[*The New York Times*: ‘A Military Regimen: Bring the Pain’](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/nyregion/crossfit-a-military-regimen-with-geek-appeal.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=all)

In 2005, though, there were no CrossFit gyms in the state. Joshua Newman recalled doing CrossFit workouts with friends at the Arthur Ross Pinetum Playground in Central Park while children and their parents stared in bewilderment.

“We got kicked out of Equinox, New York Underground Fitness, Peak Performance, Trainer’s Place,” said Mr. Newman, 32, a former mixed martial arts competitor who runs a venture capital firm in Manhattan. “The owners complained that we were too loud and crazy.”

When Mr. Newman founded CrossFit NYC in 2007, with a paltry 22 members, their informal motto was “They can’t kick us out of here.”

Today, the business is one of the largest affiliates in the world, with more than 1,100 members and two sprawling spaces in the Flatiron district totaling around 24,000 square feet. (The rent is $60,000.) It is seeking a third space in Manhattan to accommodate its growing clientele.

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June 2, 2012

Brother Strength

A few months back, my brother and I ended up staying at the same hotel in Orlando while attending a good friend’s wedding for the weekend. While we were there, we agreed to meet at the hotel’s gym one morning to work out together.

Or, at least, that was the ostensible plan. But, really, both of us knew we weren’t there for a workout. We were there for a Grand Competition of Manliness and Strength. Somehow, that’s what our workouts always become.

Of course, a little competition shouldn’t hurt. But, in our case, it does. Because, while both of us are fairly conservative in our exercise in general, putting safety and effectiveness first, and while both of us will gladly admit in the abstract that we have differing physical strengths and weaknesses as compared to the other, if you actually put us into a gym together, all of that goes right out the window, and we instead each become monomaniacally focused on totally crushing the other.

In that situation, we’re even further set back by a phenomenon that I will here call ‘brother strength’ – essentially, a less benign relative of the sort of ‘mother strength’ that allows slightly built women to lift cars off of their children in emergency situations. Here, instead, it’s channeled towards, say, allowing a brother to bench press more than his sibling, even if his doing so flies in the face of all recorded exercise physiology and science.

I, for example, almost never train the bench press, whereas my brother does frequently, and has since his ice hockey days. Also, he outweighs me by about twenty-five pounds. But if you make him go first, and I get to go second, I can always, always bench at least five pounds more than he can.

And then, say, if we get on the pullup bar, and I go first, David can hop on and do at least one more rep than I did, even if that entails knocking out more in a single set than he’s performed in total over the past year.

Driven by a strange cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline, and long-submerged childhood rivalries, we can go back and forth like this, the second brother to try a given feat invariably besting the first, for literally hours on end. Eventually, we leave, laughing, perhaps part with an overly firm, hand-crush-attempting handshake.

And then, a few hours later, the high passes, and the hangover sets in. Down in Florida, the next morning, I woke up sore not just in my muscles, not even just in my tendons, but down in my very bones. My only solace, later that evening at the wedding reception, was noting that my brother looked equally rough.

But somehow, still, we both managed to pull ourselves out onto the dance floor. And we both did our damndest to out-boogie the other, excruciatingly painful as it may have been. Or, maybe, it didn’t hurt at all. Once the brother strength kicked back in, I don’t remember feeling a thing.

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December 11, 2011

Work Out Like a Caveman

Last year, I gave a talk about Paleo Fitness (with CFNYC‘s inimitable Allison Bojarski) for the Eating Paleo in NYC Meetup.

The thesis was simple: the same evolutionary thinking that drives the increasingly popular Paleo Diet could be applied equally well to fitness – to how we exercise, how we move, and how we live our lives.

So, I pulled together some slides on, as we put it, “caveman lessons on performing better, living longer, and looking good naked.”

The event was very well attended, and I’ve been meaning to record a web version ever since. I finally did. Part one below; look for parts two and three at some point in the next two weeks.

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October 5, 2011

In F.lux

If you, like 40% of Americans, sometimes have trouble falling asleep, consider blaming your computer.

Turns out, melatonin (the sleep hormone) is largely regulated by blue light. That makes evolutionary sense, as the sun gives off blue light during the day, while the moon, and fire, both give off much redder light at night. So your body monitors blue light levels, emitting hormones accordingly, to create a circadian rhythm: tired at night and alert during the day.

Problem is, we screw with those signals on both ends: we spend too many of our waking hours inside, getting less blue light than we should; and then we spend much of our post-sunset evening in front of boxes like computer screens, getting too much blue light.

To fix the day side of things, you’d need to spend more time outdoors, with more of your skin exposed to the sun. Which, during the winter, probably entails moving to Hawaii.

But fixing the evening side of the equation is much easier: just download F.lux, a great little piece of freeware for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

In short, after sunset, f.lux changes the color temperature of your display, from its default 6500k (even bluer than the 5000k of daylight) to something between 2700k and 4200k (depending on whether the rest of your room’s lighting is tungsten, halogen, or fluorescent).

