Saturday, March 22, 2014

Walking In LA (N O ONE Walks In LA)

MORE PROOF THAT JOGGING IS BAD FOR YOU. PERSISTENT, CONSISTENT, LONG-TERM JOGGING DOES MORE HARM TO YOUR BODY THAN GOOD. HUMANS EVOLVED TO TRAVEL IN TWO WAYS: WALKING AND SPRINTING. ANY OTHER FORM OF LOCOMOTION IS UNNATURAL AND NON-ADAPTIVE.

 ·  Aug 14
Overweight people in the gym mostly seem to be on treadmills/cycles, the fit mostly lifting weights. Correlation or causation?
 http://blogs.denverpost.com/fitness/2013/11/23/is-your-cardio-routine-making-you-fat/13461/

 The Gift of Walking

Massimo
@Rainmaker1973
This map potentially shows one of the world’s longest uninterrupted walks from Cape Town, South Africa to Magadan, Russia: a distance of 22,387km (13,910 miles). Google Maps estimates it would take 4,492 hours to walk it or 187 days of non-stop walking brilliantmaps.com/longest-walk/
https://twitter.com/rainmaker1973/status/1402905878345535491


I'LL ADD SOME PASSAGES FROM THE STORY OF THE HUMAN BODY BY DANIEL LIEBERMAN REGARDING THE EVOLUTION OF RUNNING LATER THIS WEEK. 
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~skeleton/danlhome.html 
Maria, age twenty-eight, couldn't understand why she had gained seventy pounds in the last three years. She didn't think her diet had changed. She worked at a computer all day but had been doing that for several years. The only change in her life is that she moved to the suburbs and started driving to work instead of walking. Before that, she walked a mile to and from work every day. Maria had hard time believing that walking to work instead of driving was what had kept her from gaining weight.

Bob had gained fifty pounds in ten years during which he worked as a computer programmer. At age forty-two, he developed type 2 diabetes. When he reduced his starch and sugar intake and started exercising on weekends, he lost twenty pounds, and his blood glucose measurements improved. However, he found it difficult to lose more weight. Then he had an idea. He started having his wife drop him off two miles away from his office so he could walk to work every day. He lost twenty more pounds in a year.

I have often been astonished by the weight loss benefits of walking to work every day. What is it about regular, low-intensity exercise that relieves insulin resistance so effectively?

It's not your liver, kidneys, or some other internal organ that causes insulin resistance. It's your muscles. Their lack of responsiveness to insulin makes your pancreas secrete six to eight times the normal amounts of the hormone to handle the carbohydrates you eat. The good news is that you can restore your muscles' sensitivity to insulin. You do it with exercise, but not the kind you're probably thinking of, not the sweaty, exhausting kind. When it comes to reversing insulin resistance, the benefits of exercise don't necessarily correlate with strenuousness.

Let me illustrate this with a story. A group of researchers in Switzerland worked in a clinic near a mountain. There were two ways to get to the top - you could traverse a two-mile path or ride a tram. The scientists decided to compare the effects on blood sugar of walking up the mountain and riding the tram down versus taking the tram up and walking down. After two months, they measured their subjects' responses to a glucose load. To the researchers' surprise, walking downhill improved insulin sensitivity more than walking uphill did.

The point is, the no-pain, no-gain philosophy of exercise doesn't always apply. Certainly, if you're training for a footrace or trying to build big muscles, you need to sweat and strain, and walking uphill would be better than walking down. However, some kinds of muscle activity create less fatigue than others do, and if you're trying to relieve insulin resistance, it so happens this is exactly the kind you need. To understand how this is so, you need to consider what causes insulin resistance.

Researchers have recently pinpointed the biochemical quirk that causes some people's muscles to lose sensitivity to insulin when they don't exercise enough. It's a genetic defect in the tiny energy-producing units of muscles called mitochondria. These little dynamos use oxygen to burn glucose and fat and produce the energy that powers muscles. 

The difference between people who are genetically prone to developing insulin resistance and those who are not is that the mitochondria of those predisposed to insulin resistance go into a deeper than normal dormant state when they haven't been used. It's like my computer. If I don't use it for an hour, it automatically goes into "sleep mode." It's not completely shut off; parts of it are still running, and if I press a key, it immediately starts up again. But while it's in the sleep mode, it uses less energy.

That's the way your muscles behave if you have insulin resistance. If you don't use them for a day or two, they go into a kind of sleep mode in which they burn fewer calories and stop responding to insulin. When you exercise them again, they immediately wake up. They remain sensitive to insulin for twenty-four to forty-eight hours - they will maintain their sensitivity to insulin, your pancreas won't have to make as much insulin, and your body will stop trying to store calories as fat.

To understand how it's possible to keep your metabolism humming like a long-distance runner's but without a lot of huffing and puffing, you need to know about the two different kinds of muscle fibers in your body. Your muscles comprise a mix of two different types of muscle fibers. One kind contracts slower than the other does, so they're called "slow-twitch" fibers. The others are "fast-twitch" fibers. Each type specializes in its own kind of exercise. Slow-twitch fibers provide power for steady, long-distance activities like walking or jogging. You use fast-twitch fibers for short bursts of intense effort like weight lifting or sprinting.

The important difference between these two kinds of muscle fibers is that slow-twitch fibers require oxygen to do their work, and fast-twitch fibers do not - at least not immediately. They go into "oxygen debt," replenishing their energy after their work is completed.  

