Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Zen Manualist Coffee: Part 1 - roast your own beans.
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IF you enjoy good coffee, such that your fave coffee place is because of the coffee not because of the ambiance per se, and if your a bit of a Manualist (i don't know what else to call it - someone who enjoys crafting a process by hand-ish - is there a term?) then here's something simple you can try: roast your own coffee beans.
Roasting one's own coffee rather sounds daunting, doesn't it? It turns out, it's not. And so i begin to wonder at all the hoopla and mystique around roasting and the oh so precious precious ness of it. Great packaging for a product, but ah c'mon! You may come to the same conclusion after the following "it can't be this simple" post.
Step 1: get green beans and be as ethical and snobbish about it as you like, as you can pick beans from anywhere in the world.
Green beans stay fresh for YEARS. That seems a big plus. And getting sample packs of bunches of places lets one explore flavours, blends and roasts.
For bean sources:
In the US i keep hearing about Sweet Maria's. In the UK, i've found Rave Coffee.
Step 2: choose your roasting implement -
There's loads of how-to's on the web from using fry pans ( i wanna be a cowboy...) to amazingly crafted bbq rotiserie turned roaster. Just check out this page of roaster mods (who knew?)
One way to get into it - and you may have this implement for other purposes - just use a hot air popcorn popper. No fuss; no muss. Super overview and video how to here.
NOTE: In the UK, here's one german made model Severin - that i've used for about 23 quid (amazon uk affil link). You can drive these into the ground. If you're using them weekly, at 4-6 mins per batch, and do three batches - more or less in a row - that's pushing these little motors to the max - and they can fall over. They make very interesting noises when they do. I rationalise this by considering that a dedicated home roaster now is about 300 quid, and i'm just not sure i'm ready to go there. Not quite sure.
Step 3: Load beans into roasting mechanism of choice
Here we see green beans loaded into a popper - usually take about 100g pre-roasted weight. Mark Prince gives a lovely overview of the popcorn popper set up approach here.
Step 4: attend as required
(learn about first crack, second crack, temperatur, time and immanent flambé)
Step 5: delight in bean roast
It's pretty cool to see the transformation happen, as beans go from green swirls, to yellow, to darker tan to what we recognise as roasted coffee bean color.
Interestingly, roasting beans do NOT smell like coffee. it's not an entirely enticing aroma. so the first flush of coffee joy may be mainly visual in observing that this bean transformation has actually taken place.
Step 6: put in appropriate off-gassing vessel for 18-36 hours pending preference.
Here's where the coffee roast aroma starts to happen, as the beans blow off the gasses from the roasting.
You can use a bag with a gas out valve (the kind of bags starbucks coffee come in - i got a bunch from Rave when i ordered the beans) or, one tip from the Sweet Maria's video tutorial above, get screw lid type mason jars and leave the lid slightly unscrewed for a day or two. And then either transfer to an airtight vessel to keep beans out of light as well, or just grind up for service.
Some beans - Guatemalan in particular - seem to do better to be left alone for a week or ten days.
Step 7: Occasionally enjoy the aroma of the roast's progress
It's fun after the beans have been bagged to squeeze the valve bag and inhale a bit to get an aroma for the colors of your coffee as they mature over the next day or so.. It's really happening, this wonderful chemical reaction.
Small story: in Paris last week for conference; found a coffee roaster in a wonderful wee market area (the shop is called "brulerie des turnes) - i'd run out of the coffee i'd roasted and ground for the trip (yes and i also brought a moka pot), so went to the shop asking for coffee that had been roasted two days ago - no sooner. Intriguingly this request perplexed the staff. Everyone else wants it just after it's roasted, they said. Oh dear. Well (and then my french failed me in terms of "perhaps they grind it themselves, or do they grind it here?)...Were these staff or owners? I was then perplexed: based on what i've learned (and inhaled) about "fresh roasted coffee" why would you grind coffee just after it's roasted?? Fascinating, oui?
And that's about it.
Just roasting beans is a pleasure. If you find you enjoy it, but don't like coffee, you have a very personalised gift you can share with friends.
If you do like coffee - you're in for a treat on multiple levels, from process to product. Really: you did that! Isn't that cool? And it tastes great.
For some insights into the next part of the process, grinding, scroll down to the end of this post on post processing trauma through manualist interactions (i'm grokking this term). You'll see several videos on cool ways to do manual coffee grinding.
Anon:
I refer to this roasting process as part of a Manualist coffee "zen" - well ya know it just gives me delight - and perhaps any emotional experience is not particularly zen, but it sounds kind neat. Maybe it should be "delight coffee"??
Anyway, if you give this a go, please shout. Will look forward to hearing your experience.
We'll talk about using a wee espresso pot and about latte art, i'm sure, anon.
DO TRY THIS AT HOME (have some good ventilation) - and let me know - please - what you find.
you can follow me on twitter @mcphoo
Related Posts
Fat Tea
Possible Coffee Replacement Drink
Green Tea: good for more than what ails ya
Value of Reusable bits - like a tea infuser.
Tweet Follow @begin2dig
 |
| is it a sign? what does it mean?? latte art readings rather than tea leaves...a sort of automatic writing, perhaps? i continue to explore the lacto path |
Roasting one's own coffee rather sounds daunting, doesn't it? It turns out, it's not. And so i begin to wonder at all the hoopla and mystique around roasting and the oh so precious precious ness of it. Great packaging for a product, but ah c'mon! You may come to the same conclusion after the following "it can't be this simple" post.
or of course, there's instant...on the menu in some UK restaurants....
Step 1: get green beans and be as ethical and snobbish about it as you like, as you can pick beans from anywhere in the world.
Green beans stay fresh for YEARS. That seems a big plus. And getting sample packs of bunches of places lets one explore flavours, blends and roasts.
For bean sources:
In the US i keep hearing about Sweet Maria's. In the UK, i've found Rave Coffee.
Step 2: choose your roasting implement -
There's loads of how-to's on the web from using fry pans ( i wanna be a cowboy...) to amazingly crafted bbq rotiserie turned roaster. Just check out this page of roaster mods (who knew?)
 |
| 4-7mins for about 100g fresh roast coffee |
NOTE: In the UK, here's one german made model Severin - that i've used for about 23 quid (amazon uk affil link). You can drive these into the ground. If you're using them weekly, at 4-6 mins per batch, and do three batches - more or less in a row - that's pushing these little motors to the max - and they can fall over. They make very interesting noises when they do. I rationalise this by considering that a dedicated home roaster now is about 300 quid, and i'm just not sure i'm ready to go there. Not quite sure.
Step 3: Load beans into roasting mechanism of choice
Here we see green beans loaded into a popper - usually take about 100g pre-roasted weight. Mark Prince gives a lovely overview of the popcorn popper set up approach here.
 |
| green water processed beans from an ethical, organic, free trade all things wonderful, place in Guatemala. |
Step 4: attend as required
(learn about first crack, second crack, temperatur, time and immanent flambé)
Step 5: delight in bean roast
It's pretty cool to see the transformation happen, as beans go from green swirls, to yellow, to darker tan to what we recognise as roasted coffee bean color.
 |
| Post processing of beans from the spin cycle and just past what's known as "second crack" |
Step 6: put in appropriate off-gassing vessel for 18-36 hours pending preference.
Here's where the coffee roast aroma starts to happen, as the beans blow off the gasses from the roasting.
You can use a bag with a gas out valve (the kind of bags starbucks coffee come in - i got a bunch from Rave when i ordered the beans) or, one tip from the Sweet Maria's video tutorial above, get screw lid type mason jars and leave the lid slightly unscrewed for a day or two. And then either transfer to an airtight vessel to keep beans out of light as well, or just grind up for service.
Some beans - Guatemalan in particular - seem to do better to be left alone for a week or ten days.
Step 7: Occasionally enjoy the aroma of the roast's progress
It's fun after the beans have been bagged to squeeze the valve bag and inhale a bit to get an aroma for the colors of your coffee as they mature over the next day or so.. It's really happening, this wonderful chemical reaction.
Small story: in Paris last week for conference; found a coffee roaster in a wonderful wee market area (the shop is called "brulerie des turnes) - i'd run out of the coffee i'd roasted and ground for the trip (yes and i also brought a moka pot), so went to the shop asking for coffee that had been roasted two days ago - no sooner. Intriguingly this request perplexed the staff. Everyone else wants it just after it's roasted, they said. Oh dear. Well (and then my french failed me in terms of "perhaps they grind it themselves, or do they grind it here?)...Were these staff or owners? I was then perplexed: based on what i've learned (and inhaled) about "fresh roasted coffee" why would you grind coffee just after it's roasted?? Fascinating, oui?
And that's about it.
Just roasting beans is a pleasure. If you find you enjoy it, but don't like coffee, you have a very personalised gift you can share with friends.
If you do like coffee - you're in for a treat on multiple levels, from process to product. Really: you did that! Isn't that cool? And it tastes great.
For some insights into the next part of the process, grinding, scroll down to the end of this post on post processing trauma through manualist interactions (i'm grokking this term). You'll see several videos on cool ways to do manual coffee grinding.
Anon:
I refer to this roasting process as part of a Manualist coffee "zen" - well ya know it just gives me delight - and perhaps any emotional experience is not particularly zen, but it sounds kind neat. Maybe it should be "delight coffee"??
Anyway, if you give this a go, please shout. Will look forward to hearing your experience.
We'll talk about using a wee espresso pot and about latte art, i'm sure, anon.
