L.I.F.T.

Ever wonder why doctors are so quick to prescribe you medication when you have a problem?

A recent article by Duff Wilson, in the New York Times – “Doctor Training Aided by Drug Industry” – might give a clue.

According to Duff, citing a recent journal article from the Archives of Internal Medicine:

More than half of the nation’s medical residency programs to train doctors in internal medicine accepted financial support from the drug industry, even though three-fourths of the programs’ directors said accepting the aid was “not desirable,” a survey found.

Surprised?

Chris at Conditioning Research posted a great entry about the different benefits of squatting and deadlifting.

What really caught my attention was this quote from Matt Metzgar, taken from a post on his blog:

“Toddlers squat constantly, but it is all “mobility” work. The squats are done for the purposes of movement, not for the purposes of lifting a weight. If a toddler wants to lift a weight, they shift into a deadlift position.”

we all used to do it...what happened?!

The Back Squat

As far as squatting goes, there are a ton of squatting types/forms.  What the authors above are talking about is a natural full-squat position, similar to the resting/seated position used by most people in most “undeveloped” countries:

many still do...

The exercise called “the back squat” involves placing a bar across your upper back, and squatting with it.  As the authors mention (and Mike Boyle harps on), this can cause injury if proper form isn’t maintained – that is, if you progress too fast in weight.

The body is only as strong as its weakest link, and, in most “modern” people the lower back is a very weak link.  When you put that weight on your shoulders, and squat down, if your mobility sucks, you bend forward, and all of that weight goes to your weak link.

Then the weak link breaks.

The “back squat” though, is called the “back squat” not just because you put the weight on your back, but because it is a back exercise.  The back squat, traditionally, was thought of more as a strengthener of the back than of the legs.  The deadlift, as the authors above mention as well, was traditionally a leg exercise – though not even the “predominant” leg exercise…that was the “front squat.”

The Front Squat

The front squat involves supporting a bar across the front of your shoulders, and squatting with the weight held there.

The front squat usually allows for a much greater range of motion than the back squat, because the weight is ahead of the individual.  It also uses the quadriceps much more than the back squat, and can take a lot of the loading off of the lower back, as the back is necessarily kept in a more upright position (to avoid falling over).

This is the squat used in Olympic lifting, where lifters frequently achieve weights in excess of 3 or 4 times their bodyweight.  And it uses the “full squat” (“mobility”) position.

The Deadlift

The deadlift was called “The Health Lift” by most writers before 1970.  It was considered the single best lift for achieving total body strength.  I think it still is.

However, the deadlift has its own problems, which are, or can be, very similar to those encountered in the back squat.

If form is sacrificed in the traditional deadlift, and the lumbar spine rounds, the load, again, is transferred to that spot, and the weakest link goes.

The Goal – Maximal Strength within Proper Technique

The problem with all of these discussions is that they try to make a claim that one exercise is “better” than another.  That “better” can mean “builds more strength,” or “is less dangerous,” or “has a higher functional carryover.”

But there is no absolute truth…except, maybe, this:

If you do any exercise with proper technique, to the current limit at which you can sustain proper technique, and progress as you are able, you will be fine.

No exercise is “better” than any other.  They’re all good.  They all have their time and place.

The problem happens when people try to rush things, and sacrifice technique for “success.”

Sacrificing technique for success = failure.

Write that on your whiteboard.

My good friend Kwame Brown:

director of fitness at the Arlington, VA, Lee-District RecCenter; PhD. in neuroscience; founding member of the International Youth Conditioning Association; Exuberant Animal (par excellence):

and all-around good guy, needs your help.

He’s trying to get some insight into the factors affecting child development – from parents, educators, and policy-makers.  I’m sure that he’d even accept some ideas from folks who have an educated opinion, but don’t fit into any of those specific categories.

Please go over to his site and offer some ideas.

February 3rd was National Girls and Women in Sports Day.

Supposedly, “thousands of sports educators, coaches, athletic directors, recreation directors, association members, sponsors, students, and parents across the country will show their support of the Day and of this year’s theme, “Stay Strong, Play On.”"

I hadn’t heard anything at all about it.  But, congrats girls and women!  I’ll back you up any day of the week!

You go, women!

Guy McPherson’s most recent blog post over at Nature Bats Last garnered a lengthy response from me that I’d like to share and expand upon here.

Guy reviews Tom Blees’ book “Prescription for the Planet.“  While I haven’t read the book (and that’s partly the point), Guy cites some issues he has with it.  Namely, that Blees’ recommendations don’t call for any radical (root) change in the way things are done, but merely use alternative forms of the same (destructive) system.