Because slow-twitch fibers need more oxygen while they're working than fast-twitch fibers do, they have more mitochondria, which, as you recall, is exactly where the problem is if you have insulin resistance. That's why exercise like walking or jogging, which depends on slow-twitch fibers, promotes weight loss better than short bursts of more strenuous exertion like weight lifting, which uses mainly fast-twitch fibers.

You may find it hard to believe that you can lose weight without strenuous exertion, but think for a moment about your diaphragm, the muscle under your rib cage that moves air in and out of your lungs. How much effort does it take to exercise that muscle to breathe? You're not even aware you're doing it. Indeed, certain muscles can work steadily for long periods without causing fatigue. The reason such muscles can operate without producing a sense of tiredness is that they're  powered by slow-twitch muscle fibers. As slow-twitch fibers work, oxygen constantly replenishes their energy.

A light should have just come on in your brain: slow-twitch fibers are where the problem is if you have insulin resistance. How convenient! The kind of exercise you need to restore your body's sensitivity to insulin is exactly the kind that requires the least effort. You don't need to sweat and strain to lose weight. All you have to do is turn on those oxygen-burning mitochondria in your slow-twitch muscle fibers. Here's  how to do it.   

Because all animals need to breathe and get from one place to another, Mother Nature made sure that the muscles that perform those tasks operate with as little effort as possible. Consequently, those activities rely almost entirely on slow-twitch muscle fibers. Of course, your breathing muscles are only a small part of your total muscle mass, so they contribute little to  your metabolism. But the muscles that propel you, your walking muscles, are a different story. They represent about 70 percent of your muscle mass. Activating them has a profound effect on your body chemistry. And that's where the problem lies: modern humans are the only creatures in the history of the world who don't depend on muscle power to get from one place to another.

Although a change in dietary habits triggered the rise in obesity of the last thirty years, the stage was set by the marked reduction in muscle activity that occurred over the previous century as engines took over the task of moving us from one place to another. Think about how little we modern folks walk compared with our ancestors. Prehistoric humans spent most of their waking hours scrambling across rugged terrain in search of food and game. They migrated hundreds of miles as the seasons changed. As recently as the early 1900s, people thought nothing of walking four or five miles a day to get to and from their jobs and spent most of their workday on their feet. Now it's a big deal if you have to walk across a parking lot or up a flight of stairs. We use our walking muscles a pitiful fraction of what our ancestors did. 

Considering that most of the mitochondria in our bodies reside in our walking muscles, it's not surprising that our metabolisms are out of whack. The reason so many of us are insulin resistant is not that we don't go to health clubs, lift weights, or run marathons. It's because we don't walk. We don't use our slow-twitch muscle fibers enough to keep them out of sleep mode.


Our ancestors walked simply to get from point A to point B. They weren't doing it to keep in shape. They didn't have to push themselves. You don't have to push yourself either.

The next time you go for a walk, pay attention to how much effort you're expending. If you walk fast enough, you become air-hungry, and your legs start to feel tired. If you're not an exercise lover, you might describe that as strenuous. But notice what happens when you decrease your walking speed just a little. You will find that you don't have to slow down much before the shortness of breath and leg fatigue abruptly stop. You quickly reach a point where you don't sense you're expending much effort at all. What's happening? That's the level of exertion at which the energy you expend powering your slow-twitch muscle fibers is being completely replenished by oxygen. You aren't pushing your muscles beyond their capacity, and you're not building up an oxygen debt by enlisting your fast-twitch fibers. You stop thinking about how hard you're working, and your mind moves on to other things. At that pace, you feel as if you could walk indefinitely. You might be bored, you might be in a hurry to get home, but you cannot honestly say that what you're doing is strenuous. That is all the effort you need to expend to relieve insulin resistance and lose weight. 

Make no mistake, there are benefits to more strenuous exercise - you can build more endurance and develop stronger muscles. But remember what you're trying to accomplish. You're not training for a footrace or trying to build big muscles. You're just trying to restore your muscles' sensitivity to insulin, ad happily, there's a disconnect between strenuousness of exercise and its effectiveness for reversing insulin resistance. You don't have to push yourself. All you have to do is take yourself back to the nineteenth century and use your leg muscles as nature intended, to walk at a comfortable pace.

It it's inconvenient to walk - if the weather's bad or if you can't find a place to do it - you can activate your slow-twitch muscle fibers with a StairMaster, elliptical trainer, or stationary bike. For easiness, however, there's nothing better than walking. Exercise physiologists have found that of all the different kinds of exercise, walking burns the most calories with the least perceived effort. In other words, you might not think you're' exercising much, but you really are. Study after study proves that for losing weight and preventing diabetes, walking is just as effective as running or working out at a gym. 

Exercise activates biochemical reactions in muscles that allow them to respond to insulin. As you would expect, you can't get these reactions going by sauntering over to the watercooler. You need to exercise for a certain amount of time. The question is how long you have to walk to relieve insulin resistance.

Insulin sensitivity exhibits a sort of all-or-none phenomenon - like a switch, it's either on or off.  Once you do enough exercise to get those metabolic processes started, there's little need to do more. You've already learned that you don't have to engage in strenuous exercise to activate your slow-twitch muscle fibers. Walking at a comfortable pace is just fine. Now, if you could figure out the minimum amount of walking needed to switch on your insulin sensitivity, you could get away with doing that and no more. 