DO TRY THIS AT HOME (have some good ventilation) - and let me know - please - what you find.
you can follow me on twitter @mcphoo
Fat Tea
Possible Coffee Replacement Drink
Green Tea: good for more than what ails ya
Value of Reusable bits - like a tea infuser.
Tweet Follow @begin2dig
PDF
Monday, May 13, 2013
4 steps to Work Through DOMS Safely While Exploring Movement.
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Ever had DOMS - you know - that really stiff/sore the next day or two (or three) after a workout that had a new twist to it? Ever wonder about working out the same muscles before that soreness is gone?
(If you'd like more on DOMs there's a two part story on delayed onset muscle soreness on b2d, referenced in Related Links, below).
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TO address this query, here's a quick 4 step protocol to progress through DOMs that seems so obvious it's stupid. Indeed, it caught me this morning. Thing is, i'm now trying to practice catching this effect ("what is new today and where's its source?) deliberately in each work out.
We'll go over the general bits of what is the protocol, and an example of when to run it, and then we'll go through a worked example, this time with DOMS.
Trigger: I'm sore in a particular muscle group - DOMS sore.
The Protocol Response to the Trigger? Four parts: two at the start of a session; two at the end.
Jon, if you're listening, i tried it, i did three sets of those and no, that didn't result in a standing ab wheel roll out, but i do like the movement. Quad burner. oy. By the way, the whole practice session here with the Wheel is awesome - come back and watch the whole thing and git yerself a powerwheel.
Anyway, i did in fact last friday try the standing ab wheel roll out. Ended up dropping a knee to the mat on the way down, then when stretched out, getting the knee off the mat and rolling back up. Exhausting. Got three of those in.
And then i tried the ab wheel rollouts from the knees. What a surprise - i got full, nose touching to the ground extension in a way i hadn't thought possible before.
Here's how far i'd pretty much made it before:
That may not look it but that felt super elongated. But with seeming effortlessness i was now going much further. Will show you in a minute.
And that evening, sitting laid back in a chair watching a movie, my upper ab area right under the rib cage went into such an awesome spasm/charlie horse/cramp that my gooodness that was incredible trying to think fast about what the complementary muscles were, whether to rub or stretch out or breath or just hope to knock myself out.
My upper abs in particular have been having a DOMS experience since then.
Now, here's a vid of me doing ten reps after a couple of those sets of five - and please notice something after about the fifth rep: i thought i'd been saying relax to myself in the first five but in the last bunch i really thought RELAX - and i think you'll see that slight shift to deeper, smoother, more elongated.
The above isn't perfect (the start position i'm going to try with butt down to keep whole back straight from knee to top of head, for instane), and perhaps it's more a feel than a see thing, but there is a depth difference, and there is a movement quality difference (i just may be keeping it all inside). What do you think?
Two takeaways from this DOMS-exploring protocol - at least that keep showing up in my practice
We've done this example with DOMS, but the "what is new; what's its source; what can i learn" protocol can be run with any new discovery in a movement.
- if you explore these concepts, please let me know what you find.
And remember: you can also:
FOLLOW B2D on TWITTER
DOMS part 2: what seems to work to address DOMS?
Tweet
Follow @begin2dig
(If you'd like more on DOMs there's a two part story on delayed onset muscle soreness on b2d, referenced in Related Links, below).
 |
| Never been this far out before - and guess where it was DOMsore, later... |
FOLLOW B2D on TWITTERTO address this query, here's a quick 4 step protocol to progress through DOMs that seems so obvious it's stupid. Indeed, it caught me this morning. Thing is, i'm now trying to practice catching this effect ("what is new today and where's its source?) deliberately in each work out.
We'll go over the general bits of what is the protocol, and an example of when to run it, and then we'll go through a worked example, this time with DOMS.
What is New Today and Where's its Source? What Do i Know? What can i Learn?
This morning's trigger to the "what's new" is feeling sore in a new way in a new place - or in a place i haven't felt DOMS in some time. So that new thing is what i'm calling the protocol Trigger.Trigger: I'm sore in a particular muscle group - DOMS sore.
The Protocol Response to the Trigger? Four parts: two at the start of a session; two at the end.
- explore: try the movement(s) we think may have set off the DOMS, and check which part of the movement feels most restricted (due to soreness, potentially)
- think: once we have the range restriction/soreness isolated - think back to what was NEW in that movement the last time we did it. Consider what part of that movement had EXTENSION (stretching out) going on. Question to consider: was this a new movement? or was this a new load? new number of reps? By how much on any of these parameters
- return: - make a note in our logs about the observations and then, later in the workout or at the end of the work out when done, come back to this movement just to find out if being all nicely warmed up provides access to the movement again.
- relax: consciously remind oneself to breath, to relax into this movement - our natural inclination if we've been sore and triggered something is to tense up to want to protect ourselves. The counter-intuitive cue to relax going into that "sore" range of motion movement may just help us becoming more efficient in this movement.
Worked Example:
Background: Getting further in an Ab Wheel Roll Out.
It's monday. Last friday in my workout i tried ab wheel roll outs - haven't worked these for some time. In fact i've been "working" them indirectly via a suggestion from Jon Hinds, developer of the awesome Power Wheel version of an ab wheel (can hook your feet in or use your hands. cool. hell). I'd asked Jon about getting to a standing ab wheel roll out, rather than from knees alone. He said, if you can do 30 knees to elbows (a movement shown in the clip below at about 15:10), then you can do standing roll outs.Anyway, i did in fact last friday try the standing ab wheel roll out. Ended up dropping a knee to the mat on the way down, then when stretched out, getting the knee off the mat and rolling back up. Exhausting. Got three of those in.
And then i tried the ab wheel rollouts from the knees. What a surprise - i got full, nose touching to the ground extension in a way i hadn't thought possible before.
Here's how far i'd pretty much made it before:
 |
| mc doing an power wheel roll out in Feb 2013 that felt "deep" or extended. |
And that evening, sitting laid back in a chair watching a movie, my upper ab area right under the rib cage went into such an awesome spasm/charlie horse/cramp that my gooodness that was incredible trying to think fast about what the complementary muscles were, whether to rub or stretch out or breath or just hope to knock myself out.
My upper abs in particular have been having a DOMS experience since then.
Applying the Protocol
THis morning (we're getting closer to the example now), i have a session where i like to add in ab work and wanted to do some roll outs. Here's the specific worked example of the above protocol.Start of workout:
1. Explore -
I tried the roll out and well, no, my extension was not getting to where i was on friday to be sure. In fact if felt like i was getting to about where the above picture goes and no further. And sore. oh yes. I then tried the knees to elbows and that was fine so thought, ok i'll do that.
2. Think
DOMS is about extension for the most part - what *part* of the roll out was new? That last bit of extension. What else about load/reps? Doing three sets of ten - so thirty bodyweight load of extensions in a new range. Interesting - that new part of the movement is where the soreness was. Makes a kind of sense, doesn't it. Interesting to note: a mere thirty reps (and then maybe those few standing-ish ones) set off this killer response. That's worth noting. If i don't want the DOMS next time maybe try half the reps in the new area.
End of Workout3. Return, end of work out.
Having done everything i wanted to do this morning, coming back to this roll out movement was a bonus. What i found is that i could do the movement, and my range of motion was back. I only tried sets of five. Cool. Reforming the movement when no longer super sore - good - more rebuilding the area. and not overloading my body - just reminding it, it's safe to go here.
4. Relax. Really. There is no spoon.
The biggest win of this session, the most potent insight for me is the difference in the movement quality when i reminded myself to relax. Not breath or go loose, but the cue for me was "relax" - i had visions of the muscle firing patterns of efficient practiced movement in my head - where only the necessary fibers are firing for as long as they need to fire, and only as many as are needed. I reasoned that perhaps by tensing in trying to protect myself, i was firing up more fibers than necessary and doing my movement no good in the process - tension, and too much of it, perhaps.
WOW, gang, wow. Relaxing into the movement gave me greater depth, more fluidity and control and ESPECIALLY - less pain. The difference was really night and day.
Now, here's a vid of me doing ten reps after a couple of those sets of five - and please notice something after about the fifth rep: i thought i'd been saying relax to myself in the first five but in the last bunch i really thought RELAX - and i think you'll see that slight shift to deeper, smoother, more elongated.
You can find this and other b2d vids on http://youtube.com/begin2dig
The above isn't perfect (the start position i'm going to try with butt down to keep whole back straight from knee to top of head, for instane), and perhaps it's more a feel than a see thing, but there is a depth difference, and there is a movement quality difference (i just may be keeping it all inside). What do you think?
Two takeaways from this DOMS-exploring protocol - at least that keep showing up in my practice
- Do it AGAIN. It's OK. Just because we don't get a movement the first time we try it doesn't mean we can't come back to it. Failing at a rep is not the same as being toast for that movement. It often just means the pattern + control/strength hasn't come together yet
- Relax! - even when it seems counter intuitive - can yield incredible rewards in the performance of movement. i won't call it the performance of strength. I dunno about that here, and i'm not entirely sure how to apply this yet to my double 24kg Kettlebell press, but something's going on. After all i was able to do the movement both with tension and with much less, and i can tell you which version felt better in all levels from movement quality to pain level to range of motion.
Time and again, do it AGAIN keeps showing up in practice success. Eg, the first time i tried a single leg pistol with a 24 at the end of a work out i had to diss my inclination to say well that's it - end of workout anyway, and say - try it again, maybe? That lead to my very first 24 single leg pistol.
With DOMS, here, i've just been taught another counter intuitive lesson about relaxation to come back into a movement - when nice and ready for it - relax into the movement.
