tight calves? Could targeted stretching of your identified weak spots reduce your risk of injury or help rehab an existing injury? Here, too, the evidence is slim at best—but this is a hard question to study, so I’d leave it in the “plausible” category.

As for performance, there’s solid evidence that holding a stretch for a minute or more temporarily decreases strength and speed for up to an hour, likely due to changes in the neuromuscular signaling from brain to muscle. That’s a pretty harsh irony: all the stretching that I did religiously before every race in the 1990s and early 2000s might have actually dulled my edge.

To be fair, I’m glossing over some details here. We could spend hours parsing the evidence for whether the loss of strength after stretching is significant, how long it lasts, and so on. But if you zoom out to the big picture, the important point isn’t whether stretching is a tiny bit good, a tiny bit bad, or neutral—it’s that any benefits, at least on a population level, are pretty much invisible.

So anointing flexibility as one of the five “major components” of physical fitness gives it undeserved importance, and leads people (including, apparently, personal trainers) to spend time that could otherwise be devoted to other activities with far better return on investment.

Nuzzo suggests that strength training is an ideal alternative. Sure, it makes you strong and has all sorts of other long-term health benefits—but if you use your full range of motion while doing it, it can also make you more flexible, with various studies showing increases in sit-and-reach scores of between 10 and 25 percent. Aerobic exercise and other forms of functional and combined training can also boost flexibility, according to a few studies. Basically, it appears that being healthy and active is enough to maintain a reasonable level of flexibility.

As for what to do before exercise, the state-of-the-art among pro athletes has shifted away from static stretching toward a three-stage dynamic warm-up:


Start with an easy jog (or spin or swim or whatever) to raise your body temperature.
Then progress to some dynamic stretching drills that move your muscle through (and a bit beyond) the full range of motion they’ll encounter during the workout. For runners, that might mean high knees, butt kicks, walking lunges, and side skips.
Finish with some short bursts that approach the full intensity of the coming workout, like relaxed 15-second sprints.
The overall goal of this warm-up isn’t to extend your maximum range of motion, but to physically warm your muscles up to make them softer and more pliable (along with various other things like getting your heart rate up so it’s ready to deliver oxygen to your muscles). A warm-up like this is a good idea before an interval workout or race; if you’re just heading out for a run, simply easing into it by starting the first mile slowly is probably good enough.

Or maybe it’s not. Perhaps you know from years of experience that you feel like crap if you run without stretching first, and feel great if you do stretch. Or maybe you just like the feeling of being flexible: I can’t deny that, as the parent of a couple of young kids, I kind of wish I could sit cross-legged on the floor more comfortably. If so, then stretch to your heart’s content—but do it because you want to be more flexible or you like the feeling, not because you imagine it will prolong your life, protect you from injury, or boost your athletic performance.









The Case Against Stretching


Scientists are increasingly skeptical of the benefits of flexibility, but the fitness world doesn’t want to hear it




www.outsideonline.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Sugar is addictive. I see the evidence in people's shopping carts. Get off the Sugar Train completely and you will lose cravings, and lose weight. Natural fats are your friend and will assist you with resisting over-eating.


----------



## DennisT (Dec 29, 2019)

Well, I'm in the process of finding out. My last checkup showed my cholesterol way up, so I've changed my diet (literally last Saturday). Not particularly reducing calories, just choosing meals and snacks that are healthier. Let's see what happens.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*How Cycling Affects Your Run Metrics*










When Alistair Brownlee stormed to his second successive Olympic triathlon gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics, he ate up the 10km run in a swift 31 minutes and nine seconds. Gwen Jorgensen won the women’s gold, blasting through the 10km run in 34 minutes and nine seconds. Analyze both runs and the captivating images are of both elites executing pitch-perfect running form — as you’d expect from athletes at the peak of their powers.

Sadly, back on planet age-grouper, things were very different when the biomechanics of cycling and then running are placed beneath a microscope. It seems the prospect of injury is heightened if your form isn’t like Brownlee’s or Jorgensen’s.

*Running Injuries Are Further Impacted by Cycling*
Around 70% of injuries reported in triathlon occur during, or because of, the run. That’s not surprising, as the weight-bearing nature of running, though good for bone health, is more stressful on the joints and muscles than both swimming and cycling. 

