Archive for April, 2007
Listen to This
Friday, April 27th, 2007I’ll be on the Fitness Buff radio show with Pete and Sabrina this afternoon. (I’m very precisely scheduled for 5:23 to 5:27.) It’s always a lot of fun, and you can hear it live.
Speaking of me and my big mouth, I did a new Internet show, Big Butt Radio, earlier this month. You can find the hour-long program here. I was on third, following Donnie Osmond and boxing trainer Rob Pilger. I give it high marks for entertainment value, as the conversation veered to MILFs, breast implants, Jack Nicholson, and ab training.
If listening to me isn’t enough, be sure to check out the new and technologically functional Male Pattern Fitness here.
See You in the Rock!
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007I’m off to Little Rock for the fifth annual JP Fitness Summit from Thursday through Sunday.
Last I heard, there were still a few seats left. So if anyone just happens to be in Little Rock on Friday or Saturday and wants to drop in to hear some very smart folks talk about our favorite subjects, you could still make it.
Unfortunately, if you get there by 9 a.m. on Friday, you’ll have to listen to me before the smart people begin speaking. But after that it’s nothing but the best and brightest.
A Whole New Blog
Friday, April 6th, 2007And now the news:
I’ve started a new blog, which like this one is called Male Pattern Fitness.
Why a new MPF?
As many of you know, I’ve been unsatisfied with this site from the get-go. I was frustrated with the blog’s inability to accept comments from readers (except those Dan Brown fans who’d figured out how to crack the comment-posting code), the site’s lack of connectivity to the greater blogosphere, and the expense involved in making even the most minor modifications to the site.
I can’t say when I reached the tipping point, but I do know that in the past year or so I’ve started telling friends and colleagues that I really needed two sites: one for promoting my books, articles, interviews, and appearances, and one for blogging. This site works just fine for promoting my work, so what I really needed was a new place to blog.
Most of you know that I’m a pretty serious seamhead. I occasionally post on baseball message boards. (Please don’t share that fact with my wife or any of my former employers.) In fact, I got the idea for starting a fitness message board at menshealth.com from my clandestine experience with online sports argumentation. For the past few months, my favorite baseball site has been Viva El Birdos, which is part of Sports Blog Nation. SB Nation, just to take things full circle, is run by Tyler Bleszinski, a former colleague of mine at Men’s Health.
So I asked Tyler if I could join his blogging collective, and I guess I caught him on a good day, because he agreed. His folks designed the very cool site, and I should soon be blogging away on the new and (vastly) improved MPF. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to update this site when I do something worth promoting, and of course you can find me for at least a few minutes a day over at JP Fitness.
Thanks for your time and attention here, and I look forward to continuing our conversation over there. And this time, you should find it easy and fun to hold up your end of that conversation.
Major Announcement Coming Soon
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007Hate to be cryptic, but … well, in this case I can’t really avoid it.
Sore Winners
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007I haven’t had many chances to celebrate championships. In all my years of playing sports, I was only on one team that won anything. That was my senior year in high school, when our football team won the conference championship. I remember celebrating in the usual way, by getting drunk. Unfortunately, I threw up after I got home. Even worse, I didn’t come close to making it to the bathroom. (My older brother cleaned up the mess, and for that alone should be eligible for sainthood.)
As a fan, my favorite team has four championships in my lifetime: 1964 (when I was seven), 1967, 1982, and 2006. The only one I publicly celebrated was in 1982, when I was in downtown St. Louis, watching the climactic Game Seven in a bar that was less than a mile from the stadium. The post-game scene was both giddy and weird. Everyone out on the streets that night was smiling and shaking hands with everyone else. Race, politics, social class, hygiene — nothing seemed to matter at the moment.
Given that experience, I’ve never understood why fans of winning teams feel compelled to riot. But I guess that says more about me, and perhaps about my hometown, than it does about typical sports fans:
A Cardiff University team quizzed 197 male rugby supporters going in and out of the city’s Millennium Stadium.
They found those who had seen their team win or draw were more aggressive than those who had seen their team lose or had been questioned before the game.
Researchers said fans may get caught up by the euphoria of a win and lose perspective, increasing aggression.
I love that polite, nonjudgmental choice of words: “lose perspective.” As in, “When I robbed a convenience store, beat five innocent people unconscious, and then set that police car on fire, I seem to have lost perspective.”
