Exercise is Part of Your Job

In the October 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review, author Ron Friedman asserts that exercise not only enhances our performance in the workplace, but indeed, exercise is actually a part of our job.  He states, “Instead of viewing exercise as something we do for ourselves—a personal indulgence that takes us away from our work—it’s time we started considering physical activity as part of the work itself. The alternative, which involves processing information more slowly, forgetting more often, and getting easily frustrated, makes us less effective at our jobs and harder to get along with for our colleagues.”

I'm going to sign up for a marathon to help me lose weight

This is the intention of many first time marathoners.  The assumption is something like this: Training for a marathon involves a heck of a lot of running; if I sign up for a marathon really get serious about running, I'll lose a heck of a lot of weight in the process.  The reality is far different from this.  A 2010 research study indicated that of novice marathoners completing a 3-month training program (a time period in which they ran literally hundreds of miles and expended tens of thousands of calories), some people lost weight, some stayed the same, and many gained weight.  Here is a breakdown of what happened:

New Research: It's not the amount of weight that matters

New research published this month in the Journal of Applied Physiology challenges what strength training pundits have taught for years: In order to grow bigger muscles, you need to lift heavy weights.  A team of researchers led by Stuart Philips at McMaster University in Canada separated subjects into two groups: one group did "heavy" weights for fewer reps (8-12 reps) and the other group lifted a lighter weight and performed more reps (20-25 reps).  Subjects in both groups were "trained" meaning they had a minimum of 2 years of strength training experience (studies with "trained" subjects are often viewed as more credible because applying any type of strength training intervention produces positive results with subjects who are new to strength training).  The researchers required both groups to train to momentary muscle failure.  The result?  After 12 weeks, both groups experienced the same improvements in muscle strength and muscle size.  The researchers concluded, "We provide novel evidence of lifting markedly different (lighter versus heavier) loads (mass per repetition) during whole body resistance training on the development of muscle strength and hypertrophy in previously trained persons. Using a large sample size (n=49), and contradicting dogma, we report that the relative load lifted per repetition does not determine skeletal muscle hypertrophy nor, for the most part, strength development."

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