Researchers have found that it takes between twenty and thirty minutes of walking to switch on insulin sensitivity. Exercising more than that might be good for other things - you might burn more calories or get in better shape - but it's unnecessary if you're just trying to lose weight.

I highly recommend using a tread mill desk. It's an effective way to rediscover the joys of sitting.


http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/315347.php

https://chriskresser.com/how-sitting-too-much-is-making-us-sick-and-fat-and-what-to-do-about-it/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=share&utm_term=too-much-sitting&utm_content=&utm_campaign=blog

Research studies show that the weight loss benefit of going from being a couch potato to walking just twenty minutes every other day is greater than the benefit of going from walking regularly to being a long-distance runner. Nevertheless, as long as you're out there walking, you might want to do enough to guarantee that you shed pounds. Most studies show that people consistently lose weight - even if they don't change their diet - if they walk forty minutes four times a week. That's about two miles every other day.

Whatever you do to reverse insulin resistance, you need to do it at least every other day. It doesn't matter if you walk a couple of miles or run a marathon. About four-eight hours later, your muscles stop responding to insulin. Exercising only on weekends, even if it's very vigorous, won't do the trick.

Considering that the beneficial effects of exercise last only forty-eight hours, if you have a sedentary job and exercise only on weekends, your body spends four days a week in a state of insulin resistance. That means for four days out of seven, you have higher than normal insulin levels, your weight-regulating systems are out of kilter, and your body tries to store calories as fat.

Relatively sedentary activities like walking around an office, retrieving files, or doing light housework are no substitute for aerobic exercise, but if such movements are performed hundreds of times a day, they contribute significantly to energy expenditure. Conversely, the fewer such movements you make throughout the day, the greater your tendency to gain weight. Researchers call this the fidget factor, and it significantly influences your ability to lose weight.

Two common activities have very low fidget factors: working on a computer and watching television. Observe someone doing these things. They hardly move a muscle for several minutes at a time. Television screens and computer monitors seem to mesmerize people, freezing their body movements. Some of the worst physically conditioned people I see in the medical practice are computer workers. So if spend more than eight hours a day in front of a computer or television screen, walking every other day might not be enough. You probably need to exercise daily.


The Glycemic Load Diet: A Powerful New Program for Losing Weight and Preventing Insulin Resistance. Thompson. p.75-82.


WALK IT OUT 
Look At The Benefits Of Staying Physically Active Throughout One's Life (i.e. Walking On A Daily Basis). The Nunnelee's Look Much Younger Than Their Actual Age.

Charles Darwin's walking stick, made of ivory & whalebone, with glass eyes for the skull. He called it his "moriturri," as in 'memento mori"

Geoffrey Miller Retweeted Jaipreet Virdi

How did Darwin write 25 of the world's most influential books? By walking every day with his hand on a skull to remind him of mortality.


We Didn't Evovle To Lead Sedentary Lives. This Leads To Frail Bodies, Failed Health, And Fairly Early Death, My Fair Ladie!


But there's a problem: What many of the outlets did not report was that sitting for long periods did not explicitly cause cancer: It led to an increased risk of two specific types of the disease. These two types also happen to be linked to being overweight and obese, behaviors that are associated with sedentary behavior.
Here's what the researchers actually found: After reviewing 43 studies, the researchers, who published their study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, discovered that people who sat for long periods of time had a higher chance of developing colon and endometrial cancer. The more time they spent on their butts, the more their risk increased.
In fact, for every additional two hours someone spent sitting, the researchers reported an 8% increase in their risk for developing colon cancer and a 10% increased risk for endometrial cancer.
So what is risk, anyway, and why does it matter? The 66% increase that TIME boasted in its headline sounds huge.
What that figure doesn't include is the overall risk of developing the two types of cancer that the study found to be associated with more sitting time. For example, this table shows the percentage of American men who developed colon cancer over 10-, 20- and 30-year periods according to their age between 2008 and 2010.
If you're a 30-year-old man, your risk of developing colon cancer by the time you turn 60 is just under 1%.
According to the study, every two-hour increase in sitting time led to an 8% increase in the risk for developing colon cancer.
So, theoretically, if you're a man that spends eight hours sitting at the office each day and you were to start sitting for only six of them, you could decrease your colon cancer risk by about .08%.
As for the allegation that sitting causes breast cancer? That's a conclusion the researchers who did the study explicitly did not find.
We know sitting is bad for us. Too much sedentary time can have dozens of unintended long-term consequences, from higher rates of chronic diseases, including heart disease and diabetes, to immediate effects such as strained and sore muscles.
Bonnie Berkowitz and Patterson Clark made an awesome infographic of all the health problems someone can develop just by spending too much time in a chair.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/young-people-old-age-bupa-conditions-older-varicose-veins-back-knee-problems-sedentary-a7436166.html?utm_content=buffer327ba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/well/move/keep-it-moving.html?src=twr&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 
Image Credit: Washington Post
Luckily, there are tons of ways to cut back on your chair time. At work, you can take breaks every couple of hours — walk down the block or around the office. And instead of hunching over your desk for lunch, step outside and get some air.

