I love working out in December. The January newbies are long gone. Even the novices who work out with the gym’s trainers have mostly given up. It’s easy to get to the equipment I need, and to find space to use it. There’s an easy camaraderie among those of us who lift 52 weeks a year. Even if we don’t know each other by name, we know the woman to the left won’t try to step over the bar we’re about to lift off the floor, and the guy to the right won’t bump into the arm that’s pressing a 70-pound dumbbell.

But it’s January now, and January is different. January is when you see people you’ve never seen in your gym before, some of whom are there for the first time. Most of…

Tags: Tags: advice, fitness, gym etiquette, January, newbies, training

Back in the late 19th century, some of the most educated and progressive people of the age believed in spiritualism. That is, they believed it was possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead, and regularly attended seances where transparently contrived bumps, breezes, and groans kept them on the edge of their chairs.

Mary Roach, in a book called Spook, explains why.

The rise of spiritualism coincided with the dawn of the electronic age. Their lives had been filled with one wonder after another: the telephone in 1876, the phonograph in 1877, and the first radio transmission of a human voice in 1900. That’s in addition to the mid-century rise in telegraph networks and continual improvements in photography.

If messages could travel thousands of miles on telegraph wires, and human voices could be…

Tags: Tags: belief systems, cleanses, diets, exercise, fitness, hcg, magic, national weight control registry, nutrition, Weight Loss

Today, George Washington is a marble bust. Historians typically rank him as our second-greatest president, after Lincoln. But for most Americans Denzel is the first Washington who comes to mind if we’re talking about a person, vs. a city or symbol.

(Fun fact: Washington is the blackest presidential surname, even blacker than Black, which is 68% white. Meanwhile, there’s a 19% chance that a person named White is in fact African-American.)

If we conjure up an image of George Washington as a fully fleshed-out human, it’s probably one of those portraits that shows him with narrow shoulders, a spreading midsection, and womanly hips.

The actual Washington didn’t look anything like that. Here’s how a fellow military officer described the 26-year-old future hero:

“[S]traight as an Indian, measuring six feet two inches in his stockings, and weighing…

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Tags: Tags: fitness, george washington, sports, training, u.s. presidents

I walked into the spelling bee just as my daughter was at the microphone for her first word of the day. She saw me coming in, and for a moment I panicked, thinking that I would distract her and she’d miss an easy one.

Fortunately, the word was “exclusive,” and I suspect Meredith could spell the word before she could pronounce it. As a seventh grader, it was no challenge whatsoever.

That’s the way it is in our family. Kimberly and I are journalists, and we’re all avid readers. Spelling comes as naturally to us as breathing. I wasn’t surprised to learn that spelling and reading proficiency have a very strong genetic component:

According to John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University Medical School, both reading and spelling require a phenomenal amount of brain power. Deciphering…

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Tags: Tags: exercise, family, fitness, genes, nutrition, personal, spelling, sports

You probably know by now that Jack LaLanne celebrated my 54th birthday on Sunday by dying at his home. He was 96.

I had one chance to meet LaLanne. It was late 2004, and I was wrapping up a photo shoot when an editor called and asked me to meet the fitness icon the next day in New York. I can’t remember why I couldn’t do it — I’m pretty sure it was a family obligation — but I’ve always regretted the lost opportunity.

I wrote about LaLanne several times in the past few years. Here’s a T-nation article from 2006, in which I put LaLanne at #5 on my list of the 10 most influential muscleheads of all time:

Here you have a guy who was there at the creation, but also not there. He opened a…

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Tags: Tags: exercise, fitness, healthy living, jack lalanne, longevity

I wanted to start the year by getting way out of my personal comfort zone and trying something entirely new. That’s why I accepted when physical therapist Shon Grosse invited me to join him and some of his neighbors and clients at his annual New Year’s Day workout. I think this is the third time he’s invited me. Shon’s training facility is about 30 miles south of me, and in the past it’s been hard to justify spending a couple hours away from the family on a holiday.

This year I made my excuses way in advance, and the weather was perfect. By the time we got outside to push sleds, it was 50 degrees. We were in shirtsleeves and sweating like farm workers.

The highlight, for me, came when we worked out on the gymnastic rings. In the video clip,…

Tags: Tags: exercise, fitness, new years, shon grosse, strength training

For most of the year, I don’t spend much time thinking about weight loss. I could stand to lose an inch around the middle, but I’ll be honest: the reward wouldn’t match the effort it would take to get significantly leaner than I am right now. I’ve been weight-stable at around 185 pounds for years, and that’s a comfortable weight for me. I can be strong and lean and mobile and feel solid and fit at that weight, and what else do I really need?

But who cares about me (other than me)?

In the past few days I’ve had three conversations with friends that inspired this three-part series. I’ll start with the most recent.

Gregg and I have worked together for years, but had never actually met until we got together for a drink the other night. He mentioned that he only worries…

Tags: Tags: exercise, fitness, problem solving, Weight Loss

I started coaching my daughter’s soccer team last year, as I wrote about here. I’d never been a head coach before, in any sport, and had no confidence in my ability to do it. But I plunged in, and learned enough about the game on the fly to teach bits and pieces of it to the kids. We had a really good fall season, followed by an okay spring season. 

For reasons that I think made sense at some point, I decided to move the team up to a travel league this year. We’re getting crushed on the field, but the kids are working hard and enjoying themselves, giving me hope that we’ll be a little more competitive in the second half of the season.

This past weekend, we played three games, all on Sunday. I entered our team in this particular tournament…

Tags: Tags: coaching, fitness, soccer, sports, workouts

According to the New York Times, the “coolios” among us — the first movers, the Influentials, the ones who get their fashion tips from celestial sources and force the less favored among us to play perpetual catch-up — are fat.

Not obese, mind you. Just skinny at the ends and round in the middle. In the words of a magazine editor, the hipsters are “proudly rocking a gut.”

The author, Guy Trebay, quotes his own trainer for this passage:

[A]s lean muscle and functionality become the new gym mantras, hypertrophied He-Men with grapefruit biceps and blister-pack abs have come to resemble specimens from a diorama of “A Vanished World.”

“When do you ever see that guy, anyway?” Mr. Morea asked, referring to those legendary Men’s Health cover models, with their rippling torsos and famished smiles. “The only time you really see that guy, he’s standing in front of an Abercrombie & Fitch…

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Tags: Tags: fashion, fitness, Media, skinny-fat, trends

I don’t always answer my email promptly, a character flaw that I’d like to correct but probably won’t anytime soon. However, I did answer a couple of random questions sent by readers this weekend, and thought I’d share the answers here. If this is something you’d like to see here, I’ll do it more often.

And if you disagree with my replies to those readers, please let me know where I’m wrong and how I should’ve answered. With both questions, I’ve done some slight editing for the usual reasons (grammar, punctuation, clarity) and to protect the correspondent’s anonymity.

I’m a newbie personal trainer working in a local gym. Whenever I try to talk to my fellow trainers about functional training and training the body as a unit vs. body-parts style, they think I’m stupid and new and just don’t get it.

I’m intimidated to train my clients in…

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Tags: Tags: careers, email, fitness, journalism, magazines, Media, personal training