Eff the Resolutions workshop redux
A kind shout-out from Amanda, who attended our Feb 10 workshop (and rocked the deadlift, may I add). She reviews the workshop here — BONUS! You’ll learn what mawashi geri is!
Benefits of exercise during late pregnancy
Author of New Rules of Lifting for Women Cassandra Forsythe is blogging about her pregnancy. Her post on her blog at 30 weeks reports that she’s feeling good and strong! In this post, she explains why training relatively intensely is good for you. If you missed Cassandra’s excellent podcast on training and pregnancy (and other woman-related issues), see here.
Why Big Ag won’t feed the world
A year ago I sat in a room at the Earth Institute at Columbia surrounded by executives from big food companies. One of them, I believe from Unilever, clicked to a slide that read “The solution to global hunger is to turn malnutrition into a market opportunity.” The audience — global development practitioners and academics and other executives — nodded and dutifully wrote it down in their notebooks; I shuddered…
In 2008 more food was grown than ever before in history. In 2008 more people were obese than ever before in history. In 2008 more profit was made by food companies than ever before in history. And in 2008 more people went hungry than ever before in history.
Hunger is not a global production problem. It is a global justice problem.
A thoughtful post from Slow Food USA on the disparity between how much food we can produce and how much food actually gets to people (and how much of the food we produce is actually good, nourishing food).
Stumptuous hits the road
Stumpamaniacs:
I’ll be in Valencia, CA next week (Jan 25) for Ninja Camp. Anyone interested in a training workshop? If so, leave a comment or email me at mistresskrista [at] stumptuous [dot] com.
I’ll also be in Seattle in late October, so if there’s anyone there who thinks a workshop would be cool, lemme know and we can try to organize something.
New Rules of Lifting for Women and podcast with Cassandra Forsythe
If there’s a woman in your life who’s considering weight training (or a man in your life who trains women), The New Rules of Lifting for Women is an excellent introduction to the field of women and weight training.
NROL is written by a kickass trifecta of three major names in the business, including women’s nutrition and fitness expert Cassandra Forsythe. I review her book and chat with her for nearly an hour about women’s strength training, working out while pregnant, the dirty little secret of disordered eating in the fitness biz, and lots of other good stuff.
Know when to fold ’em
Good post from Josh Hillis today, about knowing when to quit. He’s more focused on getting women “bikini-ready”, but nevertheless the underlying concept is good — that you should understand:
- what reality looks like — what a fit body truly is
- how a fit body stacks up against the rest of the world (hint: 20% body fat is pretty good!)
- you should celebrate your accomplishments — modest as they may seem to you
As he writes, “Here is the problem: You actually don’t have any idea of what you look like. Sometimes you feel fat and gross, sometimes you feel skinny and hot, and neither is entirely connected to reality.” This is especially true for folks who don’t spend a lot of time in the world of athletic training, because they don’t have the context nor experience to properly evaluate things like “strong” or “fit” or “lean”.
We don’t know what fit women really look like. They sure as heck don’t look like magazine cover models. (And even magazine cover models don’t look like magazine cover models, as the example of Heidi Montag illustrates.)
If you’ve achieved a certain (fairly moderate) set of goals, he writes, you’re already a rockstar and there is nothing left to fix. Keep up the great work! YEAH!
Canadian Health Measures Survey: Fatter! Weaker! Slower! Sicker!
Between 1981 and 2009, fitness levels of Canadian children and youth, as well as those of adults, declined significantly, according to the first findings from the Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS).
BMI measurements have shown that Canadian adults have become heavier over the past 25 years.
However, the BMI is only one indicator. The CHMS offer a variety of other measures to gain a more complete understanding of fitness levels associated with current and future risk of disease. Survey respondents underwent body composition measurements and participated in fitness tests in mobile examination centres.
Fitness levels of children and youth have declined significantly since 1981, regardless of age or sex. Fitness levels of adults have also declined, particularly among younger adults.
Among youth aged 15 to 19, the percentage whose waist circumference put them at an increased or high risk of health problems more than tripled.
Among young adults aged 20 to 39, the percentage with a waist circumference that placed them at a high risk for health problems more than quadrupled. The proportions went from 5% to 21% among men, and from 6% to 31% among women.
Roughly 3% of the adult population had high blood pressure that was undiagnosed in 2009.
Ghostwriting and academic publication
When looking for evidence-based clinical guidelines and health care information, who do you trust? Peer reviewed research? Well, hopefully. Or maybe not.
From the recent Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA):
U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R, Iowa) is asking medical schools about their policies on ghostwriting, specifically, the practice in which faculty agree to be named as authors of articles written primarily by health care companies. [aka Big Pharma or Big Insurance]
In letters sent to 10 prominent universities on November 18, Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, asked questions about their policies for faculty who lend their names as authors of review articles, editorials, and research articles prepared by marketing and/or medical education companies on behalf of drug and device manufacturers.
“When the article is then published, the participation of the ‘ghostwriter’ may not be revealed,” Grassley wrote. “Essentially, the companies are using the reputation of prestigious academic researchers and their institutions to promote the sale of drugs and devices.”
The senator also asked the institutions their policies toward students who commit plagiarism, noting that “some experts refer to ghostwriting as a form of plagiarism, and I understand that institutions view charges of plagiarism quite seriously.”
Mike Mitka, “Ghostwriting Questions.” JAMA. 2010;303(2):125.
Strongman dead at 104… after being hit by a car
People called him the Great Joe Rollino, the Mighty Joe Rollino and even the World’s Strongest Man, and what did it matter if at least one of those people was Mr. Rollino himself.
On Monday morning, Mr. Rollino went for a walk in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a daily routine. It was part of the Great Joe Rollino’s greatest feat, a display of physical dexterity and stamina so subtle that it revealed itself only if you happened to ask him his date of birth: March 19, 1905. He was 104 years old and counting.
A few minutes before 7 a.m., as Mr. Rollino was crossing Bay Ridge Parkway at 13th Avenue, a 1999 Ford Windstar minivan struck him. The police said he suffered fractures to his pelvis, chest, ribs and face, as well as head trauma. Unconscious, he was taken to Lutheran Medical Center, where he later died.
Full story in New York Times
Still time to sign up for Jan 10 workshop!
If you are in Toronto and are looking for a good intro to weight training, nutrition, and program design, I’ll be running a 3-hour workshop this Sunday Jan 10. More details are here!
I’d love to see some more little Stumpamaniacs representin’. And you’ll get to meet my dad, who will be busting out the squat reps with his 65-year-old, post-heart-attack bad self.