Tag: Fitness

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I’ve scarcely fenced with the students since the groups split a year ago. It was made clear that I was welcome to come train with the student group, but most of the training sessions were the same time as my group was meeting, and anyway my shoulder and elbow issues meant I had to reduce the amount of training I was doing, so I ended up training with my own group.

That changed this week when the student group had a “fancy-dress fechtschule,” and invited the TMHF members to join in.

A fechtschule (which just means “fight school”) is a particular kind of contest where the point is not so much to “win” (although you want to do that too), as it is to display artful fencing. To encourage that the rules call for only head hits to count, and prohibit things like thrusting (too likely kill your opponent), grappling, pommel strikes, etc.

Because only head hits count, it seemed reasonably safe to wear just masks and not full protective gear, enabling a fancy-dress version, which seemed to me like great fun. Many of the women showed up in dresses or gowns of one sort or another (some in heels!). Many of the men wore suits. I wore a coat and tie.

Two people with swords, one wearing a sport coat, the other wearing a fabulous gown, with other people in fancy dress in the background
Me practicing a drill with Autumn. Photo by Matt K The Other Shore Studio

The call for attending was simply to wear “the most formal thing you own that you are willing to fight in.”

After a youth during which I couldn’t imagine “dressing up” any more than absolutely necessary, somewhere along the line I figured out a few things, one of which was that men’s dress clothing is actually more comfortable than casual clothing, because it is altered to fit well, rather than just being “the right size.” These days besides wearing dress clothing whenever it will give me an advantage, I also wear it anytime it seems like fun. (While traveling—on a plane or a train, and while in a station or an airport—you get much better service if you’re wearing a coat and tie than if you’re wearing shorts or sweats.)

There was a great deal of artful fencing.

Two fencers in dress clothes with longswords and a judge behind them with a staff
Me on the right, fencing with Milosh. Photo by Matt K The Other Shore Studio

It has taken most of three years, but I’m finally doing a pretty good job of keeping my arms extended while doing longsword. (Partly I just needed to develop the habit, but I also needed to build strength and endurance in that arms-extended posture.)

It was glorious fun. I even did okay in the contest. (I think Milosh went easy on me.)

I do need more work on fencing artfully.

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Just before my summer trip to Amherst, I got a Covid booster—even though the new Covid shot was just about to come out—because I wanted to minimize the chance of catching Covid on a plane or at an airport, and bringing it to my mom or brother.

Since then, I’ve been waiting for four months to pass, so I could get the new shot, now that it’s available. (It turns out that now you only have to wait two months, but nobody told me that.) Anyway, the four months are up, so I got my Covid booster and a flu shot this morning.

Me with two band aids on my left arm, where I got a Covid shot and a flu shot
Flu shot and Covid shot

My left arm is now moderately sore. In fact, it roughly matches my right arm, which has been sore for months now. (I think originally dog-walking injuries to my right elbow and right shoulder, exacerbated by sword fighting, and exercise. I’ve recently started walking the dog left-handed, cut my sword fighting practice to just once a week, and cut the weight way down on my kettlebell clean&press. Oh, and I have a modest bruise on the right bicep where yesterday I took thrust that just missed the protective plate on my fencing jacket. The jacket is also padded though, and the thrust wasn’t that hard, and the sword was nicely flexible to make it safe for sparring between friends.)

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For much of my life I thought that the key to losing weight was just exercising more. Especially in the mid-1980s, when I lived in Utah and California, I’d get out for some long hikes in the mountains and deserts and think, “If I could just do this all the time, it would be easy to maintain a proper weight.” That turns out to be both true and false.

The fitness influencer types like to say things along the lines of “You can’t outrun your fork,” meaning that you simply can’t burn enough calories to get ahead of eating way too much. I knew that wasn’t completely true. Read about any long-distance endurance athlete (ultra-marathoner, Tour de France rider, etc.) and you’ll have a window into really extreme efforts to eat enough just to keep going, let alone enough to recover for the next day’s effort.

I also have a slightly more ordinary example. A couple of guys I knew tried to bicycle around Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, and had to abandon the effort halfway through, because their riding (100+ miles per day) burned so many calories (perhaps 5000 calories on top of their basal metabolic rate, so maybe 7500 calories per day total), they ran out of money for food.

It’s tough to eat 7500 calories per day even without the financial limit, so it seems like, if you have all day to do nothing but exercise, and the will to exercise hard for several hours a day, perhaps you could “outrun your fork.”

Recent research shows that this is not the case, except in the very short term. People who are very active all day, like hunter-gatherers (but also subsistence farmers, and laborers of other sorts), burn more calories than people who are sedentary all day, but only modestly more.

A recent study showed that among of Hadza people, activity was almost insignificant as a predictor of total energy expenditure. They were remarkably active, but their calorie consumption was pretty ordinary. The study suggests that body size is just about all that matters

In that study, average total energy expenditure among Hadza men was 2649 calories per day. The average is higher among western men, but only because their body size is greater. (Hadza men averaged 50.9 kg (112 lbs), while Western men averaged 81.0 kg (179 lbs). Differences in BMI are more stark, with Hadza men having a BMI averaging 20.3, while Western men’s BMIs averaged 25.6.)

