playthink

In Chip Brown’s wonderful portrait about Tiger Woods, It’s Good to Be Immortal, the New York Times journalist makes reference to a story in which Michael Jordan, a good friend of Woods, said he (Jordan) was “driven to win because somebody might be watching for the first time.” 

What motivates Tiger?, Brown wanted to know. Woods said, “I don’t see how you can live with yourself not trying and not giving your best. I don’t see how you can go home and say, ‘I didn’t give it my best.’ People do that. I don’t know how they do that. That to me is unacceptable.”

If pride in a job well-done is not enough to help you achieve peak physical performance, Men’s Health magazine, home to “tons of useful stuff,” offers 20 Ways to Stick to Your Workout. Some of the tips are Duh!, such as “Don’t do what you hate.”

Some, no matter how “motivating,” feed off of fear and insecurity, including “Ask your wife/partner make a list of your most displeasing physical characteristic… Make the most-hated body part your workout focus for 4 weeks, then repeat the quiz for more motivation.”

A couple are really useful, even if an echo of what you’ve read on various message boards, including competing/racing (not just training) and registering for an event that is a few states away. Paying — now! — for the registration fees, hotel rooms, airplane tickets, and car rental will certainly be an incentive to train. (Sometimes the best motivation affects the pocketbook.)

But my favorite tip, included maybe half in jest but certainly a unique and effective technique, is number 20 on the list: Blackmail yourself.

Take a picture of yourself shirtless, holding a sign that shows your e-mail address. Then e-mail it to a trusted but sadistic friend, with the following instructions: “If I don’t send you a new picture that shows serious improvement in 12 weeks, post this photo at hotornot.com and send the link to the addresses listed below….” (Include as many e-mail addresses — especially of female acquaintances — as possible.) “It’s nasty, but extremely effective,” says [fitness trainer] Alwyn Cosgrove.

Hey, whatever works.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood 

With the launch of Nintendo’s Wii Fit, parents and health experts can no longer claim that video games make our kids fat.

Or can they? Just what kind of workout can you get from balancing on an expensive piece of plastic? Does a cartoon avatar offer the same kind of coaching as a personal trainer?

Doesn’t it feel a bit weird to stand shirtless, wearing Spandex shorts, in front of our favorite animated plumber Mario, who encourages you with a cheerful “Mama Mia!” every time you do a push-up?

(Just for the record, I do not know if Mario — or even Super Mario — make an appearance in Wii Fit. But the possibility of the above scenario makes me want to dust off my old Game Genie and connect it to Wii Fit to see if maybe, just maybe, there’s a hidden gym where I can virtually workout with Mario, Luigi, Toad, and the Princess.

I came across two interesting stories this morning about the hottest video game — er, exergame? — on the market: “Gaming Your Way to Fitness,” which aired on NPR, and the NYT’s “O.K., Avatar, Work With Me.”

In each story, a couple of volunteers ran through the various exercises of the game. The verdict?

Wii Fit won’t, nor should, nor aims to put your neighborhood gym out of business. You still need to get outside to walk or run around throughout the day; you still need to eat right and get plenty of rest; you still need to stretch and strengthen your muscles by doing more than a few balance moves in front of your TV.

But for people who might be uncomfortable in a locker room, want to engage in physical activity with their families, or simply enjoy the interactive nature of video games, Wii Fit can provide you with a mild aerobic workout.

For an ever-growing number of us, with ever-growing waistlines, it’s enough to make you say, “Mama Mia!“

Bonus clip: Game Genie TV commercial.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

Friday is turning into excerpt-from-Gina-Kolata day. Her Personal Best column in the New York Times consistently produces some of the most thoughtful, interesting, and well-written articles on exercise, health, and fitness. This week’s piece explores the sport of triathlon, generally, and the difficulty of excelling at multiple disciplines — swimming, cycling, running — specifically.

Excerpts and notes from “For Peak Performance, 3 Is Not Better Than 1“, which looks to answer the question, “Is it possible to peak in more than one sport at once?”:

In the article we meet Joel Friel, a triathlon coach and author of 10 books, including the bible of the multi-sport world — literally. I did not feel comfortable calling myself a triathlete, even as an accomplished athlete in the sport, until reading and underlining what turned out to be nearly ever-other-sentence in Friel’s best-selling training guide, The Triathlete’s Training Bible.

Friel says many of his athletes sometimes feel frustrated that they aren’t running as fast as they think they can and should. His advice? “[I talk with them and ask] do you really want to be a triathlete? If you want to run faster you have to give up swimming and cycling.”

There’s a reason it’s hard to excel in three sports at once, physiologists say. The training necessary to do your best in one sport is likely to counteract what is needed to be good at another.

When you are training, said Gary Krahenbuhl, an exercise physiologist and emeritus professor at Arizona State University, improvement depends on physical and biochemical changes in muscle cells and in nerve-firing patterns. And those changes are very sport-specific, he added. The result, Dr. Krahenbuhl said, is that “changes that facilitate performance for one event may actually undermine performance in another event.

“To think that you could train in such a way as to have your greatest performance in all the sports is impossible,” he added.

Even body musculature can trip up triathletes. Swimmers need large muscles in their backs and shoulders. Runners and cyclists want small, light upper bodies. Cyclists need large quadriceps muscles. Runners don’t, and in fact they don’t want any extra muscle weight on their legs.

