For today's edition of Sunday with Sisson, I'm covering a couple newer studies, rapid fire style.
The
first study is really interesting. It involved taking a group of people and splitting them up into three groups. One was the control group. The two other groups engaged in positive thinking about the future, but one of the positive thinking group's "positive thinking" was related to the task they were doing. The other group just did positive thinking about the future unrelated to any task.
The group whose positive thinking was related to the task they were doing saw reductions in anxiety and stress and improvements in performance. Everything got better.
The group whose positive thinking was unrelated to a task saw increases in anxiety and stress.
In other words, thinking positive about the future needs to be hewed to actually doing something. Your future self (the "thinking about the future" part) needs to be aligned with your present self (the "doing"). If you think positively about the future without doing anything to bring it about, you suffer. Your brain always knows.
The
second study is related to a previous Sunday with Sisson on the fractal nature of reality. It turns out that antihistamines, by inhibiting the effects of the inflammatory mediator histamine, also blunt the beneficial adaptive effects of exercise.
Exercise is an inflammatory insult to your body that your body responds to by getting stronger so that it can deal with any similar insults in the future. "Getting fitter" is actually "getting better at dealing with the inflammatory insult of exercise." It is dampening the effect of the insult so that you can handle greater insults and maintain performance and homeostasis.
That's fitness.
Turns out that histamine is necessary for proper training adaptations. Block one thing and you'll often block another. Physiology tends to be redundant when it can be, reusing the same pathway for multiple effects. Killing as many birds with as few stones as possible.
What new studies have you been reading or thinking about? Share in the comment section of
New and Noteworthy.