In the late 1920s, two enterprising young men from Michigan held a contest to name the upholstered reclining chair they had invented. From the many submissions, they chose La-Z-Boy (other entries were Sit-N-Snooze and Slack Back), and the company is still producing luxury chairs of the same name. Today's models feature eighteen "comfort levels" with independently moving backrests and footrests, plus "total lumbar support in all positions." If you pay extra you can add features such as vibrating motors to massage you, a tilting seat that helps you in and out of the chair, cup holders, and more. Yet for the same price as some La-Z-Boy chairs, you could buy a round-trip airplane ticket to the Kalahari Desert or some other remote part of the world, where you'll be hard pressed to find chairs, let alone ones with cushioning, reclining backs, and leg rests. But this doesn't mean you won't find anyone sitting. Hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers work hard to obtain every calorie they eat, and they rarely have energy surplus. When hardworking people with limited food have the chance, they sensibly sit or lie, which costs much less energy than standing. However, when they sit, they usually squat, or they rest on the ground with their legs folded or straight out. Chairs, when they exist, tend to be stools, and the only backrests are trees, rocks, and walls.

SITTING BULL

To those of us reading this book, siting in a comfy chair is an utterly normal and pleasant activity, but an evolutionary perspective teaches us that this kind of sitting is unusual. But are chairs unhealthy? Should I abandon the office chair in which I am writing these words and instead write this standing up, perhaps using a treadmill desk? Should you read these words while squatting? And for that matter, should we throw out our mattresses and sleep like our ancestors on hard mats?

Don't worry! I am not going to make you feel bad about sitting in chairs, and, for the record, I have no intention of getting rid of the chairs in my house. But there are many reasons to be concerned about the amount of time you spend in chairs, especially if you are inactive for the rest f the day. On major concern relates to energy balance (see chapter 10). For every hour you sit at a desk, you spend about 20 fewer calories than if you were to stand, because you are no longer tensing your muscles in your legs, back, and shoulder, as you support and shift your weight. Standing for eight hours a day adds up to 160 calories, the equivalent of a half-hour walk. Over weeks and years, the energetic difference between mostly sitting and mostly standing is staggering.  

A different problem caused by sitting for hours upon hours in comfortable seats is muscle atrophy, especially in the core muscles of the back and abdomen that stabilize the trunk. In terms of muscle activity, sitting in a chair is not much different from lying in bed. It is commonly appreciated that prolonged bed rest has many deleterious effects on the body, including a weaker heart, muscle degeneration, bone loss, and elevated levels of tissue inflammation. Prolonged chair rest has almost the same effect because you don't use any leg muscles to support your weight, and if the chair has a backrest, a headrest, and armrests, you may not be using as many muscles in your upper body either. This is why La-Z-Boy chairs are so comfortable. Slumping forward or slouching back in a chair also requires less muscle effort than sitting up straight. But there is a price to pay for such comfort. Muscles deteriorate in response to prolonged periods of inactivity by losing muscle fibers, especially the slow-twitch fibers that provide endurance. Months and years of sitting with poor posture in comfortable chairs combined with other sedentary habits therefore allow trunk and abdominal muscles to be weak and to fatigue rapidly. In contrast, squatting and sitting on the ground or even on a stool require more postural control from a variety of muscles in the back and abdomen, helping to maintain their strength.

Another kind of atrophy caused by endless hours of sitting is muscle shortening. When you immobilize joints for lengthy periods, muscles that are no longer stretched can become shorter, which accounts for why wearing high-heeled shoes shortens calf muscles. Chairs are no exception. When you sit in a standard chair, your hips and knees are flexed at right angles, a position which shortens the hip flexor muscles that cross the front of your hip. As a result, many hours of sitting can permanently shorten the hip flexors. Then, when you stand, your shortened hip flexors are tight, so they tilt the pelvis forward leading to an exaggerated lumbar curve. Your hamstring muscle along the back of the thigh then must contract to counter this curvature, tilting your pelvis backward, leading to a flat-back posture, which hunches your shoulders forward. Fortunately, stretching effectively increases muscle length and flexibility, making it a good idea for anyone spending long hours in a chair to get up and stretch regularly.    

Muscle imbalances caused by hours of sitting in chairs have also been hypothesized to contribute to one of the most common health problems on the planet: lower back pain. Depending on where you live and what you do, your chances of getting lower back pain are between 60 percent and 90 percent. Some cases of lower back pain are caused by structural failures like a collapsed disk or by a traumatic accident that damages the spine; however, the majority of lower back pain is diagnosed as "nonspecific," a medical euphemism for problems whose causes are poorly understood. Despite decades of  intense research, we remain woefully ineffective at diagnosing, preventing, and treating lower back pain. Many experts have therefore concluded that lower back pain is a nearly inevitable consequence of evolution's unintelligent design of the human lumbar curve, which has cursed the human lineage ever wince we stood up about 6 million years ago.

But is this conclusion true? Lower back pain is the most common cause of disability today, costing billions of dollars a year. Today we have painkillers, heat pads, and other largely ineffective ways to alleviate back pain, but imagine how a serious back injury would have affected a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer. Even if our ancestors simply suffered through the pain, back troubles would surely have lessened their ability to forage, hunt, evade predators, provision offspring, and do other tasks that affect reproductive success. Natural selection is therefore likely to have selected for individuals whose backs were less susceptible to injury. As chapter 2 reviewed, selection in response to the biomechanical demands of pregnancy likely explains why women have adaptations that spread their lumbar curve over more vertebrae and have more strongly reinforced joints than men. Selection to strengthen the spine may also explain why humans today tend to have five lumbar vertebrae, one fewer than early hominins such as H. erectus. Perhaps the lumbar spine is a much better adapted structure than we realize. If so, then is the high incidence of lower back pain today an example of an evolutionary mismatch in which our bodies are not well adapted to the way we use them? Could it be that we are simply poorly adapted to sitting and other forms of inactivity?