According to research, this specter of injury is further impacted by the previous bike section. A team from Miami University examined a group of triathletes’ running posture and movement patterns in what’s called the “sagittal plane.” This is also called the “longitudinal plane,” and anatomically divides the body into right and left parts.

The US researchers examined the running patterns of 28 recreational triathletes who ran at a self-selected speed on a customized treadmill, both before and after riding a bike for 30 minutes. Their cycling intensity was based on their rate of perceived exertion (RPE), with the athletes told to settle into the range of 12-14 out of 20, which translates as moderate to somewhat hard.

Twelve cameras surrounded each runner (and treadmill) to capture the triathletes’ 3D kinematics at different times (at 2, 6, 10, and 14 minutes) during the run. The goal was to understand how 30 minutes in the cycling position influenced their subsequent running biomechanics.

*Leaning Too Far After the Bike*
The results? It’s perhaps of no great surprise that running movement was significantly impacted by spending 30 minutes in the prolonged and trunk-flexed cycling position. Whereas the likes of Brownlee and Jorgensen flow gracefully from bike to run, striding into a sustainable, efficient, and fast tempo, the recreational triathletes saw greater peak angles for anterior (forward) pelvic tilt; an increase in hip flexion and spine extension; and a decrease in hip extension across all the time points.

Essentially this meant a greater forward lean around the pelvic area and exaggerated hip flexion. This resulted in a forward-leaning posture that resulted in a far-from-optimum stride length.

These inefficiencies and changes were noticeable in the sagittal plane, specifically at the spine, pelvis and hip, leading the researchers to conclude that these alterations were enough to increase injury risk and, of course, impact running performance.

These effects are not ideal, but not terminal either. There are plenty of solutions for age groupers hoping to improve their run — one being hip-flexor stretching. A simple exercise is easing into the lunge position and gently applying pressure to the buttocks of the rear leg in a forward direction to increase the stretch intensity. A more complete gluteal and lower-back strengthening program will also improve hip extension and running posture after cycling.

There’s also evidence from a study in Spain that plyometric training bulletproofs the triathlete’s body so that they’re more resilient to neurological fatigue when transitioning from bike to run; in fact, the researchers showed a significant improvement in the first kilometer post-T2 due to better biomechanics.

*Correcting Inefficient Stride*
Again intuitively, the cycling portion also affects running efficiency, or economy, according to a further study from Australia. Broadly speaking, good running economy equates to expending less energy for a given pace. This is especially attractive at higher speeds where you burn through limited glycogen (your muscle’s carbohydrate stores) stores at a swift rate.

The Aussie team analyzed the running economy, muscle activity and limb movement along the sagittal plane of 15 moderately-trained triathletes, again either following the bike (this time a 45-minute high-intensity ride) or with no preceding cycle.

What did they find? That muscle recruitment and kinematics during running was significantly changed post-cycle in seven of the 15 triathletes. This alteration realized a significant drop in running economy, leading to greater oxygen uptake to sustain the same running speed. Interestingly, a change in ankle angle when the foot contacted the ground accounted for about two-thirds of the reduction in running economy.

Strategies to rectify the situation include building optimum ankle strength and flexibility via such simple exercises as calf raises and suitable stretches. And even exaggerating the ankle movement when pedaling (also known as ‘ankling’) a few minutes ahead of T2 to prepare you for the run. Spinning at a lower gear is also beneficial for the change from pedaling to striding.

With a few strengthening and stretching exercises, you can bike and run into 2021 with the stylish, efficient, and injury-reduced biomechanics of a Brownlee or Jorgensen.



















How Cycling Affects Your Run Metrics | TrainingPeaks


Cycling and running aren’t always complimentary—these tips will maximize your ability to run fast off the bike.




www.trainingpeaks.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*A New Study Points to a Surprisingly Simple Way to Ward Off Knee Pain*


A promising new study suggests that walking could ward off knee pain for people with osteoarthritis.

