Fitness Pudding - Where The Proof Is

Easily, the leading barrier to physical activity I have heard over my career is ‘lack of time’. But, is time really a barrier to physical activity? In one of my favorite studies on his issue, 24-hour activity diaries found adult women spent 28 hours per week in sedentary leisure-time activity. 1 In other words, their reports that lack of time is a barrier do not reflect actual time available for physical activity, and might not be...

Video only.

I went back and forth on whether or not to cover this one, but it kept bouncing back up.  In short, ping pong (or table tennis) is being promoted as a weight loss tactic. What We Already Know The Compendium of Physical Activities has table tennis listed as a 4.0 MET activity. "MET" stands for the metabolic equivalent of a task, and represents the amount of energy required for a particular test. 1 MET is the...

  The 10,000 step goal is not a myth. In 2015, I clarified the proposed “myth" of 10,000 steps , expanding our understanding that our knowledge of step counts and health has greatly expanded. However, what goes around comes around. Not only are bell bottoms back, so are more recent claims that 10,000 steps per day is a myth. Despite its seemingly random origin, getting 10,000 steps each day can provide us with numerous health and...

This one is no joke, and I can personally confirm it. When I lived outside Atlanta, I became good friends with a group of ladies who would not exercise. Their number one barrier? Their hairdo. They were not going to pay that much money and look that good, only to see it all get ruined by exercise. They made their choice. So, we made an agreement. They agreed to exercise more, if I could find them a...

This morning, I waved to my little girl, as my wife drove away to drop her off at her first day of school. When they were out of waving distance, I said a quick prayer, and grabbed another cup of coffee before sitting down at the computer to get through all I needed to do today - mostly writing at the computer. As nerdy as it sounds, there was some excitement thinking about the free hours...

A recent video and article by Yahoo! with a "fitness expert" complied the 5 biggest workout myths. Myth #1 – Walking is a great way to lose weight. In other words, this fitness expert, based on her expertise, is saying that walking is NOT a great way to lose weight. However, if she were to look at the research, she may have come to a different conlusion regarding this myth. Let us bust her attempt to...

There is thought that if we stop exercising, our muscle will turn to fat. Or if we start exercising again, our fat will turn back into muscle. Just as we cannot turn apples into oranges, we cannot turn muscle into fat (or vice versa).

Recent media attention has been given to scientific discoveries which may suggest that a person is ‘genetically predisposed’ to being fat or lazy. Indeed, our laboratory recently published a scientific paper using rats, suggesting that genetics and gene products can contribute (key word) to laziness 1 . This report garnered a good bit of media attention, which led to message board posts such as, “now I can blame my genes for not wanting to get off...

Many of us have incorrect assumptions on how much physical activity it would take to improve or maintain our health. We assume that it will take hours on hours of grueling exercise, sweat, pain and spandex to improve our health. But, are these correct assumptions?  The general recommendation 1  to maintain health and reduce any risk of chronic disease (for healthy adults under age 65) is: Moderate intensity cardio 30 minutes a day, five days a...