Category: Fitness

A few weeks ago, whilst lunching with Sensei Hutch, he mentioned reading an article on stretching being worthless--or worse--which contradicted all he'd believed about stretching for so many years. This article surprised me since I'd seen lots of pro-stretching articles over the past year or so. Plus the rise of dedicated stretching centers where you can go to be stretched by a "licensed coach." Some other practices, such as massage therapists, have also jumped on the stretching bandwagon.

Recently I read another pro-stretching article and thought: why all the confusion? So let's take a look...

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Home fitness isn't new. Although gyms (or something like them) have been around more than 3000 years, they've never been accessible (or desirable) to everyone.

In the modern media age, Jack LaLanne was bringing fitness into the home via television starting in the 1950s. More recently, endless infomercials have touted exercise programs on DVDs and "fitness" equipment (almost all of it a rip-off, but that's another post) for home use.

There are plenty of advantages to exercising at home. Here are some of them.

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!

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.

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