Researchers surveyed over 1,000 people ages 50 or older with knee osteoarthritis, the most common type of arthritis in the United States. Some had persistent pain at the outset, while others did not. After four years, those who started off without frequent knee pain and walked for exercise at least 10 times were less likely to experience new, regular bouts of stiffness or aches around their knees and had less structural damage in their knees. The study suggested that people with knee osteoarthritis who are bowlegged might particularly benefit from walking.

The research offers the potential of an easy — and free — way to combat one of the most common culprits of knee pain among older adults.
The findings represent “a paradigm shift,” said Dr. Grace Hsiao-Wei Lo, an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the lead author on the study. “Everyone’s always looking for some kind of drug. This highlights the importance and likelihood that interventions for osteoarthritis might be something different, including good old exercise.” The research suggests that exercise could help manage osteoarthritis in other joints, she added, like those in the hips, hands and feet.

Osteoarthritis, sometimes referred to as “wear and tear” arthritis, affects over 32.5 million adults in the U.S. and occurs when the joint cartilage breaks down and the underlying bone begins to change, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The risk of developing the condition increases as you age, and around a third of people over 60 have knee osteoarthritis, Dr. Lo said. Many patients take medications like ibuprofen or naproxen to treat the pain, she added, which in large doses can lead to kidney issues and ulcers.

Instead, they may be able to turn to exercise. For decades, health experts saw walking primarily as a way to boost cardiovascular health, said Dr. Elaine Husni, a rheumatologist at Cleveland Clinic who was not involved in the study. In recent years, though, doctors have looked to low-impact workouts to treat conditions like depression, cognitive impairment and mild osteoarthritis. But the new study shows that walking can also act as a preventive measure, Dr. Lo said, and suggests that people who are at higher risk of developing the condition may want to incorporate a regular walk into their routine. For instance, Dr. Lo herself said that, based on her findings, she should walk more, as her mother has osteoarthritis.

The study began in 2004 and documented participants’ baseline knee pain, using radiographs to assess their osteoarthritis. Researchers then asked participants to document their exercise habits and reviewed their symptoms at regular follow-up visits, asking how frequently their knees hurt.

After four years, 37 percent of the study participants who did not walk for exercise (not including the occasional trip to the train or grocery store) developed new, frequent knee pain, compared with 26 percent who did walk.

Of course, researchers cannot definitively say that walking staved off knee pain, and it did not appear to lessen existing pain. Self assessments can be less accurate than fitness trackers or step counters. And the researchers did not track the distance or frequency that people walked, nor did they recommend strategies for how and when people with osteoarthritis should incorporate walking into their exercise routines.

Still, the results bolster what clinicians already understand about how to manage osteoarthritis. Consistent movement can help create muscle mass, strengthening ligaments around the joints that have osteoarthritis, Dr. Husni said. Walking is a low-intensity, low-impact workout, allowing people to maintain the strength and flexibility that are critical for healthy joints, she added.

“It’s an intervention that anyone can do,” she said. “You have no excuse. You can do it anywhere you are.”

Those who are already in pain should be careful to not overdo exercise, though, said Dr. Justen Elbayar, a sports medicine specialist in the orthopedic surgery department at NYU Langone Health who was also not involved in the study. Walking long distances might exacerbate aches in some patients with severe arthritis, he said — but for those with smaller amounts of arthritis, “it’s one of the best exercises you can do.”

He recommends that people start with a small, short walk, gradually building up distance over time. The goal of the exercise is to provide muscular support to an arthritic knee, he said, and to let the joints, tendons and tissues become acclimated to the walking.

He also suggested using supportive shoes, drinking plenty of water during a walk and taking frequent rests if tired or new to it. After a long walk, icing the knee may also help relieve discomfort, he added.

While a stroll down the street can’t repair cartilage or remedy existing pain, the exercise offers a compelling and accessible option for staving off the more intrusive aspects of osteoarthritis, Dr. Lo said. After all, she added, “walking doesn’t cost a cent.”










A New Study Points to a Surprisingly Simple Way to Ward Off Knee Pain


Encouraging new research suggests walking could help prevent new bouts of knee pain in people with osteoarthritis.




www.nytimes.com


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*You Won’t Live Longer by Diet or Exercise Alone, Study Says*
Sprawling new research showed that healthy eating and regular workouts do not, in isolation, stave off later health issues. They need to be done together.