The point here is that it seems like your biology is attuned to wanting to eat 2600 calories and wanting to burn 2600 calories. (Adjust for frame size. It seems the Hadza men averaged about 5′ 2″.) You can be sedentary, under-eat to match, and not gain weight, but it’s not in tune with what your body wants, so you’ll be hungry all the time, as well as having all the side-effects of under-movement.

You can also try to exercise enough to burn more than 2600 calories, but it seems that as soon as you go over that level, your body starts trying to compensate—turning down whatever is easy to turn down, such as your immune system, and muscle-building system.

That doesn’t happen immediately. If you go on a century ride you will burn the extra 5000 calories that simple arithmetic would suggest. That would probably continue if you went on a three-day bicycle tour. But pretty quickly—probably just in a week or so—less-essential body functions would ramp down (and of course fatigue would ramp up) bringing your total consumption back down toward 2600 calories.

You can see how this would work well for hunters. You go for a hunt one day (or two or three days), hiking or running for miles, finding prey, tracking it, and finally killing it. Then you (and your whole tribe) have lots of food to eat for a day (or two or three). During extended periods of excess activity maybe your immune system and muscle-building system ramps down, but then during periods of ample food and less activity, maybe it ramps up extra, allowing for full recovery.

Consuming more calories than you burn for more than a few days, however, quickly leads to problems. Increased fat storage is probably the least of them. Insulin resistance is another. Systemic inflammation is another. Those extra calories will go into the things that get turned down when you’re extra-active, such as the immune system. I don’t know that there’s any evidence, but an obvious possibility is that a lot of auto-immune disorders are just an immune system that never gets turned down because people are never active enough to burn more calories than they eat, if only for a day or two.

I think it’s true that you can’t out-exercise excess calorie consumption. However, you can definitely under-exercise—and trying to under-eat to match that will also cause problems. Humans evolved to thrive with an ideal level of activity.

It’s also true that you don’t need to hit that particular level of activity and food consumption every day. In fact, I’m sure you’d be better off to be moderately active most days, and then very active 1–3 days a week. My long-ago dream of being able to hike 10–15 miles every day and then eat all I want turns out to be a terrible idea. Rather, you want to walk 5 or 6 miles most days, and then hike 10–15 miles just once or twice a week. (Feel free to swap in bicycling or rowing or whatever you like for the long days of vigorous activity, although you probably want to keep in the basic walking if you possibly can.)

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For years now, I’ve been trying to figure out (and writing about figuring out) how to exercise in ways that support all the different things I want to do. My latest hobby, HEMA (sword fighting), has seemed like it required more support than most of my other activities, which prompted more (and more different) exercise than I’d been doing before. I’ve worried for a while that I was overdoing it, and I’m now pretty sure that’s been true.

Me in fencing jacket and mask with a longsword

The specific experiment that convinced me was skipping a few HEMA practice sessions. My HEMA club has two-hour practice sessions on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Two weeks ago I just wasn’t feeling it on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday. Each of those two days I skipped practice, but otherwise did my regular workouts—and started feeling more energetic each day. Last week I repeated that. Not only did I continue to feel better, I also was able to step up my regular workouts a bit.

I’ve had two specific issues: a sore elbow and a sore neck.

I’m pretty sure the sore elbow is not HEMA-related, but rather dog-walking related. I think I’ve fixed the issue with how I was handling the dog, but my elbow has been slow to recover—probably because of either how I was handling my longsword, or else how I was exercising to support my longsword training. Having taking a break from longsword training (just going on Sundays, when we’ve been doing rapier training), and having my elbow get much better, even while I continued doing the rest of my exercise regimen, I’m pretty sure it was the actual longsword training that was keeping my elbow from getting better. As I write this, it’s feeling entirely better.

The sore neck, I suspect, is also HEMA-related, I think due to the asymmetrical stance of longsword. (Rapier stance is even more asymmetrical, but I haven’t been doing it as long or as vigorously.) Anyway, after a couple weeks of less training, my neck was, and is, feeling much better.

Of course I’m doing all the regular stuff to enhance recovery: stretching, good diet, trying to get plenty of sleep, etc.

I’m still working toward a plan for exercise. My current thinking is to give up one of Tuesday or Thursday HEMA practice. Then I’ll do four days a week of general exercise focused on support for my HEMA activities: Specifically, I’ve started two different programs of steel club swinging, one 1-handed and the other 2-handed, with a plan to do each of those two days a week. That would add up to 4 days a week. Add to that 2 days a week for HEMA training, and I’d be exercising 6 days a week, with one day of complete rest.

No one day of that should be completely exhausting, so maybe I’ll be able to recover better than I have been.

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I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.

The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.

That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.

A dog standing on a picnic table

As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.

