Fitness for Geeks: Real Science, Great Nutrition, and Good Health
Bruce W. Perry
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1449399894
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The digital age has made a big splash with new web-connected gear in the sports/fitness world. Fitness for Geeks covers many of these new self-tracking tools and apps, including Endomondo, FitBit, Garmin Connect, Alpine Replay, Zeo, and more. The book shows you how the gear and apps work, relate to human physiology, and can be hacked and integrated into your lifestyle and fitness routine.
Fitness For Geeks is designed to appeal to a broad audience of techies and other engineers, athletes, gym rats, adventurers, in short anyone with a scuffed-up muddy pair of running or cycling shoes (or bare feet) who wants to take a cerebral approach to health. The "measure mantra" is a useful concept for people seeking fitness ("what gets measured gets managed and fixed"), and now you have the software, gear, and companion book to do it.
The book includes an eclectic mix of interviews with a wide range of experts, including two NFL pro football players, a mountaineering guide, a national expert on vitamin C, a runner who won a hot Boston Marathon, a scientist who tests the effects of fasting on mice and tumors, an MIT scientist who studies our mTOR growth pathway, an expert sports masseuse, and a former Israeli soldier who studied the diet of the Spartans, Greeks, and Macedonians.
Fitness For Geeks has detailed chapters on nutrition as well as outdoor and indoor fitness and sports, with explanations of various protocols (for resistance training and sprinting), the physiological aspects of exercise (such as metabolic equivalent of task and calculating your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and total energy expenditure), and of course a number of apps and tools that can accompany your workouts.
Sprinkled throughout the book are familiar software-engineering concepts, such as antipatterns and design patterns, and how we can apply these same paradigms to fitness. How important is real food, an oscillation of movement throughout the day, as well as getting plenty of sleep and healthy sunlight? We have the same "preinstalled software code," our genes, as pre-modern people. The book discusses this imperative of mashing up a techie lifestyle with the paradigm of evolutionary health - the ancient behaviors for which we are programmed.
A geek is someone who spends a huge amount of time analyzing the fine points of whatever interests her, ad infinitum, to a level that no one around her can possibly understand. Her family members and friends are all flabbergasted and scratching their heads, until finally with a shrug of their shoulders and a murmur of "fanatic..." they return to quotidian concerns. See yourself in there? Then Fitness For Geeks is probably the book you've been looking for.
Just as Jeff Potter brought a new perspective to cooking in O'Reilly's bestselling Cooking for Geeks, in Fitness For Geeks you're likely to find a similar originality and outside-the-box approach to taking charge of your own health.
Pilates Anatomy: A Comprehensive Guide
Chapter, we look at some of these tools and apps with which you can analyze and quantify your fitness progress. An Interview With Mark Sisson Fittingly for this chapter, we interviewed Mark Sisson of “Primal Blueprint” fame in Fall 2011. Mark is one of the pioneers of, and a powerful voice for what you might call the “live according to your design” principle. Mark is a former elite endurance athlete, a popular blogger at Mark’s Daily Apple (www.marksdailyapple.com), and he runs a health and.
Research has shown that the brain is not stuck as a static anatomical entity from birth and early development, as once thought. The brain can be strengthened and made more robust with exercise (of a cerebral nature, that is), similar to a muscle. The fancy term for this is “neuroplasticity.” According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity, neuroplasticity: …is a nonspecific neuroscience term referring to the ability of the brain and nervous system in all species to change structurally.
We’re designed. It’s also impossible to develop vitamin D toxicity from the sun, unless you’re also taking too high a dose in supplemental form. My guess is that surfers and lifeguards who aren’t covered by a wetsuit and sunblock all the time have pretty healthy D levels. A recent study of some people in East Africa who live pastoral or huntergatherer lifestyles, the Maasai and the Hadzabe, noted that their mean 25(OH)D levels fell into the mid to high-40s range. The Maasai’s mean levels were “48.
Diets for managing several neurological diseases like epilepsy, autism, lipid storage diseases, and cancer. Inflammation underlies the progression of many diseases. Both calorie restriction and fasting target inflammation. Are we humans designed for intermittent fasting—in other words, does it turn on pathways that promote health? Does it express genes in a positive way? Many have speculated that our evolutionary ancestors (such as from the Upper Paleolithic) may have experienced extreme swings.
Maps, and graphs for an Endomondo stroll The calorie count is, of course, an estimate, which probably includes your basal metabolic rate (BMR). See the sidebar on BMR for more information. For example, my BMR is roughly 70 calories per hour, meaning I’d burn off about 1,680 calories while prone in bed all day. So, during a 28-minute walk, I burned about 130 kcal according to Endomondo, or about 100 kcal extra on top of my BMR. 160 Chapter 7 Exercising Outside What’s Your Basal Metabolic.