Guy says:

Ultimately, Blees’ plan boils down to two “solutions,” both of them extremely suspect. First, he claims we can we can ramp up production of renewable energy systems and also fourth-generation nuclear reactors to keep the power on. Indeed, Blees claims our lives depend on electricity. As such, he dismisses the first two million years of the human experience. If our lives depend on electricity, it’s because we’ve abandoned a viable, durable set of living arrangements in exchange for endless opportunities to destroy the living planet. Second, Blees promotes the notion that boron-powered automobiles will keep us on the highways. And he thinks that’d be a good thing. After all, boron seems to be essentially limitless on this world. Just as crude oil seemed, not so long ago.

Indeed, Guy.

The rest of this post is my response, with some editing.

we need power

Welcome to the Machine

It’s not that I disagree with Guy’s sentiments, but it’s worth noting that he and I wrote our opinions (and you are currently reading them) on a piece of equipment that is an integral part of the “omnicidal technology” that we decry.

The roots of the culture of omnicide are not located in any single place.  They’re distributed through our culture.  This is true of any culture.  Culture, as accepted, shared values, is always self-policing.  Individuals within the culture accept it, and see anything that is different from the culture as “foreign,” and therefore also “dangerous,” or “threatening.”  They then seek to ostracize or destroy that foreign element – whether or not that makes sense.

The greatest example I can think of is the American Civil War.  Brother fighting brother, father against son.  It didn’t matter whether or not they were family, or that they loved one another (previously, at least).  What mattered was that they had become “the enemy” to one another, through a process of enculturation.  The Northerner accepted the cultural values of the North.  The Southerner, those of the South.

Beneath that lay the dominant drive of life – at any and all costs to expand, to become more (people call it a lust or desire for “power,” though that description seems flaccid to me).

The two forces combine.  The Southern father is now a foreigner.  A threat to the Northern son’s expansion – and not just his expansion, but his entire culture’s expansion – everything he stands for or represents…a force greater than he himself.  A fight to the death is the only option, it seems.

brother, can you spare a bullet?

Wherefore Art Thou, Culture?

The thing is, the roots, the seeds of the “omnicidal technology,” must already have existed in our culture from the beginning, in order to be able to sprout into their current form.  I don’t think they were “planted” along the way.  I think they were always present, like anything, just needing ideal conditions for their growth.

What happened?  How did “hard work” turn into “entitlement?”  How did the earth-consciousness of the small farmer turn into the money-consciousness of modern agribusiness?

Some values were (are) allowed to be stressed (or impressed), while others were (are) allowed to be suppressed.  How did those allowances occur, or how were those allowances coerced?

This, I think, is the appropriate starting-point.  Starting from a discussion of right/wrong tacitly concedes the ground that supports the undesirable state.  Once conceded, it is the “dominant system.”

Now (still) the dominant system, any energy put into it, is used by it (not singularly, but in a distributed fashion) to further its cause.

The “antagonist” must fight against an “agon.”  There must be a hero for the villain to fight.

I think these are clues to the way out.  Any argument that relies on something other – especially any argument that relies on reference to the current (read, dominant) paradigm – will only be used by the current paradigm.

What do you think?

Saturday was the first Highland Games practice of 2010!

As usual, Games-expert and all-around-good-guy Alan Hebert was the host of practice, down at the fields at Stanford.

Here’s a brief highlight reel of my activities:

In all, I felt pretty good.  A LOT better than starting out last year, when everything was brand new.  I think this season is going to be a great one!  I’ve got a good strength foundation built up over the winter, and some great practice locations.  Also, a ton of useful throw tips from Alan.  The only event I’m “worried” about is the Heavy Weight For Distance.

Now the only thing is to practice practice practice!

If you’re interested in trying it out, and live in the Bay Area, Alan is going to start holding regular practices on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I’ll send an update as soon as I know more!  If you just want to try it out on your own, search Scottish Heavy Athletics, or Highland Games, for your area, and find a club!  Alternately, you can go to Alan’s YouTube page and try some of the moves yourself.

Enjoy!

I recently read, for the first time, about the Peckham Experiments.

What, you ask, were those?

Well I’m glad you asked!

The Peckham Experiments have been a series of “experiments” on the effects of social solidarity and access to physical activity on a socioeconomically disadvantaged group (the “Peckham” region of London).

What happens, the originators asked, when a “deprived” group of people are given a place where they can have access to sporting events, physical health monitoring, and other workshops, at a very very low cost?

Very good things – that’s what!

People begin to organize themselves into small groups to achieve creative ends.  Health indices go up, and disease indices go down.

Everyone gets happier.

Shall we dance? Well...we are dancing!

A Class Divided

This next “experiment” left me shocked and amazed.  I hope you take the time to watch the entire 50-minute documentary about this incredible woman, and her experiment.

