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Bandwidth and Vitamins

September 29, 2006 07:22 PM

Hiking with two distinguished scientists in Zion. I had a great day hiking with Robert and Barry, both of whom are accomplished psychologists/psychiatrists who focus on neurological and physiological aspects of mental and metabolic disease. We had an nice hike, a fine lunch, and great conversation.

It seems my little site hit another bandwidth limit today. I was not even able to post. If you can't get on I can't get on. So, what to do? Do I need the site to go to 2 or 3 million or more hits per month? I don't think so. I have other things I want to do. I will at sometime slightly change the way I do things here. I will offer a subscription, I think, for slightly more detailed and innovative posts. But, I will continue to post when I feel there is something I need to share. So, you will be able to ride free or get more with a subscription (which will be a very nominal fee).

After reviewing the advertising options, I have decided not to accept ads from anyone but Mark Sisson. Many of you know who Mark is and I have been using his product for the last 2 months, along with the glutathione in the HMP product line. I like it. It has a few advantages over the HMP product, at least for me.

First, I can throw away or not use the other supplements that I sometimes use. Mark's formula is very complete. Second, I get no gastric distress from Mark's product. Some mornings, when I have had a bit too much coffee, I get an upset stomach if I take the HMP product. I hate that. This doesn't happen with Mark's product and I think the digestive enzymes he puts into the mix is helpful to me. I continue to take the glutathione from HMP. Third, well I can't tell you.

Mark's ad will be a minor distraction on the side bar when I have time to put it there. Ignore it or have a look. I use it.

LINK · Everything · Comments (8)

Combating Type 2 Diabetes

September 28, 2006 02:46 PM

I have a good friend who has now developed Type 2 diabetes and three of my neighors are in varying stages of pre-diabetes. You can tell by the abdominal fat, the lack of energy, and their slightly inflammed faces. You can see it in the stores and restaurants around town; it is everywhere you look. In the gym a gentleman came over to compliment me on my appearance and I learned that he too is a Type 2 diabetic. I could tell by the body shape and the lack of energy visible in his posture and movement. He asked me what he could do to combat his diabetes.

I said that I am not a doctor and don't give medical advice. Then I said that if it were me, the first thing I would do is talk with your doctor to formulate a plan to attack the underlying medical condition rather than its symptoms. You can manage your diabetes or you can get rid of it if your pancreas has not burned out already.

An awful lot of diabetes care is focused on managing a symptom --- elevated blood glucose. Insulin injections and food intake revolve around blood glucose testing and keeping glucose in a range where it will do less harm. But, they do nothing to address the underlying illness. Glucose control is important to limit oxydative damage, glycosylation and kidney damage but it does nothing to improve the disease.

Aggressively managing blood glucose (a symptom) can make the disease worse. For example, injecting insulin to keep blood glucose from getting too high reduces insulin sensitivity in the receptors. Insulin resistance may be the primary cause of the disease and tight glucose management through insulin injections makes one even more insulin resistant. Some Type 2 diabetics become so resistant to insulin that they require large injections and eventually the pancreas burns out and they become Type 1 diabetics as well (this hybrid disease sometimes called Type 3 diabetes). Taking medications that prompt the pancreas to release more insulin may push it over the edge to burn out. Taking medications to improve insulin sensitivity may lead to a burn out of the receptors from the almost toxic levels of insulin that Type 2 Insulin resistant-diabetics have. In these instances, the attempt to control blood glucose worsens the disease. These treatments focus on a number, blood glucose, but do not address the underlying disease. It is a bit like attacking cholesterol numbers to fight heart disease.

The gentleman who asked me how to attack his Type 2 diabetes had been walking on a treadmill the whole time I was at the gym (35 minutes). I said that you are too heavy to do that and your joints are taking a beating. Walking is fine, but a treadmill is too repetitive (the foot strikes are all the same) and you are doing too much volume. Your body can't repair damage at the volume you are doing. And, more importantly, walking does little to raise your insulin sensitivity. Muscle needs to contract to express GLUT 4 and other insulin sensitizing factors. Your muscles are not being contracted sufficiently to significantly improve your insulin sensitivity.

As we were both leaving I said...

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LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (9)

Teeth, part of the complete package

September 27, 2006 11:36 AM

I have only briefly discussed teeth, though they are an essential part of a healthy person and their look. You cannot have the whole package if your teeth look bad. And the teeth and gums are a pathway for pathogens and inflammation if they are not healthy. Almost everything that is bad in a modern human being is the result of inflammation, so it is best not to open the mouth as another source.

The Vikings had a phrase "long in the tooth" to note when old Lars was getting along. As he lost gum tissue, the teeth and inflammation would follow and he would also become deficient in protein and begin to lose muscle mass.

People often comment about how good my teeth look and how white they are. So, just a short note on how I care for my teeth. Naturally, the Evolutionary Fitness Diet ensures that I have adequate protein for my teeth (they are after all mineralized protein), that I do not grow cultures of bacteria on them by feeding them sugar and near-sugar starches, and that they get some exercise chewing. These are all important.

I smoke only an occasional cigar (intermittently, so it is a slight challenge to my defenses --- the hormesis idea again), so my teeth do not become tobacco-stained. I do drink coffee so I watch for staining.

I brush twice a day, morning and evening after dinner. Since I do not eat after dinner, a brushing then is sufficient to take me to my breakfast. I brush lightly with a smooth toothpaste. Then I floss with satin floss. Then I use my Rota-Dent ($125 from my dentist. It is 7 years old and works perfectly. Replacement brushes are available.) with a slight amount of a gel (Plus White at most stores) containing tooth bleach. The gel is a lubricant for the brush to make sure it does not grind into the tooth. The two together keep my teeth completely free of stains and discoloration.

I am not trying for News Anchor white, just clean, unstained teeth. Take a look at some of my pictures; just a clean smile, not a blinding flash.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)

Super Car

September 26, 2006 10:38 AM

This is the Xeno III designed by Nick Pugh. Its construction was always in doubt, but the result is spectacular. Mark Christensen partnered with Nick in transforming Nick's concepts into the automotive flesh you see here.