Looking forward to checking that relax bit out in my next heavy pressing day
That will be EXPLORE More, THINK about it - what i know about that movement in me, RETURN to it (without needing it) and RELAX into it -
We've done this example with DOMS, but the "what is new; what's its source; what can i learn" protocol can be run with any new discovery in a movement.
- if you explore these concepts, please let me know what you find.
And remember: you can also:
FOLLOW B2D on TWITTERRelate Posts:
DOMS part 1: what is delayed onset muscle soreness?DOMS part 2: what seems to work to address DOMS?
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
To Move is Human: 7 simple steps to get in shape - for life
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Getting (back) in shape: How begin the begine? Have you experienced this effect when making a sortie into getting back into some kind of fitness space? You do your first workout, see what you can do, and are so gassed by it you think heck, you'll only be able to do this once a week - till you get stronger. Maybe once a year. Or maybe you feel you'll never go back; that was horrible. Totally understandable. Totally reasonable to think gosh so much for my plans to work out several times a week; i need to build up to that. So i'll work out once or twice a week instead. After all finding time to work out more frequently is a challenge, anyway.
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In the following post, i'm going to argue that a first order of business in any get in shape program is, in the beginning in particular, to think less about intensity (ie working out "hard" one or more times a week) and more about frequency (more TIME in movement is better). I'm going to make seven points about this daily approach to in-shape-ness, that build upon each other, as guidelines for the approach. One for every day of the week, perhaps:
Fundamental: make the TIME for movement: practice doing that; then move within the time.
A first strategy of a workout program, rather than focusing on a specific activity like lifting a lot of weight or swimming the english channel might be the more mundane but powerfully effective target simply to "move more." Consistently. Daily.
For more reasons than we can count here, simply moving *more* than we do now is a potent target for just about anyone reading this post (including its author). From anecdotes of coaches to research about physical and cognitive practice, it seems the more we move, the happier we are in our performance, from body compoisition to intellectual performance. Yes, we perform more intelligently the more we move (the opposite is also true - so if we're sedentary for years at a time, we're not only not getting younger, we're getting stupid-er (see the Whitehall study)). For the brain, movement with our heart rate elevated is very good. For body comp, it seems moving 5 hours a week minimum of movement/activity correlates with greater happiness about body shape (one ref on this topic).
If we accpet this premise to "move more" first, rather than "lift heavy" or "swim/run far" as our founding premise of wellbeing or of getting in shapeliness, then our strategy shifts from "i must get to the gym X times per week" to preparing for a sustainable movement practice. If it's daily, we need to be able to recover from it to keep doing it. Going crazy is not an initial option. Consistency and Persistence is the biggie. Please note, i do not mean get a cardio program (ie, lots of running or swimming or similar as opposed to lifting weights or sprinting or interval stuff). I mean MOVEMENT.
Practice Variety. Push ups are movements; dancing is movement. Walking is movement. Olympic lifting is movement. Throwing a discuss or frisbee is movement. Moving as many joints as possible in a movement is movement. The more variety of kinds of movement that we practice, it seems, the better off we are in terms of engaging not just our joints but our vision and balance systems as well. Moving harder and less hard also important. It seems we're wired for variety, hence the need to practice variety.
Daily Practice: I Move More. This focus on daily practice can be quite liberating. We have a whole ton of choice - of anything counts. Whether that practice is walking, running, going upstairs, skipping, mobility work, playing frisbee doesn't really matter: it's that we have said we will do SOME movement everyday and we do it. We'll look at how to ensure the practice leads to progressive development, in part 4, below.
It's a fact that when we're stressed we go to what we've practiced most. If we've practiced being innert more than we've practiced movement, that's our likely go-to place when we often need the exact opposite: movement helps blow off stress (it's hormonal: fight or flight responses mean MOVE; when we don't move those signals keep coming on; move/exercise/get the heart up - we signal we get it; we're responding; the signals change; we feel better).
Thus, the first part of true and enduring get in shape work, it seems, is to accept it into our hearts as a necessary and good thing to do - that we see it as fundamental to be moving more - that that is the natural state; being so sedentary is not natural at all. We who neither reap nor sow. Nor hunt nor build. Living in the head, the digital ALL the time would not too long ago be perceived as a disease state, where our inertia would be pitied, and where if rich we'd be shoved up to the mountains to take The Cure.
So yes, no. 1: accepting that to be human is to move; and if we want to experience our humanness we may want to move a little more, (eat a little less). To move more, we need to habituate movement into our lives. That means lots of practice.
The next point deals with how to get all those reps.
Block out the Time: Make a Promise to Yourself - and keep it. Plan ahead, write it down; talk with whomever you need to talk with who might need to know this is what you're doing so they know, this is what you're doing. To borrow from Steven Covey's First Things First (uk | us), why not put those times for movement practice into the calendar before the week starts?
When we make appointments with ourselves, Coveys' argument goes, we show respect for ourselves. We honour ourselves. That time becomes as important as appointments we set with anyone else. Covey also has this lovely notion that we can't say no to something until we have something to which we're saying yes. If we are committed to being human, and thus to movement; if we get that to move we need to make it a habit, and that to make a habit we need lots of reps, then finding the time to make movement happen in order to get those reps will be a natural YES priority. AND that movement practice will help us be more alive, more present and more successfully present in our engagement with others, as well. Thus, our movement practice times are protected, scheduled and
Making the time to move also throws open many more options than any pre-canned workout program. Movement - rather than a workout program - lets us think about doing something that is natural every day. Some folks have a hard time initially with thinking about "doing a workout" every day. No kidding. That sounds daunting. But moving every day? what's the alternative? be innert every day? is that a desired state to NOT move daily? And yet, if you put a pedometer on many of us, that's exactly what you'll see: we move very little. So actually, it's often pretty easy to move more.
WHAT COUNTS as MOVEMENT?- Generally speaking ANY deliberate movement where we bring our minds to the fact that we are moving is better than not. So mobility work where we go through each joint in our body to explore range of motion (like r-phase and i-phase movement templates, links about these approaches, below), that's great for many reasons written about elsewhere.
Combining some mobility work then with work that gets our heart rates above standing state - that's generally where even more goodness happens.
Validate Movement: Check Seated and Standing Heart Rates. That's easy to test: check your heart rate seated at rest for a bit; check it when standing for a minute or two. Check it after you've walked a bit; check it after you've walked up a flight or two of stairs - get some sense of your body's responses to movement.
Having a movement plan B means we're rarely taken by surprise.
The Unbearable Lightness of Sustainability
When we start a movement practice, we can pick a small unit of time - say five minutes. We can propose to walk around the block at a pace where it's easy-ish to keep a conversation going, but not effortless. Let's say that that may seem, after that walk, to have been pretty easy - but
a) how long did it take?
b) what's our post-walk heart rate?
c) what's our heart rate a minute after the walk is finished?
If the goal was to move for five minutes, and the round block walk took five or likely more minutes, and the heart rate after the walk is above standing rate, and a minute later it's closer to standing rate, that is a huge success.
It's a huge success because
1) we scheduled it AND did it - check on keeping a committment
2) we learned something about ourselves in terms of walking pace for five minutes
3) our recovery heart rate shows we didn't over do it
4) we know we can do it again - we have a building block
5) we also have measures for progress:
- time taken to walk a specific distance
- distance travelled
- heart rate at close of event
- recovery rate inside a minute
- success rate at keeping a promise to ourselves
Plans: For many of us, though, we find it easier to develop a movement practice if we plan time ahead for what we're going to do. That's grand. A plan can be - kick a football around outside for half an hour monday; hack around playing squash with a friend for 45mins tues. Push baby in stroller for twenty minutes at a fast-ish clip twice on wed. Swing a light kettlebell for 100 reps total and do 100 wall push ups total for thurs. Take an olympic lifting class friday, recover saturday. Go for a long walk with partner sunday trying flexible shoes that pass the twist test. That's six days of mixed movement. And as long as we're checking those measures of time and heart rate, we have a really cheap way to see what progress we're making, like - i can do the round the block faster and with a lower heart rate and greater recovery this week than last week. That's progress. Time to look at maybe going a bit further or a bit longer. Or a bit harder.
Once we get to a place where we're compliant in moving daily - let's say 5-6 days a weeks - for a month, then i'd suggest game on for thinking more deeply about what skill we'd like to practice (walking is a skill, too: a learned action).
If we've already decided what our skill sets are going to be - say working with a kettlebell - then super. There are many approaches and schedules out there for practicing kettlebells. If these call for a three day a week schedule, grand. Since to Move is Human, and we want to be Human every day, what will we do on the other days to continue learning about how our bodies move, and to keep moving, to keep up a daily practice of Being Human?
The great thing about movement is we have so many options to find a skill practice that engages our attention sufficiently to keep us from being bored, to keep us engaged and improving. What will that be? Every rep is a learning opportunity: how do we engage our practice to feel like we're learning, doing, having fun?
(At least once in awhile) Get a Coach: I've said this before: everyone needs a coach. Once you've found something you enjoy, do yourself a favour and talk with folks for recommendations about a coach. Find out how to carry out the movements of your sport as effectively as possible. Find the smartest person you can with the best experience and manner. Engage with them about checking your technique. Excellent coaches will not try to do everything at once, but the right thing for now to let you enjoy your practice more. Each time you come back will be a retune to help you get that much further along. This is an affordable, effective way to reduce injury risk and improve performance and pleasure.