The incredible woman is Jane Elliot, formerly a 3rd-grade teacher in Riceville, IA.  The experiment involved separating the children in her class into two groups – those with brown eyes and those with blue.  Whichever group was judged to be “superior” on the first day was given special privileges, the other group had privileges taken away.

Why, you might ask, would someone do this?  Ms. Elliot was moved by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to teach her schoolchildren about racism and prejudice – by having them experience it firsthand.

While her method would not fly today, watch the video and see what you think about it for yourself.

I think both of these experiments reveal a glimpse of the profound effect that small changes in our environment can have on us.

A recent New York Times articles asks :”Is There An Ecological Unconscious?“

Aside from citing a bunch of studies and trying to draw general conclusions from them (which is an incorrect use of science, by the way, for a great discussion of this, see John Sifferman’s most recent blog post), the author describes the field of ecopsychology, from its inception to present attempts at connecting individuals’ psychology and environment.

I dare you to look inside...

The article cites a study by Marc Berman, at the University of Michigan, whose study “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature” describes attentional gains after participants have walked through a setting full of “nature” (in this case, the Ann Arbor Arboretum…is that redundant?!).

But what is “psychology?”  Until that question is answered succinctly, all “psychological” studies are potentially redundant and misleading.

No one has ever answered that question in concrete terms.  Wikipedia says that: Psychology (lit. “study of the soul” or “study of the mind“^[1]) is an academic and applied discipline which involves the scientific study of human (or animal) mental functions and behaviors.

But what is the “mind?”  (let’s leave questions of the “soul” out of the discussion for now).  Apparently it’s a combination of “mental functions and behaviors.”

Again, Wikipedia says that “mind” is: the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself subjectively as a stream of consciousness.

But where do all of those things come from?

These guys must know...if they're helping "mind"

Most of psychology, if you’ve ever taken a psychology course (or several) addresses “mind” as a thing separate from physical reality.  Theorists make up their own paradigms of mind and mentality, of “mental functions and behaviors.”

The terrible redundancy can be seen most clearly in the field of Child Psychology, or Child Development.  There are five or ten competing theories of child development at different stages of maturation.  All are right, most are completely redundant with one another.  Many (if not most) create definitions of the child’s developmental process that are obviously derived solely from the researcher’s personal experience…no “objectivity” there (the question of “objectivity” is quite another question entirely).

This redundancy seems extraordinarily silly to me.  For one, can’t we all just get along?!  But for another, where does this “mind” come from?  I mean, “mind” doesn’t just exist on its own, apart from the physical body…apart from “behaviors.”  Does it?

I think the development of the field of psychology stems largely from the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and an underlying belief in “human supremacy” in the Order of Things.

Foucault me.

That is, human beings always believe that they are somehow specially different, better, “more special” than anything else in nature.  We always try to find qualities that separate us from the “lower animals.”

But, one by one, all of those arguments have been disproved.  I’ve heard them all – human beings have language (all animals have language); human beings are creative (ever see a spiderweb?); we use tools (ever see an ape catch termites with a long blade of grass?); we are self-conscious (debatable, and impossible to prove that other animals are not also self-aware/conscious)…etc.

The list goes on, but always with the same result – we are no “better” than anything else this planet has produced, we’re simply “different.”

This led, in combination with the Cartesian separation of mind from body, to a belief that our thoughts were somehow separate from our bodies, from our “physical” selves.

“Ecological Unconscious” or “ecopsychology” is one attempt to put those things back together, but it has skimmed over one of the most important questions – “When studying psychology (the mind), what exactly is it that we are studying?”

In reference to this, I’d like to cite a 2007 study by Japanese researchers (following up on several earlier studies of a similar nature).  The study is called “Psychological effects of forest environments on healthy adults: Shinrin-yoku (forest-air bathing, walking) as a possible method of stress reduction,” and, similar to Berman’s study, looked at the effects of walking or sitting in a wooded environment on physiology.

Needless to say, the effects were drastic, and positive.  Physiological markers of stress (salivary cortisol, resting heart rate, blood pressure, etc.) decrease in a “natural” environment.

Do the participants’ “psychologies” change?  Undoubtedly, yes.

I guarantee that changing your breathing will change your mind.

You see, for  me, “psychology,” or “mind,” is just a product of the physical body.  Sure, at some level it also becomes the product of the interaction of itself (recursive thought) and anything else (mind-to-mind, mind-thinking-about-itself), but without the physical body, there is no mind.

How can I assert this?  Well, you can “change your mind” by changing your body.  If you’re feeling blue, go out for a run.  It will change your mind.

So when fields like “ecopsychology” spring up, or talk of an “ecological unconscious” begins, I wonder why.  Why is it that we want to separate our physiology from our thoughts (or vice versa)?  Why is it that we hold onto this belief that there is some “magic” happening in our gray matter?