Mark sent me his book Super Car telling the story of the Xeno and I couldn't put it down. Well, at times I had to because their failings and foibles were so many and so great I had to have some relief. That they persevered and that the car looks so pure is a tribute to their commitment to an ideal and to the dextrous use of multiple credit cards.

A few lines from the witty book:

"I've borrowed $2,500 from everybody I know and currently my wife and I, using credit cards, are able to pay money back only to those most likely to starve or sue."

"Sure, there are problems. This minute, the unfinished Xeno is about as safe as a time bomb, and there are questions too. Like, where will we find the money to make the Xeno more than just dangerous, and whose soul will have to be sold to do so? Also, there are lawyers after me and suggestions that I make Don Quixote look like Alan Greenspan..."

Every chapter has gems like these. I really enjoyed the book and it was a ride through the Southern California car scene for me, one I lived through during the 1950s.

Mark attended my talk at the Calorie Restriction Society meetings and has been following Evolutionary Fitness for a couple of months. He is writing a book on the quest for immortality, a quest worthy of someone who could build the Xeno. I am in the book somewhere he tells me.

LINK · Everything · Comments (0)

Deja Vu; It has to be

September 25, 2006 06:29 PM

Mr. Biggy comments on my Deja Vu all over again post by offering this definition. 'Deja vu means "the illusion of having previously experienced something actually being encountered for the first time." This doesn't seem to agree with your definition. '

It does agree with my definition, though that may be a bit hard to see. First, though, I don't like the "illusion" part of the definition and I think many brain researchers and cognitive scientists would also object. It is not an illusion if the brain's representation does not agree with reality; it is a limit on the brain's ability to see and perform the task in the way the experimenter presents it. This is the basis of most magic tricks. If it were a true illusion, then neither the experimental subject nor the researcher doing the study would be capable of recognizing it because the brain just doesn't get it.

I gave the cognitive process by which the brain experiences deja vu of the kind that makes one say: I have been here before, but I can't believe that is true. Not an illusion, just an undecidable question given the brain's limitations in understanding how it thinks.

To make my point more concretely, and to dispell any deep beliefs anyone might have in over-interpreting deja vu moments, let me offer this example. Suppose the "real" world takes place in 10 dimensions. But, the brain only registers events in 5 dimensions. Let events be binary so that a list of 10 zeros and ones is enough to fully describe an event. The brain, given its limits, records that same event with a list of just 5 zeros and ones. If events are uniformly distributed over all possibilities, then about half the things that one experiences will be deja vu moments. The deja vu moments will have the same list of zeros and ones in the first 5 dimensions of brain space even though they differ in some or even all of the remaining 5 dimensions of the "true" event in 10 dimensional event space.

Hence, half of the events experienced in brain space will be construed as the same event even though they differ. The brain just can't get the difference because of neural and processing limits. This fits exactly the definition of deja vu of seeing events recure even though they differ. The problem is they differ in ways that are beyond the brain's ability to capture or represent in limited brain space.

This simple model has empirical content. It makes predictions that could be false. One test is to see what happens to people who suffer brain damage, a reduction of the brain space. They become more limited in the ability to adapt. This follows because their reduced brain space fails to see as different situations that are different because they cannot perceive them in full dimension. These individuals adopt ritualistic and routinized responses to what you and I might see to be different situations calling for differing responses. In effect, brain damage reduces brain space so that event space is compressed onto fewer dimensions and the behavioral responses become more limited.

Because the brain space must be of lesser dimension than event space, deja vu has to happen and more often the more limited is brain space.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)

Deja Vu All Over and Over and Over and ... Over Again

September 24, 2006 07:15 PM

Yogi Berra may have been far smarter than he is given credit for. His has been credited or blamed for the famous statment; "It's deja vu, all over again."

To some the statement is repetitive for deja vu is to see an event that one has experienced before as experienced again. But, give him some credit for one can have a deja vu experience on many levels since life is a fractal experience and the brain has limited capacity to detect and represent patterns. Thus, it is possible to experience deja vu moments on many levels.

One can experience the experience of deja vu, in effect saying "I have felt a moment like this before and am likely to do so again." This is second order deja vu; recognizing previous such experiences. A still higher order of deja vu is in seeing a pattern of higher order in deja vu recurrence. And so on. Because life is a fractal there will be events and complex moments that are similar to one another on many scales. Thus, a deja vu moment on a low dimensional scale (sweaty and kissing in the drive-in as a teen ager) may recur on a higher dimensional scale (devotion to your wife) and on yet higher temporal orders (discovering a new love at a late stage of life). Or they may recur from lower to higher dimension --- physical love, love, sharing, and devotion, or rediscovering love that one has lost. And so on.

Because life is fractal there are many scales on which it looks similar --- self-similarity all over again. Small events look similar to bigger ones and these events recur on a scale of decades and these patterns recur on the larger canvas of a lifetime.

It cannot be otherwise because life is a fractal so if we have the ability to see higher orders of order we must experience similarity of experiences; deja vu on many levels. We should not make too much of this because, fractal life aside, the brain is limited in its recognition and representation of experiences. Deja vu moments have no deep meaning. They represent little more than the limits of the brain to detect and represent complexity in real events. Because there is limited neural substrate and real patterns are of unlimited complexity, many experiences must recur on different scales. So, representational limits in the brain make deja vu inevitable because a finite brain can only support a finite number of representations of experiences. If similar events call forth the same or similar representation in neural substrate, a deja vu moment occurs.

This is easy to show. Suppose the brain can allocate 20 neurons to an event. If an event is complex it may require a description of the state in 200 dimensions. Thus, a lower order representation is one of 20 to the 200th power number of states. A higher order processor must pick a state or subset of states from this huge number of possible combinations. 20^200 possible states cannot be enumerated in a lifetime or many lifetimes.

