Geeks and health

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Dave Cramer <davec-zxk95TxsVYDyHADnj0MGvQC/G2K4zDHf at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Giles Orr <gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> Clifford's presentation was on a subject I consider very important,
>> and I thought I might have a few words to add ...  It turned out to be
>> rather more than "a few."  Forgive my verbosity.  Skip through and
>> look at the headings to see if there's anything of interest to you.
>
>> I would recommend that those over about 35 approach martial arts
>> (other than Tai Chi) with considerable caution: I tried to return to
>
> This is a generalization as I have injured myself in tai chi as well.
> It's not as "gentle" as it appears

My hips hurt remarkably, in a "boy, there are some muscles that have
never gotten used before!" way for about the first six months after
starting.

I'd reckon that *anything* can be done in a way that can injure
yourself, but I'd put Tai Chi pretty low on the spectrum of things
*likely* to easily cause injury.  In contrast, I'd fully expect karate
to be injury-ful for any of us relative "oldsters."

What I find most interesting, after having done Tai Chi for a few
years now, the experienced folk come out of a session sweating
heavily, whereas newcomers generally don't.  If you're doing it right,
it's a *lot* more work than if you don't know what you're doing.

Pulling from my notes...

- When Clifford headed to a gym, he saw they were heavily hawking
trainers to walk him through resistance training.  A lot of what they
were proposing was pretty ridiculous.  I worked with a trainer for a
while, myself, and there's *some* value to it, as weight machines can
easily be ill-used leading to injury.

In many cases, what you *think* you see isn't quite the same as what
you should be doing.  A bit like with Tai Chi, if you're doing weights
properly, you don't need huge stacks of weight unless you're one of
the "steroid mutants" that don't exist at GTALUG :-).

- Clifford mentioned a notion of doing interval training.  Brief
sprints of high intensity, with limited recovery times.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_training>

He pointed at exercise representing about 20% of the "causality mix",
and proper diet representing the other 80%.  There was some mention of
proper sleep also being an important component; I suspect the mix
might be more like (diet, sleep, exercise) ~ (20%, 10%, 70%).

He noted some sorts of foods being particularly unhelpful, notably
those with high glycemic indices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic
- High: anything "white" (white flour, breakfast cereals)
- Medium: whole wheat-ish stuff
- Low: most fruits & vegetables, nuts, whole grains

He noted that fats are often not evaluated quite properly, and there's
a traditional tendency to treat consuming fat as "bad," and a whole
industry surrounding "fat free" when we really should be getting a
fair bit of our energy from fat.
- Bad fats tend to be solid at room temperature;
- OK fats are, at that point, still liquid.
- His preference is coconut oil, as long as he can validate the
provenance.  Apparently there are lots of problems with "olive oil"
being constructed from non-olive combinations that are made to taste
as if it's olive oil.
- Milk fat tends to be pretty bad; he replaces that with almond 'milk'.
- Avocado is pretty fatty, but of a good nature that you should
consider consuming.

One of the notions commended was to not try to "fix everything" by
'going on a diet', but rather to incrementally improve habits.  It's
no good if you do a 'crash' 6 week diet that loses you a bunch of
weight, but which leaves you so starved that you immediately gain it
all back afterwards.

The gyms are terrible about this "sin"; they are keen on getting you
to have super-ambitious goals that require extreme intervention and
self-control.

Incremental changes that you can keep to are way more worthwhile.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
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