Give f.lux a whirl for a week. Though it may take a few days of adjustment – your screen will look awfully pink/orange to you at first – by week’s end, I’m betting you’ll have a tough time using your computer without it.

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April 25, 2011

Obesity Explained

Over the past fifty years, Americans have gotten fatter and fatter. By now, some 63% of American adults are overweight, and 26.5% are obese.

Over the time we’ve fattened up, we’ve also been arguing about the cause. It’s dietary fat. It’s dietary carbohydrates. Etc., etc. By now, the story has changed so many times that most people have entirely given up on trying to follow along, retiring to a sort of nutritional relativism: it doesn’t matter what we do today, as, in ten years, we’ll probably be advised to do the exact opposite.

That’s not an unfair position, given that most of the research on both sides of any nutrition issue has tended to be pretty terrible. Our best young minds, and the lion’s share of our grant dollars, have gone to solving cancer and AIDS, not to resolving whether egg yolks are healthful or not. But, in the past five years or so, things have started to change. For whatever reason, the amount and quality of nutrition science research has gone up exponentially. Now, though public knowledge and opinion hasn’t caught up, we’re coming to a scientific picture of obesity as clear as that of any other well-studied biological process.

The rough shape of that consensus points to three main causes of the American (and global) obesity epidemic:

1. Toxic foods like wheat, fructose, and omega-6 fats. In excess, these make us fat and sick, yet they represent an increasing majority of our diet.

2. Deficiency of important micronutrients like choline and iodine. As more of our calories come from those nutritionally empty toxic foods, we end up micronutient deficient (several of which deficiencies lead to obesity directly), while also instinctively eating more to shore up those micronutrient levels (with such overeating leading to obesity, too).

3. Viruses like Adenovirus 36. While you can get fat pretty effectively with just the two steps above, you can do so even more quickly when infected with an obesity-causing virus; AD-36, for example, is found in obese children at rates four to five times children of healthy weight. Here, too, it’s a vicious cycle: toxic foods lead to gut permeability, and micronutrient deficiencies lead to a compromised immune system, both of which leave your body less able to fight off such an obesity infection.

And that’s it. Certainly, a slew of other factors play in, too (things like non-exercise activity thermogenesis). But those three factors explain the majority of the obesity problem. And, increasingly, it looks like they’re implicated in pretty much every other terrible thing that happens to us, from Alzheimers to acne, from cancer to cellulite.

Of course, agreeing on the problem and implementing a solution are completely different issues. Consider the AIDS epidemic, where, despite our strong understanding that sexually transmitted HIV infection is the primary cause of the spread of the disease, the global number of HIV cases continues to steadily climb. With obesity, too, I fear that even agreement among the science, nutrition, healthcare, and public policy crowds may nonetheless leave us far from effectively addressing the problem in the real world.

Still, it’s worth noting that we’re closing in on such consensus, even if a read through Shape or Men’s Fitness would give you no indication of that. As I said, I think we’re simply five to ten years off from popular opinion catching up to the emerging science.

But catch up it will. You heard it here first.

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April 21, 2011

Multimedia

This month, I’m taking Self-Aggrandizement beyond mere words, and into the brave new world of multimedia. In particular, look shortly for:

– A new episode of the (long-hibernating) F. Scott & Friends Bourbon and Brylcreem Hour, with the inimitable Sarah Brown.

– A narrated slideshow version of my upcoming Paleo fitness talk, “Caveman Lessons on Performing Better, Living Longer, and Looking Good Naked.” (As it’s fairly long, I may be posting it in a couple of installments)

– A series of videos stemming from that talk. First up, one looking at how to sit better (so you can maintain something at least vaguely close to good posture while you’re at your desk or in a car), and another demonstrating three simple hip stretches you can do on your couch to conquer back and knee pain.

Stay tuned.

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January 19, 2011

Walk the Talk

This Saturday (1/22), from 2-4pm, I’m giving a talk for the (700 member!) NYC Paleo Meetup (along with CrossFit NYC’s Communications Director and resident Paleo Diet expert Allison Bojarski) entitled:

Caveman Lessons on Performing Better, Living Longer, and Looking Good Naked.

As I just blogged about, the Paleo diet is getting all kinds of press these days. But the basic underlying hypothesis (we evolved for one set of conditions, yet currently live in another, which causes an array of health problems) dictates a much broader prescription than simply diet – from sleep schedule and stress management, to how we move, stretch, exercise, and play.

In particular, the talk explores three main questions:

– What is fitness, and how can we tell when we’re ‘in shape’?
– How fit were cavemen / hunter-gatherers, and how did they get that way?
– What does that mean we should do to be healthy and fit in today’s world?

The talk isn’t focused on CrossFit per se, but rather covers fitness in general, in a broad evolutionary context. Admission is $5 through the Paleo Meetup, but if you email me in advance, I can squeeze you in for free.

