Joshua Bryce Newman

Even if you don’t have to wear a swimsuit on national television, you can still get in shape like CrossFit NYC member and newly crowned Miss America, Mallory Hagan.

For anyone dismissing her win strictly to genetics, here’s Mallory two years apart, winning Miss Brooklyn in 2010 and winning Miss New York in 2012:

Turns out, working out works.

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[Relatedly, as per the NY Post:

“She did not want to be rail-thin,” Maynard said. “She did it the right way: She did a lot of CrossFit, and she just ate a lot better.”]

When Bob Harper is in New York, he works out at CFNYC. So I turned on Biggest Loser tonight, to see him in action. Hilariously, though Planet “No CrossFitting” Fitness is this year’s sponsor, Harper still managed to sneak in an array of Rogue Fitness equipment, and even wore a Rogue t-shirt for much of the episode. Undercover CrossFit!

But while I enjoyed watching a WOD go down on major network TV, I was more than a bit shocked to see what Harper and the other trainers (particularly Jillian Michaels) put their trainees through for a first workout. Minutes in, several contestants had passed out, vomited or fallen repeatedly off treadmills.

Obviously, that makes great television. (Look! It’s a fat guy being fat!) But it’s a terrible example for people looking to get in shape in 2013.

Over the past eight years of building the country’s largest CrossFit gym, I’ve seen a huge number of people resolve to lose weight. I’ve seen a lot of them pull it off, and I’ve seen a lot disappear, presumably reverting to their old habits. The difference, invariably, is that the people who succeed start slow, and focus all their energy on sustaining their efforts over the long haul.

As I said a few days back, building a habit is about consistency before intensity. If you’ve started out doing two workouts a day, seven days a week, you’re not going to make it to the end of January before you fall off the wagon, no matter how much New Years resolution piss and vinegar you’re full of. Instead, twelve months from now, it’s the people who have found a way to get to the gym three mornings a week, every single week, come hell or high water, who will be forwarding around a picture of themselves standing inside their old, now oversized pants..

The New York Times: ‘A Military Regimen: Bring the Pain’

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.

[From "Chronic Exercise Preserves Lean Muscle Mass in Masters Athletes"]

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.

A few weeks back, I posted the first part of a talk I gave about Paleo Fitness for the Eating Paleo in New York Meetup.

As promised, here’s the second chunk, which looks at what we know about how fit our ancestors were, and how they go that way:

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.

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.

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.

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.