The reason why fans lose perspective after their team’s victory is both obvious and oft-cited:
“It is known that winning causes an increase in testosterone, which has been associated — although far from established — to increases in aggression.”
I guess I just didn’t have enough in me to make me think of looting.
That’s not the only testosterone news this week. At the opposite end of the age spectrum is this:
Researchers monitored the amount of nighttime sleep for 12 healthy men, ages 64 to 74, and then measured their morning testosterone levels.
The study found that the amount of sleep was an independent predictor of the men’s total and free testosterone levels in the morning.
“The results of the study raise the possibility that older men who obtain less actual sleep during the night have lower blood testosterone levels in the morning,” study author Dr. Plamen Penev said in a prepared statement.
This does have some interesting implications, since we also know that poor sleep is associated with an increase in diabetes risk. But when we look at it side-by-side with the first story, we get a clear-eyed picture of the adult male’s rise and fall:
1. Soccer hooligan
2. Work, marriage, kids, stress, more work, more stress
3. You’d rather sleep than have sex.
The more you think about it, the more you realize this isn’t as crazy as it once seemed.
Bald Man Fuming
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my two months as a member of the AARP. The magazine, formerly known as Modern Maturity, is a first-rate product.
But I have a serious problem with a workout feature in the latest issue.
If you click on the link, you’ll see a middle-aged guy who appears to be robust and in perfectly good health. And he’s doing bench presses with eight-pound dumbbells.
A grown man. Eight-pound dumbbells.
Let’s assume the man weighs 200 pounds, and he can do at least one push-up. A push-up forces you to move about 60 percent of your body’s weight, which in his case would be 120 pounds. So the photo in the magazine shows a man capable of pushing at least 120 pounds off his chest doing an exercise with 16 pounds.
Here’s the article’s advice on how to select the weights to use:
Beginners should start with one set — 8 to 12 repetitions — of each exercise, using 5- to 8-pound weights (you can find them for $20 or less at any sporting-goods store). More advanced exercisers should shoot for two sets of each exercise, using 10- to 12-pound weights.
So I’m the magazine’s reader, and I’d consider myself a “more advanced exerciser.” That means I’m supposed to use 12-pound weights for bench presses, as well as the other exercises in the workout — squats, one-arm rows, biceps curls, lateral raises, and triceps extensions. (The triceps extensions show the model using a single dumbbell, held in both hands.) I could see how those weights might start to feel heavy on lateral raises, especially since it’s an exercise I rarely do. But bench presses? Squats? What possible benefit would I get from that?
According to the article, I’d get all these:
Strength training has been shown to decrease insulin resistance, decrease resting blood pressure, reduce arthritis pain, even improve memory. Some experts believe it’s as essential as aerobic training: “As good as walking is for a variety of things, it does not address the loss of muscle that accompanies the aging process,” says Wayne L. Westcott, Ph.D., fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Massachusetts, and coauthor of Strength Training Past 50 (Human Kinetics, 2007). That loss of muscle — about seven pounds per decade for men and five pounds per decade for women — causes a slowdown in resting metabolism that then translates into a host of health problems.
Yes, but where’s the research showing that grown men working out with Barbie weights get any of those benefits?
It’s hard enough to convince women to use weights that will increase their strength and muscle mass, which of course are the only ways they can get the promised benefits of strength training. You don’t increase your metabolism unless you challenge your body. But now here’s a magazine that goes out to millions of people telling men to work out with weights that wouldn’t challenge my six-year-old daughter.
Grrrrr …
How to Look Good
Monday, April 2nd, 2007I’m off to a late start this morning. In terms of blog meat, I’m tempted by many, but called by few.
For example, I love this story on the therapeutic powers of dirt. Getting down and dirty boosts your mood, improves your immune system, and gives new resonance to the phrase “happy as a pig in shit.”
Then there’s the National League Championship Series, Game 8, otherwise known as baseball’s opening night. The Mets looked good and the Cards looked bad. It was essentially an even game in terms of the number of runners on base (each team got 13 hits and walks, although one additional Met reached when the Cards’ left fielder dropped a ball any of us reading this could’ve caught). But the Mets managed to score five more runs. The Cards hit into four double plays, lost a runner at third on a failed bunt attempt, and had another thrown out at the plate … with Albert Freakin’ Pujols on deck.
Diamond Mind Baseball, a traditionally accurate computer simulation game, picks the Cards to win 85 games this year and the Mets to win just 82, with the Cards winning their division and the Mets finishing out of the money. But if the Cards have many more games like last night’s, they’ll be home watching the playoffs this October. And my guess, based on the way the Mets turned what should’ve been a very close game into a blowout, is that the Mets will be one of the eight teams the 2006 World Champions are destined to watch.
