Exercise Physiology Quotes

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Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increases bone mass, thirty-year-old athletes who run 40 to 50 miles a week can wind up with decalcified bones, decreased bone mass, increased risk of stress fractures and scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine)—their skeletons look like those of seventy-year-olds. To put exercise in perspective, imagine this: sit with a group of hunter-gatherers from the African grasslands and explain to them that in our world we have so much food and so much free time that some of us run 26 miles in a day, simply for the sheer pleasure of it. They are likely to say, “Are you crazy? That’s stressful.” Throughout hominid history, if you’re running 26 miles in a day, you’re either very intent on eating someone or someone’s very intent on eating you.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
the majority of the learning on a tactical exercise comes afterwards in what is called an “after action review,” where all the participants talk about what took place. This phase is so important that to not do it is to have essentially wasted the exercise.
Dave Grossman (On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace)
through a scenario where he fails, and then you put him through it again and he succeeds. First you revealed a flaw in his armor and then you taught him how to shore up that weakness. In so doing, you brought him out the other end of the exercise as a superior warrior.
Dave Grossman (On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace)
Yoga has been superficially misunderstood by certain Western writers, but its critics have never been its practitioners. Among many thoughtful tributes to yoga may be mentioned one by Dr. C. G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist. “When a religious method recommends itself as ‘scientific,’ it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation,” Dr. Jung writes.10 “Quite apart from the charm of the new and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good cause for Yoga to have many adherents. It offers the possibility of controllable experience and thus satisfies the scientific need for ‘facts’; and, besides this, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its doctrine and method, which include every phase of life, it promises undreamed-of possibilities. “Every religious or philosophical practice means a psychological discipline, that is, a method of mental hygiene. The manifold, purely bodily procedures of Yoga11 also mean a physiological hygiene which is superior to ordinary gymnastics and breathing exercises, inasmuch as it is not merely mechanistic and scientific, but also philosophical; in its training of the parts of the body, it unites them with the whole of the spirit, as is quite clear, for instance, in the Pranayama exercises where Prana is both the breath and the universal dynamics of the cosmos…. “Yoga practice...would be ineffectual without the concepts on which Yoga is based. It combines the bodily and the spiritual in an extraordinarily complete way. “In the East, where these ideas and practices have developed, and where for several thousand years an unbroken tradition has created the necessary spiritual foundations, Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Self-Realization Fellowship))
When a training scenario does not go the way you wanted it to, then do it again, but do not ever think you are dead in an exercise.
Dave Grossman (On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace)
Many people don’t realize that the benefits of exercise go far beyond physiological and psychological improvements,
Michael Matthews (Beyond Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Advanced Guide to Building Muscle, Staying Lean, and Getting Strong)
My favorite definition of fear is “False Expectations Appearing Real,” and when I allow myself to remember that all of my thoughts are merely fleeting physiology, I feel less moved when my story-teller goes haywire and my circuitry is triggered. At the same time, when I remember that I am at one with the universe, then the concept of fear loses its power. To help protect myself from having a trigger-happy anger or fear response, I take responsibility for what circuitry I purposely exercise and stimulate. In an attempt to diminish the power of my fear/anger response, I intentionally choose not to watch scary movies or hang out with people whose anger circuitry is easily set off. I consciously make choices that directly impact my circuitry. Since I like being joyful, I hang out with people who value my joy.
Jill Bolte Taylor (My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey)
recent research has suggested that a wide variety of practices—from physical exercise to studying to meditation—can lead to physical and physiological changes in our brains that affect our abilities to think and form memories.
Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
Nature’s ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence — or, more exactly, to the interdependence of mature adults living in community. Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows. Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community and of nurturing children who will also grow into self-regulated adults. Anything that interferes with that natural agenda threatens the organism’s chances for long-term survival. Almost from the beginning of life we see a tension between the complementary needs for security and for autonomy. Development requires a gradual and ageappropriate shift from security needs toward the drive for autonomy, from attachment to individuation. Neither is ever completely lost, and neither is meant to predominate at the expense of the other. With an increased capacity for self-regulation in adulthood comes also a heightened need for autonomy — for the freedom to make genuine choices. Whatever undermines autonomy will be experienced as a source of stress. Stress is magnified whenever the power to respond effectively to the social or physical environment is lacking or when the tested animal or human being feels helpless, without meaningful choices — in other words, when autonomy is undermined. Autonomy, however, needs to be exercised in a way that does not disrupt the social relationships on which survival also depends, whether with emotional intimates or with important others—employers, fellow workers, social authority figures. The less the emotional capacity for self-regulation develops during infancy and childhood, the more the adult depends on relationships to maintain homeostasis. The greater the dependence, the greater the threat when those relationships are lost or become insecure. Thus, the vulnerability to subjective and physiological stress will be proportionate to the degree of emotional dependence. To minimize the stress from threatened relationships, a person may give up some part of his autonomy. However, this is not a formula for health, since the loss of autonomy is itself a cause of stress. The surrender of autonomy raises the stress level, even if on the surface it appears to be necessary for the sake of “security” in a relationship, and even if we subjectively feel relief when we gain “security” in this manner. If I chronically repress my emotional needs in order to make myself “acceptable” to other people, I increase my risks of having to pay the price in the form of illness. The other way of protecting oneself from the stress of threatened relationships is emotional shutdown. To feel safe, the vulnerable person withdraws from others and closes against intimacy. This coping style may avoid anxiety and block the subjective experience of stress but not the physiology of it. Emotional intimacy is a psychological and biological necessity. Those who build walls against intimacy are not self-regulated, just emotionally frozen. Their stress from having unmet needs will be high.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
Hormones are central to understanding obesity. Everything about human metabolism, including the body set weight, is hormonally regulated. A critical physiological variable such as body fatness is not left up to the vagaries of daily caloric intake and exercise. Instead, hormones precisely and tightly regulate body fat. We don't consciously control our body weight any more than we control our heart rates, our basal metabolic rates, our body temperatures or our breathing. These are all automatically regulated, and so is our weight. Hormones tell us when we are hungry (ghrelin). Hormones tell us we are full (peptide YY, cholecystokinin). Hormones increase energy expenditure (adrenalin). Hormones shut down energy expenditure (thyroid hormone). Obesity is a hormonal dysregulation of fat accumulation. Calories are nothing more than a proximate cause of obesity.
