Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [0]
WHICH COMES FIRST,
CARDIO
OR
WEIGHTS?
Fitness Myths,
Training Truths, and Other
Surprising Discoveries from
the Science of Exercise
For Lauren
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction: What This Book Is (and Isn’t)
Chapter 1 - Getting Started
Chapter 2 - Fitness Gear
Chapter 3 - The Physiology of Exercise
Chapter 4 - Aerobic Exercise
Chapter 5 - Strength and Power
Chapter 6 - Flexibility and Core Strength
Chapter 7 - Injuries and Recovery
Chapter 8 - Exercise and Aging
Chapter 9 - Weight Management
Chapter 10 - Nutrition and Hydration
Chapter 11 - Mind and Body
Chapter 12 - The Competitive Edge
Conclusions: From Lab to Gym
Acknowledgments
Index
References
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction: What This Book Is (and Isn’t)
WHEN A RESEARCH INSTITUTE in La Jolla, California, issued a press release with the provocative title “Exercise in a Pill” in the summer of 2008, it wasn’t hard to predict the headlines that would be splashed across the next day’s newspapers. “Trying to reap the health benefits of exercise? Forget treadmills and spin classes,” the release proclaimed. “Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found a way around the sweat and pain.” Feeding a drug called AICAR to a group of mice for four weeks allowed them to run 44 percent longer than drug-free mice, the new study found—without a single step of training.
Stories like this are hard to resist. After all, who wouldn’t love a pain-free, effortless shortcut to fitness? That’s why we’re bombarded on a daily basis by similar promises in magazines, on television, over the Internet, and in our spam folders. There’s just one problem with these get-fit-quick schemes: they don’t work.
Exercise, as medical physiologists Frank Booth and Matthew Laye of the University of Missouri pointed out in a critique of the Salk Institute study, affects almost every organ system in your body—circulatory, neural, endocrine, gastrointestinal, immune, kidney, skeletal muscle, bone, ligament, and so on. In fact, the only systems that don’t respond to exercise appear to be the senses and (surprisingly) the lungs. Unless a pill can somehow produce changes in all these systems simultaneously, it will never replace exercise. (Moreover, you don’t get healthy by having the capacity to run 44 percent farther—you can only burn calories and get the resulting benefits by actually doing it.)
So let me begin with a full disclosure: this book does not contain any secret workouts or magic pills that will produce instant fitness.
Instead, what follows is an up-to-date guide to what scientists know about exercise, health, and performance—and, just as importantly, what they don’t know. It’s an “evidence-based” guide: the answers it offers to common fitness questions aren’t based on conventional wisdom or gut feelings. Instead, they’re drawn from the more than 400 peer-reviewed journal articles listed in the reference section at the back, along with over 100 interviews with researchers around the world.
That means that if scientists don’t yet have a definitive answer to a question, I haven’t just made one up. For example, the last few years have seen a surge of interest in running barefoot or in “minimalist” shoes, a practice that some people believe reduces the risk of injury compared with conventional running shoes. A few studies examining how running barefoot affects your joints have now been published, but the results so far have been ambiguous—so, in chapter 2, you can read about some of these studies and make up your own mind about whether the potential benefits outweigh the risks (and the funny looks). For someone who has been repeatedly injured trying to run in conventional shoes, the answer might be yes; for someone trying running for the first time, probably not.
This is an important point: there’s no single “best” exercise program or technique that applies to everyone. You’ll have to take into account your background, current level of fitness, and goals in designing