The problem has to be reduced in dimension because there are not enough neurons and there is not enough time to function with state representations that are of dimension 200. Increasing the number of neurons devoted to an event is not a solution because doing so expands the demands on the next level of cognition, the pattern recognizers. So, the state representation must be reduced in dimension, from 200 perhaps to 10 or even 3 or 4. Doing so frees neurons from simple representation to higher orders of pattern recognition, a likely avenue of brain evolution. It also reduces the computational burden of the higher order neuronal circuits and this holds true farther up the line all the way to the neocortex.

So, I think the brain must be organized to operate with low dimensional states; that is to say, that complex events will be represented in the brain as finite and rather low dimensional events, say, on the order of 3 or 4 up to 7 dimensions. This spares the requirements for neurons from the lowest to the highest levels. The cost is that the finite number of states make deja vu inevitable. The down side is that once an experience is brain-encoded in the sex, food, danger dimensions a lot of the other dimensions can't carry much weight.

LINK · Complex Systems ~ · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (4)

Quick Thoughts

September 22, 2006 02:58 PM

Running and other dumb things. Do have a look at the excellent comments on deaths among endurance runners and bicyclists. Yuneek, who can produce references faster than a politician can change positions, supplies yet more spot-on references to studies on runners and cyclists and the list is getting pretty long if you go back over some of my earlier posts such as Top Ten Reasons Not To Run Marathons and associated comments. Sisson and Fugate weigh in with sharp comments too.

Kids. I bought a soft, large-diameter rope so that my grandson and I could pull one another and play tug of war. I took the rope and an 8 pound medicine ball (how did it get this name?) with Corey to the field. We tugged and pulled until he dropped laughing and worn out. Then we took turns throwing the ball as high and as far as we could. After a rest and conversation about what we were doing, we did it all over again. Then we went home and tossed a football. A great work out for a little kid. He wants to do it again.

Hitting. I had been wondering how my softball hitting would be since I have not played for almost a year. But, I have been visualizing my swing, sort of a Pujols/ARod swing, and working certain muscles that enable it. My rotator cuffs and my core have been prime targets of my workouts along with heavy db rows. The tight core works with my swing which is rather upright and with a short stride. I throw the bat head into the ball with my arms and just a bit of shoulder rotation. I don't open the lead hip until the ball is struck. This keeps everything moving down line through the ball. The release is the key and I support a full release by letting the top hand go off from the bat as the bat goes through the hitting area and then rolling the left wrist over and letting the left arm extend more down line than around. A little like Mark McGwire. I make sure to tell myself to go quick to the ball. This keeps me back a long time, which is hard to do in slow pitch, and then lets me explode into the ball. Boy, does it work. I went 6 for 6 and was a bit tired from being on base so much. All but one hit was for extra bases and two were triples. One hit high on the fence, two more were on the warning track, and a line drive down the third base line got to the fence in no time. Too much base running though. Got to start hitting more out, but the beat up practice balls have no life in them.

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Lucy's Baby

This is the skull from an almost complete skeleton of a three year old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago. She stood on two feet, had arms long enough to fall well below the hips and her shoulder structure resembled that of a gorilla. Just what one might expect if afarensis descended from the trees to explore a new niche. BBC News.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (0)

Sudden Cardiac Death in Athletes

September 21, 2006 02:32 PM

This has become a more serious discussion and a worthy one I think i view of the favor with which the press and the public tend to look at athletes as a model of health. One of my readers was kind enough to point me to a review for physicians of sudden cardiac death in athletes. I can't put up the whole text but a few portions and some summarization are enough to put this discussion on a foundation of data and physiological consequences of athletic training for competitive sports. The document is Sudden Cardiac Death in Athletes: A Clinical Perspective by Michael Gold, MD, PhD and is published on the Medscape web site.

From our perspective the study is limited because it is focussed on underlying heart disease and how athletic training affects it. On the other hand, many people have undiagnosed heart disease.

The introduction begins by describing adaptations in the heart from athletic training and offers a definition of "athlete".

Athletes are generally thought to be very healthy, so when sudden cardiac death (SCD) occurs in this population, it is a particularly unexpected and high-profile event. But just as in the general population, athletes can harbor undiagnosed cardiac disease and congenital abnormalities that unknowingly put them at high risk for SCD. Moreover, intensive athletic activities may trigger life-threatening arrhythmias in susceptible subjects. It is noteworthy that athletic training can result in physiologic adaptations in the heart (including atrial dilatation and hypertrophy) and autonomic changes in heart rate control (such as sinus bradycardia, atrioventricular [AV] nodal conduction disturbances, and atrial fibrillation [AF]) that can be difficult at times to distinguish from more serious structural or arrhythmia problems.

Although the word "athlete" can be defined in various ways, the 36th Bethesda Conference on sports eligibility recommendations for athletes with cardiovascular abnormalities defines a competitive athlete as "one who participates in an organized team or sport that requires regular competition against others as a central component, places a high premium on excellence and achievement, and requires some form of systematic (and usually intense) training."[1]

A large 21 year study in Italy quantified the risks of physical activity in adolescents and young adults and found the incidence of SCD to be 2.62 per 100,000 among athlete males, 1.07 among athlete females versus 1.00 for the entire cohort (athletes and non-athletes). 89% of deaths were exercise related versus 22% for the cohort. Still the number of deaths is low and the risk is low; just 300 SCD in the 21 year study period involving 1.4 million people. Nonetheless, the low risk was doubled for athletes relative to their cohort peers.

Contributing risk factors for SCD are summarized as:

There are a number of underlying cardiac conditions that increase the risk of SCD in athletes (Table 2).[6] Congenital heart disorders are the most common associated disorders found in those under age 35 and are estimated to account for at least 40% of sudden deaths in young athletes in the United States.[7] Chief among these is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which is fairly common in the general population (occurring in 1 of every 500 individuals); this condition is responsible for an estimated one third of SCD cases in young athletes. Other common congenital causes include arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), Marfan syndrome, and ion channel abnormalities, such as long QT syndrome. These genetically linked diseases may account for an additional 10% of SCD cases.[8]

Older athletes...

