Physical exercise is not simple. Sure, any of us can do something physical at any time but working out in order to achieve a specific goal is way different. This is because exercise affects the body at many different, frequently overlapping levels. Isolating them in order to study their effects helps us understand how each…
In theory lifting a weight is the same regardless of its shape. In practice however anyone who’s had to lift his mum’s biggest garden pot, knows this is not the case. Shape, handles and center of gravity do make a difference in the way the load of the weight is distributed and then the way…
If you’ve trained with a group of people at any time, or even trained with a partner you intuitively know this to be true: you perform better when you train with others than when you train on your own. On paper this, at first, makes little sense. After all we train on our own because…
We all want to exercise more. To achieve that we need to answer three specific questions: What should we do to exercise more? What type of exercise should we do? How can we get fitter? This article covers it all. New studies, the Covid pandemic and the ubiquity of fitness tracking apps changed a lot…
By creating a fitness routine you provide yourself with a structured approach to gaining and then maintaining a strong, healthy body and a strong healthy mind.[1] Creating a structured fitness routine, of course, is easy. All you need is a coach, a nutritionist, several trainers who will design specific workouts, a sports psychologists or two…
Despite having evolved to get about on two legs we all have to, at some point, learn to run properly. Walking, on the other hand, seems something we have evolved to do for over 6 million years. Because it feels so natural to us we frequently overlook its effectiveness as a means to improve our…
Let’s start with a small experiment. Stand up straight. Move your left foot about a foot in front of your body so that your leg is in front of you, knee bent. Keep your right leg straight. Now swing it in a straight leg fashion and see how high it gets. Ideally, you want to raise…
Working out twice a day sounds like one of those solutions to the problem of fitness that is theoretically possible but practically improbable. We all think that if we could train twice a day we’d get fitter, stronger and healthier twice as fast. Fitting a twice-a-day training habit in our lifestyle however is something that…
In looking for the best time of the day to exercise we are really looking to answer the question “How can I achieve more with less effort?” This is both natural from a human perspective and desirable from an evolutionary one. If we can, somehow, get more health and fitness benefits from exercise we are…
The paradox of exercise becomes immediately apparent the moment you need to use it to lose weight and feel healthier. It then becomes obvious that exercise is easier to start, do and maintain when you’re already fit. The reasons exercise feels so difficult when we haven’t actively engaged in anything physical for a while are: …
