Stop With Your Kryptonite Tears

Turns out that women's crying makes men weak. Literally. In fact:

According to a new study, even a whiff of [women's] tears can dramatically reduce men's testosterone levels and to a lesser extent, their sense of sexual arousal.

So guys: If you're on a mass gain program, try not to make your wives/girlfriends cry.

Old School Women's Gym

Maybe it's just me, but when I think about women's fitness in the 1940s, I tend to imagine this:

And not so much this:

No Shortage of Obese Binge-Drinking Women in the U.S.

According to news reports, American women are in a state of "unsatisfactory" health.

More women are binge drinking, saying they downed five or more drinks at a single occasion in the past month, and fewer are being screened for cervical cancer. Over all, more women are obese, diabetic and hypertensive than just a few years ago, and more are testing positive for chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease linked to infertility.

In other words, women are getting to be just as drunk, fat, and STD-ridden as men.

(Source: New York Times, Gawker)

A Revised Myth

The New York Times reports that according to a new mathematical formula used to calculate a woman's maximum heart rate, women who are trying to push themselves hard during exercise can actually push a little less hard:

[R]esearchers at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago announced a new formula for calculating a woman’s maximum heart rate, a measure commonly used by athletes to pace themselves and monitor their progress. In a study of nearly 5,500 healthy women, scientists discovered that a decades-old formula for calculating heart rate is largely inaccurate for women, resulting in a number that is too high.

The news may be a vindication to many women who have struggled to keep up with lofty target heart rates espoused by personal trainers and programmed into treadmill displays.

The commonly used formula subtracts a person’s age from 220. But based on the data collected in the Chicago study, the right formula for calculating a woman’s maximum heart rate is a little more complicated: 206 minus 88 percent of a woman’s age.

The findings are significant because many runners, cyclists and other exercisers obsessively monitor their heart rates by taking their pulse and rely on the old formula to gauge the intensity of the workout. The typical goal is to stay within 65 to 85 percent of the estimated maximum heart rate, depending on whether the athlete is trying to build aerobic capacity or increase endurance.

But the new study shows that for women, the number typically derived from the standard formula is far off the mark. Using the old formula of 220 minus age, a 40-year-old woman would achieve an average maximum heart rate of 180 beats per minute. That means her pulse should stay around 153 beats per minute during her workout to achieve a target heart rate of 85 percent.

But based on the new calculation, the same woman’s average maximum heart rate is 171 beats per minute, meaning her desired target heart rate is just 145 beats per minute, 8 beats a minute slower than under the old formula.

But if you're someone who's "obsessively" checking your heart rate during your workouts, you know you can stop, right? Constant monitoring of your heart rate is unnecessary. If you exercise regularly, you can judge how hard you're pushing yourself, and can instinctively ramp your intensity up or down accordingly. Unless you're: (1) completely new to exercise and want to get a baseline sense of how hard you're working, or (2) a highly-specialized athlete doing some very specific training to gain a particular (marginal) boost in performance, your heart rate monitor's just a high-tech distraction from your workout.

Besides, as I've mentioned before, the "target heart rate zones" posted on treadmills and elliptical machines are utter bullshit. (Want more on this subject? Read this and this.)

So in the end, what does the new formula for calculating women's max heart rates tell us?

Not too much.

CrossFitting Girls Will Kick Your Ass

(Photo: Amber K.)

M pointed me to this article in the latest issue of Fitness Magazine (which, for some reason, gets delivered to our house for free):

The encounter started like a bad horror flick. It was still dark outside one morning last September when Katy Vander Roest, 24, suddenly woke in her Cincinnati sublevel apartment. "The room felt strange somehow, and I sat up in bed," she recalls. "I put my arms at my sides, and then I felt a gloved hand." Screaming, she looked down to see a man crouching on the floor.

Katy, a student and bartender, wasn't about to be a helpless victim. First she punched the intruder in the face. Hard. Then she jumped out of bed and pinned the would-be rapist, who police estimate was six foot one and 185 pounds, over a low dresser. "I held him down with my left hand and hit him in the face with my right," says Katy, who is five foot eight and 145 pounds. "I was yelling at him to get out, and he was begging for me to stop."

She maneuvered him out of her room, down the hall and through the front door. She literally punched him out of her apartment, an outcome Katy credits to CrossFit, an intense strength-and-conditioning program that is especially popular with police academies and military units. Katy, who had played soccer and basketball and run track as a kid, was introduced to the tough training regimen by her boyfriend; she'd been doing it daily for several months. She loved the challenge and variety of the constantly changing workouts and was putting in up to 12 hours a week at her local CrossFit gym. At the time of the break-in, she had five new pounds of solid muscle to show for her dedication and hard work.

Police arrested the intruder that night; he was eventually convicted and sentenced to five years. "Looking back, I realize how scary it was," Katy says. "Other girls I've talked to say that if the same thing had happened to them, they would've frozen. But I felt as if I were physically ready to fight back, and that made me less afraid. I feel strong on the outside and the inside."

Remember: CrossFit is for girls, too.