Back at it

Wow. The legs are feeling sore after getting back to our interval training over the weekend. We had to trim down a little our 20-minute session on Saturday but did the full thing yesterday.

Anyway, it feels good to get back at it. There was a little intertia to overcome but it was easy owing to the fact that we put such a limited amount of time into it at this time of year. The wife wanted to take an extra day but I said to her "look, we're only talking about 20 minutes here."

We jumped back on the bikes and are both glad we did. Strength-training session later today. Look for an entry soon that outlines in greater detail our current upper-body strength-training routine.

Week off continued

Just a short note to maintain some semblance of activity here. We continue with our week off, which actually ends tomorrow. We'll be back to cycling (stationary bikes) over the weekend. It's good to take a break and to get a renewed yearning for exercise.

I've also pretty much stopped doing my stretching during this week, which is probably not so good. Also have not been doing breathing exercises for the last few days, though I did do them this morning.

Also I may not be doing much blogging during the coming week. I may need to take a trip out of town, which will interfere. But as I mentioned in a previous entry, I do plan on posting at least a few times each week from here on out--though likely not daily, as I tried to do throughout January.

Break time, blogging schedule remarks

Our week off from fitness has arrived. We actually started it a little earlier: I had planned on starting the week off on Monday. But we missed our stationary bike training this past Thursday, then again yesterday. And I decided to add today as part of our time off as well. So we'll be back to exercising again only next weekend.

Physical health is important. But spiritual health is important, too. And as Lent begins, it's time to do some more intensive training in spiritual things. The two are really closely interconnected--physical and spiritual health.

I'll also probably cut back a bit on blogging--but only partly because of Lent. I decided recently to try blogging much more regularly, sort of taking a cue from fitbomb. But having done that for a while I've come to feel that such frequent posting doesn't really fit the aims of this blog.

My main aim isn't necessarily to tell you everything I do each day. That's what some bloggers do, whether in an attempt to maximize traffic to their blogs by keeping them very active, or, in the case of fitness blogs, because posting with greater frequency provides the blogger with motivation to keep up their efforts. Neither of those factors motivate me: I'm not engaing in a commercial effort here, nor have I had much problem over the last two years sustaining interest or motivation in my fitness regimen. No, I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm in fitness for the long term.

I do want to keep readers apprised of my fitness regime via this blog, but that's not something that necessarily requires daily entries. Rather, my interests lie more in providing a resource for information on pursuing fitness at a certain stage of life. And what is required for that, as best I can tell, is to blog about important information I find, to recount significance experiences in fitness, and to blog about what has worked (and hasn't worked) for me. And that doesn't require daily postings.

That said, I do intend to blog much more regularly that I did during the first year or so after starting this blog. So I hope to have new material here at least a few times each week. So, keep checking back

Day off: gotta hav'em sometimes, don't ya?

Had some errands to run this evening so we took the day off from our usual fitness routine (ab/core exercises and ca. 20 minutes of cycling intervals). I feel a bit guilty, as usual.

In fact, let me wallow in my guilt a bit to try and get it off my chest. We are, after all, taking the whole week off next week, so why an extra day now, right before the week off? Furthermore, you're only exercising for about a half hour on Thursdays anyways: couldn't you even bring yourself to do a measly half of exercise?

Ok, now that I've got that out of the way. Yes, it's good to deprive yourself of your regular fitness activities some times, in my view. It gives you some drive to get back to it--as long as your break doesn't go on for too long. And we typically don't take off more than say one day per month, if that.

And since it's winter I can somewhat allay my guilt by thinking to myself "gee, I'm so glad I did this in winter and took some time off from the stationary bike; imagine how guilty I'd feel if the weather were really nice and warm and, not only did I miss some exercise, but I missed being out in that beautiful weather!"

How do you deal with guilt feelings when you miss a workout day? C'mon, I know you miss one now and then--we all do.

(Hey, maybe I should have just hooked one of these [internal combustion engine assisted] bikes to my trainer and let it run while I was out doing errands?)

The J-660B-UB exercise regime

In this entry I want to extol the virtues of the J-660B-UB exercise regime. As you may be guessing, the guy who came up with that title name didn't exactly have a flair for merchandising gimmicks. And I can personally vouch for that fact, given that I know him very well: in fact, that guy is me.

Ok, so this entry is going to be a bit facetious. But it will be, after all, in the interest of making valid points about fitness regimes.

So, what is J-660B-UB? Since the title is not nearly as catchy as something like "P90X," we can expect it's not going to be nearly as sexy. And, well, it isn't. But it may still be something worthwhile.

No, J-660B-UB is my own fitness regime. I came up with the name partly as a way to take a jab at what I see as faults in the ways fitness is marketed and consumed, and partly as a realization about my own fitness endeavors to date.

The "J" in J-660B-UB is, of course, the first letter of my first name--indicating my role in formulating the plan. The 660 is the approximate number of days since I started my current fitness pursuits. And the "B-UB" part stands for the main components or foci of my regimen: bicycling and upper body strength training.

I have to use the phrase upper body rather than naming a device or program--as in the case of the "B" part of the moniker (for bicycle)--because I've been pretty eclectic so far in choosing what sorts of things I do for upper-body strength training. Readers of this blog will know that I've used calisthenics, the Soloflex, and various parts of some Tony Horton routines. In the future I will try yet other things--kettlebells perhaps being next.

And I feel quite justified in, and satisfied with, taking that eclectic approach. In fact, I would encourage anyone reading this blog to consider taking a similar approach. Granted, I may have something of an advantage when it comes to more or less formulating my own fitness regime--being in good shape and having done a fair amount of athletics at various points in my life--but I still think many who may not have had as much experience as I have could nonetheless do what I've done and do it just as effectively.

But let's get back to the exercise regime I'm promoting here. As I mentioned, I somewhat facetiously pose it in opposition to plans like P90X. Why? Because it seems to me the 90-day-plan approach has some serious flaws.

One of those flaws is that it's so short: do you really want an exercise regime that encompasses only a 90-day period? I'm thinking to myself, "no way. I want a 90 month plan, or maybe a 90 quarter plan" (about a 7.5 or 22 year cycle, respectively). Yeah, that's right. I want a fitness regime that will last, if not the rest of my life, at least a good portion of it.

The 90-day plan can, I think, have some appropriate applications. For example, it can motivate someone who's not too badly out of shape to get back in shape. Nothing wrong with that . . . that is, until the 90 days are up. What happens then?

Well, various things. I'll bet a lot of people who follow that cycle just end their fitness pursuits after the 90 days. They've proved to themselves they can do it. They've paraded around their results in a tank-top or swimming suit, gotten their egos stroked, and now they're going back to their old ways. Judging from the many moribund P90X blogs I've run across, this pattern may be occurring in a significant percentage of cases. In other words, as I've said before, the 90-day cycle and the marketing of it represents a sort of fast-food approach to fitness.

But don't think the marketing minds behind that hype aren't wise to the additional sales opportunities inherent in the 90-day approach. No, not at all. They understood before even shooting their first infomercial that there would be a follow-up to the 90-day saga.

Thus, we get things like P90X plus, or the latest challenge for P90X graduates--Insanity. So the 90-day approach is not just a quick-fix pitch for fitness: it's a prequel to future marketing possibilities that will keep the cash flowing into the corporate coffers of fitness empires.

But honestly speaking, how many 90-day segments is the remainder of your life going to occupy? None of us know the answer to that for sure. But most of us hold out hope that it's going to be more quarters than can be easily calculated. I've dared above to hope that 90 90-day segments remain in my life, and that I'll be able to pursue fitness during each of them.

Now, I know that fitness marketers would be happy, for the right price, to sell me a new regimen for each of the remaining 90-day segments of my life. But I hope it's become apparent by now that, no thanks, I don't think I need them to do that. No. I might need to rely on their products at the outset as I learn more about fitness, but there's going to come a point--and it's likely to be sooner than later for some of us--where we're ready to go it on our own.

That's the point at which we've made a life-long commitment to fitness, and at which we have developed some sensibility about what it's going to take to sustain our interest in continuing to do it over the long haul.

And that's the point I'm trying to get to now. So far I've kept it going for close to 2 years. Now I'm looking toward the 90-month and 90-quarter goals. I guess I'll have to come up with names for them when I reach those milestones. But for now I've been quite satisfied with J-660B-UB.

Arm toner phase begins

As I've been mentioning, we've now commenced a new phase in our fitness regime--the arm toner phase. I had actually intended to begin this phase a couple of weeks from now, but we decided to start a little early.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we found a new Tony Horton routine that we want to work into our regimen, a routine called "arm toner." We just did it for the first time tonight. We'll be using this one twice a week on our strength-training days probably until April or May.

Preliminarily I can say we both liked it. It's a bit shorter than what we've been doing--just a little over a half hour. It doesn't contain any lower-body exercises, which is what we want for most of the year, focusing instead on the upper body. And it's pretty intense.

I'll give a fuller report later, but I'll just observe for now that it's a fast-paced routine that mixes one-minute exercise periods with 30-second stretch periods. A fuller breakdown and itemization of the routine will be forthcoming.

By the way, why am I naming the phases of our exercise regimen after mostly upper-body exercise routines? Because these are the variable part of our regimen. Bicycling is the constant part, so it makes sense to name the phases after the varying parts of the regimen.

Bust your telomeres to stave off aging

Below is an interesting article found in a New York Times blog today. It describes a study that indicates that fitness pursuits can have effects at the genetic level, essentially keeping DNA younger. Who'd a thunk it? It's an encouraging message for those of us who exercise as we approach middle age. And for those in this age range who don't exercise, perhaps an impetus to start.

Phys Ed: How Exercising Keeps Your Cells Young
GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Recently, scientists in Germany gathered several groups of men and women to look at their cells' life spans. Some of them were young and sedentary, others middle-aged and sedentary. Two other groups were, to put it mildly, active. The first of these consisted of professional runners in their 20s, most of them on the national track-and-field team, training about 45 miles per week. The last were serious, middle-aged longtime runners, with an average age of 51 and a typical training regimen of 50 miles per week, putting those young 45-mile-per-week sluggards to shame.

From the first, the scientists noted one aspect of their older runners. It ''was striking,'' recalls Dr. Christian Werner, an internal-medicine resident at Saarland University Clinic in Homburg, ''to see in our study that many of the middle-aged athletes looked much younger than sedentary control subjects of the same age.''

Even more striking was what was going on beneath those deceptively youthful surfaces. When the scientists examined white blood cells from each of their subjects, they found that the cells in both the active and slothful young adults had similar-size telomeres. Telomeres are tiny caps on the end of DNA strands - the discovery of their function won several scientists the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine. When cells divide and replicate these long strands of DNA, the telomere cap is snipped, a process that is believed to protect the rest of the DNA but leaves an increasingly abbreviated telomere.

Eventually, if a cell's telomeres become too short, the cell ''either dies or enters a kind of suspended state,'' says Stephen Roth, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Maryland who is studying exercise and telomeres. Most researchers now accept telomere length as a reliable marker of cell age. In general, the shorter the telomere, the functionally older and more tired the cell.

It's not surprising, then, that the young subjects' telomeres were about the same length, whether they ran exhaustively or sat around all day. None of them had been on earth long enough for multiple cell divisions to have snipped away at their telomeres. The young never appreciate robust telomere length until they've lost it.

When the researchers measured telomeres in the middle-aged subjects, however, the situation was quite different. The sedentary older subjects had telomeres that were on average 40 percent shorter than in the sedentary young subjects, suggesting that the older subjects' cells were, like them, aging. The runners, on the other hand, had remarkably youthful telomeres, a bit shorter than those in the young runners, but only by about 10 percent. In general, telomere loss was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ''at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect.''

There are plenty of reasons to exercise - in this column, I've pointed out more than a few - but the effect that regularactivity may have on cellular aging could turn out to be the most profound. ''It's pretty exciting stuff,'' says Thomas LaRocca, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who has just completed a new study echoing Werner's findings. In Mr. LaRocca's work, people were tested both for their V02max - or maximum aerobic capacity, a widely accepted measure of physical fitness - and their white blood cells' telomere length. In subjects 55 to 72, a higher V02max correlated closely with longer telomeres. The fitter a person was in middle age or onward, the younger their cells.