Jason Fung (The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss)
In the past, before the physiology of abdominal training was well understood, bodybuilders used to do a lot of “conventional” abdominal exercises such as Sit-Ups and Leg Raises. Unfortunately, those are not primary abdominal exercises but instead work the iliopsoas muscles—the hip flexors.
Arnold Schwarzenegger (The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding: The Bible of Bodybuilding, Fully Updated and Revised)
just drive. “Sarah, I want to share with you something. I think it will help you. Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older. I speak of emotional pain. Your pain is greater, in duration and strength. It is harder to bear. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, of physiology. Of psychology. Your emotional sensitivity—it is superior to that of your parents, your teachers. That is why these years of your life, when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, are so difficult, but also so important. That is why developing your talent at this age is so crucial. This heightened emotional pain is a gift. A difficult gift.” Despite herself, she’s listening. “Are you saying,” she manages after a while, “that in the future, when I’m older, things won’t hurt as much?” “Yes, exactly. But Sarah, I am saying something else. Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse.
Susan Choi (Trust Exercise)
After that, studies started to show that everyone from violinists to taxi drivers beef up relevant brain areas with new cells and connections, just as we build muscles with physical exercise. Lazar’s study showed that meditation can do this too. For the first time, it was possible to explain how the practice might permanently change psychology and physiology.
Jo Marchant (Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body)
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences where their peers were presenting long rows of data arrayed in complex charts and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they themselves were talking instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to one another on the street and of having three generations under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on her practice, mostly among women and children. She believed strongly in diet, exercise, hygiene, and mental health. She organized a Ladies Physiological Society in 1843 where she gave monthly talks. She remained single, defying convention here too.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
This is because the outcomes of life are not governed by passion; they are governed by principle. You may not think what you did this morning was important, but it was. You may not think that the little things add up, but they do. Consider the age-old brainteaser: Would you rather have $1 million in hand today or a penny that doubles in value every day for the next month? The $1 million right now sounds great, but after a 31-day month, that one penny would be worth over $10 million. Making big, sweeping changes is not difficult because we are flawed, incompetent beings. It’s difficult because we are not meant to live outside of our comfort zones. If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until those choices are habituated. Then you’ll just continue to do them. If you want to spend less time on your phone, deny yourself the chance to check it one time today. If you want to eat healthier, drink half a cup of water today. If you want to sleep more, go to bed 10 minutes earlier tonight than you did last night. If you want to exercise more, do it now for just 10 minutes. If you want to read, read one page. If you want to meditate, do so for 30 seconds. Then keep doing those things. Do them every single day. You’ll get used to not checking your phone. You’ll want more water, and you’ll drink more water. You’ll run for 10 minutes, and you won’t feel like you have to stop, so you won’t. You’ll read one page, grow interested, and read another. At our most instinctive, physiological level, “change” translates to something dangerous and potentially life-threatening. No wonder why we build our own cages and stay in them, even though there’s no lock on the door. Trying to shock yourself into a new life isn’t going to work, and that’s why it hasn’t yet.
Brianna Wiest (The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery)
Findings such as these can change the way we handle chronic stress. When we are mired in stress, what we desperately need to do is minimize the novelty in our lives. We need familiarity. But quite often we seek out the exact opposite, responding to chronic stress at work, for example, by taking a vacation in some exotic place, thinking that the change of scenery will do us good. And under normal circumstances it does. But not when we are highly stressed, because then the novelty we encounter abroad can just add to our physiological load. Instead of traveling, we may be better off remaining on home turf, surrounding ourselves with family and friends, listening to familiar music, watching old films. Exercise, of course, can help, in fact there are few things better at preparing our physiology for stress. But when someone is this far into chronic stress its effects, suggests Stephen Porges, are mostly analgesic, possibly because exercise treats us to a shot of natural opioids. Again, what we really need is familiarity.
John Coates (The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind)
And if you can tolerate it, a minute’s worth of maximal exercise, in the form of three all-out sprints for twenty seconds each can change your physiology as much as fifty minutes of cycling at a moderate pace. Studies from my lab have demonstrated all these things. The naysayers warn that high-intensity intervals are only for people who are really fit and really motivated. But those naysayers are wrong. Listen: Some people shouldn’t perform interval training. But it’s a rather limited group, and many more—even those with chronic diseases—can benefit from an interval-based approach to fitness.
Martin Gibala (The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That's Smarter, Faster, Shorter)
Mark Vink is a physician in the Netherlands who suddenly fell ill with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). He wasn’t just your typical physician; he also happened to have a brown belt in judo, was the former captain of a Dutch national field hockey championship team and was a marathoner and triathlete. In other words, the guy was a stud who loved to test himself physically – the last person anyone would ever expect to get ME/CFS. Or end up bed bound. Or end up using a six yard tramp from his bed to the bathroom to test his exercise capacity. But that’s what happened. Mark Vink’s ME/CFS story – like many stories – is so striking in its suddenness and so devastating in its comprehensive that it beggars the mind to think that anyone could believe his downfall could have other than a physiological cause.
