Isegoria

According to a recent study, six minutes of exercise a week ‘is as good as six hours’ — if it’s an intense six minutes:

Just six minutes of intense exercise a week does as much to improve a person’s fitness as a regime of six hours, according to a study.

Moderately healthy men and women could cut their workouts from two hours a day, three times a week, to just two minutes a day and still achieve the same results, claim medical researchers.

I’m not surprised by the finding; I’m surprised that academics even considered it.

More detail:

The two-minute workout requires cycling furiously on a stationary bike in four 30-second bursts. Professor Martin Gibala, the author of the study, said: “The whole excuse that ‘I don’t have enough time to exercise’ is directly challenged by these findings. This has the potential to change the way we think about keeping fit.

“We have shown that a person can get the same benefits in fitness and health in a much shorter period if they are willing to endure the discomfort of high-intensity activity.”

The study, published in this month’s Journal of Applied Physiology, involved 23 men and women aged between 25 and 35 who were tested to see how long it took them to cycle 18.6 miles. The subjects, who all did some form of regular moderate exercise, were then given varying exercise programmes three times a week.

The first group cycled for two hours a day at a moderate pace. The second group biked harder for 10 minutes a day in 60-second bursts. The last group cycled at an intense sprint for two minutes in 30-second bursts, with four minutes of rest in between each sprint.

At the end of the two weeks each of the three groups was asked to repeat the 18.6 mile cycling test. Every subject was found to have improved to the same degree. Further tests showed that the rate at which the subjects’ muscles were able to absorb oxygen also improved to the same level.

The key findings in terms of overall health showed that the two-minute workout produced the same muscle enzymes — essential for the prevention of type 2 diabetes — as riding 10 times as long.

Years ago, when Art De Vany was still teaching at UC Irvine (before he became a professor emeritus and moved to Utah), he had an Evolutionary Fitness website. The name was a play on words — it was a health and fitness routine (or lack of routine) based on evolutionary principles.

He never followed through on his promise to write and publish a book on the topic, but he has started a blog, with the intention of exploring his ideas and providing himself enough of an incentive to finally write that book.

At age 67, he’s 6’1″ tall and 208 lbs, at 8% body-fat.

(Hat tip to CrossFit for pointing me to his new blog.)

Change or Die:

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We’re talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You’re probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn’t change.

Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

For instance, 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise. Even individuals who know they need to change don’t change:

“If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle,” Miller said. “And that’s been studied over and over and over again. And so we’re missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can’t.”

Getting people to change requires an emotionally resonant argument, not just an analytical one, that reframes the issue. Change your ways in order to enjoy life, not change or die:

Reframing alone isn’t enough, of course. That’s where Dr. Ornish’s other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish’s tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. “These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator,” he says. “When people who have had so much chest pain that they can’t work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, ‘These are choices worth making.’”

Research shows that this idea applies in business:

Bain & Co., the management consulting firm, studied 21 recent corporate transformations and found that most were “substantially completed” in only two years or less while none took more than three years. The means were drastic: In almost every case, the CEOs fired most of the top management. Almost always, the companies enjoyed quick, tangible results, and their stock prices rose 250% a year on average as they revived.

This sounds surprisingly sane. From Judge Strikes Down FDA Ban on Ephedra:

A federal judge Thursday struck down the FDA ban on ephedra, the once-popular weight-loss aid that was yanked from the market after it was linked to dozens of deaths.

Origins and evolution of the Western diet (Cordain et al. 81 (2): 341 — American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) steps through the many ways our modern Western diet differs from that of our primitive ancestors:

In particular, food staples and food-processing procedures introduced during the Neolithic and Industrial Periods have fundamentally altered 7 crucial nutritional characteristics of ancestral hominin diets: 1) glycemic load, 2) fatty acid composition, 3) macronutrient composition, 4) micronutrient density, 5) acid-base balance, 6) sodium-potassium ratio, and 7) fiber content. The evolutionary collision of our ancient genome with the nutritional qualities of recently introduced foods may underlie many of the chronic diseases of Western civilization.

In Terrell Owens, meet Jack Youngblood, the legendary Rams linebacker comments on Terrell’s injury:

“To be honest,” Youngblood said, “it’s hard to compare my injury to [Owens']. He’s been out of the game for what, five weeks? He’s been convalescing. After four weeks, an amputation should be healed. Shouldn’t it?”

In case you don’t remember Youngblood, here’s why he can talk that way:

“It was the first game of the 1979 playoffs. We had barely made it to the playoffs after having one of the dominant teams in the league for a few years and never getting over the hump. Really, it was a little bit of a surprise we made it. So we’re playing the Cowboys in Dallas in the divisional playoffs. Late in the second quarter, the guard bumps me over, foot gets caught in the turf, and it gets pinned up against a body and I feel it snap maybe an inch or two above the ankle. I rolled around like a turtle in pain. They take me directly to the locker room. Clarence Shields, one of our doctors, takes an X-ray, and I’m just dying, from pain and anger that I’m out of the game.

“I start yelling, ‘Somebody come in here and tape this damn thing up and bring me some aspirin!’ Clarence comes in and says, ‘I can’t do that! You’re fibula’s snapped like a pencil.’

“I said I didn’t care, and he sticks the X-ray in that light board they had and says, ‘Look! You got a broken bone!’

“I told the trainers, ‘Tape me up!’ And so they came in, strapped my leg as tight as they could. The pain was excruciating. I can’t even describe it. But they couldn’t shoot the bone with a painkiller; that stuff doesn’t work on bones. And I got up. It was near the end of halftime now, and I moved cautiously, just putting a little weight on it at first. The coaches were standing around, looking at me, and wondering, ‘What is this madman going to do?’ But I was playing. I told [coach] Ray Malavasi I wouldn’t play if it hurt the team, but I knew I could do it. But my leg was … again, just really bad. It took me all of halftime and then a couple of minutes into the third quarter to know I could go back out there and play.”

The Tetsujin (Iron Man) competition at RoboNexus takes powerlifting’s “supersuits” to their logical extreme — only the lifters inside these robotic exoskeletons are pencil-necked geeks, and their contraptions generally aren’t as strong as a guy named Magnus. From Ironmen:

Dan Rupert crouches inside a 180-pound frame of chrome-myolybdenum steel alloy like a man wearing the bones of a robot gorilla. Metal bars cantilever over his shoulders and down along his arms, terminating in menacing, knuckle-dragging hooks. At his feet, an industrial screw drive – a machine for turning torque into up-and-down force – hums quietly. Rupert, a high school engineering teacher from San Diego, isn’t trying to look like a supervillain. He is trying to lift a 650-pound barbell in front of a crowd of several hundred people. The exoskeleton — nicknamed Technotrousers — is supposed to make it happen.

Rupert stoops and grasps the bar. He begins to straighten, the screw drive hissing. Man and machine together hoist the weight. But something’s wrong. Rupert feels it almost immediately: a slight imbalance, a tiny wobble that his partner, engineer Don Engh, can see from the wings. As Rupert lifts the bar higher, Technotrousers starts to tilt forward. Halfway through the lift, just about every spectator lets out a gasp ? and man and machine together tumble forward into a heap at the foot of the stage. “Even as I was toppling over, I had my hands on the triggers,” Rupert says later, nursing a minor cut on his arm. “We were lifting right up until the end.”