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LINK · Endurance Training: Death, Injury, and Risk · Comments (4)

He Was So Active

September 20, 2006 11:41 AM

Another death. I can't go into the details, but a long-distance runner died of a heart attack.

His friends said, as they always say, "He was so active. How could this happen?"

We are beginning to see why. The human heart and vasculture were never made to do the extreme things heavy-duty runners and cyclists (and some others) do to it.

The inflammation load is huge and the diet is rotten. And they work synergistically to make things worse: the inflammation from the ischemia and microdamage is heightened by the flame of glucose.

Measuring health by how far you can run is a bad metric. So is using the bench press as a measure of anything other than a bench press.

A run is just a run and a bench press is just a bench press. Health and performance are something altogether different and far too complex for any single measure.

LINK · Endurance Training: Death, Injury, and Risk · Comments (11)

Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture

September 19, 2006 09:51 AM

Elsevier has just published the Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. It is wonderfully edited by Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby. My chapter The movies is in it and it contains a new synthesis of research that goes beyond my book a bit, though the depth is not quite the same.

LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (0)

Chippendale's at Armani

September 18, 2006 11:20 AM

This was so much fun I have to tell somebody about it. I stopped in the Armani store at the Bellagio in Las Vegas while I was in town. Nothing fits me like Armani clothes, though I have little need of them here. But, with all the speeches I am giving over the next few months, I thought I ought to see if I could get a sports coat to go with some Armani slacks I have.

I found a great sports coat that only needed a little more waist cut in. The suits fit well too because you can buy the pants and coat separately, which is important since I have an 11 or 12 inch drop from chest to waist. But, the pants were all flat front style and I don't like it. Doesn't suit me.

After I picked out the sports coat the saleslady brought over some soft long sleeved shirts. One was the wrong color, the other a perfect color but it looked like it would be too tight and I don't like to wear tight shirts. So, I tried it on. I came out of the changing room and climbed onto the pedestral in front of the mirror. It was cut perfectly and was not too tight.

When I turned to ask the saleslady what she thought, I saw her and two other women looking at me with their jaws wide open. They looked kind of transfixed. I laughed and said "Ladies, this is not Chippendale's." They laughed and recovered whereupon I said if it looks that good I will have to buy it.

To have that happen to you when you are 69 years old is not too bad. What age has done is give me more knowledge and I have used that to refine my posture, movement, hair style, skin, and to sculpt my body. I am leaner now than at any time I can recall. A solid 197 in the gym this morning before breakfast. Evolutionary Fitness is The Way. There is nothing like it.

Actually, the Chippendale's show was at the hotel I was staying at, The Rio. Two cast members were usually standing in the casino promoting the show. They were a bit oiled and had their costumes on under a strong spot light to show their cuts. They looked pretty good, though some lacked symmetry and posture. I could have walked under the lights too and looked as good. But, how do they get rid of any trace of body hair?

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (4)

Server

My site was moved to a new server and things were shut down briefly. I couldn't even log in to post entries. It is fixed now and the server will be faster and more reliable. I have been traveling a bit too. The nice thing about not taking ads or promoting my site is that I don't have to post all the time. Just when I want to or have something I think is worth noting.

LINK · Everything · Comments (2)

Moving the Stakes: Changing Risk Bearing and Reward in Film Finance

September 12, 2006 08:26 AM

This is a summary of my upcoming talk at the Strategic Research Institute organized Film Finance Conference in Los Angeles on November 27th.

Moving the Stakes: Changing Risk Bearing and Reward in Film Finance

Dr. De Vany's talk will begin with an exposition of risk and return in the movie business, demonstrating that it lies on the boundary between quantifiable risk and uncertainty (unquantifiable risk). This is a durable feature of the business over time periods, cultures, genre, budget and virtually every aspect of the movie business. He will show how the stable Paretian model, a non-normal, high-kurtosis probability distribution, captures these features and is the key to understanding the structure, uncertainty, and returns in the movie business. He will also show that many other innovation industries, such as patents, pharmaceuticals, and real estate share these properties.

The second part of his talk will focus more closely on the distribution of risk and reward in the movies to demonstrate that stars are not "bankable" and that they bear too little risk relative to the returns they bring and are paid too much for their contribution to box office revenue. Risk takers receive too little for the large risks they bear. As more sophisticated outside investors enter the business they will move the stakes and reallocate risk and returns. The compensation of stars will change and there may be more Tom Cruise-like firings.

The third part of his talk will show the pitfalls for hedge funds and investors and what they must do to guard against failures to correctly understand the implications of the stable Paretian probabilities they are up against. Common errors are 1. a belief that there is a model that can predict box office or other sources of revenue, 2. a belief that a large portfolio offers protection (they do not because the law of large numbers does not hold in the stable Paretian model), 3. believing that the average return is a good predictor of the mean return, 4. a false belief in the precision of forecasts.

In the fourth part of his talk, Dr. De Vany will show how Extremal Securities are designed for motion pictures and other innovation industries where returns have a non-normal stable Paretian probability distribution.

Dr. De Vany will describe this new class of assets and show their three broad areas of application:

Principal funding --- film finance, oil field exploration, pharmaceuticals
Securitization --- real estate appreciation, artist contingent contracts, stock options
Forward selling --- professionals selling a conditional interest in future earnings

He will discuss how banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, investors and principals will package ES and ES portfolios in each of these market models. The differences between these models will also be described.

Extremal Securities are an instrument for repackaging risk and reward in the film and other innovation industries so that the market can bear the risk.

LINK · The Movie Business ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (1)

Other Bad Things to do in the Gym

September 11, 2006 05:41 PM

My previous post could not possibly cover all the bad things people do in the gym. But, it is a start. Let me add these two right away.

11. Excessive grimmacing and over griping with the hands. I warned about this some time ago; I never grimmace or over grip. They tend to shut down blood flow by constricting blood vessels or clamping them down with muscle force. If combined with pressuring the chest, as is often done in dead lifts and bench presses, blood pressure is sent soaring. Done briefly, this may challenge the heart to become stronger and the blood vessels to flex more, but most do not do anything briefly. They do rep after rep and go to failure, straining and gripping tightly.