A woman named Anne Gordon is profiled in the article. She’s a “51-year-old triathlete [who] has never gotten a personal record in each leg of a triathlon on the same day.”

But, she said, that is part of what draws her to triathlons.

“What I love best about this sport is the training, the sense that the goal of hitting a perfect 10 for all three sports will take a lifetime.” And that, she added, “is O.K. by me.”

As noted, I participated in the sport of triathlon for a few years before leaving for a host of issues that I’ll explain in another post. But the elusiveness of perfection that Ms. Gordon refers… This is what intrigued me about triathlon. There are so many variables in a race — the swim, bike, and run, of course, but also the transitions, hydration and nutrition management, and gear and technical issues — that I never executed anything close to a perfect performance.

But it is that frustration — I had a great swim and run, but I got two flats on the bike section, or I didn’t grab my special-needs bag out of T2 and utterly bonked on the run — and that hope — Next time, baby. Next time – that kept me racing. I couldn’t quit until I mastered the sport and conquered at least one race.

It’s an ultimately futile chase for perfection, I realized. But an exciting and inspiring one. Says Ms. Gordon:

“The simple act of working hard at three things requires a diversity and balance in my life that is rewarding in and of itself. It is good for my spirit to know that I have to work hard and be patient to achieve mastery.”

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

More great stuff from the NYT: “You Name It, and Exercise Helps It” by Jane Brody.

“The single thing that comes close to a magic bullet, in terms of its strong and universal benefits, is exercise,” reports Frank Hu, epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

I have written often about the protective roles of exercise. It can lower the risk of heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, dementia, osteoporosis, gallstones, diverticulitis, falls, erectile dysfunction, peripheral vascular disease, and 12 kinds of cancer.

But what if you already have one of these conditions? Or an ailment like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, congestive heart failure, or osteoarthritis? How can you exercise if you’re always tired or in pain or have trouble breathing? Can exercise really help?

You bet it can.

“The data show that regular moderate exercise increases your ability to battle the effects of disease,” says Dr. Marilyn Moffat, a professor of physical therapy at New York University. “It has a positive effect on both physical and mental well-being. The goal is to do as much physical activity as your body lets you do, and rest when you need to rest.”

“With regular exercise, the body seeks to continue staying active,” wrote Dr. Tsai, an assistant professor of neurosciences at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

So get out there, no matter how you feel, and…

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

Over the last few years, a growing body of research (but by no means widely accepted) has found that it is possible to be both fit and fat. [Source]

Wishful thinking, says a new Harvard study of 39,000 women. It’s findings:

“Compared with normal-weight active women, the risk for developing heart disease was 54 percent higher in overweight active women and 87 percent higher in obese active women. By contrast, it was 88 percent higher in overweight inactive women; and 2 1/2 times greater in obese inactive women.” (Emphasis mine.)

“Physical activity really does make an impact,” said lead author Dr. Amy Weinstein of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

But, as stressed by Dr. Martha Gulati, a heart specialist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, while being physically active is important, “Weight still matters.”

This point is underscored by Dr. Weinstein: “If you’re overweight or obese, you can’t really get back to that lower risk entirely with just physical activity alone.”

No dessert for me, tonight.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

From researchers at Princeton University: Running by yourself could be bad for your brain. Or at least, not as good as running with a group.

According to an article in the journal Nature Neuroscience, as reported by the BBC, exercise can have “negative effects on activity in the brain… Running is known to increase levels of stress hormone corticosterone, which can reduce the creation of new brain cells - a process known as neurogenesis.”

But wait, right?! Isn’t exercise good for the brain? Doesn’t physical activity promote neurogenesis?

Here’s where things can get a bit complicated.

Yes, exercise “has been found to increase spatial awareness and to boost communication between neurons.”

But… Only (or at least, especially) if exercise is done with others. Or if done for a really long time. Here’s the rundown on this study (no pun intended):

The researchers at Princeton looked at rats that ran in groups and rats that ran in social isolation. In both groups, “running caused similar elevations of the stress hormone, which can impair neuron generation.”

However, “running was found to increase neuron generation when rats were housed in groups. In rats that ran in social isolation, neurogenesis was suppressed.”

So even though running increased stress on the brain, which can impair neuron generation, group running “increase[d] spatial awareness and boost[ed] communication between neurons.” Running is stressful for the brain, but the social aspect of group running produced more good things for the brain than it hurts.

The rats that ran in isolation, however, experienced no such gain. “Only animals that ran alone were vulnerable to its negative influence. They also had higher levels of the hormone compared to group runners.”

So running alone could be bad for the brain. Unless…

Unless you go for a really long run. “When isolated rats ran for a long time, they did see the same benefits as their short-term runner peers [who ran in groups] - but only when they had been running for a much longer period.”

The Princeton research team was led by Dr. Elizabeth Gould. In their article, “Social isolation delays the positive effects of running on adult neurogenesis” (aka “The Stress of Running Alone” article), in the journal Nature Neuroscience, she explained, “In the absence of social interaction, a normally beneficial experience can exert a potentially deleterious influence on the brain.”

So what to do? Grab a friend and hit the trails. Or, if going solo, go long. Real long.

Fascinating research. It’s enough to make you…

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood