Can Exercise Reverse Aging?

The video clip above (which Angelo Coppola just posted on the "Latest in Paleo" Facebook page) reminded me of Dr. Jeffry Life. Last year, both the New York Times Magazine and the Los Angeles Times wrote about Life's gospel of anti-aging.

Every year, Life gets a new set of beefcake photos taken. Now 71, he said he put on five pounds of muscle this past year by scheduling extra tae kwon do practices and cranking it up a notch in the weight room. He can bench-press 235 pounds and can do 10 pull-ups, “full extension.”

(That's not all: He also regularly undergoes testosterone and human growth hormone therapy -- something that "Life views as entirely appropriate, even necessary despite the medical evidence questioning both its effectiveness and safety.")

Still, the guy's clearly on the right track when it comes to the importance of exercise for those beyond retirement age. Consider, for example, that:

• Exercise makes you smarter. Older women who regularly weight-trained "saw an improvement in their performance on cognitive tests of memory and learning as well as in executive functions such as decision-making and conflict resolution" while those that didn't saw no such improvement. (Women who hit the weights just once a week "improved their scores in executive functioning by 12.65.")

• Elderly persons who exercised more than three times a week were found to be "half as likely to have developed dementia, compared with the people who reported no physical activity."

• Elderly women who regularly exercised four times a week for 18 months -- doing a variety of moves, including aerobics, balance moves and weight training -- "improved their bone mineral density by nearly 2%." Meanwhile, women who focused only on walking, muscle relaxation and breathing skills saw just a 0.33% increase in bone density -- and had a 66% higher risk of experiencing a fracture-causing fall.

• Research on mice suggests that premature aging can be halted -- and even reversed -- in virtually every tissue and organ in the bodies" of mice that exercised. (Yes, I know we're not rodents. I'm just sayin'.)

No excuses. If Art De Vany can pull his Land Rover around with a rope, you can do a few deadlifts.

Use Your Head

Back in March, the L.A. Times published a piece about how researchers examined 18 years' worth of data and concluded that weightlifting injuries are on the rise.



It must be a slow news day, because today, nine months after the fact, the New York Times decided to report on the same study. And what new information did the Gray Lady have to add?

This year Jessica Cleary, a 40-year-old mother from Chicago, joined the growing number of injured weight trainers. Ms. Cleary said in an interview that she had been working out with free weights and on resistance machines about five times a week for several years. She believed she was well trained, having been guided by a personal trainer for eight months. But on a fateful day last May she slid off a leg-strengthening machine head first, and her neck landed hard on a metal part of the equipment.

Unable to talk and having trouble breathing, she was taken to an emergency room, where tests showed she had fractured her larynx. A challenging operation and three months of recovery later, she said she felt lucky to have ended up with “only a paralyzed vocal cord” and a permanently raspy voice.

“At another gym on a similar piece of equipment, a woman broke her neck,” Ms. Cleary told me.

And once there was a guy who stuck his penis in a tree and got bitten by a squirrel. Lesson: Your ween doesn't belong in a tree, just as your ass doesn't belong on a "leg strengthening machine" if you have no clue how to use it properly.

Tip of the Day: If you want to strengthen your legs without "slid[ing] off a leg-strengthening machine head first" (and by the way, how exactly does one manage to do that?), do SQUATS, for crying out loud.

And can someone please explain to me why wasn't this nominated for a Darwin Award instead of being held up as an example of a common weightlifting injury?

Little Hercules

According to the New York Times, kids who train with weights won't damage their growth plates. They won't end up being shorter as a result, nor will they suffer "lack of testosterone" or experience "a variety of safety issues." In fact,

a major new review just published in Pediatrics, together with a growing body of other scientific reports, suggest that, in fact, weight training can be not only safe for young people, it can also be beneficial, even essential.

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to turn my kids into Giuliano Stroe.

(Source: New York Times)

"You're Cleaning? You're Dating a Jerk?"

The Washington Post just posted a write-up about CrossFit's role in the resurgence of Olympic weightlifting -- a "total-body technique that's pretty much guaranteed to make you run faster, jump higher and get stronger."

Sadly, over the past few decades, "America's fitness industry has virtually abandoned [O-lifting] in favor of new equipment, fads and methods. 'It is almost a forgotten way to train. People just want to bounce around,' says Greg Haff, vice president of the National Strength and Conditioning Association and an assistant professor at West Virginia University School of Medicine." (Zumba, anyone?)