There was a brief reference on the news that I have not checked on further that mentions detached retinas from the distortion of the eye ball from high blood pressure inducing lifts and the strong contractions induced by grimmacing.

I never ever grimmace, go to full failure, or over grip the weight and shut down my blood circulation.

12. Talking. I sometimes think that people have a trainer, women in particular, so they have a captive audience. They talk non-stop during their work out.

13. Training into pain or trying to impress a trainer. Now a lot of these people don't really know what they are doing. Wonder Woman was injured trying to do what the class teacher was putting the participants through. On the other hand, to be fair to trainers, people try to do what the trainer says to do even if it hurts. And it is hard for the trainer to be aware of their pain. This can be a recipe for injury. Injury reverses progress and sets in discouragement or worse.

I am dealing a bit with a tear somewhere along the lateral band on my leg from doing splits the wrong way. I heard a pop and that was months ago and it still hurts. I was tight from a softball tournament and trying to stride fully out as Mark was suggesting. But, I was not bending my back leg and over extending it. I blame myself, not him because I should have known better. Yet, there is that psychology of trying to do what the trainer suggests, even if you may have it wrong or he/she has not checked your form. Form counts for a lot. Ignoring warning signs is an error.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)

Top Ten Causes of Pain in the Gym

September 10, 2006 08:10 PM

I see so many harmful things that people do in the gym. My tour of the new Gold's was filled with visions of prospective pain for the people doing all the wrong things. Let me mention just what I saw without trying to be comprehensive. There are fewer references this time compared to my Top Ten Reasons Not to Run Marathons, but you can find them all over the site. Be sure to go to Dr. Stuart McGill's site, SpinePro, and to Dr. Wong's for more.

1. The cardio trauma room. OK, that is my title. It is really called the Cardio Cinema room or something like that. People in there dumbing their brains down with noise and simple two dimensional images.

Point a. The brain and the eyes live in three dimensions. Two dimensional images promote poor vision. Lack of full spectrum light dulls the senses and vision. Dark in the afternoon is a bit of a shock to the brain and the pineal gland. They are saying "Where am I?' "What time is it?" "Is it time to sleep or what?"

Point b. I don't know how long people stay in there watching, but if they are pumping hard for long, they are over doing it and just promoting inflammation rather than fitness. They look wretched and they are.

2. The twisting ab machine. All the gyms have them now. Stay off them. They strain the interspinsuous ligaments and stress the pars. They generate massive compressive loads and overload the passive tissue as you move to full stop.

3. The ab crunch machines. They put a massive compressive load on the spine. If you try to go to full extension and flexion (bend forward) you are setting the disk up for herniation.

4. Same thing is true of the back extension machine. Even though these are used in back therapy, Dr. McGill's research shows they are the surest mechanism to disk herniation (he didn't test the ab crunch, but would have found the same result). The disk is held at the wall by a ligamentous structure that breaks down with the repeated bulging induced by crunches and extensions on these machines.

5. A guy was doing crunches on the floor for nearly the whole time I was there, about 35 minutes. But, he never engaged his rectus abdominus, transverse abdominus, or internal obligues, the muscles you want to be engaged. Do the abdominal brace and feel the muscles you want to enagee. All he was doing was using his hands and arms to put his neck through endless cycles of flexion and extension. A sure way to break down the cervical disks. No ab work at all because he did not lift his trunk.

6. Too little intensity was the word of the day for everyone I saw. Just endless repetition. The joints have a limited number of duty cycles, as we would say in management science. Even light load done repetitively will break down the tissue.

7. Back extensions off the floor. If there is a back killer, it is the Cobra so beloved of Yogas. Or the Superman as some gym people call it. On your stomach and arch your upper and lower body on your abdominum. It generates the highest spine loading measured in McGill's lab. Do not do them.

8. Wide grip lat pull downs. I have been through this before and so has Dr. Wong. They tear up the rotator cuff. Do them behind the neck and wonder why you hate to go into the gym again. Your rotator cuff WILL be injured. It is just a matter of time.

9. The bench press. Endless repetitions do not build strength or muscle. They inflame the muscles and tear the rotator cuff. Inflammation weakens tissue because it softens tissues to permit the infusion of blood to extra vascular sites. People who do them tend to be addicted to them. They make for an ugly body. And they load the spine terribly if you arch and even if you don't. The bowed back most heavy bench pressers have come from the iliocostalis and other long back muscles taking up the load. Chest compression from bench pressing loads the spine and the back muscles take up the high shear forces to keep the back from collapsing. The force has to go somewhere and it follows a path through the spine down to the feet. Every force goes there, like lighting, it has to go into the ground eventually. Or you are not connected.

And that brings up the number 10, and most important reason not to do what other people do in the gym (sort of an upside down Letterman Top Ten)

10. If you sit on something like a machine when you work out, where does the force go? Into the lower spine because you are sitting down. Your legs and hips, your most powerful muscles, are disengaged far too much. It all goes into the seat and what you have sitting on it.

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Gold's Gym, Lite

September 8, 2006 11:19 AM

I stopped in the new Gold's Gym yesterday and had a very brief workout. I mostly looked around. It is a big, airy and well-lighted gym with nice colors and style. But, it is not the right kind of gym for Evolutionary Fitness. Few are.

There were acres of machines and a huge cardio area in the open gym. And there was a large cardio trauma theater, darkened, loud, and with something showing on the screen. In the dark I could see sweating, suffering people pedaling their hearts into mild trauma and exposing their minds to the hamming noise and screen images. I had to leave, it was to hard to watch, so I am lacking in the details.

There were so many machines it is hard to keep track. But I know I counted at least six different machines for tricep extensions, one of the least productive exercises you can do. It also makes you ugly and ill proportioned. I never do them. I can see you might need several stations when a gym gets busy, but this is over kill.

