Although there is a good correlation between being slim and being healthy, being slim does not automatically guarantee that you are healthy.

Being naturally slim most of my life, I experienced this fact first hand. There were long periods where I was not involved in any active training and ate large amounts of unhealthy food. I did feel unfit, less healthy, and much more lethargic; fall asleep in classes, etc. Being slim, people assumed I was naturally fit and healthy. I tried to explain to them that I was not, but they would not listen, saying “oh, but you’re much more fit than <insert a fat guys name here>”. Well that wasn’t always true!

Of course, being overweight is not a good thing either, but improving your fitness is of even greater importance.

According to a report on MSNBC:

Men and women who were fit, as judged by a treadmill test, but were overweight or obese had a lower mortality risk than those of normal weight but low fitness levels, the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some aimless internet wanderings I stumbled across some articles about a gene called the Myostatin gene, nicknamed the “Schwarzenegger Gene”. Apparently the gene produces a protein called Myostatin which (for god knows what reason!!) regulates muscle growth.

Experiments in mutating the gene (which lowered the Myostatin levels) has resulted in up to 30% muscular gains in cattle and up to 300% in mice. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, so I was googling myself the other day, as you do, and one of the sites that popped up was a spam blog with a post “how do boxers lose weight so fast”? Obviously it was just junk, but let’s see if I can beat that site to the top of the google results by writing a real post about how boxers lose weight so fast.

Read the rest of this entry »