Chameleon

I’m not normally a big video-gamer, though I do tend to play games on my iPhone while riding the subway. As I almost always listen to a podcast or audiobook at the same time, I tend to like mindless yet engaging games – something to distract me visually from the sweaty summer riders crowded in around me, as complement to my earbudded audio cocoon.

In the past, Alto’s Adventure has been a favorite, as has Candy Crush, Two Dots, and Twofold.

This past week, however, I discovered Apple 2016 Editor’s Choice Award-winner Chameleon Run, and I’m thoroughly addicted.

The game is an autorunner, with a simple twist: you can change your little running guy’s color from yellow to pink, and you can only run on planks that match your current color. That addition – forcing you to monitor color-switching with your left thumb, while jumping with your right – makes the game far more difficult and interesting than a standard, one-choice autorunner. The levels are also extremely difficult, with multiple variations and paths through each: collect all the marbles, collect all the stars, complete the level without changing color.

Most brilliantly / nefariously, the game also leverages economist Richard Thaler‘s insight about the power of default behavior: when you die (which happens quite a lot), the game automatically restarts the level, without you having to click something to begin again. That small nudge is enough to keep me playing one more try, wait just one more after that, okay seriously just this last one, no seriously after this one I’m putting it down, etc.

If you’re looking for stupid brilliant immersive fun, go download it (for iPhone or Android) yourself.

Suck it Up

For the most part, you should run the other direction from crash diets, fast fixes, and “one weird trick” solutions. But with summer upon us, there is at least one exercise you can still deploy in the last couple of weeks that will make you appear noticeably slimmer when you hit the beach.

It’s called the ‘stomach vacuum’, and it’s an old bodybuilder standby, used by competitors to achieve the waspish waist that was the hallmark look of that sport’s golden era.

The stomach vacuum works the transversus abdominis (or TVA), a deep postural core muscle that serves as essentially a natural corset, holding in your guts. Improving the maximal contractive strength of the muscle also increases the muscle’s tone – its degree of resting contraction. Which, as a result, will carve an inch or two visually off your waistline, even in just two or three weeks.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Ideally, do this first thing in the morning. Or, at least, on an empty stomach.
  2. Start lying on your back, with your feet on the ground.  
  3. Take a full breath, then exhale through your mouth until you've blown out all the air.  
  4. Once your lungs are empty, pull your bellybutton down to your spine, as hard as you can. Really pull it down; the harder you pull, the closer to your spine your bellybutton gets, the better this works.
  5. At the same time, try to make your chest as big as possible (i.e., lift your chest up), though while still pulling down hard on your bellybutton.
  6. Hold that for 15 seconds.  
  7. Then relax, breathe normally for 15-30 second, and repeat, 2-4 times more.

If you stick with this exercise over the course of the summer, you can slowly increase the duration of each hold, adding 5-10 seconds each week, until you’re holding for 60 seconds for each of your 3-5 sets.

Again, this should drop two inches off your waist in just two to three weeks. And, as a bonus, engaging your TVA improves power transfer in athletic movements, and may even protect your low back from tweaks and injuries.

Suck it up, indeed.

Burn Baby Burn

Recently, I started re-reading Ray Bradbury's inimitable Fahrenheit 451. I hadn't read it since high school, and though I remembered much of the plot, I had apparently forgotten one of the most crucial – and relevant to our current world – details.

As I recalled it previous to picking up the book again, the Firemen burn books on the order of some dystopian dictatorial government. But Bradbury's point is the exact opposite: the Fireman burn books by populist democratic will, because Americans have become concerned that those books contain content that some minority of society might find offensive.

In a world of micro-aggressions and Social Justice Warriors, a world where our best comedians no longer want to play college campuses because the student bodies are literally too sensitive to take a joke, Fahrenheit 451 seems prescient indeed.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And if we wish to be a first-rate country, our polity must similarly be willing to hold – or, at least, to hear – opposing ideas.

If you similarly haven't read Fahrenheit 451 for years or decades, I'd highly recommend picking it back up.

Presidential

When I was a junior in high school, AP US History and jazz band were held at the same time. As a result, I can play a mean bebop line, but I have a totally remedial understanding of America’s past.

That’s long been a source of some embarrassment, so I was particularly happy to recently discover Presidential, a new(ish) podcast from the Washington Post. In a series of 44 episodes, culminating with this year’s election, they’re reviewing each of our presidents past, one by one.