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Somebody in the local HEMA Discord shared:

“The fact I gotta train 3–5 days a week to keep my body at “moderately broken,” while my cat sleeps all day, and can do parkour with ease, is a crime.”

Another guy said:

“Maybe the reason the cat’s ok and needs to sleep all day is because it spends all it’s waking time doing parkour. If you did parkour all day and then slept for 12 hours you’d probably be able to keep up with the cat.”

To which I said:

“I have spent the last 15 years of my life trying to arrange it exactly like this. I have not yet achieved complete success, but I haven’t given up.”

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I’ve been thinking about longevity too long and too hard. It isn’t something that I suddenly started doing when I reached my 60s, or even when I hit middle age. I can remember as a high school student figuring out that I’d need to live about two thousand years to have time to learn and do all the stuff I wanted to learn and do.

Sadly, everything we know now suggests that lifestyle improvements can get you a life extension of 7 years—maybe as much as 11 years, if you get serious about it. I mean, that’s not nothing, but it’s not going to get me to two thousand years, or even to eleventy-one, like Bilbo. (That’s what I lowered my sights to, when I realized that two thousand years was unlikely.)

“Immortal Holding a Peach” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the public domain.

I was briefly pretty hopeful in the late 1980s, when it looked like nanotech might produce amazing longevity gains. But, no. Turns out except for a few materials-science things—stuff like that tweaking the surface of glass to make it self-cleaning—the only nanotech that anyone has been able to get to do anything remotely interesting is biotech. I mean, MRNA vaccines are awesome, but nothing like the nanotech we were promised.

Considering how much is written about longevity, the stuff that actually works offers pretty minimal benefits. Getting a life extension of 7 to 11 years look pretty easy, just by doing the obvious, boring stuff, and practically none of the fancy bio-hacky things have any evidence behind them at all.

So what are the boring things that work?

Eat food

Don’t eat industrially produced food-like substances. Eat in reasonable amounts. Eat diversely. I saw one study that suggested that any exclusion-based diet—keto, carnivore, vegan, etc.—seemed to be associated with poorer health outcomes. (On the other hand, if one of those things produces benefits in the short term—for me, it’s eating low-carb—there’s no reason not to do it long enough to reap those benefits. But long-term you want a diverse diet.)

Exercise

Until recently the only real evidence-based exercise advice was for 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise (brisk walking, basically). But recently it has become very clear that maintaining muscle mass, strength, and power are beneficial in multiple ways (everything from reducing falls to providing a glucose sink). Separately, a high V̇O2 max is strongly associated with a longer life. So although there’s little evidence for weight lifting, running, or high-intensity cardo, there is now very good evidence that the entirely expectable results of those exercise modalities are excellent for longevity. So: diverse exercise is going to help you live longer.

Manage your blood pressure, blood glucose, and blood lipids

Really good diet and exercise can maybe eliminate the need for drugs. But taking the drugs if you need them can help a lot.

Enjoy life

There’s good evidence of benefit from social connection. There’s good evidence of benefit from time spent in nature. There’s good evidence of benefit from having a positive mental attitude. (All those are suspect, because being sick makes them tougher to do, so you’re selecting out some fraction of the people who are going to die young, which makes the statistics misleading. But there’s not much point in a long life unless you’re going to enjoy it, so why not?)

Other stuff

I’ve refrained from mentioning the bio-hacky stuff that I’ve spent way too much time thinking about. Not just the nanotech stuff, but also all the rest: All of the supplements, sleep hacks, drinking more (or less) coffee (or tea or bone broth or mushroom-enhanced beverages), etc.

It’s not that things like sleep aren’t important. It’s that there’s essentially no evidence that any specific intervention is going to help in a measurable way. In fact, there can’t ever be any such evidence. The experiment can’t be done. And if it were done, the effect wouldn’t be measurable.

I mean, if you have a diagnosis for a problem—sleep apnea, for example—then treating that problem could very easily be transformational, not just for your longevity, but for your life right now. But giving everyone a CPAP machine would do no good. Furthermore, picking a few random sleep hacks—avoiding caffeine after mid-day, wearing blue-blocker glasses, or tweaking your pre-bedtime routine—isn’t going to make any difference across the population. (Any one of those might help you in particular, and if it does, more power to you. But none of those, even if adopted by 100% of the population, is going to add a year to the average lifespan.)

If you’re interested in details, you might look at the recent New York Times article “The Key to Longevity Is Boring.” Another option would be to read the Peter Attia book Outlive, or listen to his most recent podcast episode, Longevity 101, either of which does a great job of covering the handful of things that will give you that extra 7 to 11 years of life.

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I’m finally sending out my newsletter! An “issue zero” just went out, but starting next month you’ll be getting actual newsletters. My first cut at a title is “Sword fighting, writing, and a dog,” because that’s what I seem to be spending my time on these days. (I’ll try to get more writing stuff in than I have been just lately.)

Me in fencing gear, with a rapier in my hand
A black dog lying in the sun on the patio

If you’re interested, subscribe here: https://philipbrewer.micro.blog/subscribe/