FitSpring

Memory giving you problems? Forgetting why you walked into a room?
Here’s what to do about it

Ever have a problem finding the right word? Can’t remember what you went into a room for? Struggle with people’s names more than you used to? All examples most of us in middle age will be all too familiar with. Neuro-degeneration or mild cognitive decline is part and parcel of getting older. It sucks and it is scary when your brain feels like it is giving up on you.

The good news is the a significant part of the solution is exercise. Good news because it is simple and effectively free.

Exercise has many benefits for your brain’s health. Follow the mantra “what’s good for your heart & body is good for your brain”. Regular physical activity will help with forming new neurons, primarily in the Hippocampus, an area of the brain crucial to learning, memory and cognitive flexibility. Exercise also helps alleviate feelings of despair and anxiety often associated with neuro decline. The long term protective benefits of exercise happen by lowering inflammation, reduced oxidative stress and the build up of amyloid plaques which are a feature of Alzheimers disease.

From a paper in Experimental Gerontology”

“Physical activity slows the progression of neurodegenerative illnesses..... Exercise can help you sleep better, which improves your cognitive performance. Exercise reduces chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, which helps to promote brain health and cognitive performance.” - Link to original source: https://buff.ly/3ACZ2Vm

Exercise helps release Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), long known as miracle grow for your brain. The link between exercise, BDNF release, neural development and improvements in learning have been long understood in kids. Now the benefits are being tested for and found in healthy adults staving off neuro-degeneration and adults experiencing decline by helping to reverse it.

**Action steps:**

Rather than planning to start a workout plan an Olympian would blanch at and then failing, hating yourself and ending up in a worse place than you are now. Start small.

A walk, a jog around the park, do 10 mins of yoga in your living room. Dig out your dumbbells from the garage and do some curls. Start, then build consistency, only once you have a solid habit, think about optimising for duration, intensity or whatever else.

If you already have a fitness practice, look at how you could increase the frequency. Grow 3 times a week into four or five. If you're smart you'll mix up what you do.

If you’re already training 5 times a week, look at how you could hit a more balanced scorecard of training.
A gold standard week might look like:
One long slow zone 2 effort
A medium duration high intensity session
One sprint session
A couple of strength sessions
A couple of stretch and balance sessions as recovery.

If you had one or two really hard efforts in that week and the others were more gentle, that would suit most working adults.

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

50 y/o & 5 half hour sessions in a week...

I was talking to a 50 year old working mum who said she knew she needed to do something to avoid he slide into disability and decrepitude that her parents were experiencing. She also wants to be a good role model for her kids. The problem was she didn’t know what to do with that time for the largest fitness effect. TBH, she didn’t know what she was trying to achieve, let alone how to get there. This isn't a criticism of her, why should she have any fitness, training, nutrition coaching knowledge?

Start with why:
There are two things to consider. The length and quality of your life.

Chances are you’ll die from a heart problem, cardiovascular issue, cancer, a lung issue or dementia. However, the quality of your life will probably be influenced by less lethal things, such as your bone density, muscle mass, aerobic capacity and mobility.

QoL is also strongly effected by social factors such as the number of friends you see regularly, your extended familial support network and your mental health. There is a clear need for a nutritional and lifestyle component in the plan as well as training and social stimulus, but nutrition is outside the scope of our 5 x 30 minute workouts. It is something I as a coach would weave into the conversation and aim for small but steady changes

We’re looking for activities and habits we can build that will positively impact all of those measures of quality of life while at the same time reducing the likelihood and severity of symptoms of those diseases, pushing back the onset as far as possible to give you the longest, healthiest, happiest disease free life.

Right, so 5 x half hour sessions in a week…

The amount of time and amount of kit you have when you start is not necessarily a long term limiting factor. Getting started is the hardest step. Once you are in the habit of getting up and doing something, getting hold of extra kit or making a bit more time for a long workout once a week are probably doable.

What would a week look like:

2 x strength sessions, we can start with bodyweight exercises.
1 x long slow workout (loaded fast walk or a jog)
1 x sprint session, zone 5 as hard as you can go
1 x medium effort, medium duration tempo workout

Day 1: Strength 1
Day 2: Sprint session
Day 3: Medium effort tempo cardio
Day 4: Strength 2
Day 5: Long loaded walk

Sprints:
The sprint session doesn’t care whether you do 10 seconds hard and 30 recovery or 30 on, 30 off or 4 minutes as hard as you can go, 4 mins recovery. There is no magical protocol.
Warm up, work as hard as you can, recover. Do it again 2-10 times. As with everything, build up volume and intensity. The sprints should leave you gasping and hating your life choices.

Medium effort tempo cardio
This means go as hard as you can for somewhere between 10-30 minutes. Run, row, bike, ruck, whatever. Pick a route, keep the time the same and try and beat your distance each week.

Long slow cardio:
Slow, but not super slow, out of breath, but not dying. Add 10 minutes each week until you’re getting an hour and a half of solid Z2 cardio. If you can’t manage that, do what you can.

Strength:
What do the strength sessions include? We want to cover all the big, commonly used movement patterns, but try and avoid doing very similar movements on the same day.

These movement patterns are:
Squat - getting up out of a seat
Hinge - picking something up from the floor
Push - both vertically and horizontally, vertically as if you were putting a suitcase on top of a cupboard and horizontally as if you were doing a push up.
Pull - vertically, pull ups and chin ups. Horizontally, bent over row of some type
Split - lunges, step ups/ downs, split squats
Rotation: movements that mimic throwing a rugby ball or a hook punch
Anti-rotation, the ability to stop yourself from being rotated by either outside forces or your own movement
Crawling & floor work: copy a young child, crawl, roll, get up, get down

Now we’ve decided on the movement patterns we’re going to use, we need to pick a specific exercise to start with.