Never Surrender An approach many folks have is actually to trust someone else to put them through a "program" for x period of time to achieve a specific result. They tend to surrender to the other person the understanding of the process and trust them to get them from a to b, and that getting to B is a great thing to do. Maybe it is; maybe it isn't. How would we judge that beyond the claims of the packaging without having some grounded undesrtanding of how our body adapts to movement? And sure, it's understandable starting out: we just want a plan to get going and feel better. We want to believe There's a Program for That. This desire has helped sell an awful lot of fitness DVDs (like p90x, anyone?). That doesn't mean Programs per se are bad. But yes i will go so far as to say, just doing a program and not delving into what its assumptions are, and whether or not they're valid, is lazy. How many folks have accepted P90X's claim about "muscle confusion" for why P90X claims it is better than any other program? if you don't know what that claim is - really it's ok (though if you're really interested, a critique is linked below). My point is that we bring incredible skepticism to many product claims, but programs, especially when we like the sound of their claims (ripped in 90 days, for example), not so much it seems.
Learning more about how our bodies work is also really really good for our brains' health. After all, our
brains are another part of our bodies. They need practice, too. Learning new things; exploring new domains is apparently a great way to keep them resilient. By learning about how different kinds of movement practice can develop different properties of the complex systems that we are, we exercise our brains and improve our wellbeing. We can test and refine a practice for ourselves to become our optimal selves. Work with a coach yes, but have questions, too.
Indeed, in my experience folks who build successful life-lasting, resilient movement practices also develop knowledge around those practices so they can (a) get off someone else's program that may or may not be effective for them over the long haul and (b)begin to build and explore and evaluate/test their own approach to movement and wellbeing.
1) to be human is to move. Movement works more than joints; it helps our brains; helps regulate hormones, related to how we feel; how we eat; how we sleep; how we engage with others.
2) To move more - that is change for many of us, and for a change to become not a change but normal, a habit, a part of our lives, we need lots of reps. To create the space for those reps to happen, we need daily movement practice - and since the more we move the more natural and human we are, moving many times within a day is optimal. More reps is both better for our bodies and helps create the change wiring, forming the habit.
3) To give ourselves the best chance of success with a new habit, like moving more, we are most effective when we plan our strategy in advance: what are we going to do, when? what do we need to address in order to make sure that time can happen/will not be put at risk? What is our back up plan if Plan A falls through? Plan, schedule and protect that time for ourselves.
4) To make sure we keep going with our practice, what we do has to be gaged to hit a level of effort that enables us both to make progress and not kill ourselves. We need - as part of our plan - to start lighter than we think we need and ramp up progress from there.
5) To make sure we are making effective use of our precious movement time, keeping a log lets us reflect on the success of our practice, as well as reality check whether it is what we think it is.
6) Especially when starting out - play / exploration - is an optimal course. Try out as many skills as we can. If we don't like something - like a ball sport - find out why - it may be a vision issue (can't catch? get a vision (not an eye) check). Even if we have a practice we particularly like, spice it up with variety of movement. That all gets back to point one: we move in many ways - make sure our movement practice moves like a human too.
7) To ensure we can "own" our practice, and engage our brains in our practice, committing to learning about what's happening in our bodies with our movement is a Good Thing, too.
If we follow these 7 points, we will "get in shape" - and more - we'll stay in shape for the rest of our lives. That's a bold claim, but also inevitable: we repeat what we enjoy. Finding a path that is stimulating, pleasurable, repeatable - it's all good. We may find periods where we move less and know we don't like it; we need to get back into moving more; we learn that's where our happy place is. If we have never experienced that yet, this is why it's important to start with consistency of movement, blend in fun and challenge to keep us engaged, sufficiently challenged and improving. This is why we have to make a commitment to ourselves to keep searching till we find a path that engages us.
Once we have something we're doing, or many things we're exploring, every rep is an opportunity to practice, to learn, to re-wire, to adapt, to get better to keep moving. The more reps we find in a day, the more attention we pay to the quality and shape of each rep (hence a coach to ensure quality is entrained) the more we learn the faster the better, the smarter. It's just the way it goes.
Caveat: This 7 point approach to "move more" and get to moving at LEAST 300 minutes a week is not a "minimal effective dose"approach - or what we might call not the best we can do but the least we can get away with. The goal here is not to move the least possible to have a benefit - but to move as MUCH as possible, as to move is wholly human.
Quite frankly, i don't know how one would decide what a "minimal effective dose" of movement is. And why do we want to try to find the least we can get away with rather than the best we can do for ourselves and so be our best for ourselves and those in our lives? Sure we have limited time, but few of us have explored deliberately how we might optimise our opportunities to move. Why not give ourselves that chance to explore that potential?
To get in shape, we just need to move more and better as we go.
To move more,
Prepare, plan, commit, do, learn.
Rinse
Repeat
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Getting (back) in shape: How begin the begine? Have you experienced this effect when making a sortie into getting back into some kind of fitness space? You do your first workout, see what you can do, and are so gassed by it you think heck, you'll only be able to do this once a week - till you get stronger. Maybe once a year. Or maybe you feel you'll never go back; that was horrible. Totally understandable. Totally reasonable to think gosh so much for my plans to work out several times a week; i need to build up to that. So i'll work out once or twice a week instead. After all finding time to work out more frequently is a challenge, anyway.
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| source of photo |
In the following post, i'm going to argue that a first order of business in any get in shape program is, in the beginning in particular, to think less about intensity (ie working out "hard" one or more times a week) and more about frequency (more TIME in movement is better). I'm going to make seven points about this daily approach to in-shape-ness, that build upon each other, as guidelines for the approach. One for every day of the week, perhaps:
- To move is to be human; practice being human as frequently as possible by moving as much as possible in a day.
- To sustain movement, create it as a habit. To create a habit - something done autonomously, effortlessly - takes thousands of reps - frequent "movement snacks" a la Frank Forencich helps get the reps up.
- To succeed, plan-ify: first, plan ahead; second, plan a plan b. Resilience is Plan B.
- To continue, start lighter than expected and respect recovery.
- To develop, keep a record. Records can be lightweight: what is sufficient to be useful?
- To understand, play. Taking time to explore all sorts of movement experiences is a huge win.
- To thrive, include the brain in practice. Learn about the body; challenge the brain.
Fundamental: make the TIME for movement: practice doing that; then move within the time.
1. To Move is Human
One thing people have in common who want to get in shape is lack of time under movement. We work at a desk or at a single machine; we move about in the house or work place a bit, but we're not spending deliberate time "in movement."A first strategy of a workout program, rather than focusing on a specific activity like lifting a lot of weight or swimming the english channel might be the more mundane but powerfully effective target simply to "move more." Consistently. Daily.
For more reasons than we can count here, simply moving *more* than we do now is a potent target for just about anyone reading this post (including its author). From anecdotes of coaches to research about physical and cognitive practice, it seems the more we move, the happier we are in our performance, from body compoisition to intellectual performance. Yes, we perform more intelligently the more we move (the opposite is also true - so if we're sedentary for years at a time, we're not only not getting younger, we're getting stupid-er (see the Whitehall study)). For the brain, movement with our heart rate elevated is very good. For body comp, it seems moving 5 hours a week minimum of movement/activity correlates with greater happiness about body shape (one ref on this topic).
If we accpet this premise to "move more" first, rather than "lift heavy" or "swim/run far" as our founding premise of wellbeing or of getting in shapeliness, then our strategy shifts from "i must get to the gym X times per week" to preparing for a sustainable movement practice. If it's daily, we need to be able to recover from it to keep doing it. Going crazy is not an initial option. Consistency and Persistence is the biggie. Please note, i do not mean get a cardio program (ie, lots of running or swimming or similar as opposed to lifting weights or sprinting or interval stuff). I mean MOVEMENT.
Practice Variety. Push ups are movements; dancing is movement. Walking is movement. Olympic lifting is movement. Throwing a discuss or frisbee is movement. Moving as many joints as possible in a movement is movement. The more variety of kinds of movement that we practice, it seems, the better off we are in terms of engaging not just our joints but our vision and balance systems as well. Moving harder and less hard also important. It seems we're wired for variety, hence the need to practice variety.
Daily Practice: I Move More. This focus on daily practice can be quite liberating. We have a whole ton of choice - of anything counts. Whether that practice is walking, running, going upstairs, skipping, mobility work, playing frisbee doesn't really matter: it's that we have said we will do SOME movement everyday and we do it. We'll look at how to ensure the practice leads to progressive development, in part 4, below.
2. Building up a Practice-as-Habit
REmember the body comp stat of 300 minutes a week to feel good about one's body? If 300 movement minutes sounds a bit daunting for starters, that's understandable too. Change can be pain. No joke: changing patterns of behaviour is rewiring the brain. Change of established patterns takes work. And lots and lots of practice. So making it possible to get many reps in is another aspect of daily practice. We simply need the time to build the reps to make the change to sustain the habit, to do the re-wiring in the brain.It's a fact that when we're stressed we go to what we've practiced most. If we've practiced being innert more than we've practiced movement, that's our likely go-to place when we often need the exact opposite: movement helps blow off stress (it's hormonal: fight or flight responses mean MOVE; when we don't move those signals keep coming on; move/exercise/get the heart up - we signal we get it; we're responding; the signals change; we feel better).
Thus, the first part of true and enduring get in shape work, it seems, is to accept it into our hearts as a necessary and good thing to do - that we see it as fundamental to be moving more - that that is the natural state; being so sedentary is not natural at all. We who neither reap nor sow. Nor hunt nor build. Living in the head, the digital ALL the time would not too long ago be perceived as a disease state, where our inertia would be pitied, and where if rich we'd be shoved up to the mountains to take The Cure.
So yes, no. 1: accepting that to be human is to move; and if we want to experience our humanness we may want to move a little more, (eat a little less). To move more, we need to habituate movement into our lives. That means lots of practice.
