My Trainer, My Desk

Everybody get on your feet,
You make me nervous
When you're in your seat
-----Jerry Jeff Walker


    
     What on earth would our Ice Age ancestors think?  Genetically identical to our 21st century selves, they were perfectly suited to a life of obligatory physical exercise, periodic famine, and unrelenting cold.  We, on the other hand, no longer running from predators or chasing our dinner, pass our days on the job and at leisure slouched in our chairs, inert, well-fed, and warm.
     My Fitbit, a pedometer-plus, tallies steps, stairs, and calories. Gizmos within know when I am active and know when I am not.  After a day at home or at work, add housework or laundry plus a walk and a trip to the store, I might manage to reach the 10,000 step goal. Syncing with Fitbit on-line turns daily data into a pie chart of motion, gray for sedentary with blue, yellow, and pink for light, moderate and heavy action.  Alas, my so-called busy day is awash in inert--big yawning gray, a thin slice of sky, a sliver of sun, and one slash of pink.
     Perhaps it's time for on beyond Fitbit. A smart--and very pricey!--desk might be the next best thing to a personal trainer.  For several thousand dollars, you can buy a work station at stirworks.com that greets you by name, gently nags you to move, keeps a log of your day, week, and month, and advises you how long until you're next scheduled to fidget.  When you've been too still for too long, the thing takes a 'whisperbreath', heaving beneath your laptop like an impatient dog past due for a walk.
     Sit-stand workstations are today’s medical news; studies prove they decrease on-the-job sedentary behavior (SB), may or may not affect productivity, and mostly don’t cause workplace injuries.  Ingenius, creepy, or just a sign of our times? 

Caffeine plus exercise

I am preparing a talk on exercise, and I figure I can't just say "You should," thank the audience, and head for the gym. On perusing articles on exercise and breast cancer (you should do the former to decrease risk of the latter!), I followed one of those delightful internet link trails and came across this interesting study on New Jersey mice (1).

Imagine being offered three choices: two weeks of daily Starbucks plus an obligatory work-up with a personal trainer (both free of course!) that same Starbucks sans gym work-out, or a caffeine-free opportunity to exercise only if you care to but never mind if you don't. These Jersey rodents were assigned the mousy equivalent of these choices, then all underwent tanning sessions under UV lights. Oh yeah, and then followed by skin biopsies...

All lost some of the fat lurking just beneath their furry hides, but the exercise plus caffeine group lost twice as much as the indolent coffee drinkers. Better yet for those buff little fellows that enhanced their exercise-enhanced physique with tans, those who drank caffeine-laced water AND exercised exhibited apoptosis of sun-damaged skin cells. In other words, caffeine inhibited DNA damage from UV light--and therefore tumor formation-- by promoting the destruction of UV-damaged cells.

If we're at all like mice, which we more or less are, caffeine plus exercise may equal some sort of cancer protection.
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Yao-Ping, L et al. Voluntary exercise together with oral caffeine markedly stimulates UVB light-induced apoptosis and decreases tissue fat in SKH-1 mice. PNAS July 31, 2007 vol. 104 no. 31 12936-1294.

Fidgeting and weight loss

I got a pedometer that actually works this holiday season. I discovered not only do I get well over half of my recommended 10,000 steps in a 90 minute Jazzercise workout (did that yesterday), but also that I don't sit still very long. This reminded me of a study I wrote about some time ago, so I thought I'd share it with you that you might consider the health benefits of racing around looking for your keys etc. as you consider your New Year's Resolution List (1. Fidget more, 2. Run upstairs to answer the phone instead of putting the handset on the table next to your recliner, etc.).

Consider inclinometers and triaxial accelerometers. Gizmos found in the instrument panel of a fighter jet that were sewn for this study into the high-tech underwear encasing the more or less active behinds of twenty Minnesotans. While all of the subjects were self-proclaimed 'couch potatoes,' half were lean and half were mildly obese. Dr. James Levine and colleagues then recorded 25 million underwear-generated data points on posture and movement from each subject over ten days. The Mayo Clinic investigators believe the results may explain why some persons tend to put on the pounds more easily than others.

Healthy adults gain weight when energy in (food) exceeds energy out (daily activity). While energy expenditure occurs during exercise, a large part of our daily calorie output is Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis or NEAT. Dr. Levine defines NEAT as "physical activities other than volitional exercise, such as the activities of daily living, fidgeting, spontaneous muscle contraction, and maintaining posture when not recumbent." The more you twitch, squirm, and generally fussbudget through your daily activities, the more calories you burn in this unexpected way. The researchers discovered that their obese volunteers were seated daily for 164 minutes more than were lean participants. In fact, if the heavier group had demonstrated the same NEAT behavior as their skinnier colleagues, they would've burned off an extra 350 calories per day or the equivalent of 7 pounds per year.

The Mayo endocrinologists had previously conducted research on the effects of overeating on NEAT. They stuffed an extra 1000 calories/day over 8 weeks into sixteen normal weight volunteers. During the two month feeding extravaganza, the subjects increased their energy output in subtle but significant ways, burning the majority of the extra calories as NEAT. Based on these studies, the researchers theorize that while obese individuals may "have a biologically determined posture allocation" (genetically inclined to hit the recliner), perhaps they can be taught to consciously overcome their torpid destiny with increased body busyness as part of a weight loss program.

How many ways to say no?

Me: Are you exercising?

Pt: Not particularly actually currently.

A 17th century pitch for exercise:

Better to hunt in fields for health unbought
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
The wise for cure on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend.

--John Dryden

Practicing what I preach

Well it wasn't exactly stalking a saber-tooth tiger across the tundra. But it was a whole lot like air-boxing to overloud music with a bunch of women half my age.

I've signed up for a trial membership at 24-Hour Fitness, and went today to their Turbo Kickboxing class. Very humbling--I consider myself fit enough, but these women, especially the buff little instructress, have taken fit to entirely new levels.

Here's wise words by FW Booth from the Journal of Physiology:

In sedentary cultures, daily physical activity normalizes gene expression towards patterns established to maintain the survival in the Late Paleolithic era.

The cute little membership rep asked me what my goals were for my 24 Hour Fitness work-outs. I told him "Staying alive," and I meant it.