There are countless unanswered questions about how and why activity affects the DNA. For instance, Dr. Werner found that his older runners had more activity in their telomerase, a cellular enzyme thought to aid in lengthening and protecting telomeres. Exercise may be affecting telomerase activity and not telomeres directly. In addition, Stephen Roth has been measuring telomeres and telomerase activity in a wide variety of tissues in mice and has found, he says, the protective effects from exercise only in some tissues.

Another question is whether we must run 50 miles a week to benefit. The answer ''can only be speculative at the moment,'' Dr. Werner says, although since he jogs much less than that, he probably joins the rest of us in hoping not. Given his and his colleagues' data, ''one could speculate,'' he concludes, ''that any form of intense exercise that is regularly performed over a long period of time'' will improve ''telomere biology,'' meaning that with enough activity, each of us could outpace the passing years.

One of the more interesting inferences that can be drawn from the article and one I believe I've run across in other reading is that, contrary to popular sentiment, it's probably better for your health to take on ever more challenging fitness goals as we age. Ask yourself the following question: given the choice, would you rather meet your end by collpasing partway through a marathon, or hooked to a ventilator in a nursing home? Perhaps by taking on ever more challenging fitness pursuits as we age, we can increase the chances that we'll meet our maker in the former rather than the latter way.

Anyway, this study indicates that stressing the body through fitness can lengthen those telomeres, thus extending our health into old age. Now, do something about it--go out and bust a telomere!

Biofeedback

Just a few words about biofeedback in this entry. Many of these words will consist in my own speculations, so look on these parts as a sort of thinking aloud session.

I'm concerned with biofeedback for a couple of reasons--one being that the breathing exercises I've adopted as a means of (hopefully) counteracting high blood pressure are a form of biofeedback. At least they qualify in the opinion of this rank layman.

My question was just how biofeedback works. Not as in, how do you perform biofeedback--which I already know something about--but rather how to understand the cause and effect relation between the biofeedback activity and its influences on health. Specifically, how could breathing in a certain controlled way have an effect on blood pressure--which is connected with the circulatory system? Does breathing affect blood flow?

Well, yes it does. We have to breathe more heavily when we're exercising and our muscles are demanding more blood. But in this case it's more like muscle activity and the circulatory demands that creates is affecting breathing rather than breathing affecting the circulatory system. Does the converse make sense though, viz. that, if we could control our resting breathing rate, it could have an effect on the circulatory system? Broadly speaking, it seems to me that yes, it's possible it could have an effect. The questions are: what effect, how much control, and for how long do the effects last?

According to some things I've read, controlled breathing exercises performed for as little as 10 minutes, twice a day, can have an effect. On the surface, it sounds a little suspect, doesn't it? How could what you do during such a tiny percentage of--not to metnion your entire day, but only--your waking hours have much of an effect at all?

Well, rather than offering my own further speculations about this, here's a popular press article that presents one doctor's attempts to explain the "mechanism" by which this works:

Breathe deep to lower blood pressure, doc says
Experiment suggests slow breathing helps break down the salt we eat
updated 4:29 p.m. ET, Mon., July 31, 2006

WASHINGTON - Take a slow deep breath, then exhale just as slowly. Can you take fewer than 10 breaths a minute? Research suggests breathing that slowly for a few minutes a day is enough to help some people nudge down bad blood pressure.

Why would that brief interlude of calm really work? A scientist at the National Institutes of Health thinks how we breathe may hold a key to how the body regulates blood pressure — and that it has less to do with relaxation than with breaking down all that salt most of us eat.

Now Dr. David Anderson is trying to prove it, with the help of a special gadget that trains volunteers with hypertension to slow-breathe.

If he's right, the work could shed new light on the intersection between hypertension, stress and diet.

"If you sit there under-breathing all day and you have a high salt intake, your kidneys may be less effective at getting rid of that salt than if you're out hiking in the woods," said Anderson, who heads research into behavior and hypertension at the NIH's National Institute on Aging.