Cort Johnson
Yes,” some objectors declare, “I would like to expand my consciousness, but I feel that I must do it for myself.” To this, our usual reply is that doing everything for oneself can be an unbearably limiting factor as well as an exercise in egotism. What if we had to weave all our own clothes, grow our own food, make our own paper and so forth? In actuality we accomplish hardly anything without external instruments, tools or technological aids. Our manifest interdependence attests to nature’s determination to force us to overcome isolationist tendencies. Even our two most essential physiological functions, eating and breathing, serve as constant reminders that in every respect we are obliged to use what lies outside of the confines of the bodily organism. In the end, we do nothing alone and everything by our selves.
Marcia Moore (Journeys Into the Bright World)
Yoga has been superficially misunderstood by certain Western writers, but its critics have never been its practitioners. Among many thoughtful tributes to yoga may be mentioned one by Dr. C. G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist. “When a religious method recommends itself as ‘scientific,’ it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation,” Dr. Jung writes (7). “Quite apart from the charm of the new, and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good cause for Yoga to have many adherents. It offers the possibility of controllable experience, and thus satisfies the scientific need of ‘facts,’ and besides this, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its doctrine and method, which include every phase of life, it promises undreamed-of possibilities. “Every religious or philosophical practice means a psychological discipline, that is, a method of mental hygiene. The manifold, purely bodily procedures of Yoga (8) also mean a physiological hygiene which is superior to ordinary gymnastics and breathing exercises, inasmuch as it is not merely mechanistic and scientific, but also philosophical; in its training of the parts of the body, it unites them with the whole of the spirit, as is quite clear, for instance, in the Pranayama exercises where Prana is both the breath and the universal dynamics of the cosmos. “When the thing which the individual is doing is also a cosmic event, the effect experienced in the body (the innervation), unites with the emotion of the spirit (the universal idea), and out of this there develops a lively unity which no technique, however scientific, can produce. Yoga practice is unthinkable, and would also be ineffectual, without the concepts on which Yoga is based. It combines the bodily and the spiritual with each other in an extraordinarily complete way. “In the East, where these ideas and practices have developed, and where for several thousand years an unbroken tradition has created the necessary spiritual foundations, Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.” The Western day is indeed nearing when the inner science of self- control will be found as necessary as the outer conquest of nature. This new Atomic Age will see men’s minds sobered and broadened by the now scientifically indisputable truth that matter is in reality a concentrate of energy. Finer forces of the human mind can and must liberate energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction (9).
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Illustrated and Annotated Edition))
The Yogi practices exercises by which he attains control of his body, and is enabled to send to any organ or part an increased flow of vital force or “prana,” thereby strengthening and invigorating the part or organ. He knows all that his Western scientific brother knows about the physiological effect of correct breathing, but he also knows that the air contains more than oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen, and that something more is accomplished than the mere oxygenating of the blood. He knows something about “prana,” of which his Western brother is ignorant, and he is fully aware of the nature and manner of handling that great principle of energy, and is fully informed as to its effect upon the human body and mind. He knows that by rhythmical breathing one may bring himself into harmonious vibration with nature, and aid in the unfoldment of his latent powers. He knows that by controlled breathing he may not only cure disease in himself and others, but also practically do away with fear and worry and the baser emotions.
William Walker Atkinson (Science of Breath)
Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre. „Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable. In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra! Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.
Emil M. Cioran
With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.
Lisa Robertson (The Baudelaire Fractal)
It has to be said: there are too many great men in the world. There are too many legislators, organizers, founders of society, leaders of peoples, fathers of nations, etc., etc. Too many people put themselves above humanity in order to rule it and too many people think their job is to become involved with it. People will say to me: you yourself are becoming involved, you who talk about it. That is true. But they will agree that it is for a very different reason and from a very different point of view, and while I am taking on those who wish to reform, it is solely to make them abandon their effort. I am becoming involved with it not like Vaucanson with his automaton but like a physiologist with the human organism, in order to examine it and admire it. I am becoming involved with it in the same spirit as that of a famous traveler. He arrived among a savage tribe. A child had just been born and a host of fortune-tellers, warlocks, and quacks were crowding around it, armed with rings, hooks, and ties. One said, “This child will never smell the aroma of a pipe if I do not lengthen his nostrils.” Another said, “He will be deprived of the sense of hearing if I do not make his ears reach down to his shoulders.” A third said, “He will never see the light of the sun unless I make his eyes slant obliquely.” A fourth said, “He will never stand upright if I do not make his legs curve.” A fifth said, “He will never be able to think if I do not squeeze his brain.” “Away with you,” said the traveler. “God does His work well. Do not claim to know more than He does and, since He has given organs to this frail creature, leave those organs to develop and grow strong through exercise, experimentation, experience, and freedom.” [print edition page 146] God has also provided humanity with all that is necessary for it to accomplish its destiny. There is a providential social physiology just as there is a providential human physiology. The social organs are also constituted so as to develop harmoniously in the fresh air of freedom. Away with you, therefore, you quacks and organizers! Away with your rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with your artificial means! Away with your social workshop, your phalanstery, your governmentalism, your centralization, your tariffs, your universities, your state religion, your free credit or monopolistic banks, your constraints, your restrictions, your moralizing, or your equalizing through taxes! And since the social body has had inflicted on it so many theoretical systems to no avail, let us finish where we should have started; let us reject these and at last put freedom to the test, freedom, which is an act of faith in God and in His work.
