The power of pauses I was doing some prep for a lecture last year – the topic, osteoporosis and exercise – and I came across a curious suggestion in a paper by Srinivasan et al (2002). They tried some low-intensity loading of animal bone, basically by applying a bit of bending load to bones. In […]
Health harshening the exercise buzz? With the emergence of the ‘Exercise is Medicine’ (EIM) movement, biomedical models of health have been applied to exercise and physical activity, with seemingly limited success (Halall et al, 2012). The value and benefits of physical activity, exercise, sport and recreation extend well beyond physical measures of health. The risk […]
My computer screen was commandeered this morning by a video advert featuring a former All Black captain and his elite athlete wife, running together and subliminally planting turmeric in my mind. I replayed the clip a couple of times and I think the message was ‘taking turmeric supplements somehow provides a fitness edge’. Turmeric belongs […]
One of my graduate assistant roles at the University of Alberta was to conduct fitness tests for the Faculty’s Fitness Testing Unit. The Unit targeted the general population and their health and wellbeing and was well subscribed. We followed standardised fitness testing protocols that included skinfolds, a bike test to estimate aerobic fitness, a sit […]
Gimmicks and fads have been ‘part and parcel’ of societies for centuries. We only need to look to some of the medical treatments employed throughout the ages. Bloodletting, supposedly a fad treatment for a range of maladies, has documented use as far back as 3,000 years ago. Yet that fad was still in vogue up […]
Sometimes I wonder about the supposed advances in sciences, particularly the rapid emergence of technologies, and whether they are often more problematic than helpful. We live in a world where we prefer to see things as causes and effects. Mostly we like to believe that when something happens there has to be an identifiable cause […]
(March 26, 2018) After a few years of working with elite, well-trained athletes, it started dawning on me that we all seemed to be caught up in some kind of bizarre ‘arms race’ of strength and conditioning. All around me it was more, more, more. In the rugby world, coaches wanted players to be bigger, […]
Measuring what for what? I’ve just been working on a chapter from our book (longest title ever – Understanding Strength and Conditioning as Sport Coaching: Bridging the Biophysical, Pedagogical and Sociocultural Foundations of Practice) and I touched on Functional Movement Screens. In my research I came across an old post titled “I HATE the Functional […]
For the past five years, I’ve pulled a nasty trick on students taking my college Exercise Prescription courses. I’d explain that the assessment for the course included a couple assignments and practicals and a final examination accounted for the other 50% of their final grade. Over the past few years, I’d noted some complacency and […]
(February 11, 2018) One of the things that really bothers me about the Physical Activity and Health movement has been their tendency to catastrophise inactivity. ‘Catastrophising’ is a term that seems to have come from psychotherapy, where it was used to describe a tendency to exaggerate the seriousness of a situation and to forecast an […]