Though I’ve thus far only made it through Polk, I can definitely recommend starting from the beginning, and listening all the way through yourself. It’s a great chance to get a deeper sense of context as we continue to bowl through this rather “interesting” election year.

Game of Thrones: Predictions

There’s only one episode left in season 6, and it seems pretty clear from foreshadowing throughout the season that it will focus on Cersei’s trial, her inevitable decision to burn down King’s Landing with the wildfire that “Mad King” Aerys Targaryen buried below the city years before, and possibly on Jamie deciding to kill Cersei to save the city / their son. (Also, I’m virtually certain the episode will end with the White Walkers coming through the Wall.)

But more interesting to me is the three-way conflict slowly being set up for season 7: aside from Bran (on his solo mission north, and en route to aging into the old man in the tree who has come back in time to teach his younger self how to time-travel), nearly every other character in the show is gradually aligning under the influence of three strong female leads: Daenerys Targaryen (who now controls everything across the Narrow Sea, as well as, indirectly, the Iron Islands), Margaery Tyrell (who can drive the Sparrows, and, through King Tommen, the Lannisters and all of their allies in Westeros), and Sansa Stark (who has Jon Snow, will certainly have Arya back shortly, and who will own the North and all the Westerosian houses that Margie doesn’t).

So, kudos to the show-runners; it’s unique in film and television to highlight so many competent (albeit increasingly Machiavellian) female characters in leadership positions, and it will be great to watch them duke it out for control of the Seven Kingdoms, with each lady an entirely plausible, powerful queen.

Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared

Though I do my best to stay on top of media trends and internet memes, I often still miss something great. So I was unfamiliar with artists Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling’s short video series, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared,” until just today.

While the first episode is now about five years old (playing at Sundance in 2011), their sixth (and final) installment dropped just yesterday.

The shorts are in the style of children’s television programs – with singing, talking puppets as main characters, and each episode built around a single theme like ‘creativity’ or ‘dreams.’ But, increasingly shortly within each successive episode, things diverge from their happy start to far darker territory.

All six are pretty much amazing, and there’s a subtle through-line building across the entire set. I’d highly recommend blowing your lunch break by watching them all:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Green is not a creative color, indeed.

Hot & Cold

About 40 years ago, Dr. Gabe Mirkin coined the acronym RICE – Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation – which has been the standard treatment protocol for most athletic injuries ever since.

Recently, however, a slew of studies have begun to show that icing actually delays healing. (For some good examples, see this one and this one.) The studies are persuasive; so much so that even Dr. Mirkin has changed his mind, updating RICE to the new (albeit much less pronounceable) MCE: Movement, Compression, Elevation.

In short, while inflammation was initially considered to be a source of damage (hence icing, which reduces that inflammation), scientists increasingly understand that inflammation is actually a key part of the healing process, with inflammatory cells called macrophages releasing hormones into the damaged tissue to help with repair. (Here’s a recent study on that process.)

Eagle-eyed readers will note that Mirkin isn’t just dropping icing, he’s also swapping rest for movement (or, more specifically, for “move safely when you can as much as you can”). Continuing to gently move an injured joint or muscle promotes the flow of fluid into and out of the area around the injury (which allows those macrophages to get in when they need to work, and to depart once they’re done), and prevents the injured tissues from wasting as they would with complete rest.

So throw out that stack of old ice packs in your freezer, and start thinking of creative ways to say “MCE” out loud.

Get Lost

“Lewis and Clark were lost most of the time. If your idea of exploration is to always know where you are and to be inside your zone of competence, you don’t do wild new shit. You have to be confused, upset, think you’re stupid. If you’re not willing to do that, you can’t go outside the box.”
– Nathan Myhrvold

Apnea

What I SAID

In exercise science, there’s a principle known as SAID, or ‘specific adaptation to imposed demands’: when your body is exposed to a stress, it responds by improving your biomechanical and neurological ability to handle that stress.

Start doing pull-ups regularly, and your body will get better at pull-ups, increasing the strength in your lats and biceps, and reinforcing the tendons in your shoulders and elbows.

But SAID also dictates that adaptation is specific. So while practicing pull-ups will make you better at pull-ups, it won’t necessarily improve your ability to pull yourself up a mountain face while rock-climbing.

For years, the gospel of SAID kept most athletes locked into the most literal version of their sport. If you wanted to train for a marathon, you’d simply go for increasingly long runs.