But the tastiest blog meat this Monday morning is a story about politics and the human decision-making process, which, if you’ll indulge a digression, has resonance to me in other areas.
Apples, oranges, and rotten peaches
Recently, someone of my acquaintance, a pre-adolescent male, started asking me some tough questions about how to meet, converse with, and, in a perfect world, impress a pre-adolescent female. Anybody who knew me in my youth would tell this pre-adolescent male that he’s asking the wrong person.
But I happened to be the only one in the room, so I was obliged to answer. I fumbled around through all the lessons I learned the hard way (”it’s not what you say, it’s what she hears”; “chicks dig the long ball”; etc.), and finally came up with a riff that went something like this:
“Attraction is really a mystery. It’s almost magical when it works out that two people meet and end up liking each other more or less equally. Most of the time, the girls you like won’t feel the same way about you. And the girls who do like you won’t necessarily be the ones you find attractive. So when it works out and you’re attracted to each other, you have to enjoy it while it lasts.”
When I repeated that conversation to my wife, she told me it was too negative a message to give to someone contemplating the man-woman thing for the first time. Why scare him off now? There’s plenty of time for that later.
So I shifted from probable outcomes to tactics. I emphasized the need to be excellent. If a girl figures out you like her, but isn’t sure yet if she likes you, just about anything you do might tip the balance. If you call attention to yourself, make sure it’s for something that shows you at your best — being good, being kind, being funny or proficient. Don’t let the first impression be the deal-breaker.
My guess is that he found all that more bewildering than helpful. After all, when you’re 11, what can you do that’s excellent? How much control do you have over those brief, transient moments when you’re in the spotlight?
Fortunately, this morning’s Washington Post has the ultimate take on tactics. It’s a political story, as I said, but the potential applications are much more universal:
Front-runners are usually focused on racing each other. They often do not realize that when people cannot decide between two leading candidates — and it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about politicians or consumer appliances — our decision can be subtly swayed by whoever is in third place.
Psychologists call this the decoy effect: In a perfectly rational world, third candidates should only siphon votes away from one or both of the leading contenders. Under no circumstances should they cause the vote share of either front-runner to increase. In the actual world, however, third candidates regularly have the unintended effect of making one of the front-runners look better than before in the minds of undecided voters.
Joel Huber, a Duke University marketing professor, showed how the decoy effect works with restaurants. Huber asked people whether they would prefer to eat at a five-star restaurant that was far away or at a three-star restaurant nearby. As with many choices in life, each restaurant had different advantages. If the better restaurant was also nearby, there would be no dilemma. But the question forced people to compare apples and oranges — trade off quality against convenience — which ensured no automatic answer.
The human brain, however, always seeks simple answers. Enter the third candidate. Huber told some people there was also a choice of a four-star restaurant that was farther away than the five-star option. People now gravitated toward the five-star choice, since it was better and closer than the third candidate. (The three-star restaurant was closer, but not as good as the new candidate.)
Here’s how I think it could work in our Wonder Years example. It’s not an exact comparison, but it exploits a similar decoy effect:
Let’s say Boy A likes Girl A. Girl A doesn’t yet know this, but occasionally seems to notice Boy A. He catches her looking at him from time to time, and thinks that there might be a chance. The problem is knowing how to get her attention on his own terms.
So Boy A recruits Boy B, a person of lesser stature, intelligence, charm, and/or hygiene. Boy B approaches Girl A, but does so awkwardly, in a way that’s guaranteed not to work. Girl A looks for any excuse to get away from Boy B, and Boy A just happens to catch her eye at that moment. She wasn’t prepared to make a choice before Boy B commanded her attention, but now that she’s on the spot, hey, Boy A is looking damned good.
Would it work? If I’d tried it at that age, probably not. And if anyone else tried it, I get a sneaking suspicion that I’d have been cast as Boy B, wittingly or otherwise.
Still, I’m intrigued by the question: If a teen or preteen really were devious enough or desperate enough to try to set up a favorable-comparison scenario, would the object of his affection fall for it? Would she see through it and be angry? Or would she see through it, but be charmed that he went to so much trouble just for her? Or, in the Hollywood scenario, would she end up falling for Boy B, since he’s the plucky underdog?
What do you think?