Rest Day/Theory

Food-industry watchdogs: “Exercise is medicine” just a platitude designed to distance Big Soda from chronic disease.

At first blush, it seems like a harmless statement: “Exercise is medicine.” Exercise, after all, is good.

“It’s plainly true,” said Gary Ruskin, co-founder and co-director of U.S. Right to Know, a whistleblower nonprofit targeting the food industry. “Physical and mental health indicators are improved through exercise. In general, it’s a great thing.”

Exercise Is Medicine (EIM)… Continue Reading

Exercise is not medicine, and suggestions to the contrary do nothing to help fitness trainers improve the health of their clients.

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

This popular saying portrays certain activities as having the ability to improve health. Most people accord a notion of truth to the adage, but would anyone suggest a farmer or retailer could be held out as an exemplar of a health or medical profession? Probably not.

Yet this is exactly… Continue Reading

Brittney Saline details how exercise and healthy eating might be the best way to combat sugar-fueled depression.

America has a happiness problem, and Coca-Cola’s got the answer. On the multi-billion-dollar beverage company’s website, the brand juxtaposes the words of Aristotle, Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha and others with the prose of its marketing team: “Open an ice cold Coca-Cola and choose happiness!”

It didn’t work so well for Roxanne Melillo. A survivor of… Continue Reading

Clinton Foundation sends mixed signals by partnering with Coca-Cola while claiming to work for health and wellness.

The Clinton Foundation is currently giving a nod to Coca-Cola by hosting a public art exhibit at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, until Feb. 15, 2016.

The exhibit marks “The Coca-Cola Bottle’s 100-year anniversary” and features iconic images from the last century of Coca-cola marketing, complete with the classic small-town… Continue Reading

In CrossFit gyms around the world, women deconstruct the longstanding myth of “the weaker sex” and continue the march toward true equality.

In 1973, 55-year-old Bobby Riggs—the 1939 Wimbledon champion—challenged 29-year-old Billie Jean King to a tennis match. Riggs said he could beat any female player even though he was in his 50s.

The tennis match, dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes,” took place in front of a crowd of 30,492; an… Continue Reading

Lon Kilgore explains how the pressure to publish has created libraries full of useless exercise-science publications.

Why doesn’t exercise science answer even the most basic questions about creating fitness?

In answer, many publications in recent years have pointed out problems in exercise science. Some of these pieces have been written without an understanding of the inner workings of modern academia, while some are written from within the belly of the beast.

Although… Continue Reading

Exercise-science students and professors say learning how to become a coach happens in the gym—not in a lecture hall.

A dentist, an orthopedic surgeon and a personal trainer—you would expect formal education to teach them how to fill a molar, repair a ruptured tendon and teach a squat. But when it comes to personal trainers and coaches, college graduates with degrees in exercise science say the opposite is true.

Jack Langley is one of these graduates. During… Continue Reading

Scientists and meditation experts explain how focus and mindfulness can help athletes rise above burning discomfort to improve fitness.

On the surface, pain seems straightforward. You get poked with a sharp stick. It hurts. The end. Or you do Fran. Your burning quads and forearms force you to put down the barbell. The pain was too much.

As with many things involving the human body, pain—and our perception of it—is actually much… Continue Reading