Oddly, there were no Nautilus machines. They were some of the best, superior in almost all respects to the ones I saw. On the other hand, you could always tell a guy who trained exclusively or mostly on Nautilus machines. They had their own look, like versions of Cassey Viator. Too thick in the trunk and lacking in shoulder breadth. The Nautilus pullover machine, at first called by Arthur Jones a squat for the upper body, creates a hunched barrel look. Combine that with the crunch machine and you have a stump in the making.

None of the machines create the X Look. They put one in awkward positions and do not challenge the core at all. Nor do they properly engage the stabilizers, so you can end up with unstable joints trying to support muscles made strong through isolation. No balance among synergistic, agonist, and antagonist. On lateral shoulder raise machine puts you on your knees against a post that holds your upper chest. It is so easy to get into a hyperextended position and then put large shear forces on your spine by lifting along the long levers of the arms, that this is not a good machine to use.

The machines limit the range and direction of motion, so you do not get the balance in musculature that is desirable. You have to hit them from many different angles to get balance and stability. I have been told I have a "mature" musculature because it is all over and can be seen from any angle (OK, it was a girl possibly hitting on me).

The free weight area, particularly the DB room, was a bit of an afterthought. So cramped that just leaving a db on the floor could cause someone else in the room to trip.

I miss most the Keiser Air station that can force the core to stabilize and challenge all the joints from many angles. I also like very much the way the resistance increases through the range of motion.

The best gym I ever worked out at was Spartacus in Vancouver. Next was MetRX in Newport Beach. Both are too dark and industrial for today's gym clientele I suspect. They had db racks that went all the way up to 220. Loads of Olympic bars and big free weight areas. And they had close to zero cardio trauma areas.

Actually, if I think farther back, the best gym of all was John Farbotnick's (he was a Mr. America and other titles) in Pasadena. But, that was in 1954, before most of you were even born. It had all of that Sparacus and MetRX had and an Olympic weight platform as well. Zero cardio space.

Of course, now I would do things a bit differently and would want more room to run and leap. It was hard to leap at MetRX, though I found ways to do it, because there was so much equipment taking up free space. I did find ways to do it though, like leaping down from the platform of the high Hammer leg press machine after a set of presses. I sometimes would take a few quick steps, leap onto a bench and then go as high and as far as I could down the central corridor of the gym. The rubber floor made this relatively safe. But, people did look strangely at me.

I am going to have to put my own gym in when I build the Moab house. And the ten acre back yard will be a place for me to throw and drag boulders. And throw a spear or two.

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You Act, Therefore You Think You Are

September 7, 2006 09:56 PM

I really enjoyed the discussion of the little paradox I raised about renting our genes. If the Genes R Not Us, then who are we?

It is one of those self referential paradoxes. They are always incomprehensible and several readers made that clear by confusing us about who we are. I trust they know who they are since they did sign in with their names.

I wrote a post on this some time back (What the heck was it, there are over 400 now and I am lost in my own blog. Am I a participant or an author? I think sometimes that I am only witnessing this whole thing.) where I showed or at least argued that knowledge of self (your you) must be incomplete or inconsistent (Geodel's theorem). The self can never have enough axioms or logical power to know itself. The mind does not have enough stuff to know itself.

So who is the you renting these ancient genes? It is a working organism for sure: My motto is "You act, therefore you think you are." Decartes had it backwards and sideways. It is action, not thought that makes you aware of self.

Self knowledge and self-determination orginate in action. That is why I try to find my fixed point by acting and responding to the environment. It is the primal attitude, for there could have been no other alternative. Navel gazing was not something an HG could do often. The navel gazers were eaten and did not reproduce, not much at least. And no one would pay for such confused thoughts.

I bet there were no Gurus then. The honored people would be those with practical knowledge and sound minds. They would be honored in the little band of 25 or so humans that our ancestors lived in as they were struggling to survive.

Jihadist humor...

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Predicting Box Office Success: The Failure of the Neural Network Model

People keep sending me a neural network model published by Sharma and Delen in Expert Systems that claims to predict box office success. I think they are just looking at the title, not the model. The title far overstates what the model accomplishes. The modelis not helpful to a studio or an investor trying to choose movies to make. My take on it? Choose a good story and tell it well. The rest is close to nonsense. A good movie can make someone a star. But, no star can make a turkey into a success. Just finance it in in the right way, not by paying huge costs up front before you know how the movie will do. Pay when you do know, after box office and other revenues come in. That is to say, pay stars on contingent contracts. And bring the movie in on budget. Money is not creativity.

Neural networks are useful classifiers (things that say "this thing is black or white") but they cannot even begin to approach humans as classifiers. A neural network is like a committee of idiots that you give a signal to. The answer can only be given in a discrete category. A simple message going in, really simple decision makers inside the black box, and a really simple answer coming out. After letting the committee of idiots give responses to the signals, you make some of them more influential than the others. You do this by giving their opinion more weight in the neural network. Initially, this will be the loudest idiot, but eventually if you keep changing the influence each has on the others, the choices get better. But, remember, it is a committee of idiots, no one in the black box has seen any of the movies that are classified or any movie at all, ever. They are just supposed to classify the movies based on some information about them. The information is given in discrete chunks too; like, this movie has a really big star (based on past movie grosses). So it could be Sandra Bullock playing Terminator and the neural network would not know the difference between her and Arnold in the lead role. [Come to think of it, it might be a good movie. Not difficult since there has been no good Terminator movie.]

The authors "train" their network on 9 out of 10 sets of movies and then test what they know against the remaining set. The movies cover 5 years. Now get ready for a shock: they discover that the predictors of box office success are high star value, high technical effects, and number of opening screens. The latter variable is the only one treated as a continuous variable and was not discretized as the others were. Anyone could have told you that.

If you were going to use this information (by the way they do not show you the magnitude of the effects of increasing screens or adding effects), would you take an arbitrary movie and say all I have to do is add an actor, technical effects, and book more screens and I will have a hit? Or, would you say the neural network has simply recognized how Hollywood positions movies in the market place? Which means that Hollywood already knows and the neural network (it is a committee of idiots after all) has discovered it.