Why has chronic cardio and high-rep, low-resistance "weight training" eclipsed O-lifting as the exercise approach of choice? There are plenty of reasons to choose from:

• If you view exercise as a necessary evil, it's a hell of a lot easier to just hop on an elliptical trainer, crank up your iPod and start flipping through the latest issue of US Weekly on the machine's conveniently-mounted magazine tray. As Haff points out in the Post article, Olympic lifting is "a lot of work." And ironically, most gym-goers would prefer to stick with what's familiar and easy. (Like machines.)

• Some guys might gravitate towards it, but women tend to run for ze hills due to myths about how O-lifting'll break their backs, bulk them up and turn them into she-hulks like Nicole Bass.

• And it's not easy getting started; proper technique is critical and difficult to learn without coaching or instruction (or at least a good book or two).

• Last but not least, barbells and bumper plates aren't available at most gyms. (This, though, is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: People don't ask for barbells and plates, so gyms don't stock 'em, which means people aren't exposed to O-lifting, and so they don't ask for barbells and plates. Thankfully, you can just buy your own.) 

 As a result, O-lifting's been dying a slow death in the U.S. Thankfully, CrossFit's come to the rescue:

To stage a comeback, weightlifting needed an army of advocates who not only didn't mind the challenge, but relished it. And it seems to have found that through CrossFit, a 15-year-old methodology for producing well-rounded athletes that's found huge success among law enforcement, the military and, these days, the general population... 

Every single one of [CrossFit's devotees] sweats the two "O lifts": the snatch (a single, continuous motion that requires lifting the barbell from the ground and forcing yourself under it so that you're standing with your arms locked in extension above you) and the clean and jerk (start by pulling the weight from the ground to your shoulders, then dip and drive the bar overhead, splitting your legs into a half lunge to get the power to extend your arms upward).

If you've never heard of the moves, you're like most of Allison Jetton's friends. The 28-year-old Arlington resident has had trouble explaining exactly what she has been doing during CrossFit classes and personal training sessions the past few months at Balance Gym in Thomas Circle: "People are like, 'You're cleaning? You're dating a jerk?' " But she has fallen for the feeling of raising a hefty barbell over her head -- and how it has made her clothes fit.

"Women are usually lined up on treadmills with a magazine aerobicizing themselves to oblivion," she says. "I tried that. I didn't find it effective."

 Sounds like the understatement of the year.

(Source: Washington Post)

How to Lift Weights

Round 3 / Day 83: One-on-One with Tony Horton - Just Arms

No Turbulence Training for me today. My legs are beat, and I felt the need to rest 'em for a while. So this morning, I decided to try the "Just Arms" workout from Tony Horton's One-on-One series.

 It's just as advertised: Nothing but exercises for the arms. The session consists of 47 minutes of bicep, forearm and triceps exercises, broken up into three supersets and a bonus round.
  

None of the bicep or triceps moves are new to P90X grads, but for the first time in any of the workout videos I've seen from Tony Horton, he throws in a bunch of wrist and forearm exercises. (Good thing, too -- my forearms are puny.)

Without further ado, here's a list of the sleeve-busters Tony leads us through:

Superset One:

• Seated Bicep Curls
• Seated Forearm Curls
• Lying Triceps Extensions

Repeat the superset.
 

 Superset Two:

• Seated Incline Curls
• Reverse Forearm Curls
• Triceps Kickbacks

Repeat the superset.
 

Superset Three:

• Twenty-Ones (just like in P90X Back & Biceps)
• Three-Way Forearm Curls (rotations, standard curls and reverse curls)
• Side Tri Rises

 Repeat the superset.
    

Bonus Round:

• Crazy 8's (just like Static Arm Curls from P90X Shoulders & Arms, but you do 8 bicep curls before switching to the other arm, and each arm goes twice, for a total of 32 curls while the other arm is held at a 90-degree angle)
• Back Forearm Curls
• Hammer Curls
• Tricep Throws
• Crazy 8's (again)

And that's it.
  



Overall, this isn't a bad workout. It's standard, straightforward isolation weight training, pumping up your arms while still allowing the rest of your body to rest and recover.
   

But in the end, I felt a little unsatisfied in a way that I don't when I'm doing interval training or compound bodyweight exercises. Perhaps it's because I'm not looking to be a bodybuilder; working just one series of muscles in isolation doesn't hold much appeal for me.

     

But it's also because I feel totally inadequate watching Tony and coming to the realization that I can't lift nearly as heavy as he can. And he's in his 50s.
     

Well, DUH.

Despite the image below, it's better to do fewer reps with heavier weights.