Health food or exercise alone isn’t enough to prevent chronic disease, new research shows. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t outrun the toll of a poor diet — and healthy eating, on its own, won’t ward off disease.
Most people know that working out and eating well are critical components of overall health. But a sweeping study published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that hitting the gym won’t counteract the consequences of consuming fat-laden foods, and mainlining kale can’t cancel out sedentary habits.
“Sensationalized headlines and misleading advertisement for exercise regimens to lure consumers into the idea of ‘working out to eat whatever they want’ have fueled circulation of the myth about ‘exercise outrunning a bad diet,’” the study authors wrote.

Previous animal studies as well as a few human ones have backed this up, suggesting that, at least in the short term, strenuous exercise can counteract the effects of overeating.

So an international team of researchers examined data from nearly 350,000 participants collected from the U.K. Biobank, an enormous medical database with health information from people across Britain, and followed up over a decade-long period. The study participants, median age 57, were healthy at the outset of the study, meaning they were not diagnosed with conditions like cardiovascular disease, cancer or chronic pain.

Analyzing self-reported questionnaires, the experts broke people’s diets down by quality. For instance, high-quality diets had at least 4.5 cups of fruit and vegetables per day, two or more servings of fish per week, less than two servings of processed meats per week and no more than five servings of red meat per week. The study did not measure discretionary foods like soft drinks or desserts, said Melody Ding, the lead author of the study and an associate professor at the University of Sydney.

The researchers also measured activity levels using responses from another questionnaire that asked about the total minutes participants spent walking and engaging in moderate physical activity, like carrying light loads or biking at a steady pace, and vigorous physical activity that lasted more than 10 minutes at a time. The authors wrote that it was the first study to examine diet and exercise alongside both general mortality and specific lethal diseases, like cancer.

Not surprisingly, people with both higher levels of physical activity and better quality diets had the lowest mortality risk. Overall physical activity levels were associated with a lower mortality risk, but those who regularly engaged in vigorous exercise — the kind that makes you break a sweat — had a particularly lower risk of cardiovascular disease mortality. And even just 10 to 75 minutes per week made a difference.

Regardless of your diet, Dr. Ding said, “physical activity is important. And whatever your physical activity is, diet is important.”

“Any amount of exercise is protective,” said Salvador Portugal, a sports health expert and assistant professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Langone Health who was not involved in the study. But you can’t rely solely on your workout to maintain good health, he added.

These findings underscore what many doctors have seen in practice, said Dr. Tamanna Singh, co-director of the Sports Cardiology Center at Cleveland Clinic who was not involved with the study. For instance, she said, there are many components of heart health, and “optimizing one thing is not going to necessarily improve your cardiovascular risk.”

She sees patients who classify themselves as amateur or professional athletes and are shocked when they suffer cardiovascular events, she said, without considering their diet. “Often they’ll come to me after an event and say, ‘I work out so much. Why did I have a heart attack?’”

On the flip side, even those with the most nutritious diets in the study saw considerably worse outcomes without some form of regular fitness regimen.
That doesn’t mean people can’t treat themselves after a workout, Dr. Singh said. (She’s a marathon runner herself, and she looks forward to nachos after a long run.) “If you are, for the most part, intentional about what you put into your body and intentional with how you move your body, you’re doing enough.”
The study highlights the importance of viewing food and exercise as components of holistic health, Dr. Ding said, instead of calculating how many miles can “cancel out” a cookie.

“It’s not just about burning calories,” she said. “We need to shift that thinking.”




















You Won’t Live Longer by Diet or Exercise Alone, Study Says


Sprawling new research showed that healthy eating and regular workouts do not, in isolation, stave off later health issues. They need to be done together.




www.nytimes.com




.


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

I’m left to conclude that perhaps people have had so many experiences of their concerns being dismissed due to their weight, that the moment a doctor starts talking about weight (even in a caring and earnest way to try to help, and not being dismissive) that the patient just tunes out because they assume it’s another criticism and dismissal.

*Overweight patients more likely to disagree with their doctors*
A new paper in _Family Practice, _published by Oxford University Press, indicates that overweight patients are more inclined to disagree with their healthcare providers on advice on weight loss and lifestyle.