Let Me Be (Less) Specific

Over time, however, scientists began to discover that adaptation wasn’t quite as specific as initially believed. Because most sports depend on a constellation of intertwined skills and abilities, other types of training could often develop those constituent skills and abilities more effectively than simply (or solely) practicing the goal sport itself.

Rather than just going for long runs, for example, marathoners began to integrate interval and tempo work – practicing the skill of running faster for short distances, and then working on sustaining a higher pace for gradually greater distances. Though neither type of run was as ‘specific’ as a long-distance jog, they helped runners improve faster than long-distance jogging alone, and athletes began to set new records, year after year.

As athletes and coaches further experimented, they began to see that even more distantly-related variants of the initial task could be valuable. In the early days of the competitive marathon, for example, weight-training was considered anathema to running. By now, virtually all marathoners have extensive weight-lifting programs. And the details of those programs have evolved over time, too. While runners initially used light weights for a large number of reps (reasoning that it more closely mirrored the endurance-heavy nature of the goal task), now elite runners instead tend to focus on developing skills like power-endurance in the weight room. Though a heavy set of cleans is a far cry from a long-distance jog, it turns out to pay greater dividends on the road than time spent doing multiple sets of 20-rep leg extensions.

Far, Far Away

Today, some of high-level athletes’ training modalities seem ridiculously distant from the sort of specific training that once dominated the show. For example, hyperthermic conditioning – or, sitting in a sauna or steam room – has recently come into vogue. Scientists discovered that regular time in the sauna boosts plasma volume and blood flow to your heart and muscles, increasing endurance in even highly-trained athletes.

In other words, while adaptation may be specific, a modern and science-based understanding of training has a much broader definition of what, exactly, ‘specific’ might mean.

Most of us have limited time (and energy) to devote to fitness, so it makes sense for us to focus on the things that give the most bang for the training buck. And from that perspective, a few sessions a week of strength training and metabolic conditioning are all you need to get into great shape.

But because Composite works with pro, semi-pro, and serious amateur athletes, we’re also always on the lookout for things (like hyperthermic conditioning in the sauna) that can help juice out additional percentage points of performance gains.

That’s what led me to a series of recent experiments with apnea tables, an idea borrowed from the world of spearfishing and free-diving (a sport of diving to SCUBA depths while simply holding your breath).

Let’s Get Metabolic

To understand why apnea tables work, you first need to know a bit about energy metabolism. When we work out at high levels of intensity, our bodies route around our cells’ mitochondria (which generate energy in a more sustainable, but slower, way) to create energy directly, in the rest of the cell. That process, anaerobic metabolism, is much faster, though it creates an increasing build-up of lactic acid as a by-product, called metabolic acidosis. Eventually, as enough lactic acid builds up, we hit what’s called the lactate threshold: we ‘feel the burn,’ and need to slow down or stop.

But where that threshold is, exactly, varies from person to person. In short, the higher the threshold, the more metabolic acidosis you can tolerate, and the greater your exercise endurance.

As you exercise, your body also creates carbon dioxide, or CO2. And CO2 is a buffer against lactic acid. So the higher the level of CO2 in your blood, the more metabolic acidosis you can tolerate.

We’ve long known that’s one of the ways endurance training works: you increase your tolerance of CO2, which increases your tolerance for metabolic acidosis, which increases your performance and endurance.

Just (Don’t) Breathe

But while you can improve CO2 tolerance indirectly through exercise, it turns out you can also train it directly.

When you’re holding your breath, your body doesn’t actually monitor the amount of oxygen in your blood. Instead, it monitors the amount of CO2. As it climbs, you feel like you need to breathe. But that feeling has a lot of margin of error built in. Most people can only hold their breath for 30-45 seconds, due to CO2 tolerance, but it takes a full 180 seconds, or three minutes, before your oxygen levels really begin to drop.

So free-divers and spearfishers have developed ways to improve CO2 tolerance, in an attempt to hold their breath for longer and longer durations. (With practice, a decent free-diver can go 5-6 minutes on a single hold.)

Their main training tool is called an apnea table, which alternates static periods of breath-hold with decreasing periods of recovery breathing.