Unfortunately, lower back pain is such a complex, multifactorial problem that intensive efforts to find simple answers about why it occurs and how to prevent it have been (and will remain) frustratingly inconclusive. Studies designed to associate lower back pain with specific causal factors in developed countries have mostly failed to reveal any smoking guns, such as genes, height, weight,time spent sitting, bad posture, exposure to vibrations, participation in sports, or even frequent lifting. However, comprehensive analyses of the incidence of back pain around the world consistently find that back pain is twice as high in developed versus less developed countries; further, within low-income countries, the incidence is roughly twice as high in urban versus rural areas. For example, lower back pain afflicts about 40 percent of farmers in rural Tibet but 68 percent of sewing machine operators in India, many of whom describe their pain as "persistent and unbearable." Neither of these populations lounges about in La-Z-Boys, but a general trend is that people who frequently carry heavy loads and do other "back-breaking" work get fewer back injuries than those who sit in chairs for hours bent over a machine.

If one considers cross-cultural patterns of back pain injury in conjunction with an understanding of how the back evolved to function, there are clues that lower back pain is partly an evolutionary mismatch, albeit one with multiple causes. The key point to consider is that, from an evolutionary perspective, none of the populations so far studied use their backs in a normal way. No one has yet quantified the incidence of lower back pain among hunter-gatherers, but foragers rarely sit in chairs, they never sleep on soft mattresses, they often walk while carrying moderate loads, and they also dig, climb, prepare food, and run. They also don't engage in hours of strenuous work such as hoeing or lifting that repetitively load the back. In other words, hunter-gatherers use their backs moderately - neither as intensively as subsistence farmers nor as minimally as sedentary office workers. They fall generally near the middle of an important model for the risk of lower back pain proposed by Michael Adams and colleagues, illustrated in figure 29. According to this model, a healthy back requires an appropriate balance between how much you use your back and how well your back functions. A normal, fit back needs to have a considerable degree of flexibility, strength, and endurance, as well as some degree of coordination and balance. Since people who are mostly sitters tend to have weak and inflexible backs, they are more likely to experience muscle strains, torn ligaments, stressed joints bulging disks, and other causes of pain if and when they subject their backs to unusual, stressful movements. As predicted, people in developed countries who suffer from back pain tend to have a lower percentage of slow-twitch fibers, which means that their backs fatigue more rapidly, and they also have lower core muscle strength, reduced flexibility in the hip and spine, and more abnormal patterns of motion. At the other end of the spectrum are people whose livelihoods require lots of heavy lifting and other stressful activities that cause repetitive stress damage to the back's muscles, bones, and ligaments, disks, and nerves. For this reason, subsistence farmers in Tibet, who dig their fields and harvest crops for weeks on end, and furniture movers, who carry enormous loads, both suffer from back injuries, but their injuries have a different set of causes than those suffered by people who sit all day long hunched over computers or sewing machines. 

In short, there is probably a balance between how you use your back and how healthy your back is. A normal back doesn't get pampered by chairs but instead is used with varying degrees of moderate intensity all day long, even during sleep. The adoption of agriculture was probably bad news for humans backs. Now we face the opposite problem, thanks to comfy chairs, as well shopping carts, rolling suitcases, elevators, and thousands of other labor-saving devices. Liberated from overstressing our backs, we suffer from weak and inflexible backs. The resulting scenario is all too common: for months or even years, you may be pain-free, but your back is weak, hence susceptible to injury. Then one day you reach down to pick up a bag, sleep in an awkward position, or fall on the street, and - WHAM - your back gets injured. A visit to the doctor's office usually results in a diagnosis of nonspecific back pain, plus a handful of medicines to alleviate your suffering. The problem is that once lower back pain begins, a vicious circle often ensues. A natural instinct is to rest when following a back injury and then to avoid activities that stress the back. However, too much rest only weakens the muscles, making you more vulnerable to another injury. Fortunately, therapies that improve back strength, including low-impact aerobic exercise, appear to be effective ways to improve back health.  

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. Lieberman, p. 337-343.
https://quartzy.qz.com/1121077/to-solve-problems-caused-by-sitting-learn-to-squat/

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/14/is-your-chair-killing-you-the-consequences-of-comfort.html
Q. People with bad backs often blame evolution for their pain. They say, “My back aches because man was not meant to walk on two feet.” Are they right?
A. If that were true, natural selection would have its toll and we’d be extinct. What is more likely is that many people sit in chairs all day, get no exercise, and thus have weak backs. We did not evolve to sit in chairs all day.

http://www.treehugger.com/eco-friendly-furniture/herman-miller-finally-brings-back-their-standing-desk.html
A 2 MINUTE BROTHA
Numerous studies have shown that sitting for extended periods of time each day leads to increased risk for early death, as well as heart disease, diabetes and other health conditions. Considering that 80 percent of Americans fall short of completing the recommended amount of exercise, 2.5 hours of moderate activity each week, it seems unrealistic to expect that people will replace sitting with even more exercise.

With this in mind, scientists at the University of Utah School of Medicine investigated the health benefits of a more achievable goal, trading sitting for lighter activities for short periods of time. They used observational data from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to examine whether longer durations of low intensity activities (e.g. standing), and light intensity activities (e.g. casual walking, light gardening, cleaning) extends the life span of people who are sedentary for more than half of their waking hours.

