Letters Remain

Tag: exercise

  • The Scientific 7-Minute Bodyweight Workout

    Back in 2013, Scientists from the Human Performance Institute published an article in the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal titled, High-intensity circuit training using body weight. To address the limitations of traditional exercise protocols, … one of the exercise strategies we use is high-intensity circuit training (HICT) using body weight as…

  • Stretch 15: Daily Dose of Stretching Exercises

    Stretch 15 is a straight-forward web app designed to get you stretching more. You just indicate whether you’re in the office or at home, and it gives you a timer and indicates which stretches to do, when. The site tracks your total stretch time and your daily stretch ‘streak’, if you’re into that type of…

  • Sedentary Lifestyle? Exercise Isn’t Helping

    A somewhat sedentary lifestyle combined with regular exercise is turning us into what physiologists are calling ‘active couch potatoes’–and that exercise, no matter how vigourous, doesn’t appear to be counteracting the negative effects of that sedentary lifestyle. In rats, this lifestyle was found to produce “unhealthy cellular changes in their muscles” and increase insulin resistance…

  • The Effectiveness of Social Support on Exercise Goals

    Informing our friends and family of our resolutions in hope that the social support will encourage us is an effective tactic–as long as these people ‘check-in’ on our progress at semi-regular intervals. That’s the conclusion from a study where three groups of people had their exercise goals tracked under one of three conditions: a regular…

  • More on the Cognitive Benefits of Moderate Exercise

    “There is overwhelming evidence that exercise produces large cognitive gains and helps fight dementia”, says the Harvard University psychologist John Ratey, author of the 2008 book on the subject, Spark. While Ratey propounds the “very clear” link between exercise and mental acuity, saying that even moderate exercise pushes back cognitive decline by “anywhere from 10…

  • Assorted Health and Fitness Tips from a Veteran Trainer

    After years as a trainer, Mike O’Donnell compiles and shares an extensive list of health and fitness tips. As Jason said, there’s “a lot of good (and questionable) stuff in this list”. Here are my favourites: Diet is 85% of where results come from… for muscle and fat loss. Many don’t focus here enough. If…

  • Sports Drinks and Dehydration

    More for the parents of athletic children, this article from The New York Times‘ Well blog still contains some useful all-round advice on hydration during exercise. In the comments the author also links to this urine colour test for dehydration. When [exercising children] were offered grape-flavored water, they voluntarily drank 44.5 percent more than when…

  • Cognitive Benefits of Exercise

    Walter van den Broek (AKA Dr Shock) provides a summary of the research on the neuroscience of exercise, or: the cognitive benefits of an active lifestyle. Exercise… improves learning and intelligence scores. increases the resilience of the brain in later life resulting in a cognitive reserve. [attenuates] the decline of memory, cortex and hippocampus atrophy…