The next point deals with how to get all those reps.
No. 3 In the Plan is Perfection; in Plan B is resilience.
Plan for Success. One of the biggest reasons the best laid plans of mice and would be athletes fail is that we don't plan for success - most often because we don't know how. Here's a few tips to help get a new practice in gear. To paraphrase Martha Beck from the Four Day Win (uk | us), plan four days ahead, rather than leaping in at this moment. Give yourself permission to start your new movement program four days from now. Think,where might movement begin, not today, but four days from now? And with that question we can ask, what road blocks can i anticipate? Knowing these, how make the path clear for day four, for say 20 mins. of action? Does that mean 4 blocks of five minutes each? two blocks of ten? to do what? Walk? do push ups? mobility work?Block out the Time: Make a Promise to Yourself - and keep it. Plan ahead, write it down; talk with whomever you need to talk with who might need to know this is what you're doing so they know, this is what you're doing. To borrow from Steven Covey's First Things First (uk | us), why not put those times for movement practice into the calendar before the week starts?
When we make appointments with ourselves, Coveys' argument goes, we show respect for ourselves. We honour ourselves. That time becomes as important as appointments we set with anyone else. Covey also has this lovely notion that we can't say no to something until we have something to which we're saying yes. If we are committed to being human, and thus to movement; if we get that to move we need to make it a habit, and that to make a habit we need lots of reps, then finding the time to make movement happen in order to get those reps will be a natural YES priority. AND that movement practice will help us be more alive, more present and more successfully present in our engagement with others, as well. Thus, our movement practice times are protected, scheduled and
Making the time to move also throws open many more options than any pre-canned workout program. Movement - rather than a workout program - lets us think about doing something that is natural every day. Some folks have a hard time initially with thinking about "doing a workout" every day. No kidding. That sounds daunting. But moving every day? what's the alternative? be innert every day? is that a desired state to NOT move daily? And yet, if you put a pedometer on many of us, that's exactly what you'll see: we move very little. So actually, it's often pretty easy to move more.
WHAT COUNTS as MOVEMENT?- Generally speaking ANY deliberate movement where we bring our minds to the fact that we are moving is better than not. So mobility work where we go through each joint in our body to explore range of motion (like r-phase and i-phase movement templates, links about these approaches, below), that's great for many reasons written about elsewhere.
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| Mobility Work Example: Eric Cobb demo'ing cross body figure 8's in the z-health Neural Warm Up |
Validate Movement: Check Seated and Standing Heart Rates. That's easy to test: check your heart rate seated at rest for a bit; check it when standing for a minute or two. Check it after you've walked a bit; check it after you've walked up a flight or two of stairs - get some sense of your body's responses to movement.
Plan a Plan B: Resilience is having a back up plan
Something important to have within these spaces is what's a back up plan for an activity if the main one falls through? suppose it's raining and that scotches planned outdoor play for the day? what will put movement into that 30-60 minute slot in its place? Mobility work? bodyweight practice? what are the alternatives?Having a movement plan B means we're rarely taken by surprise.
No. 4 start lighter than expected and respect recovery
When going at something new - like a DAILY movement practice - find out what level of intensity can be sustained for daily practice - we have the rest of our lives - to get more intense. The focus of practice building is to build - in this case, to build skills and habits for a lifetime. And again, the biggie here is often preparing the way for the practice to happen,making appointments with ourselves, and then filling the time with the activity.The Unbearable Lightness of Sustainability
When we start a movement practice, we can pick a small unit of time - say five minutes. We can propose to walk around the block at a pace where it's easy-ish to keep a conversation going, but not effortless. Let's say that that may seem, after that walk, to have been pretty easy - but
a) how long did it take?
b) what's our post-walk heart rate?
c) what's our heart rate a minute after the walk is finished?
If the goal was to move for five minutes, and the round block walk took five or likely more minutes, and the heart rate after the walk is above standing rate, and a minute later it's closer to standing rate, that is a huge success.
It's a huge success because
1) we scheduled it AND did it - check on keeping a committment
2) we learned something about ourselves in terms of walking pace for five minutes
3) our recovery heart rate shows we didn't over do it
4) we know we can do it again - we have a building block
5) we also have measures for progress:
- time taken to walk a specific distance
- distance travelled
- heart rate at close of event
- recovery rate inside a minute
- success rate at keeping a promise to ourselves
No 5. Progress means Understanding: Keep a Record
Especially while we are developing our practice, keeping a log means that we are keeping it real. A record is evidence that we are keeping our commitment; a record especially early on in practice helps us reflect on what works and what needs work. A record helps us craft deliberate intent. When we put something into words, we reify the practice: it becomes cognitive; it frames our attention. Going through intent to learn - making something new as cognitive as possible it seems - helps to craft it into something that can become - eventually - more reflexive.
The above list of elements in No. 4 about date, time planned; time taken; heart rates - are all simple examples of what can go into a log.
No. 6 - play: it's a learning experience
Play is a terrific part of beginning a movement practice. As i'm arguing, we don't have to have a "workout program" from day one: we just need to plan to move more. Indeed, more exploration is better. More types of movement is better. Walking one day, doing push ups (off the wall or knees if full ones are not accessible), exploring jogging another, bowling another, frisbee another, swimming another, baseball another, lifting weights - it's all good and fine.Plans: For many of us, though, we find it easier to develop a movement practice if we plan time ahead for what we're going to do. That's grand. A plan can be - kick a football around outside for half an hour monday; hack around playing squash with a friend for 45mins tues. Push baby in stroller for twenty minutes at a fast-ish clip twice on wed. Swing a light kettlebell for 100 reps total and do 100 wall push ups total for thurs. Take an olympic lifting class friday, recover saturday. Go for a long walk with partner sunday trying flexible shoes that pass the twist test. That's six days of mixed movement. And as long as we're checking those measures of time and heart rate, we have a really cheap way to see what progress we're making, like - i can do the round the block faster and with a lower heart rate and greater recovery this week than last week. That's progress. Time to look at maybe going a bit further or a bit longer. Or a bit harder.
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| running in uber-flexible xero shoes |
If we've already decided what our skill sets are going to be - say working with a kettlebell - then super. There are many approaches and schedules out there for practicing kettlebells. If these call for a three day a week schedule, grand. Since to Move is Human, and we want to be Human every day, what will we do on the other days to continue learning about how our bodies move, and to keep moving, to keep up a daily practice of Being Human?
The great thing about movement is we have so many options to find a skill practice that engages our attention sufficiently to keep us from being bored, to keep us engaged and improving. What will that be? Every rep is a learning opportunity: how do we engage our practice to feel like we're learning, doing, having fun?
(At least once in awhile) Get a Coach: I've said this before: everyone needs a coach. Once you've found something you enjoy, do yourself a favour and talk with folks for recommendations about a coach. Find out how to carry out the movements of your sport as effectively as possible. Find the smartest person you can with the best experience and manner. Engage with them about checking your technique. Excellent coaches will not try to do everything at once, but the right thing for now to let you enjoy your practice more. Each time you come back will be a retune to help you get that much further along. This is an affordable, effective way to reduce injury risk and improve performance and pleasure.
No. 7 Respect the Brain While Respecting the Body
One more aspect of building a movement practice is to learn about our bodies and brains and how one interacts with the other. For instance,- i've stated that we need to build up time in movement and need to get our heart rates up to a certain level. How come? What about time and heart rate is important?
- I've also suggested that watching for improvements like getting more distance in in shorter time with a lower heart rate is a sign of progress. Progress of what?
- I've also suggested that exploring many types of movement from game play on a field to lifting weights is good not just for our joints, but for our vision and balance, too. How's that?
- And best, i've suggested that research shows exercise contributes directly to cognitive performance. People who move are smarter than those who don't. What's going on with that?
Never Surrender An approach many folks have is actually to trust someone else to put them through a "program" for x period of time to achieve a specific result. They tend to surrender to the other person the understanding of the process and trust them to get them from a to b, and that getting to B is a great thing to do. Maybe it is; maybe it isn't. How would we judge that beyond the claims of the packaging without having some grounded undesrtanding of how our body adapts to movement? And sure, it's understandable starting out: we just want a plan to get going and feel better. We want to believe There's a Program for That. This desire has helped sell an awful lot of fitness DVDs (like p90x, anyone?). That doesn't mean Programs per se are bad. But yes i will go so far as to say, just doing a program and not delving into what its assumptions are, and whether or not they're valid, is lazy. How many folks have accepted P90X's claim about "muscle confusion" for why P90X claims it is better than any other program? if you don't know what that claim is - really it's ok (though if you're really interested, a critique is linked below). My point is that we bring incredible skepticism to many product claims, but programs, especially when we like the sound of their claims (ripped in 90 days, for example), not so much it seems.
Learning more about how our bodies work is also really really good for our brains' health. After all, our
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| 7th edition of McArdle and team's Exercise Physiology: Great place to begin exploring the what and how of movement |
Indeed, in my experience folks who build successful life-lasting, resilient movement practices also develop knowledge around those practices so they can (a) get off someone else's program that may or may not be effective for them over the long haul and (b)begin to build and explore and evaluate/test their own approach to movement and wellbeing.
In SUM: To move is human; to move more feels devine.
To review:1) to be human is to move. Movement works more than joints; it helps our brains; helps regulate hormones, related to how we feel; how we eat; how we sleep; how we engage with others.
2) To move more - that is change for many of us, and for a change to become not a change but normal, a habit, a part of our lives, we need lots of reps. To create the space for those reps to happen, we need daily movement practice - and since the more we move the more natural and human we are, moving many times within a day is optimal. More reps is both better for our bodies and helps create the change wiring, forming the habit.