The World Health Organization estimates obesity nearly tripled between 1975 and 2016. General practitioners have a key role in medical care targeting weight loss and obesity. The quality of information, mutual comprehension, and agreement between doctors and patients affect a patient’s health status, compliance, satisfaction, and confidence towards his or her doctor. Previous research has shown patients and doctors often have dissimilar attitudes about weight. Patients tend to attribute excess weight to factors that they cannot control (e.g. genetics, hormones), whereas physicians tend to attribute it to behavioral, and thus controllable, factors (e.g. nutrition, physical activity). While many factors contribute to patients’ weight and health, these differences in perception of weight could degrade doctor-patient interaction.

This study aimed to analyze whether the interaction between patients and their doctors, as measured by their disagreement on information and advice given during the consultation, varied according to the patient’s body mass index.

Twenty-seven general practitioners and 585 patients from three regions in France participated in the quantitative phase of the project in September and October of 2007 and answered questionnaires collecting both general practitioners’ and patients’ perceptions of information and advice given at the end of the consultation.

Researchers here explored differences concerning the patient’s and doctor’s declarations about actions, information, and advice during the same visit, the patient’s health status, and the perceived quality of their relationship. For example, the questions about weight loss were: “Did your doctor advise you to lose weight during the consultation?” (Answered by patients) and its mirror “Did you advise this patient to lose weight during the consultation?” (Answered by doctors). Differences in answers given by doctors and their patients were used to define disagreement.

Agreement between patients and doctors was weak (20 to 40 percent agreement) or moderate (40 to 60 percent agreement) for most of the questions, including questions about actions, information, advice, and patient’s health status discussed during the doctor’s appointment. Agreement was very weak (less than 20 percent agreement) for questions about the perceived quality of the patient-doctor relationship.

Researchers also found that there was more doctor-patient disagreement the more overweight the patient was. Disagreement was particularly pronounced for advice given by doctors on weight and lifestyle issues. Compared to patients with a “normal” BMI, overweight patients were more likely to disagree with their doctors regarding advice given on weight loss, advice given on doing more physical activity, and advice about nutrition.

“An exploration of the patient's representations and difficulties related to weight could be offered by the general practitioners as a basis for discussion and appropriate support,” said the study’s lead author, Laëtitia Gimenez.

The paper, “Interaction between patient and general practitioner according to the patient body weight: a cross-sectional survey,” is available at: Interaction between patient and general practitioner according to the patient body weight: a cross-sectional survey.









Overweight patients more likely to disagree with their doctors


A new paper in Family Practice indicates that overweight patients are more inclined to disagree with their healthcare providers on advice on weight loss and lifestyle.



www.eurekalert.org


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

Here’s what we know about some of the most popular remedies that show at least a little promise.

*Zinc? Honey? Ginger? What Actually Helps When You Have a Cold or the Flu?*

It’s that time of year again, when stuffy noses and irrepressible coughs start to show up everywhere. Experts are already predicting that this year’s flu season will be a rough one and are reporting a rise in a variety of other respiratory illnesses as well, after two years of relative quiet.

The best precaution against influenza infection is getting vaccinated, and there is little you can do once you get sick beyond managing your symptoms. The flu, common cold and most other upper respiratory illnesses are caused by viruses, so you cannot cure them with antibiotics, which are used to treat bacterial infections. Antiviral drugs for treating influenza, like Tamiflu, are usually reserved for people who have tested positive for the flu and are at risk of developing severe complications, such as those who are pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised. For everyone else, doctors suggest resting and waiting out your symptoms — which for flu, can include a fever, headache, body aches and a stuffy or runny nose that lasts three to five days. Some people may also develop a cough or sore throat or experience fatigue, which can last a little longer, said Dr. H. Keipp Talbot, an associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Symptoms of the common cold are incredibly similar, which is why people tend to “call everything that’s in the winter the flu,” Dr. Talbot said. But cold symptoms are generally slower to build up, are milder than what you would experience with the flu and are unlikely to result in serious health problems. (People with Covid also experience respiratory symptoms; testing is the best way to know which virus you most likely have.)