They found that there is no benefit to decreasing sitting by two minutes each hour, and adding a corresponding two minutes more of low intensity activities. However, a "trade-off" of sitting for light intensity activities for two minutes each hour was associated with a 33 percent lower risk of dying.
"It was fascinating to see the results because the current national focus is on moderate or vigorous activity. To see that light activity had an association with lower mortality is intriguing," says lead author Srinivasan Beddhu, M.D., professor of internal medicine.

Beddhu explains that while it's obvious that it takes energy to exercise, strolling and other light activities use energy, too. Even short walks add up to a lot when repeated many times over the course of a week. Assuming 16 awake hours each day, two minutes of strolling each hour expends 400 kcal each week. That number approaches the 600 kcal it takes to accomplish the recommended weekly goal of moderate exercise. It is also substantially larger than the 50 kcal needed to complete low intensity activities for two minutes each awake hour over the course of one week.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SIT FOR LONG PERIODS AT A TIME (3+ HOURS A DAY). YOUR ARM MUSCLES AND LEG MUSCLES ATROPHY (i.e. BECOME SMALLER AND WEAKER) WHILE YOUR TORSO (MIDSECTION) EXPANDS MAKING YOU LOOK BIG HEADED AND BIG BODIED WITH SMALL EXTREMITIES (SMALL ARMS AND LEGS, FINGERS AND TOES). IN OTHER WORDS, YOU START LOOKING DISPROPORTIONATE WHEN YOU SIT FOR EXTENDED PERIODS THROUGHOUT THE DAY (3+ HOURS A DAY)!  YOUR ARMS AND LEGS BEGIN TO WITHER AWAY (MR. WITHERS) AND YOU TAKE ON A BIT OF A BLOBISH BODIED, BALLOON HEADED LOOK!

MORE FITNESS ARTICLES

I DON'T WORKOUT FOR SHOW. I DON'T WORKOUT TO SHOW HOW MUCH I CAN LIFT OR TO BUILD A MUSCULAR BODY TO SHOW OFF. LAME, MUSCLE-HEAD, KOOKS DO THAT. GUYS THAT GO TO THE BEACH, BUT DON'T GO INTO THE WATER (I.E. DON'T SURF OR BODYSURF) AND GUYS THAT GO TO THOSE VEGAS POOL PARTIES DO THAT CORNY SHIT. I DON'T. WHY DO I WORKOUT? SO THAT I'M IN SHAPE FOR BASKETBALL (HAVE GOOD STRENGTH, ENDURANCE, STAMINA, ETC.) AND TO BE HEALTHY AND HAPPY.

http://instagram.com/p/t-9jEIhfix/?modal=true
Hey, Big Mouth, Before You Teach Your Son How To Play Basketball Teach Him How To Lose Weight Because He's A Fat Boy For His Age! (Look At That Gut On Him!)



4 Sep 2009
According to a new study, male muscles are a product of sexual selection. Bulging biceps=a worse immune system but more sexual partners.






The Article Below Applies To All Sports (Proper Practice As Applied To All Sports).
 For Instance, Before You Play In A Basketball Game You Should Warmup By Taking A Number Of Shots in Which Your Form Is Good And Your Release Feels Good. GOOOOOOD.


Mr. ShiBa Was My Golf Instructor In High School. He Didn't Have Much To Teach ME Since My Swing Was Nearly Flawless. I Think I Have Some Video Of He Watching ME Hit Balls. I'm Going To Have To Find That.
I WAS A 10-15 HANDICAP DEPENDING ON WHICH DAY!

"the spoiled brats you see in junior golf " - george karl
(I Was One Of Them!)
I'd Like To Play Speed Golf One Day.

http://instagram.com/p/hl8yynmV7I/# 
Manly Ass, HAIRY Forearms. This MothaFucca Got The Forearms Of A Diesel Truck Driving Forearm Wrestler And They HAIRY As Fucc. I Wouldn't Be Surprised If This MothaFucca Drive Uh Big Rig To And From Golf Courses. Just Pullin' Up To Golf Courses In Her 18 Wheeler Lookin' Like She Gonna Put On Her Own Golf Demo Day. (Dexter Manley Ass MothaFucca!) 

 https://instagram.com/p/8HU_vlzBxG/?taken-by=kyliecbs
Hairy Ass MothaFucca. What I Tel Ya? Hispanics (Mexicans, In Particular) Produce Hairy Ass MothaFuccas!
 

 2 hours ago
Lots of women like exercise mainly because it allows them to be outside in public in scanty clothing.
EXACTAMENTE, PD.THAT'S WHY I WALK AROUND TOWN SHIRTLESS TO EXPOSE MY BREASTS!!

OK. MAYBE EXERCISE IS GOOD FOR YOU AFTER ALL.(MAYBE IT IS WHAT IT'S ALL CRACKED UP TO BE. CRACKED OUT AND CRAPPED OUT, Y'ALL!)
 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/the-optimal-diet.html?smid=tw-share
OK. MAYBE A PALEO DIET ISN'T AS GOOD FOR YOU AFTER ALL. (MAYBE IT ISN'T WHAT IT'S ALL CRACKED UP TO BE.CRACKED OUT AND CRAPPED OUT Y'ALL!)

