Cardio vs Strength

I don't like lifting weights. In fact, I find the exercise strenuously boring. Lift till the muscles hurt, rest, and do it again. I'm told that after some time, unknown, the muscles not only adjust to the stress, but begin to enjoy and anticipate it.

I highly doubt that.

On the other hand, I was never a fan of endurance cardiovascular (a.k.a. cardio) exercise. It came to me unexpectedly in my university years. People who do cardio are different from people who do weights. Even those weight-lifting, super-muscled, gym rats are not capable of the type of cardio that requires a commitment to time.

Both cardio and strength training are necessary for total fitness. I could not find a definition of Total Fitness that I like, so I'm going to make one up.

Total Fitness is that state in which you are able to use your body fluidly and comfortably, to move around and do physical work.

Not a complete definition, but there are a few things stated that imply other things.

• Use your body = legs, arms, back and so on.
• Fluidly and comfortably = without aid and huffing and puffing.
• Physical work = walk, jog, lift, dig, pull - without huffing and puffing

... and for more than five minutes. Because anyone can work for five minutes and give up.

BORING

Yup, this is why most of us give up. We'd rather be sitting down (not being physical) eating a bag of chips and watching television.

It's much harder to walk outside and occupy yourself with your own thoughts. It's much harder to mow the lawn, water the plants, paint a room, than sit still.

Even though, also sitting still is hard to do. Our minds are too active to allow us just to sit there.

So exercise, and doing all these other ACTIVE things, is boring. And your brain is the driver of your activities, the thing that needs to be assuaged and placated and obeyed. And so when your brain is tired you are ordered to stop doing what you are doing.

To stop yourself from being bored, you need to divert the attention from your brain to your body. And you need to do this for long periods of time. During exercise, I listen to music. I have my earbuds on and I run to the beat of the music, so it's gotta be groovy. No slow grooves, but funky music.

HARD EFFORT vs LONG DURATION

So, sprint athletes have these fast twitch muscles that are strengthened using weights. Long distance athletes have more of the slow twitch muscle fibres. Fast twitch means that they contract quickly, but they also tire quickly. While slow twitch muscle fibres contract slowly, but they also take longer to tire.

I'm more of a slow twitch person, with tons of slow twitch muscle fibres that can take lower loads, but hold them for longer. Rather than high load within a shorter time. 

Because the loading of the muscles is slow and gradual, I can warm up and then stay in The Zone for a long period. I wonder if weight lifters have a Zone? Runners have a Zone. They also have something called a Runner's High. The Runner's High is that point in the run where your body switches to something that can only be described as auto-pilot. Effortless running that's supremely enjoyable.

The Runner's High may show up early in the run, somewhere in the middle, or near the end. Or it may not show up at all. But it's what keeps you getting up and going out again, and again, and again. It's like a drug, you look for it at every run. And once you've had a taste of the Runner's High, you'll want more.

DO CARDIO... AND A BIT OF RESISTANCE

Ultimately, there's no formula for fitness. But for those of us who would see gym memberships as a chore, as a taskmaster's forced diet - something you need to schedule and take it like nasty medicine, then finding an alternative, and enjoyable way to keep fit is a better option.

Running and long walks are perfect. Almost no stress and as your body gets fitter, it becomes easier to do. 

And you'll look forward to it.

You'll wake up anticipating those first steps.

And as your body slowly wakes up in the run, you'll search for The Zone.

Sugar Poison

Excess sugar is not healthy and unfortunately, there is very little on the supermarket shelves that does not have sugar in some form.

All carbohydrates are digested to glucose. Except for the very complex ones like cellulose (a fibrous complex carbohydrate that is not digestible by humans).

So all carbs either end up as glucose in your system, or are passed right through to the other end.

Sugar is essential to life. The blood glucose levels are kept optimal by the body. Normally, the blood sugars will rise after you eat and then slowly decline. People who are fasting will have a lower blood sugar since they're not putting any sugar into their diet during fasting.

And by sugar, I mean glucose. The molecular structure of glucose is a chain of six carbon atoms with 12 hydrogen and 6 oxygen atoms bound to it.

It's called a monosaccharide, because it's a simple sugar. Simple sugars cannot be broken down to make other sugars. Examples of simple sugars are glucose, fructose and galactose.

There are complex sugars, polysaccharides, which can be broken down to make simple sugars. For example, table sugar, or sucrose, is made of a fructose molecule bonded to a glucose molecule. During the metabolism of sucrose by the body, it is broken into glucose and fructose.

At the end of the metabolism of carbohydrates, or complex sugars, we get glucose. Glucose is sent to the cells in the blood where it is used for the various processes that need energy.

When glucose is introduced into the blood, the blood sugar level rises. This is normal when you eat carbohydrates, however, if the blood sugar rises too high, the body must remove it from the blood. 

That's where insulin comes in. Insulin's job is to take sugar (glucose) from the blood and allow it to cross into the cells where it can be used. It also takes excess sugar and stores it as glycogen in the muscle tissues. Once the glycogen stores are full, it then takes the excess and allows it to be stored in fat cells.

When sugar is present, you cannot burn fat. Insulin stops the liver from making glucose since there is enough sugar present in the blood.

While it's often touted that glucose is the preferred energy source for human beings, it's nutritionally light. Also, note that when glucose is present, the body cannot burn any fat. In fact the body only burns fat when there is not enough glucose in the blood. The liver makes glucose by a metabolic process known as gluconeogenesis (gluco=glucose, neo=new, genesis=make).