Frédéric Bastiat (The Law, The State, and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850)
Neutrophils Neutrophilia • Infection: bacterial, fungal • Trauma: surgery, burns • Infarction: myocardial infarct, pulmonary embolus, sickle-cell crisis • Inflammation: gout, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease • Malignancy: solid tumours, Hodgkin lymphoma • Myeloproliferative disease: polycythaemia, chronic myeloid leukaemia • Physiological: exercise, pregnancy Neutropenia • Infection: viral, bacterial (e.g. Salmonella), protozoal (e.g. malaria) • Drugs: see Box 24.11 • Autoimmune: connective tissue disease • Alcohol • Bone marrow infiltration: leukaemia, myelodysplasia • Congenital: Kostmann’s syndrome Eosinophils Eosinophilia • Allergy: hay fever, asthma, eczema • Infection: parasitic • Drug hypersensitivity: e.g. gold, sulphonamides • Skin disease • Connective tissue disease: polyarteritis nodosa • Malignancy: solid tumours, lymphomas • Primary bone marrow disorders: myeloproliferative disorders, hypereosinophilia syndrome (HES), acute myeloid leukaemia Basophils Basophilia • Myeloproliferative disease: polycythaemia, chronic myeloid leukaemia • Inflammation: acute hypersensitivity, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease • Iron deficiency Monocytes Monocytosis • Infection: bacterial (e.g. tuberculosis) • Inflammation: connective tissue disease, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease • Malignancy: solid tumours Lymphocytes Lymphocytosis • Infection: viral, bacterial (e.g. Bordetella pertussis) • Lymphoproliferative disease: chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, lymphoma • Post-splenectomy Lymphopenia • Inflammation: connective tissue disease • Lymphoma • Renal failure • Sarcoidosis • Drugs: corticosteroids, cytotoxics • Congenital: severe combined
Nicki R. Colledge (Davidson's Principles and Practice of Medicine (MRCP Study Guides))
people, the language you use to communicate with others. Your mental focus and your physiology together instantly put you into a particular state or emotion. Physiology absolutely matters. Exercising, or better yet, implementing a complete fitness program (in other words a regimen that safely works both your cardio and muscles—even yoga!) increases the effective use of oxygen and gets rid of waste throughout your brain and body, and helps soothe your soul. Emotional states of mind, which range from the worst (a suicidal state) to the best (a peak or flow state), are powerful. Your state drives actions, decisions, and even indecision, and is the direct predictor of results somewhere between the lowest
Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)
Availability of ATP declines during contraction, but it is abnormal for a muscle to totally run out of ATP. So, lack of ATP is not a fatigue-producing factor in moderate exercise.
Elaine N. Marieb (Human Anatomy & Physiology)
Whether or not fatigue occurs, vigorous exercise alters a muscle’s chemistry dramatically. For a muscle to return to its resting state, all the following must occur:
Elaine N. Marieb (Human Anatomy & Physiology)
Once exercise stops, the repayment process begins.
Elaine N. Marieb (Human Anatomy & Physiology)
Attitude creates actions create results create destiny. Dan Buettner, author of Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, has traveled the world studying the everyday living habits of people who are healthiest and live the longest of anyone on the planet. Of all the factors possibly influencing health, vitality, and longevity, Buettner and his team compiled a list of nine. These people (1) live an active life, (2) cultivate purpose and a reason to wake up every morning, (3) take time to de-stress (appreciation, prayer, etc.), (4) stop eating when they are 80 percent full, (5) eat a diet emphasizing vegetables, especially beans, (6) have moderate alcohol intake (especially dark red wine), (7) play an active role in a faith-based community, (8) place a strong emphasis on family, and (9) are part of like-minded social circles with similar habits. As Buettner points out, physiological factors like exercise and diet play a role—but not as big a role as you’d expect. A big part of it is factors that have to do with attitude, habits of behavior, and who they associate with. And while we’re talking about positivity, let me clear up a common misconception about positive outlook, right here and now. Cultivating positive outlook does not mean you are always happy. It does not mean life never gets you down. It does not mean you walk around with an idiotic grin on your face even when you’re hurting, and it doesn’t mean living in denial, ignoring the realities of pain and struggle, or checking your brain at the door. People who cultivate a genuinely positive outlook go through tough times, too; when we’re cut, we bleed red blood just like everyone else.
Jeff Olson (The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness)
By shifting from a life lived in nature to a life in the city, human beings have changed the way that we function and have severely damaged our health. We now consume foods that bring us illness, and provide less energy, we have decreased our amount of physical exercise, and have constructed an artificial way of living life that does not take into consideration the natural environment or the physiological changes that result from a change in cultural traditions. We need to return to a more natural way of life and fast, or else we will continue to contribute to a mass extinction, one that has already begun. To do this we must change the way that we perceive the world so we can focus on what is most important.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
by knowledge the privilege to BE! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known. Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted. Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not omit to specify two. The exercise of the Will or the
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature)
The optimum mix is 7.7 grams of sodium citrate and 4.5 grams of sodium chloride per liter. (Ingredients are available online.) Drink a large bottle of a low-carbohydrate (no more than 9 grams of carbohydrate per 8 ounces) hydration drink every hour you’re out there exercising in the elements. Prepare
Stacy T. Sims (Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life)
Taking an iron supplement may improve your exercise performance on nearly every level.
Stacy T. Sims (Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life)
Polyvagal Theory defines interactive play as a “neural exercise” that enhances the co-regulation of physiological state to promote the neural mechanisms involved in supporting mental and physical health. Interactive play as a neural exercise requires synchronous and reciprocal behaviors between individuals and necessitates an awareness of each other’s social engagement system. Access to the social engagement system insures that the sympathetic activation involved in the mobilization does not hijack the nervous system, resulting in playful movements transitioning into aggressive behavior.
