The Fitness Guru

Monday was a pretty rough day. First, Mark McGwire, one of baseball’s most powerful batters of all time, appeared on Bob Costas’ show on the Major League Baseball Network to announce that, indeed, he had used steroids in 1998, the year he broke the home run record.

I was shocked.

I had no idea there was a Major League Baseball Network.

Earlier on Monday, Brooklyn had lost one of its own. Joe Rollino had been struck and killed by a mini van as he went for his morning walk in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Mr. Rollino, Puggy to his friends, was 104 years old. Others called him Mighty Joe Rollino, for he had made a name for himself as a strongman. Not just any strongman, but, as an elloquent obituary in the New York Times points out, possibly pound for pound the greatest strongman to ever live. Frequently, he would swim in the water off Coney Island, at one time holding an eight year streak of swimming every day ( in 1974, the story goes, he braved a 6-degree day to go swimming.) Louis Scarcella of the Coney Island Polar Bears, a group that braves the cold waters all winter long, said of Joe: “He was known as the Great Joe Rollino, and he was great. You knew he was great just by standing next to him. He just had that humble confidence and strength. It shined.” A new member of the Guru community mentioned that he had once met Mr. Rollino a couple of years ago, when he was the ripe young age of 102, and his handshake was extraordinary powerful. He skipped red meat, alcohol and cigarettes. And of course, he had his daily walks.

I’d like to think that’s the way Mighty Joe would want to go: hit by a car during his morning walk while still feeling powerful.

McGwire? What can you say about him? He had a great start to his career, winning the Golden Glove in 1990. But then he had a couple of less-than-stellar seasons and, who knows, maybe he figured juicing would set him up for better performance, more accolades and more money. They say he and Sammy Sosa saved baseball from all the negativity of the strike a few years before. But at the end of the day, both he and Sosa will make it into the record books with asterisks next to their names. Sure, great achievements. Would they have been great players if they hadn’t juiced? Sure. For me, they would have been marginally better if they had avoided years of denial and simply admitted what they had done.

But they did, Blanche, they did use the juice. And then denied, denied, denied.

So a tip-of-the-hat to Mighty Joe Rollino: the Strongest Man in the World.

Sometimes strength is measured simply by integrity. And Mr. Rollino, 104 years old, shined.

In the midst of all the holiday merriment, take a moment, kick back and relax with this holiday week edition of The Top Stories.

Five Toys that didn’t make it to Christmas!

Make-Up “dangerous” for young girls.

Woman allergic to Christmas.

Surfing Santa video

Sugar “high” is a myth

So the Frugal Traveler stopped by to write a piece for the NY Times. Pretty cool stuff (see below). I want to try to make it the MOST EMAILED Times article of the week– that’s right, I want to beat the pants off of Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, Tiger and Afghanistan. Apparently, my spies tell me this is not all that difficult because VERY few people actually email the article. So please take a minute, open the article and scroll down to where it says “email”. Email it to one or two people (or three or four, if so motivated) with a pleasant request to pass it along. Let’s make spinal flexibility the seemingly most important topic of the week!

Oh, and add some comments while your at it– the regular commentators seem a little humorless.

oooooh so Guru-like

The Fitness Guru meets the Frugal Traveler

This week’s top stories of health, well-being, and just a touch of silly….

Pour another cup of coffee, kick back and enjoy!

Co-Ed Dorms Fuel Sex and Drinking. And they funded this study….

Toxins in toys “feminize” boys so they play nice. Yup, funded this one too.

Percentage of adults smoking is on the rise.

How necessary is stretching? Once again, the linear thinking just pisses me off.

The Skinniest Winner. Dehydration, starvation, and over-exercising on The Biggest Loser. And, surprise, some contestants have a hard time keeping the weight off.

Busy, busy week in the world of health and well being. Here are some of the top stories as well as a few bits of silliness. Kick back and have a read:

The Dark Scary Secret of Popcorn: Is it as bad as you may think? Yes, and a little worse.

Task Force Suggests Mammograms Begin at 50: The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a group of health care experts (though none oncologists) change the guidelines for early detection of breast cancer.

French Hamster Hotel: Looking for an excitingly different vacation? Ummmmm……..try this……..

Vick’s Recalls Nasal Spray: 120,000 bottles of Sinex are recalled due to bacteria threat.

Allergies on the Rise: The journal Pediatrics reports that childhood allergies are on the rise.

As you kick back with your cup of coffe this morning, check out some of these top stories from the week in health and fitness.

Tiny tattoos could help diabetics ditch needles-Scientists are starting to test a kind of high-tech tattoo that changes color with rising blood sugar levels

Buying Cigarettes and Stop-Smoking Aids from the Same Company?- Conflict of interest? Ponzi scheme? What are they up to?

The Best Exercises for Healthy Bones- Where do cycling and running rank?

Would you drink Coke or Pepsi for breakfast?- It’s hard to believe but maybe that glass of juice for breakfast isn’t all that great for you…..

Should Parents of Obese Kids Lose Custody?- Is it reasonable to remove children from parents’ care if the paretns can’t help them maintain reasonable and healthy weight goals?

As if we weren’t bollocksed up enough with all the different running techniques and shoes and theories and ideas flying all about, here comes the New York Times’ Roving Runner, out in Central Park with Christopher McDougell, author of the book Born To Run. The topic? The joys of barefoot running.

…..I’m not giving up my shoes…….

A young woman came into my office yesterday seeking answers. She had never been to the studio before and she set up an appointment because she was looking for “motivation.” She had a tendency to “not work to her full potential” during workouts and consequently felt she needed a “drill Sargent” to help spur her along the road to fitness.