3) To give ourselves the best chance of success with a new habit, like moving more, we are most effective when we plan our strategy in advance: what are we going to do, when? what do we need to address in order to make sure that time can happen/will not be put at risk? What is our back up plan if Plan A falls through? Plan, schedule and protect that time for ourselves.
4) To make sure we keep going with our practice, what we do has to be gaged to hit a level of effort that enables us both to make progress and not kill ourselves. We need - as part of our plan - to start lighter than we think we need and ramp up progress from there.
5) To make sure we are making effective use of our precious movement time, keeping a log lets us reflect on the success of our practice, as well as reality check whether it is what we think it is.
6) Especially when starting out - play / exploration - is an optimal course. Try out as many skills as we can. If we don't like something - like a ball sport - find out why - it may be a vision issue (can't catch? get a vision (not an eye) check). Even if we have a practice we particularly like, spice it up with variety of movement. That all gets back to point one: we move in many ways - make sure our movement practice moves like a human too.
7) To ensure we can "own" our practice, and engage our brains in our practice, committing to learning about what's happening in our bodies with our movement is a Good Thing, too.
If we follow these 7 points, we will "get in shape" - and more - we'll stay in shape for the rest of our lives. That's a bold claim, but also inevitable: we repeat what we enjoy. Finding a path that is stimulating, pleasurable, repeatable - it's all good. We may find periods where we move less and know we don't like it; we need to get back into moving more; we learn that's where our happy place is. If we have never experienced that yet, this is why it's important to start with consistency of movement, blend in fun and challenge to keep us engaged, sufficiently challenged and improving. This is why we have to make a commitment to ourselves to keep searching till we find a path that engages us.
Once we have something we're doing, or many things we're exploring, every rep is an opportunity to practice, to learn, to re-wire, to adapt, to get better to keep moving. The more reps we find in a day, the more attention we pay to the quality and shape of each rep (hence a coach to ensure quality is entrained) the more we learn the faster the better, the smarter. It's just the way it goes.
Caveat: This 7 point approach to "move more" and get to moving at LEAST 300 minutes a week is not a "minimal effective dose"approach - or what we might call not the best we can do but the least we can get away with. The goal here is not to move the least possible to have a benefit - but to move as MUCH as possible, as to move is wholly human.
Quite frankly, i don't know how one would decide what a "minimal effective dose" of movement is. And why do we want to try to find the least we can get away with rather than the best we can do for ourselves and so be our best for ourselves and those in our lives? Sure we have limited time, but few of us have explored deliberately how we might optimise our opportunities to move. Why not give ourselves that chance to explore that potential?
Full Motion: Herman Cornejo executes a seeming impossible
double tours en l’air as part of David Michalek's slow dancing project.
double tours en l’air as part of David Michalek's slow dancing project.
To get in shape, we just need to move more and better as we go.
To move more,
Prepare, plan, commit, do, learn.
Rinse
Repeat
Related Posts:
- Rphase, not your daddy's joint mobility program
- becoming bullet proof: iphase
- Hormones: the body's middle managers
- Intent to Learn/ Deliberate Practice
- Motivation: it's a decision
- Full Health: Movement, Recovery, Socialising, Nutrition, Cognition
- P90X - i come not to bury P90X but to contextualise it
- Move or Die
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Thursday, May 2, 2013
M'eye New Workout Reset: eye work as active recovery
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Two questions: Do you do "active recovery" as part of your workout practice? Do you include eye workouts as part of your practice? To the second question first: if you don't yet do formal eye workout practice, that may be based on a belief that our vision quality is fixed, or that change can only happen in the negative, and eyesight only get worse. Well why would this one part of the body be different than every other part where we are maleable/plastic and where deliberate practice helps performance? And if some stuff is fixed, there seem to be other parts of vision that are sufficiently cognitive and that can be improved through practice that our visual acuity can improve through work, given enough reps.
Indeed, here's a question: might glasses be seen as orthotics of the eye?
A critique of orthotics is that they use an appliance as a near permanent mechanism to address some "fault" in one's gait, rather than doing the movement work to address the issue (if it is an issue). The orthotic used this way assumes really that we are not plastic, that a chronic condition is fixed by perpetual appliance use; it is not imagined where the issue addressed at the foot by the orthotic may stem from and be addressed at another location or locations, and that chage is possible. Chat with someone with orthotics and see if they think their orthotics are temporary while they do work to improve their foot found issue or permanent. For b2d readers who may have done work to shuck the shodded way, can we imagine translating this way of thinking to vision work and self-spectacling. Can we now re-member our plasticity in vision. And will doing so make us stronger? Not just spiritually, but physically.
(aside - speaking of awesome plasticity - one of the curators at MOMA, Paola Antonelli, giving a talk at a human computer interaction conference said some neurologists are going against the efforts to reduce phantom limb syndrome in order to use those limb sensations to help better connect with various new kinds of prostheses - a sort of cyborg plasticity)
There are two other articles in this space: one shows that blood lactate is cleared by active recovery - to which i say, so what? This article was written at a time when blood lactate was still thought to be in some circles a contributor to muscle fatigue (ref 3, pdf), and not actually as is more the view now (see anything by brooks), another muscle fuel, so clearing it, not such a big deal perhaps; muscle recovery is more about calcium leaking etc etc. And proof in the pudding: another study that looked at post match performance this time by guys playing rugby had no physiological benefit (ref 4)- it didn't harm performance but that's not the same as saying it benefited physiological performance. It did have a psychological benefit, of helping athletes to relax in the post-whole-game context. Where i've been looking at active recovery is to explore this relaxation-as-recovery between sets when lifting weight. Especially on "heavy" days when my goal is more good reps; fewer fails on near max efforts.
Hence eye work. The main activity is in the eyes, and to have good eye responses means relaxing the eyes; relaxing the eyes seems also to have a soothing effect on the body, not to say relaxed to the state of cooked noodle, but toned down. It is to de-effort the body while deliberately practicing a skill, in this case, vision, which also requires de-efforting (overview of eye work relaxation practice here).
Prep for Next Rep. Eye work consequently seems super for real, between-set physiological recovery. Relaxing the eyes, getting clearer sight seems to correlate very nicely with readiness for next rep. I am keen to wire this up for repiration, muscle activation, heart rate etc, but raw checks, coupled with successful rep performance, and record of perceived exertion seem to suggest something good may be happening here.
I'll do my set, log it, and then look at a chart (or more recently (a) try to look THROUGH the chart, past the letters and (b) NOT try to translate the glyphs to letters in my head. That is to avoid saying that's an D that's a C) during my recovery and often wait for the chart to come into focus. Spending on the workout, recovery may be 30secs to three minutes. I don't put a clock on this, but when I log my set, I have a button that I hit to time stamp the set, so I'm fascinated by how recovery is felt in my body seems to correlate largely with expected times.
What has been interesting to see improvement is being able to read slides during presentations better. These are live tests of all sorts of things, from contrast to color to font effectiveness - as well as time: how quickly can i get a fix on the slide to read it before it's changed to the next slide? It's the fact that i have gone from not reading slides - letting them wash over me - to getting more from them - that gives me a sense that there is some cognitive adaptation occurring if not physical adaptation occurring.
Anyone, it seems, can do vision work and likely all of us can benefit from it, just as we do from active mobility. If you have 20/20 vision, why not go for 20/10? Or work on saccades speed? Saccade work is in no small part about target re-acquisition - which in turn can be a big part of sport performance. Like running down a field and having to look away from that frisbee in flight and then re-finding it to catch it. Focus change speed is also a good one.
If you want to explore this space of recovery, why not hang up a few charts - change the space between them - and use that recovery period between sets for doing some vision work?
Again, i've just touched on one aspect of vision training. I'll be keen to hear what you discover after a month of practice, not only in your sets, but in your daily vision experience.
Andersson H, Raastad T, Nilsson J, Paulsen G, Garthe I, & Kadi F (2008). Neuromuscular fatigue and recovery in elite female soccer: effects of active recovery. Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 40 (2), 372-80 PMID: 18202563
Davis WJ, Wood DT, Andrews RG, Elkind LM, & Davis WB (2008). Elimination of delayed-onset muscle soreness by pre-resistance cardioacceleration before each set. Journal of strength and conditioning research / National Strength & Conditioning Association, 22 (1), 212-25 PMID: 18296978
Micklewright, D., Beneke, R., Gladwell, V., & Sellens, M. (2003). BLOOD LACTATE REMOVAL USING COMBINED MASSAGE AND ACTIVE RECOVERY Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 35 (Supplement 1) DOI: 10.1097/00005768-200305001-01755
Suzuki M, Umeda T, Nakaji S, Shimoyama T, Mashiko T, & Sugawara K (2004). Effect of incorporating low intensity exercise into the recovery period after a rugby match. British journal of sports medicine, 38 (4), 436-40 PMID: 15273179
Near Far drills: focus switching work
Eye Massage
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Indeed, here's a question: might glasses be seen as orthotics of the eye?
A critique of orthotics is that they use an appliance as a near permanent mechanism to address some "fault" in one's gait, rather than doing the movement work to address the issue (if it is an issue). The orthotic used this way assumes really that we are not plastic, that a chronic condition is fixed by perpetual appliance use; it is not imagined where the issue addressed at the foot by the orthotic may stem from and be addressed at another location or locations, and that chage is possible. Chat with someone with orthotics and see if they think their orthotics are temporary while they do work to improve their foot found issue or permanent. For b2d readers who may have done work to shuck the shodded way, can we imagine translating this way of thinking to vision work and self-spectacling. Can we now re-member our plasticity in vision. And will doing so make us stronger? Not just spiritually, but physically.