Stephen W. Porges (The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
In summary, patients with CFS are not “deconditioned”. Neither their muscle strength nor their exercise capacity is different from that of other sedentary members of the community (>70%). We remain unaware of any incontrovertible evidence that the various “exercise training” programs suggested in previous articles improve either the physiological or clinical status of people with CFS.
Garry C. Scroop
Social support, which entails seeking out loving or caring relationships to help buffer the impact of stress, is indeed a superpower of anxiety. The importance of our relationships, our ability to empathize, and ultimately our ability to show compassion buffer against anxiety; this very buffer is a form of resilience. 4) Humor has been shown to be an active way to lessen anxiety and tension brought on by stress and has been shown to help people build both physical and psychological resilience. 5) Physical exercise not only improves our overall health and brain-body functioning but also acts as a source of physiological resilience, helping us manage stress both physically and psychologically.
Wendy Suzuki (Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion)
biomedical view, for its part, increasingly recognizes the power of things like meditation and traditional talk therapy to render concrete structural changes in brain physiology that are every bit as “real” as the changes wrought by pills or electroshock therapy. A study published by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2011 found that subjects who practiced meditation for an average of just twenty-seven minutes a day over a period of eight weeks produced visible changes in brain structure. Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for similar reasons as psychiatric medications do, exerting their effects not just on some abstract concept of mind but concretely on our bodies, on the somatic correlates of our feelings. Recent research has shown that even old-fashioned talk therapy can have tangible, physical effects on the shape of our brains. Perhaps Kierkegaard was wrong to say that the man who has learned to be in anxiety has learned the most important, or the most existentially meaningful, thing—perhaps the man has only learned the right techniques for controlling his hyperactive amygdala.o
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
As the insightful Gary Taubes wrote in his book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do about It, ‘We do not get fat because we overeat. We overeat because we get fat.’ And why do we get fat? We get fat because our body set weight thermostat is set too high. Why? Because our insulin levels are too high. Hormones are central to understanding obesity. Everything about human metabolism, including the body set weight, is hormonally regulated. A critical physiological variable such as body fatness is not left up to the vagaries of daily caloric intake and exercise. Instead, hormones precisely and tightly regulate body fat. We don’t consciously control our body weight any more than we control our heart rates, our basal metabolic rates, our body temperatures or our breathing. These are all automatically regulated, and so is our weight. Hormones tell us we are hungry (ghrelin). Hormones tell us we are full (peptide YY, cholecystokinin). Hormones increase energy expenditure (adrenalin). Hormones shut down energy expenditure (thyroid hormone). Obesity is a hormonal dysregulation of fat accumulation. Calories are nothing more than the proximate cause of obesity. Obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric imbalance.
Jason Fung (The Obesity Code)
AN NAD+ BOOSTER BEING TESTED BY THE US SPECIAL FORCES When it comes to boosting NAD+, there may be a new game in town in the next two or three years and it goes by the code name MIB-626. MIB-626 is a proprietary, synthetically manufactured molecule that is similar to, but not identical to NMN. It’s being developed and tested by a company called Metrobiotech that Peter and I have invested in. Historically, when measured, the most NMN has been able to boost NAD+ levels intracellularly has been 40 percent, but recent studies in humans show that fourteen days of dosing with MIB-626 can raise NAD+ levels by as much as 200 to 300 percent! “We’ve discovered a way to reverse vascular aging by boosting the presence of naturally occurring molecules in the body that augment the physiological response to exercise,” said senior study investigator David Sinclair.
Tony Robbins (Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love)
This ability to change the brain’s wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task. This remarkable feature of the brain appears to be the physiological basis for the possibility of transforming our minds. By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work. It is also the basis for the idea that inner transformation begins with learning (new input) and involves the discipline of gradually replacing our “negative conditioning” (corresponding with our present characteristic nerve cell activation patterns) with “positive conditioning” (forming new neural circuits). Thus, the idea of training the mind for happiness becomes a very real possibility.
Dalai Lama XIV (The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living)
The most useful way to estimate the body’s physiological reserve is to assess the patient’s tolerance for exercise. Exercise is a good model of the surgical stress response. The greater the patient’s tolerance for exercise, the better the perioperative outcome is likely to be, though marathon-running is not required. For most patients, the ability to sustain a little light exercise, such as playing a round of golf, or carrying a heavy shopping bag up a flight of stairs, is all that is required. When I am in doubt about my patient’s exercise tolerance, I ask them to accompany me on a short walk up the hospital stairs, which usually clarifies the matter one way or the other. It is possible to put patients on a treadmill and measure their exercise tolerance formally (so-called CPX, cardiopulmonary exercise testing), but this is time-consuming, and is therefore reserved for especially difficult cases.
Aidan O'Donnell (Anaesthesia: A Very Short Introduction)
Of all social, moral, and spiritual problems that of power is the most chronically urgent and the most difficult of solution. Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently knows none of the limits by the tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance, and lust. Growing with ever successive satisfaction, the appetite for power and manifest itself indefinitely, without interruption by bodily fatigue or sickness. Moreover, the nature of society is such that the higher a man climbs in the political, economic or religious hierarchy, the greater his opportunities and resources for exercising power. But climbing that hierarchical ladder is ordinarily a slow process, and the ambitious rarely reach the top until they are advanced in life. The older he grows, the more chances does the power lover have for indulging in his besetting sin, more continuously is he subjected to temptations and more glamorous do those temptations become. In this respect is his situation his situation is profoundly different from that of the debauchee. The latter may never voluntarily leave his vices, but at least as he advances in years, he finds his vices leaving him; the former never leaves his vices nor is left by them.
Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy)
The more difficult the food is to break down, the more energy is required to digest it. For example, if you eat a steak, it requires an incredible amount of physiological oomph for your body to digest. Your system has to divert a copious amount of resources that could be otherwise used for clear thinking or exercising well or simply being attuned to a beautiful day. The more blood diverted, the more drained and unfocused you become. You experience that “food coma” that only passes when the job is done.
Rich Roll (Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself)
Progesterone also increases muscle breakdown (catabolism), and with the catabolic responses during exercise, getting a good dose of protein postexercise becomes critical for us to rebuild our muscles and reduce the signaling to store body fat.
Stacy T. Sims (Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life)
Today, the ultra-endurance world—in which competitors push their bodies to the limits of what human physiology can withstand—continues to provide a window into both how and why we go on. In The Lure of Long Distances, Robin Harvie notes that the word athlete derives from a Greek word for “I struggle, I suffer.” Ultra-endurance athletes have a relationship to suffering that separates them from most recreational exercisers and that often resembles the wisdom of spiritual traditions. For many, the motivation is not just to complete fantastic feats, but to explore what it means, as one athlete I spoke with puts it, to “suffer well.” Their experiences paint a portrait of how humans maintain hope and momentum in the darkest moments. We endure by taking it one step at a time, by making space for suffering and joy to coexist, and with the help of others.
Kelly McGonigal (The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage)
This, therefore, is the physiological explanation of the breathing exercises, that they tend to bring a rhythmic action in the body, and help us, through the respiratory centre, to control the other centres. And that is what the Yogi aims to do when he speaks of rousing the coiled-up power in the Mulâdhâra, called the Kundalini with the help of Prânâyâma.
Swami Vivekananda (Raja Yoga or Conquering the Internal Nature)
Somatic therapy uses a variety of exercises to bring flexibility back to your physiological state so that your nervous system is responsive to the present context, as opposed to the threat or overwhelm from the past.
Jordan Dann LP (Somatic Therapy for Healing Trauma: Effective Tools to Strengthen the Mind-Body Connection)
an all-nighter or increasing heart rates to accomplish a strenuous physical challenge—they also strain the immune system. That’s why students get sick after finals week or athletes get so sore after big games. If those cortisol levels remain high over a prolonged period, as has been found in African Americans, the strain makes people more susceptible to sickness. These discoveries called into question the thinking that bad diets and a lack of exercise caused African Americans to have higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. It turned out that the stress of everything, from everyday slights to fears of a deadly interaction with the police, was altering human physiology.
Robert Samuels (His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice)
To sum it up, exercising early in your pregnancy has a profoundly positive effect on your developing baby, as it stimulates placenta growth and function as well as the organs and systems of your baby. Staying active through the later stages of your pregnancy keeps your baby’s growth and development on track. All this good stuff happens with just 30 to 45 minutes of exercise a day.
Stacy T. Sims (Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life)
In fact, women who exercise have better bloodflow to the placenta when they’re not exercising, so it’s likely beneficial for the baby’s development in the long run.
Stacy T. Sims (Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life)
For someone who is fifty pounds overweight, losing three to five pounds over half a year is a frustrating drop in the bucket. Accordingly, a stock response to these studies has been to declare exercise futile for trimming your waist. Before we entirely dismiss the weight control benefits of walking, the most fundamental type of endurance physical activity, let’s examine the major arguments behind this contention through the lens of evolutionary anthropology. The first is the specter of compensatory mechanisms, notably fatigue and hunger. If I walk ten thousand extra steps, I’ll be more tired and hungry, so I’ll rest and eat more to recoup lost calories. From an evolutionary perspective, these urges make sense. Because natural selection ultimately favors those who can allocate as much energy as possible to reproduction, our physiology has been tuned over millions of generations to hoard energy, especially fat. Further, because almost no one until recently was able to become overweight or obese, our bodies primarily sense if we are gaining or losing weight rather than how much excess fat we have. Whether you are skinny or stout, negative energy balance—including dieting—causes a starvation response that helps us restore energetic equilibrium or, better yet, gain weight so we can shunt more energy toward reproduction.35 It’s unfair, but losing ten pounds elicits food cravings and the desire to be inactive regardless of whether one is skinny or obese.
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
Your body is going to remain in “fight or flight” mode, which is characterized by a high state of emotional and physiological arousal. Good sleep, good food, lots of exercise, hydration, avoidance of drugs (including excess caffeine, alcohol, prescription drugs) are critical.