“There’s a saying that if you treat a cold, it goes away in seven days, if you leave it alone, it goes away in a week,” said Dr. Aviva Romm, a physician who specializes in integrative medicine.

But for generations, countless home remedies — cups of warm tea or soups and spoonfuls of herbs — have helped manage cold and flu symptoms, like a sore throat or congestion. Scientists have conducted research over the years attempting to quantify how effective some of those remedies are, how frequently they should be used and what formulations work best. But the studies are often small or don’t show much efficacy.

Still, experts acknowledge that there isn’t any harm in adopting practices that may make you feel better when you’re sick, even if they just end up providing a placebo effect. (You should see a medical professional if your symptoms are severe, if you have difficulty breathing, or if you do not see any improvement after more than a week.)

“Sometimes we don’t have evidence for a lot of common traditional practices because there isn’t a lot of economic value in studying them, but we have thousands of years of anecdotal data and we have enough evidence to prove its safety,” Dr. Romm said.
Here’s what we know and don’t know about some of the most popular remedies that show at least a little promise.

*Bolstering the immune system: vitamin C, elderberry and zinc*
There is some evidence to suggest that certain vitamins and ingredients in home remedies — like vitamin C, elderberry and zinc — can, at the very least, stimulate the immune system and slightly shorten the duration of your symptoms.

The idea that vitamin C can help with a cold isn’t new; it was popularized by the Nobel laureate Linus Pauling in the 1970s, which set off a surge in demand for the nutrient. Since then, scientists tied to the supplements industry have suggested that vitamin C helps support various functions, such as immune cells’ ability to find and fight off infection.
The nutrient’s effectiveness is still debated. For one, the body is not able to store high doses of vitamin C, like those found in supplements, and any excess vitamin C is usually excreted in your urine. Some clinical trials have found that the timing of when you take vitamin C supplements might be crucial to its effectiveness: a comprehensive meta-analysis of vitamin C trials published in 2013, for example, suggests that regular supplementation, even before you start to feel sick, can shorten the duration of colds by a day or so. But taking vitamin C after you’ve already developed symptoms does not show consistent benefits.

In some studies, elderberry, a common ingredient in cold and flu syrups, particularly those aimed at young children, shortened the duration of symptoms when taken in advance of or immediately at the start of an illness. But it’s a very limited amount of data, Dr. Romm said. Elderberries contain potent antioxidants and chemicals known as anthocyanins, which have been shown in lab experiments to help immune function.

Similarly, research on zinc suggests that taking syrups and lozenges containing the trace element every three to four hours may reduce the length of a cold or flu by a day or two, potentially by preventing viruses from multiplying. Other analyses have concluded that there is not enough evidence to say it is any better than a placebo.

Most formulations of zinc have several side effects. Some people who used zinc nasal sprays have experienced a permanent loss of smell. Those who take it orally can get a lasting metallic taste in their mouth. “The really important thing to note is that you should take zinc with food because it can be really nauseating,” Dr. Romm said.

*Staying hydrated and soothing a sore throat: teas, soup, ginger and turmeric*
A sore throat is often the natural result of inflammation created when your immune system is fighting off a virus lodged in your upper airways. The swelling and pain can make it more difficult to swallow food and stay hydrated. This ends up making your throat even drier. A cough can further worsen things. Staying hydrated by drinking plain water, hot teas, broths or soups can help you feel more comfortable.

In many cultures, ginger is one of the first things people reach for when faced with a sore throat. It’s often steeped in boiling water along with other herbs to make soothing teas, or added to chicken soup. And, it turns out, there may be some science to back up these age-old practices: a handful of studies have found that ginger may have anti-inflammatory properties that can help ease swelling.

Turmeric root, a plant in the ginger family that is native to Southeast Asia and long used in the Ayurvedic medical practices of India, can also reduce inflammation. But its effects have been challenging to prove because the main compound in the root, curcumin, isn’t easily absorbed in the body and curcumin supplements can vastly differ in composition. Eating turmeric in food or mixing it with a fatty substance, such as cooking oil or warm milk, may help you absorb more of the benefits of curcumin. Adding black pepper can also aid in its absorption, Dr. Romm said.

“Ginger and turmeric together is a really, really nice combination,” Dr. Romm said, adding that when she’s dealing with a sore throat, she brews herself ginger-turmeric tea.