EXCESS SUGAR IS THE CULPRIT

In our modern lifestyle, we eat when we are hungry. For the most part, we thrive on food rich in sugar.

Ancient humans also ate when they were hungry, but they did not always have food readily available. The normal practice was therefore to engorge when food was available, and then to fast, when food was not available. During those necessary fasting periods, the body consumed the glycogen and the fat that had been stored in the muscles and the fat cells.

However, modern humans eat when they are hungry and do not allow the normal fasting process that would then allow for the metabolism of glycogen and fat to take place. This is mostly because food is available. In addition, most of the food that is available is carbohydrate rich.

Therefore sugar is not the enemy. Excess sugar, by continual consumption to ease hunger, is the culprit?

What should we do? Should we not eat when we are hungry?

This is the dilemma we face as modern humans with sugar-rich food readily available. The normal tendency is to ease the hunger (an uncomfortable state) by eating to satiety.

Instead, what we need to learn to do is ignore the hunger and prolong it to allow the body to move through a fasting cycle. This fasting cycle is necessary to lower blood sugar and trigger the liver into gluconeogeness and the consumption of stored energy.

THE STORY ABOUT FRUCTOSE

Fructose is poorly absorbed by the gastrointestinal tract. It's the liver that has to deal with it When the liver digests fructose, we get glucose, lactate and fatty acids. The small intestine can also digest fructose but most of the work is done by the liver.

Half of the common sugar molecule, sucrose, is fructose while the other half is glucose. So when you have table sugar in your coffee, the glucose part will be transported directly into the blood and then insulin will help it get into the cells, while the fructose part needs to travel a little further before it is processed.

Mostly because of this, fructose digestion favours conversion to fat, either glycogen stored in the muscles or into fat cells for storage, and mostly around the liver. This is why you're more likely to get fatter on high fructose diets than glucose, or even fat itself.

SUMMARY

So, to cut a very long, and complex, story short, here's what we know.

• Glucose is essential, but you don't have to eat it - the body knows how to make it.
• Limit carbs - they are nothing but glucose in another form.
• Try to fast, don't eat when you get hungry, let your body get used to hunger.
• Avoid packaged foods with fructose - especially fructose corn syrup.

2025 - HAPPY NEW YEAR

It's January 6, 2025 and it seems that the new year is aging too quickly. I was supposed to write this and publish it on the same day, one of my resolutions, to get rid of analysis paralysis.

But here we are, 7 days later (because of course, I wrote that first sentence and got stuck) and nothing's done.

And chances are it won't be published today also, but let's see what happens.

Question: why are we so gung-ho about making resolutions at the start of the year? From a planetary, evolutionary, maturity, growth, aging, time-based, or any other base of thinking about the new year, there's no real sense in the excitement. December 31st and January 1st are not special. Really, not at all.

You could make the same resolutions on February 16th, or April 20th, or December 5th, with the same energy, same bells, cakes, balloons and fireworks. Really, you could.

But we get caught up with birthdays, holidays (like Christmas), and of course, New Year's Day. These are special and there's something in the air that you may miss if you don't take the opportunity to make a wish.

We'll get to birthday's later.

I read somewhere that gym memberships go up significantly in January, and then drop off, as significantly, in February. This alone should tell you something.

But then December, with the anticipation of January is really the least productive time. But the retail stores and manufacturers make a boom. Sales are high, prices are seemingly affordable and everyone is buying stuff left-right-and-centre.

A gift for you, and one for me. One for her, and another for me. One for my friend, and one more for me. And so on. It's really an excuse to get more stuff for yourself. And you buy more stuff. It's easier to do this in December than any other month. Why, everyone is doing it, why not me?

Back to resolutions.

I have the same one every year, and I've never achieved it. The resolution is to publish an article each week. That would be 52 articles in the year.

I've never, ever achieved it.

The closest I came was in 2011 when I published 43 articles, because in August that year, I wrote 20 of them. Nine more and that would have been the single year.

So I've stopped making that resolution. If I'm going to be true to myself, it's not achievable. Really, I won't even pretend that I can make it since it's the start of the year and I understand the psychology of New Year's Day. Everything seems achievable - the weight goals, the publishing goals, the financial goal, the career goal, the meditation and personal reflection goals. On New Year's Day, we are all our own gods. Invincible.

But I cannot resist saying Happy New Year, because as rational human beings who love to record and count everything, we are measuring time. And this is a milestone, of sorts. So it's good to see what we have achieved and make plans to move towards something. We are not built to wander aimlessly through life, but to achieve, amass and collect stuff till we die. Notably stuff that can be measured.

So the New Year is a check-point of sorts. We have all aged one year and when we were at this same point last year, we said we'd do stuff and it's time to see how far along we have come with what we said we'd do.

Personally, my health check-points are OK. My career one's need constant evaluation and I don't think the annual review really helps. But it has to be done consciously and frequently. The annual cycle is too long, monthly is way better for me. So my reflection on what's going on happens very frequently and the New Year isn't special for that purpose.

And now that I am retired, my goals are very different. Life has taken on a sense of urgency since there is a very real end-point as suggested by the word "retirement." And some of my closest friends are now also visibly aging and passing away. Dying.

Smelling the roses is a real thing.

So let me stop here, and go and smell some more roses.