I don’t think “motivation” was the right word. She was motivated enough to actually come into the studio. What she needed was inspiration. The workouts that she had been doing were not creative efforts but simply ritual tasks that various people had made her undergo. Many of us have been in that situation, either alone, slogging away on an elliptical machine watching Jerry Springer re-runs waiting for our 40 minutes to end or death to overcome us; or at the hands of a trainer who believes that his or her responsibility is to count to ten, pause then repeat. It is an entirely underwhelming experience. One of the reasons that I think Tony Horton has been so successful with his P90X program is that it offers people variety in their workouts, while at the same time creating a long term program that people can follow to achieve their results. It doesn’t hurt that Tony, like many great trainers, is both athletically inspiring and and genuine in his approach. People enjoy not being talked down to. This woman in my office needed to be challenged physically and inspired psychologically in order to pursue and conquer her fitness goals. Easy enough. That’s what we do.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend (I know I said I would put down the Times, and I took the summer off, but now school is back in session so I am reading everything– old habits die hard.) The gist of the article was that extreme exercise, pushing ourselves past our “limitations” is something that aides in brain development. Tests were conducted with rats, the always inspirational stand-ins for human test subjects. Rats were placed either on a wheel that they controled, or on a treadmill that they did not control. The treadmill rats, who were forced to exercise at a level higher than their comfort zone, exhibited higher cognitive function than the wheel rats, who kinda ran, kinda didn’t. The extreme cardio-vascular work produced an increased blood flow which carried growth factors to the brain (the article noted that weight lifting created growth factors but kept them in the muscles and did not transport them to the brain.)

So naturally I started to go one step further, creating my own little theories based on the article. Follow me on this: what if, tens of thousands of years ago, one of the factors that helped us to rise as species was the fact that our bodies were pushed to extremes due simply to our need to survive? We would run across the plains, hunting food and dodging danger, all the while pushing ourselves simply out of need for preservation. That sort of extreme activity would cause these growth factors to affect our brains and our cognitive development. Flash forward to the first part of the 21st Century: there is very little plain running these days and, though there is stress, it is not the fight-or-flight stress of our ancestors. Our cognitive abilities are rarely if ever pushed (I know many adults who avoid simple math and retreat to the calculators on their phones to tabulate 15% tips.) With so little pushing us to a physical extreme, are we also doing away with our cognitive development? There will always be members of the population who excel, in logic and imagination, just as there are members of the population who can run a sub-four minute mile. But, just as this new generation coming up may be the first generation with a shorter life expectancy than their parents, could it also be a generation that, with less and less reason to be physically active, also suffers from cognitive stagnation? Yes, weight-related health issues are a major reasons to increase the activity of our population; but the intellectual development of the species may also be part of the formula.

So here’s a great article in the New York Times celebrating coffee! Now, beware! This is not justification for drinking twelve cups while you are at work. But if you are feeling a bit sluggish before your workout or want to go a little further before that evening run, maybe a small cup of Java will do the trick.

You could see the writing on the wall at the Oscars last week. The Best Supporting Actor award goes to the handsome actor who was struck down at the height of a very young career for a role in which he mocks the seriousness of the world around him. “Why so serious?” For some reason, I mutter that to myself every so often. It’s not just a little disconcerting.

I’m giving up my subscription to the NY Times. And I’ve stopped reading most major publications for that matter. The Times, my friend since high school, has simply become way too much of a downer. Things are bad, we all know that, and the papers just seem to want to hammer it home. I’m not sure if I know anyone out there celebrating– well, one person, actually, but I won’t say names because then he stands a chance of a being hunted down and beaten with sticks.

I received these two videos over the weekend within about 15 minutes of each other:

(From Josie Namaste)

(From Rippy Cutty Boy)

“Hope isn’t a strategy.” You have no idea how many times I have heard that phrase recently. It is supposed to be a battle cry, I think, our generation’s “Don’t just sit there, do something.” But its also a dismissal, and that’s problematic. Hope isn’t a strategy, but neither is fear, anxiety, depression or apathy. Take away hope and you take away courage.

What does this have to do with a fitness blog? Stress is a killer. Not simply a killer of the human body but a killer of the human spirit. And as we are moving forward through this time of crisis in the world, it becomes even more important to take a look at how we deal with stress individually and as a community.

I have always suggested to people that they look at their exercise time as true recreation. Its an opportunity in our busy days to re-create ourselves in the image of what we want to be. We control our destinies. That’s why I love what I do– taking people past their own images of themselves and introduce them to potential they never knew existed.

In this time of intense pressures and unknown, offer yourself the opportunity to re-create who you are and offer the idea to those around you. Change your point of view.

When I was running the NYC Marathon a few years ago, I spoke to my friend, Christopher Bergland. Christopher is the ultra-endurance runner’s ultra-endurance runner. He has competed in every major ultra-endurance challenge you can imagine. Certainly a man with this sort of background would have great advice for me. I asked him what to do when the race gets tough, those moments when you just don’t remember why you are on the road. He said, “smile.” Come on, Chris, give me something more– what’s the trick? The TRICK?!?! Smile, he said, and you will feel the change come over you. Sure enough, mile 14 was a bitch, and I thought about what Christopher said and I….smiled. It was the same race, thousands all around me, fourteen miles behind me and over twelve miles to go. But the moment that I smiled, all the pain and confusion washed away. Why? I don’t care. I only know that it worked.

One last video, also from this weekend. It’s tough, but stick around for the end. Wait for it: