home

Tag: exercise

  • What’s Your Power Song? Michael Phelps used it to focus before high-stakes competition, and Haile Gebrselassie uses it to rev up while on the course. Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast, and Longfellow called it the universal language of mankind. Can it help you? And how? Almost everyone experiences music’s myriad emotional effects,…

  • Even Published Resources Can Be Totally Wrong A well-meaning magazine published this image on a page devoted to “CrossFit exercises for runners.” Everyone should do some strength training, and it can be especially helpful for runners, because being stronger often means less chance of injury and more efficient running with less fatigue — a win-win-win…

  • September is National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. If you have kids, they’re watching you to learn the right way to eat and be active. Give them a good model! The Let’s Move site contains information about healthy eating and exercise, including tips for having a more active family life. The NIH also offers a site…

  • Do You Have a Friend Like This? You may have a well-meaning friend who is excited to involve you in their activities. Jen Sinkler posted the above exchange in a blog entry, “If you don’t like it, don’t do it.” It’s nice to be included, and if the answer is, “OK! Let me know if…

  • Thinking About Change The fitness industry is full of people who boil “it” down to “one thing.” It’s “all about motivation.” “You either Do It, or you Don’t.” “If it’s important, you’ll find a way.” But if there’s one thing for sure, it’s never just one thing. The transtheoretical model (TTM) was developed in the…

  • Are athletic humans getting superhuman? Not exactly, but we’re seeing more specialization — in essence, a flowering of diversity. Today’s champion athletes are marvelous, and we are seeing better performance (with more people training, and advances in training techniques), but technology is helping them, too. Hear more about it in David Epstein’s TED talk. (Source:…

  • Here is a fun toy — a calculator of estimated calorie burns for hundreds of activities from Primus Partners, a logistics company. This is part of Fitness Partner, a set of pages with general health information and calculators, described as a “labor of love.” 🙂 True calorie expenditures depend on many things — including your…

  • What’s Better, Indoor or Outdoor Exercise? The treadmill is so reviled by outdoor runners, they have a special name for it: the Dreadmill. Some cyclists, like me, can’t quite understand what an indoor bike is even for 🙂 But this is really two questions: which activities are safer, or more efficient or strenuous as exercise?…

  • A Quick Workout You Can Do at Home Exercise science is a fine and intellectually fascinating thing. But sometimes you just want someone to lay out guidelines for how to put the newest fitness research into practice. An article in the May-June issue of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal does…