What their "high technical effects" variable measures is animated and science fiction movies. There are three categories, high, medium and low. So, this is picking up animated movies first of all and then Star Wars and the like. Hardly news, either as a prediction or as an acknowledgement of how these movies are marketed.

But, they mislead in claiming higher accuracy...

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They Are Not Your Genes

September 6, 2006 11:05 PM

Someone was asking me for my post on Immortality which I had done in June of last year. I found the link and show it below. But, it spurred me to broaden the point.

The genes you carry provide the instructions that make you what you are are not really yours. You are just using them for a while. They have been around for a long time and will be here for a long time to come. You, in a sense, are just "renting" them while you are here. They don't belong to you. Parts of the genome are more than a billion years old and have been used by nearly all living creatures. How could they be yours?

How these genes express themselves is very much up to you. Your nutrition, your activities, and the signals the genes respond to depend on how you live. Live well and they will express health and longevity. But, you should realize that they expect you to live as a well-nourished, but occasionally very hungry, and very active hunter gatherer, not an over-fed office worker. They have no clue it is the 21st century.

They don't care about you either. You are just a temporary vessel to carry them to the next generation and they are operating to insure that. You probably don't care either. You are just renting them. They belong to nobody. Renters don't treat things with care and you can easily damage the genes you are using by exposing them to damaging substances like free radicals. Like a letter too often photo copied, you may send bad copy of the genes to the generations to follow.

The genes are your gift of life. All the generations of things that have ever lived gave you that gift. You are marvelously irrelevant and only a transient user of the deep information that it took evolution millions of years to create. It is a pleasure to be mortal.

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Body Parts

What if a suicide bomber showed up in Paradise and was told his 72 virgins are ready but they can't find all his body parts?

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Short Thoughts

September 5, 2006 08:13 PM

September 11th is coming up. The Jihadists are losing, but we have to change the way people are educated (indoctrinated) in some countries. This is true in the UK, the USA and other countries. Immams, preachers and others seek their own glory and gratification. They don't know the way to heaven. There is no way. Sentience dies when brain cells die.

Why should virgins wait for you to bomb yourself to reach them? There are lots of men they would prefer. Do they get a choice?

The bench press has to be the worst lift of all. It is far over rated. Why? Tell me. But, with a big lift one seems to gain bragging rights in the gym. The lift is not a power lift. It is too slow to be a power lift. It is all about ST muscle fiber. This I do not want.

A field experiment. My buddy Gregg, a premiere golf long driver, was talking to a 600 pound bench presser. The lift, not the person. They tried a little experiment, not published in peer reviewed literature, but convincing. They both tried to throw a medicine ball from a crunch position off a bench. Gregg threw it across the room, about 35 feet. The bench presser threw it about 15 feet. Why? No FT fiber. Mostly ST fiber in the kind of mass required for this slow lift.

Many-set body building routines primarily produce ST fiber. Just look at it, they do so many reps and sets. The only fibers that can stand up to that volume is ST. That is why the research shows (finally the research got it right) that they have slow contraction and relaxation response.

The Tabata, De Vany, Bernstein and anyone else who did their own experiments protocol. We have talked about this before. It is a good protocol, which the research is only now showing to be productive with the contribution of Dr. Tabata beginning with his training of the Japanese speed skating team. It works very well, partly because it gets the body above the threshold required for adaptation to occur. I started doing my own version in about 1971. My buddy Bob Coulson saw me jogging (yes I did it at one time, but didn't take long to correct it) and told me that I looked like I was struggling. I was. I hated it and it was humid and hot in that part of Texas where i was doing it. He was right. I thought about it and started doing what felt right. Hard sprints mixed with easy running. I ran down all the guys who I started long runs with out of boredom and a need for some real intensity. They could not run fast enough to keep up, being all ST sorts of guys. Dr. Bernstein, the guy who wrote the best book ever on diabetes, had the same protocol. If you notice, most of the routines I recommend include some kind of hard sprint in a way that is like the Tabbata protocol.

Reg Park, Steve Reeves and all those other body builders. They are building ST fibers. I think this answers the mystery as to why volume works for body builders and why they are so slow. The volume produces oxygen, rather like a jogger, but in this case the MAPK signal produces hypertrophy of the ST. The joggers are sending inflammation and apoptosis signals to their muscle cells. Both are changing FTxb to FTa fibers to ST.

If I were after power and super quick speed, I would work out once a week. A few really hard moves. I really would randomize it on the grounds that you never know in the evolutionary environment when your next test will come. But, you better not fail it.

Finally, there is some new research that science magazines call nutrigenomics. Guess what it is? They are finally talking about how food influences gene expression. You know that already if you have been paying attention.

Next, there will be a field called dynamicogenomics that will finally discuss how activity influences gene expression. But, you already know about that too.

Together, these are called Evolutionary Fitness.

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Fight Science

September 4, 2006 07:22 PM

National Geographic Channel has a show this evening on Fight Science. They compare the force of strikes made by a boxer, a karate expert, a Thai boxer, and a Ninja. The strikes are modeled physiologically through a 3D model of the body and force sensors are used to record force.

It is a pretty amazing show. I saw only part of it one evening. It is a taxonomy of blows that the body can take and not survive and the way the blows are delivered.

This is not to my taste but for the dynamics of force production and the spectacular modeling. I don't do any of these sports. I don't even like to think how I might kill someone.

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Lab Tests and Field Tests

I recall an incident when I was working at a think tank for the Navy. I'm fuzzy on the details (it was 37 years ago and I only heard of it second hand), but the story goes there were some field tests and lab tests on a weapons system. The analysts who did the statistics said: The difference between the field and lab performances were statistically insignificant. They were fired. I am sneaking up on the marathon discussion, be patient.

