Sports are dominated by all kinds of machinery that measure body parameters to improve and control performance. More and more devices are construed to give more and more detailed information about our body’s condition. Nevertheless body sense is a term that in the end always comes into the game if parameters are not conclusive, and in many ways they are not.
I found an article in the Psychology Today Blog that underlines the importance of the body sense and the ability to assess the condition of well-being. It goes very much along with an article I myself wrote about this topic, and may encourage you to a less structured training program that takes the body sense more into consideration.

One of the sentences that athletes and coaches love to say is: “The most important thing you can do to recover quickly is to listen to your body. If you are feeling tired, sore or notice decreased performance you may need more recovery time or a break from training altogether. If you are feeling strong the day after a hard workout, you don’t have to force yourself to go slow. If you pay attention, in most cases, your body will let you know what it needs, when it needs it.”

The problem for many of us is that we don’t listen to the warnings of overreaching or over-training as there are general malaise, fatigue, mood instability, lack of motivation, loss of appetite, fragmented sleep, delayed muscle soreness, disturbed body temperature regulation etc… or that we are misinterpreting body signs.

The good thing about this post is that it brings body sense into the loop of understanding exercise physiology. Body sense herewith is accepted as a biological and not only psychological phenomenon. We know a lot about metabolism and muscle during and after exercise but less focus is placed on how exercise feels in our bodies. Learning to feel the body during any type of activity enhances the body’s ability to most effectively marshal its resources to enhance health and well being.

(more…)

Currently biestmilch is supporting a weight loss program of two of its friends. My view on this topic was from the beginning that the guys should not focus on weight loss only, should not put the scale into the center of concern as other health aspects may be even more important and significant, as there are blood pressure, aerobic capacity and resting heart rate.

Today I found confirmation in the current issue of the British Journal of Medicine. Dr. N. King and his co-workers from the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, School of Human Movement Studies, Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia published a study that underlines the approach that weight loss is not the one and only health benefit of exercise. Their study group of 58 overweight sedentary individuals undertook the effort of physical workouts 5 times a week for 12 weeks. Energy expenditure was 500 kcal per session. It is interesting and important to know that weight loss was less than expected for the majority of the participants. But they showed other positive changes which are of great significance for the health condition of an individual. (more…)

This post refers back to the one from yesterday that outlines the scientific approach to proove a cause by a »post-hoc assumption of a cause-effect relation«. Conclusions drawn like this are fairly arbitrary and result in data that drift and seem incorrect as soon as the standpoint of observation changes.
Under whatsoever extreme environmental conditions heat stroke is a rare event that funnily enough occurs under conditions that would never let us assume it to happen. The proof of concept is easily performed by a mathematical equation that should not be applied to real life, to real persons, because of its over-simplification.
But mathematics clearly shows that heat loss even in extreme situations like hot temperature over 35°C, no wind, high humidity, bright sunshine and low running efficiency exceeds heat storage.

The example:

Theoretically this runner cannot experience a heat stroke, no, he is even able to evaporate more heat. To keep his body temperature exactly the same, he would have to evaporate 1.5 L of sweat per hour. The calculation also reveals that it would be possible for him to evaporate 1.6 L of sweat per hour. This means that he has no problem loosing the heat he produces, and should not develop heatstroke

But the story of real life turns out to be completely different:
This runner, running in these conditions, was pulled out of the race after only 16 minutes, with a rectal temperature of 40.8°C! Therefore, despite the fact that there were no limitations in the environment, and the fact that he COULD have lost all the heat he produced, he failed. And the result was that he developed heat stroke after less than 4km of running!

Read whole article on www.sportsscientists.com