(aside - speaking of awesome plasticity - one of the curators at MOMA, Paola Antonelli, giving a talk at a human computer interaction conference said some neurologists are going against the efforts to reduce phantom limb syndrome in order to use those limb sensations to help better connect with various new kinds of prostheses - a sort of cyborg plasticity)
Plastic Vision
If thinking about eye practice is new, let me tell you about how/where I put eye practice into my workout space: it's my new active recovery between sets.A New Active Recovery
If you do strength work in particular and have longer recovery breaks between sets, what are you going to do? Some work suggests that keeping moving between sets - not just stopping cold - is a great idea; or likewise after some physical activity, do some kind of warm down to "recover". So called active recovery. The jury is out it seems on the benefits of active recovery: after a soccer match, active recovery didn't do much for elite women players (ref 1, below) but keeping the heart rate up between sets of resistance training seemed to help eliminate DOMS (ref 2, below). Not a huge endorsement of active recovery, is it?There are two other articles in this space: one shows that blood lactate is cleared by active recovery - to which i say, so what? This article was written at a time when blood lactate was still thought to be in some circles a contributor to muscle fatigue (ref 3, pdf), and not actually as is more the view now (see anything by brooks), another muscle fuel, so clearing it, not such a big deal perhaps; muscle recovery is more about calcium leaking etc etc. And proof in the pudding: another study that looked at post match performance this time by guys playing rugby had no physiological benefit (ref 4)- it didn't harm performance but that's not the same as saying it benefited physiological performance. It did have a psychological benefit, of helping athletes to relax in the post-whole-game context. Where i've been looking at active recovery is to explore this relaxation-as-recovery between sets when lifting weight. Especially on "heavy" days when my goal is more good reps; fewer fails on near max efforts.
Hence eye work. The main activity is in the eyes, and to have good eye responses means relaxing the eyes; relaxing the eyes seems also to have a soothing effect on the body, not to say relaxed to the state of cooked noodle, but toned down. It is to de-effort the body while deliberately practicing a skill, in this case, vision, which also requires de-efforting (overview of eye work relaxation practice here).
Prep for Next Rep. Eye work consequently seems super for real, between-set physiological recovery. Relaxing the eyes, getting clearer sight seems to correlate very nicely with readiness for next rep. I am keen to wire this up for repiration, muscle activation, heart rate etc, but raw checks, coupled with successful rep performance, and record of perceived exertion seem to suggest something good may be happening here.
What to Do?
So do what in the recovery break? My focus is on better faster focus at distance (seeing more clearly, consistently, faster, from further away). So what I do is hang up two different vision charts, side by side, scald for where I stand away from these charts in a room. |
| using an eye chart (c.o./ i-see.org) set up on an ipad when working out on the road. personally, i find hanging up paper copies scaled for 7' and 10' more flexible |
Improving Performance
Eye movement can help improve focus/visual clarity, in that the movement seems to help bring a chart into better focus, faster. To trigger such movement, I'll look at a line on one chart and look at a line or letter on a line in the other chart, doing a type of saccades work, going back and forth. I'll also use orientation, so align myself side on to the chart, and turn my head to the chart. What I keep noticing is that my head position has an effect on what my eyes are doing. Surprise, eh? But it's not a consistent effect. Sometimes tilting my head back seems to improve focus; sometimes it doesn't. What I wonder is if the quality of focus achieved is related to how effectively relaxed or recovered I may be. I don't know why these differences. But there they are.Many options, like many lifts; many ways to practice vision.
A quick note about vision practice. I'm describing one type, like one might work on few strength movements. There are a range of practices around vision like target acquisition, like practicing range of motion -- stretching the main six eye muscles by exploring focus change of near far or extreme ish ranges. Also Eric Cobb at a Speed course introduced a bunch of us to Contrast Sensitivity and more recently similar training of same. Yes there's even an app for that. I admit i haven't practiced with the app because i work out in a room that has daylight streaming in. In the UK, where it goes from cloudy to fleeting sunny, i do get quite a bit of contrast sensitivity work - no kidding - just from the dynamic lighting conditions both as time passes - so sun angle - and from changeable light conditions. If you want to see the difference light makes to visual acuity, give yourself a treat and make sure you try a snellen chart on white paper experience in bright sunshine. Amazing.Pain and Gain?
Something I notice from time to time and don't know what's going on with this, is that as the chart comes into focus - so seeing better - there will actually be pain in the eye, like an eyelash poking right in or across the eye, and I have to close my eyes to recover. I hate this. I hate losing that clarity. What is that pain? Is it change? Is it not enough warm up? What is it? Why is it? Doesn't happen all the time, and I don't yet have a pattern for consistently invoking this (this is not eye strain by the way, and my eye exams are fine: no monster hiding in brain or eyeball).Long term change?
What I've noticed from eye work practice is that I can perform seeing better, more effectively because I've learned that if I give myself time to focus, I can often see stuff, at least for longer periods, sufficient to do sense making.What has been interesting to see improvement is being able to read slides during presentations better. These are live tests of all sorts of things, from contrast to color to font effectiveness - as well as time: how quickly can i get a fix on the slide to read it before it's changed to the next slide? It's the fact that i have gone from not reading slides - letting them wash over me - to getting more from them - that gives me a sense that there is some cognitive adaptation occurring if not physical adaptation occurring.
Amazement: i can see clearly now - at least for a moment.
What amazes me still is that in my practice, I have these moments of utter clarity, alignment, pure focus. It's a beautiful thing, and I see lines on the chart that are smaller than ever. Wow. Easily. For moments. What is that? It shows me that I can see well. It suggests to me that something is happening with my brain and vision to be sure. What's happening is still er, unclear, to me. But it does happen, and my naive goal is to have that happen more and longer.Recap: Eye workouts as active recovery.
Recovery time in between workout sets seems tailor made as a space to carry out vision practice, whether this is for range of motion work, near far drills, or what i've been doing: working on visual distance/focus performance.Anyone, it seems, can do vision work and likely all of us can benefit from it, just as we do from active mobility. If you have 20/20 vision, why not go for 20/10? Or work on saccades speed? Saccade work is in no small part about target re-acquisition - which in turn can be a big part of sport performance. Like running down a field and having to look away from that frisbee in flight and then re-finding it to catch it. Focus change speed is also a good one.
If you want to explore this space of recovery, why not hang up a few charts - change the space between them - and use that recovery period between sets for doing some vision work?
Again, i've just touched on one aspect of vision training. I'll be keen to hear what you discover after a month of practice, not only in your sets, but in your daily vision experience.
Refs
Andersson H, Raastad T, Nilsson J, Paulsen G, Garthe I, & Kadi F (2008). Neuromuscular fatigue and recovery in elite female soccer: effects of active recovery. Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 40 (2), 372-80 PMID: 18202563 Davis WJ, Wood DT, Andrews RG, Elkind LM, & Davis WB (2008). Elimination of delayed-onset muscle soreness by pre-resistance cardioacceleration before each set. Journal of strength and conditioning research / National Strength & Conditioning Association, 22 (1), 212-25 PMID: 18296978
Micklewright, D., Beneke, R., Gladwell, V., & Sellens, M. (2003). BLOOD LACTATE REMOVAL USING COMBINED MASSAGE AND ACTIVE RECOVERY Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 35 (Supplement 1) DOI: 10.1097/00005768-200305001-01755
Suzuki M, Umeda T, Nakaji S, Shimoyama T, Mashiko T, & Sugawara K (2004). Effect of incorporating low intensity exercise into the recovery period after a rugby match. British journal of sports medicine, 38 (4), 436-40 PMID: 15273179
Related b2d Posts
Vision clarity work: taking TIME to focusNear Far drills: focus switching work
Eye Massage
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Monday, April 22, 2013
Focus on Manual Skill or Action to Restore Slightly Shredded Soul
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This is the unexpected story of working to find a path to restore some shredded soul, not through power lifting masses of weights, or sprinting all out till wiped out, but through Sharpening knives, grinding coffee beans - both by hand - making espresso on the stove, latte art - all manual, all small tasks, small skill focus, all about practice of motor learning or just small motor actions as a quest to reduce stress right now.
Often, working out sits in this place, but i feel a little too drained right now for that, except for light runs. Seems there may be a reason - or at least a good thing happening - neurologically - in finding practices that focus, soothe and restore.
Here's a possible connexion: - working on motor SKILLS (like juggling) [ref 1, below] or on abstract information gathering, like language learning [ref 2 below] seems to change the shape of the brain - in particular the grey matter around certain regions. These changes are positive - i've talked about them before in relation to thinking about holistic rather than just physical wellbeing. These studies highlight our plasticity - that we can constantly get better, more resilient.
To quote from the first study (juggling) from Nature, 2004
So if practicing a motor skill is also a soothing activity, perhaps this is doubly good for getting to a restorative place? Restoration, after all, is key to function.
Why this focus.- all because i find i cannot concentrate nor workout today.
I had watched the women's race of the marathon, and the start of the men's; went to lunch and then back over to the lab at MIT, where, on a skype with a colleague, i was told "heh, there's been some kind of explosion at the Marathon" - no way - maybe it's a gas thing.
We went on with our skype. When i got home that evening, we learned the news about the explosions being bombs.
On thursday night, when i got back home from the lab, i thought, dang, i've left my power cord over there, i'll head back - no wait, my card key's got a problem with the outside door - i'll get it in the morning.