*Controlling a cough: salt water and honey*
If your sore throat is compounded by a cough, gargling with salt water may be helpful. Mix about half a teaspoon of salt in a full glass of warm water and swish it around your mouth and the back of your throat for a few seconds before spitting it out. Any type of salt you have at home can work.

Doctors often recommend salt water gargling as a way to ease pain in your mouth or the back of your throat and improve overall oral health. Gargling helps loosen thick mucus and can also remove irritants like bacteria, viruses and allergens from your throat. Using a salt solution provides the additional benefit of drawing excess fluid from inflamed tissues and coating them with warm water instead, Dr. Talbot said, an associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Adding honey to your gargling solution, or to any tea or warm drink, can have a similarly soothing effect. Honey acts as a demulcent, meaning it calms down irritated tissues by coating them.

Many cultures have their own variation of a soothing honey drink. And some research shows the remedy works in reducing the frequency of coughs. In fact, one study of children between 1 and 5 found that taking two teaspoons of honey at bedtime was just as effective in reducing nighttime coughs and improving the quality of sleep as the drug dextromethorphan found in common over-the-counter cough syrups. (Honey should not be given to children younger than a year old, though, because of the risk of a rare type of food poisoning known as infant botulism.)

*Relieving congestion: neti pots, herbs and steam*
Keeping your nasal passages moisturized is another simple, safe remedy that may help children and adults get some relief from the flu or cold. You can achieve this by using a humidifier in your room, concocting some herbal steam or rinsing warm salt water through your nose.

The use of neti pots and nasal irrigation can be traced back thousands of years to Ayurvedic medicine. Much like gargling with salt water, nasal rinsing may help remove some virus and mucus from your body, while reducing the swelling that can cause congestion. One study published in 2019 showed that this process may help shorten the duration of illness as well as reduce the potential transmission of germs to others.

You should make sure that you use only distilled, sterile or boiled water for your rinses, as tap water can contain small amounts of bacteria and protozoa that carry the risk of other infections. Alternatively, you can try commercial nasal saline sprays for a similar effect.

Dr. Fadel Hind, an infectious disease physician at the Mayo Clinic, keeps a humidifier running in her house during winter flu season. Her research has shown that keeping rooms at a humidity level of about 40 to 60 percent reduces the transmission of respiratory viruses and may even prevent you from getting sick. “At that humidity, you tend to find lower numbers of viruses on surfaces and in the air. And the virus that is present is less viable,” she said.

Some humidifiers have built in sensors that can tell you the humidity level in a room, Dr. Hind said. If yours doesn’t, you can buy a basic hygrometer for $10 or less to monitor water vapor in the air around you and test the performance of a humidifier you already own.

If you do catch a cold or flu, a humidifier may still help ease coughing and congestion, though there is less data on how well this works compared to placebo or whether a it can reduce the overall length of your illness, Dr. Hind said.

Menthol, a chemical found in peppermint and other mint plants, can also give the sensation of easier breathing. You can dab a store-bought menthol ointment like Vicks VapoRub under your nose or on your neck and throat to get symptom relief. Some people also use the fresh or dried herbs in traditional steam therapies for clearing congestion. You can do this by steeping herbs, like eucalyptus or thyme, in boiling water for five to 10 minutes, then covering your head with a towel and breathing in the steam (while being careful of the hot water). Alternatively, you can hang the dried leaves in a steamy shower to get some of these benefits.

A few studies have found that vapor rub containing menthol, eucalyptus and camphor, when applied to the neck and chest, significantly improved sleep in children and adults with cold symptoms, but experts caution that it can be irritating to some people.

At the end of the day, choosing a flu remedy is trial and error until you find something that will make you more comfortable, said Dr. Romm. And that, she added, “is worth it.”



https://www.nytimes.com/article/flu-cold-home-remedies.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20221026&instance_id=75622&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=78430320&segment_id=111085&te=1&user_id=c57a238e515a775a5a2886440eb9cf77


----------



## cyclelicious (Oct 7, 2008)

*Walking 10K steps a day is a health sweet spot, study finds — and walking faster is even better*








By studying people wearing fitness trackers, researchers have determined that walking 10,000 steps each day is indeed a 'sweet spot' for a range of health outcomes, but how fast you walk could be just as important. 