Why were they fired? Because every one who had ever operated the systems or witnessed the operation in the field and lab knew they were different. [I have had this same conversation with Duncan Luce, the esteemed mathematical psychologist, who says the labs only catch a glimpse of human abilities and often constrain responses because humans do the strangest and cleverest things that the experimenters had not anticipated.] The Bayesian statisticians also had their say on the matter. They said that a prior distribution, based on the experiences of military personnel, would argue that there would be a difference of some magnitude. So, it was a matter of how much the experiments in the lab and in the field moved the prior expectations. Well, in this instance the lab and field tests strengthened the prior expectation that there is a difference. Don't you think there would be one? Of course. I would. The lab is very different from the field. And it turned out that the personnel worked harder in the field to overcome equipment deficiencies that seldom showed up in the lab. [This is part of the story of how Big Blue, the IBM computer, beat the human bridge champion. It had human help making adjustments.] Another trivial issue was that there were few of either kind of test. If statistical significance of the old kind, before cheap computers could calculate the revised distribugtion, meant anything it meant it all depended on the size of the sample. Big sample, like some of the longitudinal Framingham and Nurses studies, make everything statistically significant in the old framework, even though they wouldn't cause you to put your socks on differently if you could see the field data.

This is how I approach the field and lab experiments on human performance. They ought to differ and one must weight the evidence plainly in front of our eyes against lab and epidemiological sorts of studies.

This is how I approach the studies on human performance and health...

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Coronary Heart Disease in (you guessed it) Marathon Runners

September 2, 2006 04:19 PM

We have been through this before. This abstract not only speaks to the danger of running marathons. It speaks to the obsessiveness of the people who do them. All of the 6 runners studied had warning symptoms. One died. Three went on despite symptoms. It isn't about health. It is proving something to themselves or some one else. That is always an easy way to harm yourself. What for? Who cares?

Well, read the rest from the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Then throw away your running shoes.

Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1977;301:593-619.
Related Articles, Links

Coronary heart disease in marathon runners.

Noakes T, Opie L, Beck W, McKechnie J, Benchimol A, Desser K.

Six highly trained marathon runners developed myocardial infarction. One of the two cases of clinically diagnosed myocardial infarction was fatal, and there were four cases of angiographically-proven infarction. Two athletes had significant arterial disease of two major coronary arteries, a third had stenosis of the anterior descending and the fourth of the right coronary artery. All these athletes had warning symptoms. Three of them completed marathon races despite symptoms, one athlete running more than 20 miles after the onset of exertional discomfort to complete the 56 mile Comrades Marathon. In spite of developing chest pain, another athlete who died had continued training for three weeks, including a 40 mile run. Two other athletes also continued to train with chest pain. We conclude that the marathon runners studied were not immune to coronary heart disease, nor to coronary atherosclerosis and that high levels of physical fitness did not guarantee the absence of significant cardiovascular disease. In addition, the relationship of exercise and myocardial infarction was complex because two athletes developed myocardial infarction during marathon running in the absence of complete coronary artery occlusion. We stress that marathon runners, like other sportsmen, should be warned of the serious significance of the development of exertional symptoms. Our conclusions do not reflect on the possible value of exercise in the prevention of coronary heart disease. Rather we refute exaggerated claims that marathon running provides complete immunity from coronary heart disease.

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Benelli TNT

This is one of the loveliest things I have ever set eyes upon. It was sitting on a high pass above Corte d' Ampesa in the Italian Alps. Frank Lenz, one of the riders in our tour, took the picture. I was just standing there reverently with my jaw open and unable to do anything.

Michael, our guide on the Edelweiss Tour, rode it at the track at Catalunya. He rode many bikes that day and said the Bennelli was the best ride, by far. It is even more beautiful than the MV August Brutale. Those Italians. They know beauty.

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Genes and Longevity

September 1, 2006 03:41 PM

The NYT has fine science writers even if their columnists are not to my taste. I know some of them as a result of attending a writing workshop at the Santa Fe Institute.

I think the missing part of this story on genes and longevity is how diet, activity, and competence influence gene expression. Wonder Woman is one of these fidgeters, like the woman featured in this story. And she has relatives who died of cancer though she survived. It is not a death sentence to have a father, mother or close relative die of a disease.

A somewhat uplifting story I think and one that is consistent with the role that Evolutionary Fitness ascribes to genetic expression. They did not note that those who live long, universally, have low insulin and high body mass. Here is the link.

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Vegans and Sugar Junkies

It sometimes takes one to know one. In this post PaleoGal tells us what it was like to be a vegan and Mark Sisson tells us about being a sugar junkie doing endurance events.

Boy does Mark's post bring back horrid memories from my own trot down vegan lane. I too was suckered in by the promise of perfect health and bought McDougall's books (and -- shuddder! Pritikin's as well) and followed the advice to the letter. I was lucky in that I didn't gain weight, but I felt like total crap.

I remember finding it impossible to stay alert and concentrate after a typical lunch of microwaved yam topped with some beans and brocolli plus fruit and fat free vegetarian cookies for dessert. I was constantly tired and/or hungry and could put down whole packs of "whole grain" spaghetti in one sitting. The so-called healthy snacks of rice cakes topped with fat-free fruit spread could knock me out faster than a triple martini. I ate plenty of "healthy" soy and legumes for protein.

My health eventually declined (fatigue, water retention, hair loss, weakness at the gym) -- but did I get wise? NO, I got stricter in my vegan ways and began eating more raw foods thinking that would bring the ever-promised glowing health. I'll never forget when a really gorgeous girl with an impressive slim, yet muscular physique who I would see regularly at the gym asked me if I was alright. When I said yes, and why is she asking -- she said that she sees me at the gym now for months and yet she said I was looking weaker so then she asked what my diet was like. I proudly declared I was a vegan and she said why on earth for? Then the lecture: "Look at yourself -- you workout regularly but you keep getting weaker -- go eat some tuna for Heaven's sake." I sought out a vegetarian doc who listened to my symptoms, reviewed my blood test results and then told me that unless I was abstaining from animal products for religious reasons, I should start eating animal protein. He said he had lost some vegetarian patients over the years by issuing that advice but he said that it was clear to him that some people just do not metabolize plant protein well. This doc was not a vegan -- he ate dairy products and eggs as did his wife and children.

Mark Sisson tells us about being an endurance runner, sugar junkie.

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