Richard Schwindt (Emotional Recovery from Workplace Mobbing: A Guide for Targets and Their Supports)
IS FATIGUE ALL IN YOUR HEAD? In the early 1990s, in a physiology lab at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, an exercise scientist named Tim Noakes, MD, unveiled a radical new way to think about fatigue. Until then, prevailing wisdom held that fatigue occurred in the body. At a certain intensity or duration of physical effort, the demands we put on our muscles become too great and, eventually, our muscles fail. Ask any athlete, from a marathon runner to a powerlifter, and they will be familiar with the feeling. It’s not a particularly comfortable one. What at first is a manageable burn becomes worse and worse until they can no longer bear it. The runner’s pace slows to a mere shuffle; the powerlifter can’t manage to hoist the barbell up for one last rep. Try as they might, they simply run out of gas and their muscles cease to contract. Noakes, however, wasn’t convinced that fatigue occurred in the body or that muscles actually ran out of gas. He questioned why so many athletes, seemingly overwhelmed by fatigue, were suddenly able to speed up during the final stretch of a race when the end was in sight. If the muscles were truly dead, Noakes hypothesized, these finish-line spurts would be impossible. To prove his point, Noakes attached electrical sensors to athletes and then instructed them to lift weights with their legs until they simply couldn’t lift any longer. (In exercise science, this is called “inducing muscle failure.”) When the weights slammed down and each participant tapped out, reporting they could no longer contract their muscles, Noakes ran an electrical current through the sensor. Much to the surprise of everyone—especially to the participants whose legs were dead—their muscles contracted. Although the participants could not contract their muscles on their own, Noakes proved that their muscles actually had more to give. The participants felt drained, but empirically, their muscles were not. Noakes repeated similar versions of this experiment and observed the same result. Although participants reported being totally depleted and unable to contract their muscles after exercising to what they thought was failure, when electrical stimulation was applied, without fail, their muscles produced additional force. This led Noakes to conclude that contrary to popular belief, physical fatigue occurs not in the body, but in the brain. It’s not that our muscles wear out; rather, it is our brain that shuts them down when they still have a few more percentage points to give. Noakes speculates this is an innately programmed way of protecting ourselves. Physiologically, we could push our bodies to true failure (i.e., injury and organ failure), but the brain comes in and creates a perception of failure before we actually harm ourselves. The brain, Noakes remarked, is our “central governor” of fatigue. It’s our “ego” shutting us down when confronted by fear and threat. In other words, we are hardwired to retreat when the going gets tough. But like Boyle and Strecher demonstrated, it is possible to override the central governor.
Brad Stulberg (Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success)
The exercise intensity of 50 percent of VO2 max is an extremely interesting intensity from the physiological point of view. That’s when the stroke volume of the heart (the volume of blood pumped per one heartbeat) is the largest, lipid metabolism is the highest, and the accumulation of catecholamine (an indicator of lactate and sympathetic nerves’ agitation) starts.
Hiroaki Tanaka (Slow Jogging: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Have Fun with Science-Based, Natural Running)
Leverage everyday activities. The most irritating kind of injury comes from doing something that shouldn’t cause injury. Mowing the lawn, a project at home, picking something off the floor. But all too often, these are the exact things that get people hurt. It’s not supposed to be this way—even with advanced age. When you train with optimal posture and alignment, learn to stabilize your core, and use correct form when performing movements like hinging at the hips, squatting, pulling and lifting—you can translate those movement patterns to real life. Now, a movement or project that would typically cause pain serves as a type of fitness supplement, reinforcing proper mechanics. Hobbies like golfing, going for a hike, or even doing chores around the house are no longer activities that ache your joints but varied movements that give your body the exact physiological nourishment it needs to stay healthy and pain-free. Getting to this level takes a three-pronged approach: (1) mastery of the basic human movements with focused load training, (2) posture awareness, and (3) translating correct body position and movement quality (from exercise training) to everyday activities.
Scott H Hogan (Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body)
Beaudart, C., et al. (2017), Nutrition and physical activity in the prevention and treatment of sarcopenia: Systematic review, Osteoporosis International 28:1817–33; Lozano-Montoya, I. (2017), Nonpharmacological interventions to treat physical frailty and sarcopenia in older patients: A systematic overview—the SENATOR Project ONTOP Series, Clinical Interventions in Aging 12:721–40. 55. Fiatarone, M. A., et al. (1990), High-intensity strength training in nonagenarians: Effects on skeletal muscle, Journal of the American Medical Association 263:3029–34. 56. Donges, C. E., and Duffield, R. (2012), Effects of resistance or aerobic exercise training on total and regional body composition in sedentary overweight middle-aged adults, Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism 37:499–509; Mann, S., Beedie, C., and Jimenez, A. (2014), Differential effects of aerobic exercise, resistance training, and combined exercise modalities on cholesterol and the lipid profile: Review, synthesis, and recommendations, Sports Medicine 44:211–21. 57. Phillips, S. M., et al. (1997), Mixed muscle protein synthesis and breakdown after resistance exercise in humans, American Journal of Physiology 273:E99–E107; McBride, J. M. (2016), Biomechanics of resistance exercise, in Haff and Triplett, Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, 19–42.
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
Last, and perhaps most important, prolonged sitting can kindle chronic inflammation by allowing muscles to remain persistently inactive. In addition to moving our bodies, muscles function as glands, synthesizing and releasing dozens of messenger proteins (termed myokines) with important roles. Among other jobs, myokines influence metabolism, circulation, and bones, and—you guessed it—they also help control inflammation. In fact, when researchers first started to study myokines, they were astonished to discover that muscles regulate inflammation during bouts of moderate to intense physical activity similarly to the way the immune system mounts an inflammatory response to an infection or a wound.40 Without going into too many details, we have learned that the body first initiates a proactive inflammatory response to moderate- or high-intensity physical activity to prevent or repair damage caused by the physiological stress of exercise and subsequently activates a second, larger anti-inflammatory response to return us to a non-inflamed state.41 Because the anti-inflammatory effects of physical activity are almost always larger and longer than the pro-inflammatory effects, and muscles make up about a third of the body, active muscles have potent anti-inflammatory effects. Even modest levels of physical activity dampen levels of chronic inflammation, including in obese people.42
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
In 1884, Edward H. Clarke, a physician and one of Pickering’s Harvard colleagues, published Sex and Education. In this book, Clarke maintained that both physical and educational exertion came with a heavy price for women, including, but not limited to, uterine disease, hysteria, chorea (an involuntary movement disorder), increased menstrual cramps and hemorrhaging, along with “a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an appearance of Amazonian coarseness and force.” For that reason alone, Clarke contended that women should be kept inside. His reasoning was twofold. First, from a physiological perspective, Clarke—whose medical specialty was in hearing disorders and the physiology of the ear—argued that women have wider pelvises, which when mounted with the weight of the body cause their thighs to splay out, making standing and walking more difficult (and thus more taxing) than it is for men. Second, he maintained that the development of a woman’s ovaries and uterus, particularly during her teens and twenties, was such an exhausting physical feat unto itself that the body could not tolerate any additional stress, particularly when it came to exercise and “outdoor pursuits.” As a result, Clarke advocated fewer physical and intellectual demands for women overall and total bed rest during the weeks of their periods. A failure to do so, he concluded, would undoubtedly cause a woman to lose “her feminine attractions, and probably also her chief feminine functions.