It looks like this:

Round 1 – Hold 1:00 – Breathe 1:30

Round 2 – Hold 1:00 – Breathe 1:15

Round 3 – Hold 1:00 – Breathe 1:00

Round 4 – Hold 1:00 – Breathe 0:45

Round 5 – Hold 1:00 – Breathe 0:30

Round 6 – Hold 1:00 – Breathe 0:15

Here’s a good iPhone app that does a more tailored, dynamic, and easily counted version of the same thing. (It’s what I and my athletes have been using.)

With increasingly brief durations to catch your breath between holds, and less time to flush the carbon dioxide from your blood, your CO2 level will slowly climb over the course of the protocol. Which, in turn, builds your ability to tolerate the increased CO2. (Nota bene: if you’re doing it right, you should likely feel a little light-headed by the end. Sit or lie down while you’re practicing, so that you don’t injure yourself if you happen to pass out. And never, ever try this in water; drowning is tacky.)

From what I’ve seen, most free-divers recommend trying this just once a week, as well as a weekly workout on an oxygen table (where the breathing periods are constant, but the holds increase). While I suspect the latter would be beneficial to endurance, too, I’ve focused my experiment solely on the CO2 / apnea table, to better isolate its effects.

Great Success!

And, in short, the effects have been pretty impressive. My 500m row had held steady at 1:47 for the past few years. (I know, I know. At 5’6”, rowing isn’t exactly my sport.) After just six weeks of apnea table practice, however, I pulled a 1:42 – a whopping 5% improvement. And, at least as importantly, a slightly slower row (2:00/500m) now seems far, far easier in terms of perceived exertion, leaving me much less gassed when one shows up mid-workout.

I’ve seen similar improvements on my running and metabolic conditioning times, and the four athletes on whom I’ve been testing the apnea tables have also seen 3-8% performance bumps across the board.

At less than 15 minutes of weekly time commitment, it seems more than worth trying out. If you do, let me know how it goes; I’m definitely curious to test this further, and will report back with more data once I do.

Same Drugs

I’ve been a fan of Chance the Rapper since he released his first mixtape, 2012’s 10 Day, which he recorded during a ten-day high school suspension for smoking pot. I was even more impressed by his second album, Acid Rap, which layered together a larger array of samples, live instruments, and voices, creating a constantly-shifting texture under Chance’s thoughtfully penned lines.

Though Kanye and Jay-Z took Chance under their wing, and though he toured as opener for Childish Gambino, he never signed with a label, and has repeatedly committed to releasing his music for free online.  So while Chance’s first two mix tapes were heavily listened to online, they never qualified for Grammy consideration, as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences only recognizes music “commercially released in general distribution in the United States, i.e. sales by label to a branch or recognized independent distributor, via the Internet, or mail order/retail sales for a nationally marketed product.”

As a result, Chance’s free releases didn’t make the cut.  Which led to some serious grumbling in the music press; by broad consensus, Acid Rap was certainly good enough to warrant nomination.

Earlier this year, Chance released his third mixtape, Coloring Book. And this time, he put it up initially as an exclusive on Apple Music (though it’s now also online, per usual, for free).  This, too, probably falls short of the official Grammy requirements, though after a broadly-circulated online petition supporting streaming music’s inclusion hit 35,000 signatures, the NARAS is apparently reviewing an update to the language of the rules, which would push Chance (and a slew of other new, worthy contenders) into the mix.

Here’s a quick taste of Coloring Book, “Same Drugs”:

Chance sings on this one, rather than just rapping, with layers of gospel and electronica weaving their way through the background.  The song is about change over time, about how Chance has drifted away from ‘Wendy,’ who could be either (or both) his daughter’s mother or the city of Chicago (with Wendy a play on ‘windy’).

Throughout, Chance riffs off the Wendy name, weaving in elegiac references to Peter Pan:

When did you change?
Wendy, you’ve aged
I thought you’d never grow up
I thought you’d never…
Window closed, Wendy got old
I was too late, I was too late
A shadow of what I once was

or

Don’t forget the happy thoughts
All you need is happy thoughts
The past tense, past bed time
Way back then when everything we read was real
And everything we said rhymed
Wide eyed kids being kids
Why did you stop?
What did you do to your hair?
Where did you go to end up right back here?
When did you start to forget how to fly?

It’s a great song.  And the whole album is certainly worth the listen.  But, more broadly, let’s hope the Grammys catch up to 2016, and start allowing streaming music in for contention.  It would be wonderful to see the best up-and-coming artists (rather than just the same major label acts, year-in and year-out) get the recognition they deserve.