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shyness-is-nice/201401/are-you-too-embarrassed-exercise

https://twitter.com/JeanetteJenkins
Most People Exercise For Show And Not For Health. Guys Want To Have Muscly Bodies And Gals Want To Have Tone Bodies, But Neither Guys Nor Gals Are Too Concerned About Their Internal Health, For Lack Of A Better Phrase (Internal Health Which Includes Physiological, Biochemical, Metabolic, Hormonal, Etc. Functioning). So They Lift All These Weights, Run All Over The Place, And Eat A Poor Diet Everyday Not Knowing That They're Doing More Harm To Their Bodies Than Good. Plus, I Think The Whole "Workout To Build Muscle And Lose Fat" Concept Is Much Harder To Sustain Over The Long Haul (An Entire Lifetime) And Sets You Up For Failure And Depression In The Short Term As Opposed To Just Eating Healthily To Maintain Your Weight And Health. P.S. Jeanette, You're Unattractive. Keep Working Out So That You Can Maintain Your Masculinity And Unattractiveness, Tho.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/327985

Food More Important Than Fitness

All Of These Exercise Addicts Are Going To Be Fat In 5-10 Years. MUCHO GORDO MAiN!


2h 
Always make time for the gym. Even if it's just 30 min or what have it be.. DO IT💪
STRENUOUS EXERCISE ON A DAILY BASIS IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH. YOU PEOPLE HAVE BEEN FOOLED BY THE SPORTS INDUSTRY, FITNESS INDUSTRY, HEALTH FOODS INDUSTRY, AND MAINSTREAM MEDIA INTO BELIEVING THAT A LOT OF VIGOROUS EXERCISE IS GOOD FOR YOU, BUT IT'S NOT. TOO MUCH EXERCISE DOES MORE HARM TO YOU THAN GOOD. TO MAINTAIN YOUR HEALTH THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS YOU CAN DO ARE EAT HEALTHILY AND WALK FOR AT LEAST 30-45 MINUTES EVERYDAY (2 MILES A DAY) . (BODILY COMPOSITION IS PRIMARILY GENETIC AND PRIMARILY BASED ON YOUR DIET, SO ALL OF THE EXERCISING IN THE WORLD WITHOUT PROPER NUTRITION AND SUPERIOR GENES ISN'T GOING TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOU HEALTH AND BODY WISE OTHER THAN MAKE YOU SICK AND UGLY.) 


http://instagram.com/p/ft0Aesyeay/
All Of You Exercise And Diet Fanatics Have Got It All Wrong. You're Doing More Damage To Your Body Than Good. I'm Going To Post An Excerpt On The Flaws Of Specific Diets And Exercises To Prove This. (A Master Cleanse? What The Hell Is That? Just Another Hollywood Trend That Has No Beneficial Impact On Your Body. In Fact, It Probably Does More Damage Than Good. The Only Master Cleanse You Need Is Pruno Juice! That Shit'll Clean You Out Real Quick, Wigga/Nigga!)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2511045/Getting-exercise-bad-getting-all.html
https://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/366132/2/worlds-greatest-health-exercise-myths

  Retweeted
Mar 21
Replying to 
This may interest you. I Iive in Argentina, here the natives from the Northern regions are heavily overweight. But that not the case in the past. The Guaraní tribes waged years of war against the Spaniards. No fatties. I blame carbohydrates introduced by civilization...

In the late 1980s, the world community became increasingly alarmed at the shrinking tropical rain forest in the Amazon basin (due to clear-cut logging, mining, and industrialization). Politicians and environmentalists launched a host of programs to curb this deforestation and even brought native Amazon Indians to environmental conferences in New York City. At one such conference, a group of Indian came across joggers exercising in Central Park - and found this concept absolutely hilarious. That adults would run for no apparent reason was comically absurd to these practical hunters. In their tropical forest home, every movement had a function and a purpose. What could possibly be gained by running to no destination, with no predators or enemies to escape from, and with nothing to capture?

 The mind-set of these Amazonian Indians was undoubtedly very similar to that of any of the world's hunter-gatherers. They got plenty of exercise simply by carrying out the day's basic activities - finding food and water, building shelters, making tools, and gathering wood. These activities were more than enough to allow them to develop superb physical fitness. Strength, stamina, and good muscle tone were the natural by-products of their daily routine.

 Our Stone Age ancestors worked hard or they didn't eat. Sustained labor wasn't necessary every day; periods of intense exertion generally alternated with days of rest and relaxation. But the work was always there, an inevitable fact of life. There were no retirement plans, no vacations, and definitely no labor-saving devices. Everybody, except for the very young or the very old, helped out. And their daily efforts were astonishing. The amount of physical activity performed by an average hunter-gatherer would have been about four times greater than that of a sedentary office worker - and about three times greater than anybody needs to get the health benefits of exercise. An office worker who jogged 3 miles a day for a whole week would use less than half the energy of an average hunter-gatherer, such as the !Kung people of Africa. !Kung men on average walk 9.3 miles per day; the women average 5.7 miles per day. As you may expect, all this walking and regular physical activity pays off with high levels of physical fitness for everyone. In fact, my research team has shown that the average aerobic capacity of the world's hunter-gatherers and less Westernized peoples is similar to that of today's top athletes.

 There are few physicians or health professionals who would argue that exercise shouldn't accompany dietary programs.