Kathryn Miles (Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders)
Heavy resistance strength training (loads > 85% 1RM) appears to evoke significant gains in maximal eccentric muscle strength.
Marco Cardinale (Strength and Conditioning: Biological Principles and Practical Applications)
These increases in brain cholesterol and pituitary activity were clues that were rich in their implications, and in the late 1960’s a research team at the University of California at Berkeley began to look for specific differences in the neural structures of gentled and ungentled rats. They found that greater tactile stimulation resulted in the following differences: These animals’ brains were heavier, and in particular they had heavier and thicker cerebral cortexes. This heaviness was not due only to the presence of more cholesterol—that is, more myeline sheaths—but also to the fact that actual neural cell bodies and nuclei were larger. Associated with these larger cells were greater quantities of cholinesterase and acetylcholinesterase, two enzymes that support the chemical activities of nerve cells, and also a higher ratio of RNA to DNA within the cells. Increased amounts of these specific compounds indicates higher metabolic activity. Measurements of the synaptic junctions connecting nerve cells revealed that these junctions were 50% larger in cross-section in the gentled rats than in the isolated ones. The gentled rats’ adrenal glands were also markedly heavier, evidence that the pituitary-adrenal axis—the most important monitor of the body’s hormonal secretions—was indeed more active.34 Many other studies have confirmed and added to these findings. Laboratory animals who are given rich tactile experience in their infancy grow faster, have heavier brains, more highly developed myelin sheaths, bigger nerve cells, more advanced skeletal muscular growth, better coordination, better immunological resistance, more developed pituitary/adrenal activity, earlier puberties, and more active sex lives than their isolated genetic counterparts. Associated with these physiological advantages are a host of emotional and behavioral responses which indicate a stronger and much more successfully adapted organism. The gentled rats are much calmer and less excitable, yet they tend to be more dominant in social and sexual situations. They are more lively, more curious, more active problem solvers. They are more willing to explore new environments (ungentled animals usually withdraw fearfully from novel situations), and advance more quickly in all forms of conditioned learning exercises.35 Moreover, these felicitous changes are not to be observed only in infancy and early maturation; an enriched environment will produce exactly the same increases in brain and adrenal weights and the same behavioral changes in adult animals as well, even though the adults require a longer period of stimulation to show the maximum effect.36
Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
Sarah and the seven other women in the group were introduced to mindfulness with a simple exercise. Each woman was given a raisin, along with the following instructions from the group facilitator. 1.Observe the object. We are going to refer to this as an object, even if you recognize this and immediately know the name of it. By calling it an object, we are encouraging you to encounter this object as if for the first time. 2.Take note of its shape, size, color, and contour. 3.Notice how the light reflects off its surface. 4.Smell the object, taking in the various aromas. 5.Notice how your body responds to those aromas. 6.Lift it to your ear. 7.If you move it between your fingers, does it have a sound? There was a long pause between each instruction as the women lifted the raisin to their eyes, nose, and ears. The group facilitator continued, again with long pauses between the instructions. 8.Put the object against your lips without opening them. 9.Notice how it feels. 10.Notice if your mouth or body starts to react to having it there. The group facilitators could hear the women salivating as they anticipated putting the raisin in their mouth. 11.Now put the object in your mouth and roll it around with your tongue. Try not to bite it. What sensations do you notice? This can be a sharp example of how your mind anticipates something, and reacts physiologically to it by preparing for it. After another long pause, the facilitator continued. 12.Eventually put the object between your back teeth and slowly and deliberately take one bite. Notice the explosion of flavors. Can you decipher the different flavors? Can you observe where one flavor ends and the next one begins? 13.Then, very slowly chew into the object and follow the trajectory of its contents as they move down your esophagus. Notice the aftertaste and the echo of the aftertaste.
Lori A. Brotto (Better Sex Through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire)
Today, many of us experience a profound sense of duality. The body is a vast, dark and mysterious unknown. It’s not to be trusted; it’s treacherous, traitorous and unpredictable. Anything could bring us down: a genetic wild card, an environmental toxin, a renegade organ, hormone or neurotransmitter. According to this view, we are mere victims of our physiology; things can go wrong without warning and we have no control. For others, the relationship with the body is adversarial. The body must be beaten into shape, tamed and brought to heel. We exercise like demons, living the belief that the body must be pounded into condition with endless sweating, suffering and pain. If we let up our efforts for a day or a week, we’ll degenerate into obesity, sloth and disease. Alternately, we abuse our bodies with all manner of substances and behaviors, trying to punish it for sensations, emotions and motives that we don’t understand or know what to do with. For still others, the primal relationship is marked by apathy and ignorance. The body is something far away; it’s a foreign land. We don’t know what it’s capable of and we don’t much care. As long as it gets us to work and back home at the end of the day, we’re content to leave it to its own devices. If something goes wrong, we’ll just take it in to the shop and all will be well. We’re not even curious about what it is or what it might become.
Frank Forencich (Beautiful Practice: A Whole-Life Approach to Health, Performance and the Human Predicament)