Ideally we’ll have a scaled version so we can start nice and easy and progressively make it harder applying the principle of overload. This could mean more reps, but often means adding a bit more weight than you did last time. The most common reason I’ve seen for people not progressing is lack of overload. We tend to avoid overload because it is hard work and gets scary.

Hopefully as you can see, there is a lot to consider, and we haven’t touched on nutrition or lifestyle yet.

Coaching makes this all so much more manageable. Get in touch if you need help.

Photo by Peter Conlan on Unsplash

Ketogenic diet may harm gut bacteria and raise cholesterol levels

Low sugar diet good. - Keto diet long term bad. - Moderate sugar diet - meh.

"Despite reducing fat mass, the ketogenic diet increased the levels of unfavourable fats in the blood of our participants, which, if sustained over years, could have long-term health implications such as increased risk of heart disease and stroke " - Lead researcher Dr. Aaron Hengist

Published in Cell Reports Medicine, the research from the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise, and Metabolism involved 53 healthy adults for up to 12 weeks. Participants followed either a moderate sugar diet (control), a low-sugar diet (less than 5% of calories from sugar), or a ketogenic (keto) low-carbohydrate diet (less than 8% of calories from carbohydrates).

Reduced Favourable Gut Bacteria: The keto diet altered gut microbiome composition, notably decreasing Bifidobacteria, beneficial bacteria often found in probiotics. This bacteria has wide ranging benefits: producing b vitamins, inhibiting pathogens and harmful bacteria and lowering cholesterol. Sugar restriction did not significantly impact the gut microbiome composition.

Glucose Tolerance: The keto diet reduced glucose tolerance, meaning the adults' bodies became less efficient at handling carbohydrates.

Both Diets Resulted In Fat Loss: Keto Diet resulted in an average of 2.9 kg fat mass loss per person, whilst the sugar restricted diet followed with an average 2.1 kg fat mass loss per person at 12 weeks.

Metabolism: Researchers also noticed that the keto diet caused significant changes in lipid metabolism and muscle energy use, shifting the body's fuel preference from glucose to fats.

Physical Activity Levels: Both sugar restriction and keto diets achieved fat loss without changing physical activity levels.

As ever with peer reviewed studies, you need to take the results with a pinch of salt until they have been replicated by other reputable teams.

University of Bath. "Ketogenic Diet may reduce friendly gut bacteria and raise cholesterol levels." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 August 2024. .

Photo by Agto Nugroho on Unsplash

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Food labeling & peer influence improves shopping/ diet quality:

Adding behavioural nudges and financial incentives improves diet quality by a significant amount. This backs up what coaches have been saying forever, that you need clarity about what to do or you just won't do anything. You need to know why it is important and the benefits so you can judge the effort vs reward and make a smart choice. It turns out that adding a little competition, a small financial reward and maybe a fear of being judged about your shopping choices also drives healthy behaviour.

Supermarkets could and should build into their online shopping systems peer comparison and health scores without much difficulty given all the nutritional information must be available. If they were smart, they could also incentivise healthy choices by providing a low cost reward (coupons maybe) that you would lose if your basket was above a threshold for 'unhealthy'.

Researchers from Duke-NUS' Health Services and Systems Research Programme conducted a randomised trial. There were three groups, no front of packaging food labels, front of package food labels and food labels + peer influence and a chance not to lose a $5 healthy shopping bonus.

"shoppers were exposed to the front-of-pack labels and peer influence, there was a large improvement in the healthiness of the shopping basket. There was an additional improvement in the "yours-to-lose" cash reward arm, but the biggest bang came from the peer influence."

" When the researchers allowed participants to see the front-of-pack labels and how their shopping basket compared to that of their peers, there was a 14 per cent improvement in the diet quality of the shopping basket" - Science Daily

Professor Eric Finkelstein, from Duke-NUS Health Services and Systems Research Programme, said: "We've seen peer influence be effective at reducing energy consumption. With this study, we've demonstrated that it can also motivate consumers to select more nutritional items. This is a simple and costless way to fight chronic diseases. I hope our findings encourage supermarkets to introduce these interventions into their online shopping environment."

Photo by Caju Gomes on Unsplash

Change, it is hard.

The hard bit of any change effort is not the what or even the why, it is the how. More importantly what conditions need to exist for your change spark to grow into as roaring flame?

Think about it, you can get an infinite amount of nutritional, sleep, s*x, training and every other kind of advice pretty much at zero cost over the internet. So why aren't we all healthy and happy, living our best lives? Yes, some of the advice is utter crap designed to separate you from your hard earned cash, but assuming you're not an idiot you can probably filter the obvious cons out, so why are you still stuck?

I read a wonderful article by Adam Mastroianni of https://buff.ly/4aFESHl, where he talks about getting out of the bog. One of the key take home points was that change takes effort. You don't have an infinite amount of energy and you can't just create more, you don't have infinite time and you can't create more. So if you're planning a change effort, what conditions need to exist to allow you the time, head space, energy and resources to make it work before you land back in the bog.

In other words, what needs to change to allow you to change.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

Stay the course:

"Accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus.
No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road.
Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end”. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Coach Somner⠀

Photo by Diego Jimenez on Unsplash

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