An estimated 65 million Americans have high blood pressure, putting them at increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, kidney damage, blindness and dementia. Many don't know it. Hypertension is often called the silent killer, because patients may notice no symptoms until it already has done serious damage.

Anyone can get high blood pressure, measured as a level of 140 over 90 or more. But being overweight and inactive, and eating too much salt — Americans eat nearly double the upper limit for good health — all increase the risk. Indeed, losing weight, physical activity and cutting sodium are the most effective lifestyle changes people can make to lower blood pressure. Still, most hypertension patients need medications, too.

Mysteries of high blood pressure

While they know risk factors, scientists don't fully understand the root causes of hypertension: What skews the body's usually finely tuned mechanisms for regulating the force of blood pounding against artery walls, until it can't compensate for some extra pounds on a couch potato? Understanding those mechanisms could point to better ways to prevent and treat hypertension.

Enter breathing.

Meditation, yoga and similar relaxation techniques that incorporate slow, deep breathing have long been thought to aid blood pressure, although research to prove an effect has been spotty.

Then in 2002, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the nonprescription sale of a medical device called RESPeRATE, to help lower blood pressure by pacing breathing. The Internet-sold device counts breaths by sensing chest or abdominal movement, and sounds gradually slowing chimes that signal when to inhale and exhale. Users follow the tone until their breathing slows from the usual 16 to 19 breaths a minute to 10 or fewer.

In clinical trials funded by maker InterCure Inc., people who used the slow-breathing device for 15 minutes a day for two months saw their blood pressure drop 10 to 15 points. It's not supposed to be a substitute for diet, exercise or medication, but an addition to standard treatment.

Why slow-breathing works "is still a bit of a black box," says Dr. William J. Elliott of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, who headed some of that research and was surprised at the effect.

Slow, deep breathing does relax and dilate blood vessels temporarily, but that's not enough to explain a lasting drop in blood pressure, says NIH's Anderson.

Don't hold your breath

So, in a laboratory at Baltimore's Harbor Hospital, Anderson is using the machine to test his own theory: When under chronic stress, people tend to take shallow breaths and unconsciously hold them, what Anderson calls inhibitory breathing. Holding a breath diverts more blood to the brain to increase alertness — good if the boss is yelling — but it knocks off kilter the blood's chemical balance. More acidic blood in turn makes the kidneys less efficient at pumping out sodium.

In animals, Anderson's experiments have shown that inhibitory breathing delays salt excretion enough to raise blood pressure. Now he's testing if better breathing helps people reverse that effect.

"They may be changing their blood gases and the way their kidneys are regulating salt," he says.

If Anderson's right, it would offer another explanation for why hypertension is what he calls "a disease of civilization and a sedentary lifestyle."

Meanwhile, health authorities recommend that everyone take simple steps to lower blood pressure: by dropping a few pounds, taking a walk or getting physical activity, and eating less sodium — no more than 2,300 milligrams a day — and more fruits and vegetables.

This doctor's explanation of the "mechanism" doesn't offer a whole lot of promise for me since, so far as I can tell, my sodium intake is fairly low (for example I almost never use a salt shaker). Plus I'm pretty active: it's true that comparatively I'm a lot more sedentary now that at previous points in my life. But at the same time I'm probably more active than most of my peers.

But another source claims that "evidence . . . shows routinely performing certain breathing exercises can lower blood pressure by relaxing the muscles surrounding the small blood vessels and allowing the blood to flow more easily." This certainly looks like an alternate explanation of the "mechanism" by which these exercises influence blood pressure. So which is right?

I can't tell at this point whether one or other is more correct. I nonetheless plan to continue the breathing exercises for a time. It certainly can't hurt anything and is definitely relaxing.

In the future I may try another biofeedback technique, one that perhaps better typifies biofeedback and which involves holding a thermometer between two fingers and concentrating on causing the temperature to rise. The "mechanism" in this case seems more straightforward: to raise the temperature, blood flow has to be increased, and for blood flow to increase, the blood vessels have to be expanded (narrowed blood vessels being one of the factors causing blood pressure to rise, as was noted in my entry on seasonal blood pressure variation). So this technique is said to work in the same fashion as the breathing technique according to the alternate explanation offered above.

