SportsGeezer

Wii Fitness Gets Real, Kind of, (watch video)

The market for home exercise gear is set for what dot.com business pundits used to call "a major paradigm shift."  And while few people had any idea what in the world dot.com pundits were talking about, this likely shift is very clearly rendered in a New York Times video clip, in which two women allow Nintendo’s latest brainchild, Wii Fit, to put then through their paces. Lots of paces. Geezer is definitely intrigued. Check out the video here. And the Times article, in which many people offer their assessments of Wii Fit, here.

Breast Practices: Exercises to Keep Up Appearances

Now you know: Geezer is not above putting the word "breast" in a headline to build a more inclusive readership--inclusive of people who respond to well, you know, you responded. Editors at the L.A.Times are, it turns out, similarly welcoming of new readers. In this recent piece, the paper recommends "exercise moves to make your breasts stand out." Here are two:
Bench presses (in the regular, incline or decline position) and "flys." Chest flys are performed lying on the back, preferably on a bench, starting with arms straight up, a dumbbell in each hand. Arms are slowly lowered to the side, until they are on the same plane as the bench or floor.
Want your breasts to stand out even more? Read more in the L.A. Times.

Pumping Up Your Brain Is Easier Than You Think

First, readers should know that "fluid intelligence" is not knowing which kind of beer tastes best with a particular meal. It's the ability to reason and solve problems, such as figuring out which kind of beer tastes best with a particular meal. The good news is that researchers now think that fluid intelligence, once considered a constant, like height, can be improved. CBS News reports that experiments conducted at the University of Michigan suggest that a demanding memory task might kick your intelligence up a notch or two, and the more you engage your brain this way, the smarter you might become. Psychologists asked healthy adult volunteers (average age: 26) to take a standard test for fluid intelligence, and then perform a series of training exercises designed to improve their working memory. The researchers divided the volunteers into four groups; each group repeated the exercises over a different number of days. CBS News reports that when scientists retested the volunteers' fluid intelligence after the training and compared the scores to those who did not receive training they noted a significant improvement in fluid intelligence scores among those who participated in the demanding memory tasks. There were greater improvements seen in those who spent the most time training.
Read more from CBS News.

In Game of Life, Status Trumps Money

If you had to choose between status or cash, which way would you go? That was the question that researchers in Japan and at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Maryland hoped to answer with experiments that used an MRI to watch their subjects brains as they made decisions that would reward them with either money or status. The answer: It's close, but status has the lead.
In the Japanese study, researchers observing 19 participants found that the brain was activated in response to high and low appraisals by others (but did not perk up to more neutral comments); it also responded to monetary wins and losses but was quiet if a player broke even.
At NIMH, researchers scanned the brains of 72 volunteers as they attempted to earn money in a computer game. During play, the researchers occasionally revealed how supposed competitors (who, unbeknownst to them, were fake) were faring. The scientists created an arbitrary ranking system of the real and faux players in which some of the bogus gamers appeared to perform better—and others worse—than the real ones. The participants were told that their status in the game had no effect on how much money they could win, but that earning more money could boost their rank.
Lead researcher Caroline Zink told the Scientific American that the brains of players reacted very strongly to the other players and specifically the status of the other players. The journal reports that, according to Zink, the striatum became just as animated when players were given a shot at improving their social standing as it did when they won a buck. And that wasn't the only indicator that they cared about how others perceived them. She says another brain region (the medial prefrontal cortex) involved in sizing up others went wild when players were shown photos of competitors who outperformed them.
Read more in the Scientific American.

 

A Little Video Inspiration, from the film "Young@Heart"

Beat Fatigue with a Low Stress Workout

Tara Parker-Pope, writing in her Well column in the New York Times, tells us that moderate exercise may be the perfect cure for exhaustion. Pope cites research conducted at the University of Georgia that put three groups of exhausted volunteers through three different paces of exercise for six weeks. One group of fatigued volunteers was prescribed 20 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise three times a week. The second group engaged in low-intensity aerobic exercise, while a third control group did not exercise.The researchers found that both of the exercise groups had a 20 percent increase in energy levels by the end of the study, compared to the control group. They also found that more intense exercise isn’t the best way to reduce fatigue. The low-intensity group reported a 65 percent drop in feelings of fatigue, compared to a 49 percent drop in the group doing more intense exercise. Read more from Tara Parker-Pope.

Does Core Stability Reduce Back Pain?

Does pumping up core strength help to reduce back pain? The short answer, as revealed in this piece in the L.A. Times, is no one really knows.  The newspaper turns for help to Dr. Christopher Standaert, a clinical associate professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, who describes core stability training as the standard of care for back pain. "But,"he adds, "There's never even been a uniform agreement on the definition." The Times reports that among those who think that core training works, there are two schools of thought on exactly how it works. Some experts think that local muscles such as the multifidi and the transverse abdominis are critically important. Others think it's more about training movement patterns and broader motions and coordination of multiple muscles through your trunk to help your spine move more effectively.
Standaert tells the paper that whether one is talking about local or global core stabilization, the rush to embrace core training has gotten ahead of the science. "People need to know that the scientific clinical foundation, the research, doesn't match the extent of emphasis that trainers and therapists and all sorts of people put on it."
Read more in the Los Angeles Times.

Why Spring Fever Is a Good Thing

Three health-related reasons to celebrate spring: Seasonal Affective Disorder becomes orderly; there are fewer heart attacks in spring; and the number of flu cases almost always declines. On the other hand, many of us begin to feel weird. We are restless, have even more trouble than we usually do paying attention, and find romance in strange places. The L.A. Times offers some reasons for the seasonal weirdness that we call spring fever. Let's start with chemicals. In winter, the paper reports, the body secretes high levels of melatonin, a hormone that governs sleep-wake cycles. Come spring, the increasing amount of daylight is registered by light-sensitive tissue in the eye, which signals the brain to stop secreting so much melatonin. As the hormone's levels drop off, greater wakefulness results. Wait, there's more on the chemical front: In spring, levels of another chemical, serotonin, rise. This mood-elevating neurotransmitter may be at the root of the giddiness, energy boost and enthusiasm that characterize spring fever. Read more about spring fever in the L.A. Times.

Is Runners' High For Real?

Readers who have not had time to pick up the latest issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex will be delighted to learn that the relatively inexpensive feeling of euphoria known as runners' high is now officially real. New York Times' health guru Gina Kolata writes about the research, reported in Cerebral Cortex and conducted at the University of Bonn. Researchers at the German school gave PET scans to the brains of athletes before and after a two-hour run, hoping to spot evidence that endorphins produced during the run were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood. And the answer is...YES. Dr. Henning Boecker, who led the study, told the Times that endorphins could be detected in the limbic and prefrontal areas of the brain. Those are the areas, Boecker said, that are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, “when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.”  When researchers also asked the runners to describe any post-run euphoria, they found that the greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.
Read more in the New York Times.

How to Pump Up Your Compassion

While compassion is not one of the required traits for most competitive sports, Geezer has observed that it can render some other venues more rewarding: the dining room, for example, and yes, the bedroom. Now, from researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison comes good news for the compassion deficient: compassion can be learned, maybe. The Scientific American reports that researchers working at the university's Waisman Center for Brain Imaging took fMRI scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators and 16 others who had started with no meditation experience but received cursory training before they carried out a series of tests. During these tests, the researchers measured the flow of blood in the brains of both the veterans (some of them Tibetan monks) and the American novices as the subjects did or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while being subjected to various sounds with positive and negative connotations. Sciam reports that when engaged in compassionate meditation, the brain region known as the insula burst into action when the expert meditators heard the sound of a woman in distress. (The insula—a part of the limbic system—has been associated with the visceral feeling of emotion, a key part of empathizing with another's emotional state.) When these experts heard the female screams or the sound of a baby laughing, their brains showed more activity than the novices in areas like the right temporal-parietal juncture, which plays a role in understanding another's emotion. Read more about learning compassion in the Scientific American.