 The idea of exercising the extra pounds away - if this is your only means of weight loss - is not terribly practical. Exercise combined with diet is no more effective than diet alone in causing weight loss. How can this be? The answer is a scientific equation: to lose a pound of fat, you need to achieve a caloric deficit of 3,500 calories.
Imagine that a mildly obese women, weighing 154 pounds, would like to lose 30 pounds, or 105,000 calories, by walking or jogging for 3 miles (forty-five minutes) a day. On days when she walks or jogs, she expends 215 additional calories (compared to the 80 calories she expends for the same forty-five minute period on other days). The 3 mile walk/jog causes a net deficit of 135 calories - not a lot, considering the amount of work she's doing. At this rate, it will take her 26 days to lose 1 pound and 780 days (more than 2 years) to lose 30 pounds. Most dieters simply don't have the patience to wait that long. (Frankly, most of us need the encouragement of seeing the scale change more rapidly to help us keep up the good work. Otherwise, it's easy to become discourages and give up.)

 Experiments by my colleague Dr. Joe Donnelly and coworkers at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and by Dr. David Nieman at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, have demonstrated that diet alone is just as effective as diet plus exercise in causing weight loss. 

 The real benefit from exercise for weigh loss comes not from the modest caloric deficit that it may create, but from its ability to keep weight off once it has been lost. Dr. Rena Wing of Brown University School of Medicine in Providence, Rhode Island, reviewed a large number of exercise trials in which participants either dieted only or dieted and exercised. Reporting on the participants a year later, Dr. Wing noted, "In all of the long-term randomized trials reviewed, weight losses at follow-up were greater in diet plus exercise than in diet only."

The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat. Cordain, p. 198-200.

Can we talk about how humans aren't adapted to the 21st century?
The big one is obesity. We evolved to put on fat wherever necessary, and that was a good thing in human history. Most people until recently had to work hard and they lived just at the margin of energy balance, and a little bit more energy stored in fat meant that you could have more babies, and your babies were more likely to survive. That was pretty powerful stuff, right? Now we're in this bizarre situation that for the first time in billions of years of evolution we have an organism that is not energy limited any more.

I'm sure there are just as many articles in the UK as they are in the US about how difficult it is for people who are overweight to lose weight. Dieting really is a disaster for everybody, it takes superhuman effort to lose weight, it can be done but it isn't easy. And that's because we're evolved not only to gain weight but to hold onto it. So if that overweight person starts dieting that's just as hard as if an underweight person starts dieting, you go into a negative energy balance and all kinds of mechanisms kick in that cause us to become less active, to reshuffle energy around our bodies to defeat that effort to lose weight. So of course obesity is our number one problem.

AA: Why, in spite of our adaptations, have we gone from endurance athletes to couch potatoes? DL: It was incredibly recently in history that a large number of humans have been freed from having to do physical activity. My argument, from an evolutionary perspective, would be that not having regular physical activity every day is pathological and abnormal. In a lot of medical studies, we compare people who are sick with controls. But who are those controls? They are relatively sedentary Westerners. I'd argue that we are comparing people who are sick to people who are abnormal and semi-pathological.

AA: If being inactive is pathological and abnormal, then how come we hate exercise so much? DL: There was never any evolutionary selection pressure to make us like exercise. If you are a Neanderthal or Homo erectus or an early modern human, you didn't think, "Gee, I'm going to go for a run so that I'm not going to get depressed." They had to go long distances every day in order to survive. Not exercising was never an option, so there was never any selection pressure to make people like exercise. On the contrary, there was probably selection to help people avoid needless exercise when they could. Some hunter-gatherers had diets of about 2,200 calories a day. When your energy intake is that low, you can't afford to go for a jog just for fun.

AA: So evolution selected for traits that made us relax or be lazy? DL: Of course. Just like anytime you crave sugary, fatty foods—that would have been advantageous for early humans. It's only now that they have become maladaptive.

When you walk into a train station and there is a staircase and an escalator, your brain always tells you to take the escalator. Given a choice between a piece of cake and a carrot, we always go for the cake. It's not in your best interest, but it's probably a very deeply rooted evolutionary instinct.

AA: What are the consequences of the modern sedentary lifestyle? DL: It's hard to think of one disease that is not affected by physical activity. Take the two major killers: heart disease and cancer. The heart requires exercise to grow properly. Exercise increases the peripheral arteries and decreases your cholesterol levels; it decreases your risk of heart disease by at least half.

Breast cancers and many other reproductive tissue cancers also respond strongly to exercise. Other factors being constant, women who have engaged in regular vigorous exercise have significantly lower cancer rates than women who have not. Colon cancer has been shown to be reduced by up to 30 percent by exercise. There are also benefits for mental health—depression, anxiety, the list is incredibly long.

AA: What can we do about our maladaptive traits? DL: If we want to practice preventive medicine, that means we have to eat foods that we might not prefer, and exercise when we don't want to. The only way to do that is through some form of socially acceptable coercion. There is a reason why we require good food and exercise in school—otherwise the kids won't get enough of it. Right now we are dropping those requirements around the world.

If we are going to solve these health problems, we have to push ourselves to act in our own self-interest. As a society, as a culture, we have to somehow agree that it's necessary or face the consequence—which is billions of unfit, overweight people.

AA: Has evolution given us any instincts that promote exercise? DL: Yes. It's important to recognize that the body isn't adapted only in one way or another. There are multiple competing adaptations. While it's true that many of our instincts are to not like exercise, we also have other adaptations that make us enjoy exercise. The most obvious example is the runner's high.


EJERCICIO
DIABESITY 
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