If I end up trying that I'll certainly be posting about it. Stay tuned . . .

Aging and sleep need

Here's an interesting article on sleep and aging that I came across today (found here). Of course it was of interest to me because I am being plagued by insomnia. It offers scant encouragement to someone who's overall health seems to suffer from insomnia, but it's at least relevant and the findings discussed need to be considered.

Study suggests that healthy adults may need less sleep as they age
Science Centric | 1 February 2010 11:54 GMT

A study in the 1 February issue of the journal SLEEP suggests that healthy older adults without sleep disorders can expect to have a reduced 'sleep need' and to be less sleepy during the day than healthy young adults.

Results show that during a night of eight hours in bed, total sleep time decreased significantly and progressively with age. Older adults slept about 20 minutes less than middle-aged adults, who slept 23 minutes less than young adults. The number of awakenings and the amount of time spent awake after initial sleep onset increased significantly with age, and the amount of time spent in deep, slow-wave sleep decreased across age groups. Yet even with these decreases in sleep time, intensity and continuity, older adults displayed less subjective and objective daytime sleep propensity than younger adults.

Furthermore, two additional nights involving experimental disruption of slow-wave sleep led to a similar response in all age groups. Daytime sleep propensity increased, and slow-wave sleep rebounded during a night of recovery sleep. According to the authors, this suggests that the lack of increased daytime sleepiness in the presence of an age-related deterioration in sleep quality cannot be attributed to unresponsiveness to variations in homeostatic sleep pressure. Instead, healthy ageing appears to be associated with reductions in the sleep duration and depth required to maintain daytime alertness.

'Our findings reaffirm the theory that it is not normal for older people to be sleepy during the daytime,' said principal investigator Derk-Jan Dijk, PhD, professor of sleep and physiology at the University of Surrey in the U.K. 'Whether you are young or old, if you are sleepy during the day you either don't get enough sleep or you may suffer from a sleep disorder.'

The study was conducted at the Clinical Research Centre of the University of Surrey and involved 110 healthy adults without sleep disorders or sleep complaints; 44 were young (20 to 30 years), 35 were middle-aged (40 to 55 years) and 31 were older adults (66 to 83 years). After an eight-hour baseline sleep test, subjects were randomised to two nights with or without selective slow-wave sleep disruption by acoustic stimuli, followed by one recovery night. Nighttime sleep was evaluated by polysomnography, while sleep propensity was assessed using the Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT) and the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale.

During the baseline night, mean objective total sleep time decreased from 433.5 minutes for young adults to 409.9 minutes for middle-aged adults and 390.4 minutes for older adults. Average minutes of slow-wave sleep decreased from 118.4 minutes for young adults to 85.3 minutes for middle-aged adults and 84.2 minutes for older adults. Mean number of minutes spent awake after initial sleep onset increased from 21 for young adults to 49.9 for middle-aged adults and 70.7 for older adults.

Objective daytime sleepiness measured by the MSLT decreased with age. When asked to lie in a comfortable position on the bed and try to fall asleep, young adults fell asleep in an average of 8.7 minutes, compared with 11.7 minutes for middle-aged adults and 14.2 minutes for older adults.

The authors noted that the cause of the age-related reductions in slow-wave sleep and sleep need still must be established. Related factors could include alterations in reproductive hormones or changes in the brain. They added that the study did not address sleep propensity during the evening hours, when it is possible that older adults may be sleepier than young adults.

According to the authors, the study also has implications for the treatment of insomnia in older adults, who may be unaware of their reduced sleep need. Therefore, sleep restriction, which leads to increased homeostatic sleep pressure, may be a successful behavioural therapy for insomnia in healthy older adults.

If only I could sleep just 45 minutes less than I did as a young adult! If I could get just 6 hours of the sleep I used to have then I think my health would improve greatly. Seems almost the only way I can get a decent night's sleep now, though, is by taking a sleep aid. For the skinny on that problem, take a look here.