10 March 2011

Workout notes Yoga in the morning, then weights over lunch:
Squats (free): 10 x 45, 10 x 135, 10 x 155, 10 x 155
Curls: 3 sets of 10 with curl bar plus 17.5 on each side for 35 + 18 = 53 pounds (seems about right)
Pull downs: 3 sets of 10 with 120 (shoulder friendly grip)
rows: 10 x 200, 10 x 210, 10 x 210
incline press: 10 x 120, 10 x 125, 4 x 135
rotator cuff stuff
sit ups (100)
exercise ball hamstrings (3 sets of 15)

The knee is slightly achy (weather change?)

Sports: how much is too much?

Recently, researchers in Britain set out to study the heart health of a group of dauntingly fit older athletes. Uninterested in sluggards, the scientists recruited only men who had been part of a British national or Olympic team in distance running or rowing, as well as members of the extremely selective 100 Marathon club, which admits runners who, as you might have guessed, have completed at least a hundred marathons.

All of the men had trained and competed throughout their adult lives and continued to work out strenuously. Twelve were age 50 or older, with the oldest age 67; another 17 were relative striplings, ages 26 to 40. The scientists also gathered a group of 20 healthy men over 50, none of them endurance athletes, for comparison. The different groups underwent a new type of magnetic resonance imaging of their hearts that identifies very early signs of fibrosis, or scarring, within the heart muscle. Fibrosis, if it becomes severe, can lead to stiffening or thickening of portions of the heart, which can contribute to irregular heart function and, eventually, heart failure.

The results, published online a few weeks ago in The Journal of Applied Physiology, were rather disquieting. None of the younger athletes or the older nonathletes had fibrosis in their hearts. But half of the older lifelong athletes showed some heart muscle scarring. The affected men were, in each case, those who’d trained the longest and hardest. Spending more years exercising strenuously or completing more marathon or ultramarathon races was, in this study, associated with a greater likelihood of heart damage.

Sure the sample is relatively small but:

But another new study, this time in laboratory rats, provides the first solid evidence of a direct link between certain kinds of prolonged exercise and subtle heart damage. For the study, published in the journal Circulation, Canadian and Spanish scientists prodded young, healthy male rats to run at an intense pace, day after day, for three months, which is the equivalent of about 10 years in human terms. The training was deliberately designed to mimic many years of serious marathon training in people, said Dr. Stanley Nattel, a cardiologist who is director of the electrophysiology research program at the Montreal Heart Institute Research Center and a senior author of the study.

The rats had begun their regimens with perfectly normal hearts. At the end of the training period, heart scans showed that most of the rodents had developed diffuse scarring and some structural changes, similar to the changes seen in the human endurance athletes. A control group of unexercised rats had developed no such remodeling of their hearts. The researchers also could manually induce arrhythmias, or disruptions of the heart’s natural electrical rhythm, much more readily in the running rats than in the unexercised animals. Interestingly, when the animals stopped running, their hearts returned to normal within eight weeks. Most of the fibrosis and other apparent damage disappeared.

Now the article goes on to say that this isn’t a huge problem with the general public. Note also that they people were on the extremes; those were not those who strolled marathons but rather those who ran them hard.

My guess is that in my case, when I start to overdo, my joints stop me.
Intensity every day? I’ve never in my life been able to do that….perhaps that is a good thing?
Now-a-days, I get intense 1-2 days a week when I am in training. Lately: never.

Lying: people can lie to themselves very easily, and not know it!

You don’t have to look far for instances of people lying to themselves. Whether it’s a drug-addled actor or an almost-toppled dictator, some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no matter how questionable. We might imagine that these people really know that they’re deceiving themselves, and that their words are mere bravado. But Zoe Chance from Harvard Business School thinks otherwise.

Using experiments where people could cheat on a test, Chance has found that cheaters not only deceive themselves, but are largely oblivious to their own lies. Their ruse is so potent that they’ll continue to overestimate their abilities in the future, even if they suffer for it. Cheaters continue to prosper in their own heads, even if they fail in reality.

Chance asked 76 students to take a maths test, half of whom could see an answer key at the bottom of their sheets. Afterwards, they had to predict their scores on a second longer test. Even though they knew that they wouldn’t be able to see the answers this time round, they imagined higher scores for themselves (81%) if they had the answers on the first test than if they hadn’t (72%). They might have deliberately cheated, or they might have told themselves that they were only looking to “check” the answers they knew all along. Either way, they had fooled themselves into thinking that their strong performance reflected their own intellect, rather than the presence of the answers.

And they were wrong – when Chance asked her recruits to actually take the hypothetical second test, neither group outperformed the other. Those who had used the answers the first-time round were labouring under an inflated view of their abilities.

Chance also found that the students weren’t aware that they were deceiving themselves. She asked 36 fresh recruits to run through the same hypothetical scenario in their heads. Those who imagined having the answers predicted that they’d get a higher score, but not that they would also expect a better score in the second test. They knew that they would cheat the test, but not that they would cheat themselves.

Some people are more prone to this than others. Before the second test, Chance gave the students a questionnaire designed to measure their capacity for deceiving themselves. The “high self-deceivers” not only predicted that they would get better scores in the second test, but they were especially prone to “taking credit for their answers-aided performance”.

Go on and read the rest; it is interesting. Note: this is why I tell my students to do problems with their notes closed! Also, I have to remember this when I’ve done a lot of treadmill running; it is NOT the same as road running. Same for walking.