Latest Articles
Are You Working Out Hard Enough?
People often complain that most dietary advice is confusing and contradictory. Coffee is a killer one week, good for you the next. The same can be said for advice about exercise: What's it supposed to be? Thirty minutes a week? An hour a week? Ten minutes here and there when you find the time? And the big question, the one for which it is really hard to get a straight answer, is this: How hard do I have to work out for it to be worth the trouble?
The Benefits of Indoor Rock Climbing
Full disclosure: I’m terrified of heights. But for some reason, that was never an issue for me while clinging to a nearly smooth rock face some 50 feet off of the high desert floor. Maybe it was the thick nylon rope that would keep me from splattering across the ground should my feet or hands slip while climbing. Maybe it was the fact that rock climbing requires an unlikely combination of Zen-like relaxation and total focus on the task at hand. Maybe it was the fact that I must have been somewhat insane, balancing on a protrusion of stone no wider than a quarter. Maybe it just boils down to the fact that was I was too afraid of falling to be afraid of falling.
Natural Running: A Beginner’s Guide
Last year, we gave up our beach lifestyle and moved inland, to a house that sits on the edge of a trail-looped canyon. As a longtime beach runner, used to running barefoot in soft sand, I found myself struggling. Even on hard-packed dirt, I could feel my teeth rattling, and my knees and back ached in protest at the end of every run. The idea that I was doing it wrong was counterintuitive—I mean, it’s running, putting one foot in front of the other in rapid succession. I knew about pronating and heel-striking, but hey, that’s why you pay a lot of money for expensive shoes, right? The shoes are supposed to fix all that.