In recent years, walking 10,000 steps a day has become a popular fitness goal, but until now, there wasn't much scientific research to back that number.

A number of studies have shown that physical exercise can improve health and provide anti-aging benefits, but few have looked at exactly how many steps people should walk per day to optimize those benefits.

Now, scientists have determined that the big round number of 10,000 steps is indeed a great goal for a range of health outcomes, but how fast you walk could be just as important. 

Scientists from the University of Sydney and the University of Southern Denmark studied 78,500 adults in the U.K. between 2013 and 2015.

They wore activity trackers 24 hours a day for one week, which recorded how many steps they walked as well as the pace at which they walked. Researchers looked at their health outcomes seven years later.

They found that walking 10,000 steps a day lowers the risk of dementia by about 50 per cent, the risk of cancer by about 30 per cent and the risk of cardiovascular disease by about 75 per cent.

The study notes that the findings are "observational, meaning they cannot show direct cause and effect." But it stressed the "strong and consistent associations seen across both studies at the population level."

The participants consented to provide researchers their health records, including inpatient hospital registries, primary care records and cancer and death registries.

The data was collected as part of the largest study tracking step counts in the world in relation to health outcomes.

Their work was published earlier this month in the journals JAMA Internal Medicine and JAMA Neurology.









Fitness trackers often encourage users to walk 10,000 steps a day, but until now, there wasn't much scientific research to back that number.


Borja del Pozo Cruz, one of the lead researchers on the study, told _Quirks & Quarks_ host Bob McDonald that the 10,000-step goal actually originated from a 1960s Japanese marketing campaign aimed at selling pedometers. 

The pedometer, produced by the company Yamasa, was called the _manpo-kei_, which translates literally into "10,000 step metre."

At the time there was no scientific research to back that number and little had been done since, largely because it was difficult to gather precise data before digital activity trackers exploded in popularity.

Del Pozo Cruz, who is also a senior researcher in health sciences at the University of Cadiz in Spain and an adjunct professor at Southern Denmark University, said he and his team were surprised that the 10,000-step mark seemed to be the sweet spot for better health outcomes. 

But the study also found that you don't have to walk the full 10,000 steps a day to get significant health benefits.

"I guess for me at least, the most important finding was that on the very first step, the benefits are there," del Pozo Cruz said.

Results showed that every 2,000 steps walked lowered the risk of premature death incrementally by eight to 11 per cent, up to approximately 10,000 steps a day. The study found that beyond 10,000 steps, health outcomes plateaued.

"For some people, this [10,000] figure might be unrealistic," said del Pozo Cruz. "The important bit is that every step counts. Just get out there and do it, because anything is better than nothing."

Previous studies have touted the benefits of walking, including one in 2019 that found walking as little as 2,000 steps a day could lower mortality rates.

But del Pozo Cruz says that while these studies have focused on mortality rates, his team's study is the first to examine the link between walking and health outcomes like cancer, dementia and cardiovascular diseases.

*Faster is better*
The study also found that walking at a faster pace was associated with further benefits for all outcomes they measured.

For example, del Pozo Cruz said walking 10,000 steps a day cuts the risk of dementia by 50 per cent — but walking at a faster pace can add an extra 10 to 15 per cent reduction in risk. 

"How fast you walk is as important, if not more important, than how much you walk," he said. "For even more optimal health you would go about doing 10,000 steps and perhaps 30 minutes of those at a faster pace."
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radi...trying-effort-mostly-run-efficiently-possible
Del Pozo Cruz said that very high step counts — in the range of 20,000 steps and beyond — may actually decrease health benefits.

He added that his team hopes to soon replicate the study in more diverse populations, as the current data set was composed of mainly white, healthy, well-educated individuals between 40 and 79 years old. 



https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/sep-17-10-000-steps-really-are-good-for-you-astronomers-thrilled-by-jwst-garbage-picking-cockatoos-and-more-1.6584419/walking-10k-steps-a-day-is-a-health-sweet-spot-study-finds-and-walking-faster-is-even-better-1.6584679


----------