While it is magical that we have such a complex brain, the brain is not the mind.  The entire body is your brain.  To quote George Leonard:

Some researchers in the comparatively new field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) argue that the interplay of peptides with peptide receptors on the surface of cells throughout body and brain carries considerably more information than all previously discovered brain mechanisms combined. Imagine a pharmacy with well over a hundred potions that can be mixed in all possible combinations and proportions, and you can begin to understand the power of this chemical information system.

So don’t speak of an “ecological unconscious” as something separate from your body.  Don’t speak of nature as something separate from your body.  You are continuous with your habitat, with your environment.  This is why people living in cities get chronic diseases associated with urban environments – associated with pollution.  This is why people have the same diseases as their friends.

Everything “external” to your body can and should be considered your “external organs.”  There is nothing you see that does not affect your physiology on some level.  There is nothing you hear, smell, touch, that does not do the same.  At the same time, there are many things that you cannot sense in any way that are affecting your physiology…that are “creating your mind” – the invisible pollutants in your environment, the trees you do not notice that supply you with oxygen, the microbiomes that inhabit your body.

Stop separating your unconscious from your physical self.  And stop separating your physical self from the totality of your environment.  When you do that, you regain control over who you are and how you behave.

Only then can you finally say that you have a “mind.”

My friend JR Atwood posted a great TED talk by Liz Coleman, regarding the nature of education in our day and age.

I’m more concerned with something more foundational – the use of common sense.

My father is in the hospital. He’s been in before – most seriously, when he underwent emergency surgery to replace his aorta with a gortex tube, four years ago.

He’s been having some issues, and went back in recently. The doctors have him on so many medications, it’s hard to tell what’s causing what.

And that’s my problem.

The doctors have no faith in the human body to heal itself.

In days of old, before “internal medicine” (which is anything but “internal” – consisting as it does, mostly of “external” items leveraged against the internal state), the body was regarded as a delicate and powerful system. To attain health, one usually only needed to do things (or do fewer things) to return that system to balance…

Called “homeostasis” – the balance of activity within the body.

What’s Up, Doc?

Where did the faith go?  Where is the faith in the human body to heal itself?  Only in “alternative” medicines?  Even there, many alternative practitioners have taken on the cultural values of US culture, and peddle pills and external “cures.”

Doctoring the Evidence

Another faith disappeared around the same time as the faith in the human body – faith in the healing power of the Earth.  I don’t want to get too crazy with this (you’ll be calling  me a “hippie” in a minute if I’m not careful, boxing me in), but the point is salient.

As the values of “science” (the “expertism” that Liz Coleman mentions in her talk) overtook common sense, it killed any other thought process or options.

When society realized that this expertise-value could be used to sell more products, it took the reins.  As people have become more and more inculcated in the idea of “the expert,” other options disappear.

And so does common sense.

Doctor My Doctor

Now we’ve reached  a point where it has become commonsense to refer to “experts” for our opinions – for our common sense.

My father lies in a hospital bed tonight.  The doctors have not healed him at all.  They can’t figure out what’s wrong.  Because they’re incapable of asking questions.

The foundational of all common sense is found in a single question:

Why?

The Palm Beach Post did a great piece on some new literature about the frequency of junk food product placements in films.

A new study by Lisa Sutherland, assistant professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School, reveals the incredible amount of product placement occurring in popular movies.

138 of 200 films analyzed had some kind of product placement – food or beverage – most of it, what we could consider “junk food.”

How many products can we fit into one "placement?"

The problem with this is that the more we are exposed to a stimulus, the more likely we are to accept that stimulus as normal.

A lot of studies have shown dishabituation in people after being presented to stimuli a certain number of times.  That is, they cease to notice the stimulus as being novel.  Most of those studies have stopped there.  Yes, you cease to notice the thing.  But what does that mean with regard to how you treat it?

How do you treat something you don’t notice?

The fact is, we treat things we don’t notice as being non-threatening…as being “normal.”  When we notice something, we say it is “unusual” or “out of the ordinary.”  It is not “normal.”

Advertising achieves a few things at once.  First, it exposes you to a novel stimulus, and presents that stimulus as something desirable (for good or bad reasons) and as being socially acceptable or creating a certain social status.

Then, it continues to pummel you with the messaging, till you aren’t even aware of it.  For instance, if you watched TV last night, try to name ten commercials that you saw.  Specifically – what were they about, what were they selling, how were they trying to convince you to buy?

It’s a hard game to play.

Finally, every now and then the advertiser tweaks the message.  You receive a new stimulus.  Your “desire-reaction” grows.

Tweak the message

Children may be more susceptible to this type of messaging than adults, having not fully developed their “executive control” functions (though whether or not many adults have fully developed this is questionable as well…).