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January 18, 2011

Pendulum Swings

Jess and I went to dinner on Friday with one of her friends – the beauty editor at a major women’s magazine – and her friend’s husband.

Somehow, the Paleo diet came up in conversation, which led Jess’ friend to exclaim how ‘hot’ Paleo is right now – several editors at the magazine had recently started following the diet.

And, indeed, she’s right. Paleo is blowing up. Earlier on Friday, I had lunch with two authors of new bestselling Paleo diet books, as well as the author of an upcoming (likely to also be a bestseller, I suspect) Paleo book, on camera for a Nightline piece about the Paleo life that should air in the next couple of weeks.

Seven years ago, when I started preaching the idea of eating and exercising in an evolution-inspired way, Paleo wasn’t big at all. In fact, it wasn’t just below the radar, it ran directly counter to mainstream nutrition advice: fat was the enemy, carbs the solution, end of story.

But now, it seems, the tide is turning. Dr. Walter Willett, for example, the Harvard Med School and Harvard School of Public Health nutrition guru, previously published books supporting the less fat, more carbs theory. Yet in an LA Times piece last month, he 180’s to say “fat is not the problem. If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases.”

I say: not so fast.

In his excellent In Defense of Food, journalist Michael Pollan coins the term ‘nutritionism’, for the common misconception that food is essentially a delivery system for specific nutrients, rather than something valuable as a whole. In the nutritionism approach, to which we collectively seem to subscribe here in the US, we pick out a few nutrients as good (omega 3’s), others as evil (trans-fats), and then build dietary recommendations – and food products – based on those nutrients.

Problem is, even simple foods are far more complex than we boil them down to be. Sure, there are the much-discussed macronutrients (fat, carbohydrates, and protein). And then there are the micronutrients we know about (vitamins, minerals). And then there are other micronutrients, which it seems we clearly don’t.

Pollan cites, for example, the problems with baby formula: children fed formula thrive far less than children fed breast milk. For the past five decades, major corporations have spent millions upon millions of dollars trying to figure out why, to better understand the nutritional breakdown of real breast milk, to isolate those missing micronutrients causing formula to fall short. Yet despite those efforts, the milk versus formula gap remains. Despite our best science, we still have no idea how to define – much less replicate – some of the crucial, health-promoting stuff in milk, much less in every other food that naturally exists.

Which is why I’m so concerned that the early mainstream embrace of Paleo thinking seems equally driven by such nutritionism.

First, that approach makes it too easy for the pendulum to over-swing in the new direction. The anti-carb lynch-mob mentality, for example, has led many people to conflate Paleo with Atkins. Yet the two approaches diverge substantially, especially when it comes to the Paleo diet’s focus on eating lots of fruits and vegetables, which I suspect drives many of the excellent health benefits that research on the diet has begun to highlight.

Similarly, I worry the nutritionism approach will also fail to exclude some of the most problematic foods. Recent research on Paleo eating, for example, has begun to show that the diet is hugely impactful in halting the progression of terrible autoimmune diseases like Parkinson’s and MS. A lot of that, I believe, stems from the reduced inflammatory load and substantially less gut-irritating (and therefore gut-permeability-causing) aspects of the diet, because excluding grains and legumes also excludes anti-nutrients like phytates and lectins. Yet most of the coverage I’ve seen of Paleo eating glosses over that point entirely. I’m sure it’s only a short matter of time until we see new and improved ‘Paleo friendly’ Snackwell cookies: now made with agave nectar and omega-3’s! They’ll taste like cardboard, and they’ll sell like wildfire, but they won’t pack any of the benefits of real Paleo food.

And, finally, I worry that the sudden popularization of Paleo eating will make the approach too much a ‘diet’ (something you do in a faddish way to lose some weight) and less an ongoing shift in lifestyle. The beauty of eating Paleo – or even just eating largely Paleo (for, perhaps, 80% of your meals) – is that it’s not overly restrictive, it’s not socially awkward, and it’s something that you can do indefinitely. More to the point, it’s something you need to do indefinitely, if you’d like to have a long and healthy and disease-free life. Much like, say, brushing your teeth, which you need to do for at least as long as you’d like to still have teeth.

Frankly, I hate the name Paleo diet. It’s a branding nightmare. It suggests crazy people who want to do weird re-enactments in loin cloths. It sounds like austere deprivation, and literally chest-banging machismo.

Instead, I think the Paleo crowd will fare better, will have a higher likelihood of getting the actually important ideas across to people in a real and sustainable way as the trend continues to grow, if we can boil it down in ways like John Durant does:

“Despite everything you’ve been taught,” he explains, “you are a wild animal. And you will be healthier when you start acting like one. Replicate the most beneficial aspects of living in the wild. Eat the foods humans have been eating for millions of years, move in the ways we are adapted to move, get some sun.”

I don’t think that sounds too crazy. But then again, I’ve long since drank the Kool-Aid. Or, rather, whatever equivalent beverage it was that cultish cavemen drank.

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January 16, 2011