This is the lab where i work when at MIT
I love this building. Those green awnings are where we head in and out of the place.
This is the same place - one of the less gruesome photos (source)- of Thurs night/friday morning
These are some of the alerts on campus April 18/19th as the City shut down (click to enlarge).
.png)
Back in the Familiar:
It also felt good to do something manual, focused, skilful, that has an immediate, testable result.
Then - staying manua,l but less skillful - this example is even more manual than i hit, but looks intriguing, no?
More Meditative; Less Skill; Still Manual
Here's an even more manual version of coffee grinding than what i did, but i could see how this would feel good on a slightly warmer day (zip to about 2:27 in on the vid)
If you truly wish to pause, have all the time in the world, and with to enjoy some lovely engineering - here's an example from Orphan Espresso where a grinder is machined and built by hand around the best burr in the business for grinding. Ingenious design solutions. If you're interested in why burrs rather than blades for beans, that's an interesting story, too. Stumptown, New York Roasters that do coffee for my fave Boston Coffee Place, Thinking Cup, has a nice explanation in Step One here
Wasn't that a totally awesome geek out on coffee meets machine intrigue? Wow.
And that's soothing.
I hope if you're feeling stressed you can be gentle with yourself (as per Gary's suggestion), pause and find gentle practices to restore your soul, too.
Thanks for letting me share this on going experience with you. IT's so odd to feel woven into the fabric of this experience. A fluke of timing. And now etched. Grind Grind Grind, working it in; letting it go. Breathing.
This is going to take some time....and one of the biggest challenges: me being ok with that. At least my brain/gray matter should be happier with that process.
thanks again to Amy van der Heil for her care via positive focus, and Gary Ralph Music for his care in just stepping out with a Good Suggestion.
This is the unexpected story of working to find a path to restore some shredded soul, not through power lifting masses of weights, or sprinting all out till wiped out, but through Sharpening knives, grinding coffee beans - both by hand - making espresso on the stove, latte art - all manual, all small tasks, small skill focus, all about practice of motor learning or just small motor actions as a quest to reduce stress right now.
Here's a possible connexion: - working on motor SKILLS (like juggling) [ref 1, below] or on abstract information gathering, like language learning [ref 2 below] seems to change the shape of the brain - in particular the grey matter around certain regions. These changes are positive - i've talked about them before in relation to thinking about holistic rather than just physical wellbeing. These studies highlight our plasticity - that we can constantly get better, more resilient.
To quote from the first study (juggling) from Nature, 2004
Our results contradict the traditionally held view that the anatomical structure of the adult human brain does not alter, except for changes in morphology caused by ageing or pathological conditions. Our findings indicate that learning-induced cortical plasticity is also reflected at a structural level.A recent study [ref 3 below] showed that stress reduction intervention work to reduce stress level also has grey matter structural changes, this time around the amygdala. You may have heard the expression "amygdala hijack" when dealing with fear/threat/stress - going all primal on ourselves rather than staying open and transcendent. Colleagues in neurology and business have been looking at how stress literally "eats" at the brain, too, in executives. Makes sense: if de-stressing builds up gray matter, stress could eat away at it. Ick.
So if practicing a motor skill is also a soothing activity, perhaps this is doubly good for getting to a restorative place? Restoration, after all, is key to function.
Why this focus.- all because i find i cannot concentrate nor workout today.
Event Horizons
For the past couple weeks i've been in Boston/MIT. Last week was a week no one expected.I had watched the women's race of the marathon, and the start of the men's; went to lunch and then back over to the lab at MIT, where, on a skype with a colleague, i was told "heh, there's been some kind of explosion at the Marathon" - no way - maybe it's a gas thing.
We went on with our skype. When i got home that evening, we learned the news about the explosions being bombs.
On thursday night, when i got back home from the lab, i thought, dang, i've left my power cord over there, i'll head back - no wait, my card key's got a problem with the outside door - i'll get it in the morning.
This is the lab where i work when at MIT
I love this building. Those green awnings are where we head in and out of the place.
These are some of the alerts on campus April 18/19th as the City shut down (click to enlarge).
.png)
Two colleagues who works in the same group volunteer to do radio support annually for the Marathon. They stayed in the first aid tent to help after the blast.
Context: Joy
On the Holiday Monday, just before the Marathon started, i'd ordered a marathon jacket from a fave regional sports store, because i loved the colors, was missing a windbreaker and thought, what the heck, it's a connection to the time and place, and support for this awesome event.
All over town the weekend of the marathon, runners were everywhere apparent. It felt great to be surrounded by this mix of athletes in such a public, democratic event. In the Boston Marathon, only times for one's age group and number of slots available are the determining factor. For less than 150, if you have a sufficient time, you're in. Apparently this year all the times of people in their slots were higher than the minimum so eligible people didn't get in - but at least that's skills based.
It's a pretty wonderful thing to see so many people moving it. Not everyone running on that saturday and sunday were marathoners; but you could tell that the atmosphere (and the clement weather) were adding that extra nudge to Be Human and Move as it were.
Post Event 1: Together, Tough, Resilient
All this past week post the blast, I think i'd been feeling ok - there's a kind of awesome toughness in Boston that people - at least those i encountered and folks at work - just refused to give into some F**** who set off these bombs. There is very much a town feeling. And energy. We take care of each other, and screw you for trying to hurt anyone of us - seems to be the vibe. Runners kept running during the week; work went on. A colleague, Amy van der Heil, kept us focusing on that positive energy in email responses and quiet conversations.
Post Event 2: More Surreal; Sense-making Shut Down
Thurs/Friday rather had an icicle effect on that resilience vibe. It's hard to imagine a bad scene like the marathon getting worse. It started to feel more like columbine and related than New York: two guys going Random, and taking out anyone in their path. No reason; no message. Town shut down to deal with this, finish it.
And then it was finished - more or less - focus on getting back home; on a plane this weekend. Tired. Fasting on the flight - short enough - no biggie; felt good to be a bit hungry.
Back in the Familiar:
Pause for the Jets; Going Manual Mode; Going Small scale
But today. Today supposed to be back in the zone, back at work: talk about hitting a wall. A kind colleague, Gary Ralph Music, suggested i just take some time; this is rather traumatic. Ya. Maybe that is a good idea. Pause to process. Thank you, Gary.
Which brings us to the manual work. Maybe that's more avoidance than process; maybe by focussing on the manual skills though, we push stuff otherwise in the pre-frontal cortex primary memory back into the parallel processor of sub-conscious activity where it can be processed faster, wordlessly. This is not denial? This is percolating till ready to get a verbalised ah ha perhaps.
Let me note that in the Stress Reduction/Amygdala reshaping work above, participants used something called Full Catastrophe Living (pdf of one chapter on meditation) that has been used by its authors since 1990 for numerous stress studies. Apropos, perhaps, pioneered at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In that intervention, people are meditating; doing "nothing" - so i am extrapolating to think that skills manual work, or relaxing, less skilled manual work, can still have de-stressing benefits.
First example: sharpening all the kitchen knives; practicing waterstone sharpening:
It also felt good to do something manual, focused, skilful, that has an immediate, testable result.
Then - staying manua,l but less skillful - this example is even more manual than i hit, but looks intriguing, no?
More Meditative; Less Skill; Still Manual
Here's an even more manual version of coffee grinding than what i did, but i could see how this would feel good on a slightly warmer day (zip to about 2:27 in on the vid)
If you truly wish to pause, have all the time in the world, and with to enjoy some lovely engineering - here's an example from Orphan Espresso where a grinder is machined and built by hand around the best burr in the business for grinding. Ingenious design solutions. If you're interested in why burrs rather than blades for beans, that's an interesting story, too. Stumptown, New York Roasters that do coffee for my fave Boston Coffee Place, Thinking Cup, has a nice explanation in Step One here
Wasn't that a totally awesome geek out on coffee meets machine intrigue? Wow.
And that's soothing.
Delight, Distraction, Percolation ... Restoration?
Just writing about these ways to soothe the soul, restore the body in doing something mildly focused and hands on has helped breath a bit. Get some space. Unwind. Un-tension a bit. Maybe tomorrow i'll press something; maybe i'll do something else. It's ok. Feeling a bit hungry, drinking coffee and green tea, also: ok.I hope if you're feeling stressed you can be gentle with yourself (as per Gary's suggestion), pause and find gentle practices to restore your soul, too.
Thanks for letting me share this on going experience with you. IT's so odd to feel woven into the fabric of this experience. A fluke of timing. And now etched. Grind Grind Grind, working it in; letting it go. Breathing.
This is going to take some time....and one of the biggest challenges: me being ok with that. At least my brain/gray matter should be happier with that process.
thanks again to Amy van der Heil for her care via positive focus, and Gary Ralph Music for his care in just stepping out with a Good Suggestion.
References
Draganski, B., Gaser, C., Busch, V., Schuierer, G., Bogdahn, U., & May, A. (2004). Neuroplasticity: Changes in grey matter induced by training Nature, 427 (6972), 311-312 DOI: 10.1038/427311a
Bogdan Draganski1, Christian Gaser2, Gerd Kempermann3, H. Georg Kuhn4, Jürgen Winkler1, Christian Büchel5, and Arne Draganski, B. (2006). Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of Brain Structure Changes during Extensive Learning Journal of Neuroscience, 26 (23), 6314-6317 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4628-05.2006
Holzel, B., Carmody, J., Evans, K., Hoge, E., Dusek, J., Morgan, L., Pitman, R., & Lazar, S. (2009). Stress reduction correlates with structural changes in the amygdala Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5 (1), 11-17 DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsp034
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