This one isn't part of my home setup but was a 2019 Christmas gift for use where I stay on the west coast. The basic design has been around a long time and is a clever use of physics to distribute the weight into the horizontal bar putting much less stress on the door frame.
There are many uses for a pullup bar that will be covered in another post. One example is...pullups!
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An interesting article from the "Food, We Need To Talk" podcast.
https://www.wbur.org/foodtalk/2019/12/27/food-podcast-resistance-strength-training
The podcast's co-host asked every eating expert she interviewed the same question: "If you could tell people to change only one thing that would have the biggest impact on their health for the rest of their lives, what would it be?"
The answer: exercise. Remember, these are food experts. And it wasn't just a few of them saying this, it was all of them. And several of them specifically recommended strength exercise (also known as "resistance training").
It's worth reading. One quibble I have is the emphasis on calories and fat loss. As readers of this blog know, I'm much more interested in what exercise can help us do -- now and as we age -- than how it affects our weight. Improved body composition is a happy (and not at all surprising) side effect. (There are many others.)
Give the article a read and get moving!
Be seeing you.
-gary
I've been reading about this for years but here's a nice summary:
https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a29710918/icing-sore-muscles/
Bottom line: despite the old RICE (Rest Ice Compression Elevation) standard treatment for inflammation and injury, it seems icing isn't all it's cracked up to be. This might make ice factory workers very angry. (Warning: video contains graphic violence.)
Granola is generally considered a "healthy" food...and it can be! I like to have granola with yogurt (Siggi's plain 4%) and blueberries for breakfast. I usually get my granola from the local co-op bulk section. The first thing I look for is the ingredients list to see how much sugar is used. (There are no nutrition labels showing sugar per serving, so this is the next best thing as ingredients are listed in descending order of predominance.)
Whilst traveling, I went shopping for some granola at local grocery stores. It wasn't pretty.
You can find a good article on metabolism here:
https://www.vox.com/2018/9/4/17486110/metabolism-diet-fast-weight-loss
"Metabolism" is one of those terms thrown around recklessly without most people understanding what it means. There are lots of products, books, posts, diets, systems, etc., that claim they'll help people lose weight by "speeding up" or "boosting" metabolism. Most of this is nonsense (often from people who should know better). Any "boost" is minuscule and transitory.
People can sometimes blame a slower metabolism for extra caloric intake. We're really bad at estimating how much we eat and tend to overlook lots of little things (like sauces) that add up and lead to increased body fat. It's not that we're lying about it; it's just one of those human foibles.
As the author of the article found, "slow metabolism" is rarely a thing. Yes, it does slow down as we get older (which surprises no one over 40). And dieting--particularly extreme dieting--can slow it down too. But while such things can make it more challenging to shed unwanted pounds, it's not even close to impossible (although it can seem that way).
The internet is jam-packed with sources of "news." Most of these sources don't produce news themselves; rather they re-post articles, press releases, etc. And so it came to pass that a post I saw this week referenced a press release from March that prompted this post. End backstory.
The post from March (which showed up in lots of places...see previous paragraph) looked like this one: http://www.sciencenewsline.com/news/2017030718000015.html . It's about a study that showed exercise--especially High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)--"...caused cells to make more proteins for their energy-producing mitochondria and their protein-building ribosomes, effectively stopping aging at the cellular level."
Determining the intensity of a workout can help make it more effective and easier to scale. For example, asking someone to run for five minutes is physically different than asking them to run hard for five minutes. The same concept applies to strength training.
But while there are some straightforward ways to measure intensity of cardiovascular or aerobic training, strength training is a bit more challenging. Yet knowing how hard you’re lifting can help you structure your workout programs more effectively. For example, you can vary workout intensity to prevent overtraining while still getting sufficient volume and working hard enough to get results.
