kitchen table math, the sequel: the other answer to all our problems

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

the other answer to all our problems

Fitness in 6 minutes a week:
  • 20 to 30 seconds highest intensity exercise you can stand (running, jumping, etc – not sure about weight-lifting per se)
  • 4 minutes rest
  • repeat 20 to 30 seconds of highest intensity you can stand
  • repeat rest
  • continue for 4 to 6 cycles
  • repeat 3 times a week
Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week?
by GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
June 24 2009
Fasting exercise:
  • 3 groups 28-year old men
  • overate by 30% of what they actually needed
  • diet was 50% fat
  • 1 group did no exercise
  • 1 group did rigorous running/cycling exercise 4 mornings a week – two workouts were 90 minutes; two were 60 AFTER eating breakfast & while also drinking sports drinks during exercise
  • 3rd group ate the same & did same exercise BEFORE breakfast – in fasting state
  • no-exercise group gained more than 6 pounds, became insulin resistant, and began storing fat inside muscle
  • vigorous exercise-after-breakfast group gained 3 pounds, also became insulin resistant & began storing fat inside muscle
  • fasting-exercise group gained no weight, did not become insulin resistant, and showed increase in protein related to glucose transport in muscle
  • exercise in fasting state burns fat, not carb
  • probably any level of fasting exercise would be better than nothing
The Benefits of Exercising Before Breakfast
by Gretchen Reynolds
December 15, 2010


I've decided to put these two together. I'm nixing the 90-minute workout in favor of a 10-minute walk/run with the dogs and 4 high-intensity cycles of jump-rope.*

Will let you know how it goes

*Speaking of jump rope, today's jump ropes, the ones with the "precision" ball bearing handles are awful! They spin too fast and too erratically, so much so that my sister calls them "spinny." What happened to the old jump ropes with hollow wood handles & the rope threaded through? Apparently someone's going to have to reinvent them. Fortunately, I discovered today that it is possible to get a very good workout jumping rope without the rope. All you have to do is imagine the rope.

21 comments:

Jen said...

I went to this site yesterday and got my free week of the "music" to go along with a 20 minute workout -- 5 minutes to warm-up, 6 cycles of 30-second intervals at high intensity interspersed with 90-second "recovery" periods and then a cool down. Did it in my living room and was amazed that it really did feel like a workout (6 bouts of breathing heavily makes you feel like you've done something!)

They've got various 8 week programs: http://www.intervaltraining.net/hiit.html

I picked the Lose Belly Fat Fast one, because they said it was a good one to start with (nothing if not suggestible!).

Jen said...

I do have to say though, that the thought of swallowing a tablespoon of olive oil STILL makes me a little hot, sweaty and nauseous.

;-/

Jen said...

And, one more...on the first comment, that's the first week's intervals, it does increase from there, a little bit, I think -- maybe 6 minutes high interspersed with 6 minutes recovery?

Anonymous said...

Hi ,
i am here and want to know the the prime numbers but the main fact is that i want to know the real use of the prime numbers in real life so that i would able to know what's the use of that number .

Anonymous said...

"...but the main fact is that i want to know the real use of the prime numbers in real life..."

The primary use of the prime numbers in real life for most people is that a prime number is the ending date for January, March, May, July, August, October and December. On leap year, like 2012, a prime number is also used as the ending date for February. Without these prime numbers, we couldn't end these months and that would be very bad.

For programmers and computer engineers, the primary use of prime numbers is in the binary number system (modern digital computers are built around base 2 ... 2 is a prime).

-Mark Roulo

Anonymous said...

Mark, I understand about the months and all, but why is it that people use prime numbers to count TO three but not when they are counting BY threes?

Anonymous said...

"Mark, I understand about the months and all, but why is it that people use prime numbers to count TO three but not when they are counting BY threes?"

Ah ... people *DO* use prime numbers when counting by threes. The first number is, obviously, the prime number 3. The next number you get by *adding* another prime number (which is also three in this case). You just keep adding primes:

3
3+3 = 6
6+3 = 9
9+3 = 12

Primes at every step!

-Mark Roulo

Glen said...

Mark, maybe you could help me, too. Many of us programmers today use base-16 because, of course, it's eight times as fast as base-2.

But all this stuff about primes has me thinking. What if we made a base-17 computer? That would be a little faster than base-16, and it would be a prime number, too, with all the benefits of primacy. (I would actually prefer base-19, but I think Louis Farrakhan has the patent on that.)

What do you think?

And I didn't realize that thing about the months until you pointed it out. Is that why things always lasted for hundreds or thousands of years back before the Greeks invented prime numbers, because the months just went on and on?

Thanks in advance,
Glen

Barry Garelick said...

Of course, without prime numbers, we would not have prime factors, so the even numbers would not exist!

rocky said...

amit, check out purplemath.com

Here we mainly discuss math teaching, but purplemath is more about math itself.

Cheers.

Anonymous said...

"Mark, maybe you could help me, too. Many of us programmers today use base-16 because, of course, it's eight times as fast as base-2."

Yep! And back when we were still working with discrete transistors, we often could only work in base-8. This is why octal is still around (e.g. base-8 support in languages like C). Of course, working in base-8 instead of base-16, the computers ran slower back then.

"But all this stuff about primes has me thinking. What if we made a base-17 computer? That would be a little faster than base-16, and it would be a prime number, too, with all the benefits of primacy. (I would actually prefer base-19,
but I think Louis Farrakhan has the patent on that.)

What do you think?"


This is a good idea and the Russians actually tried something like this in the early 1960s. The Minsk-2 computer used 37-bit instructions.

The problem, I think, is that while it looks like it should be faster, you only have one prime. An 8-bit machine can also be thought of as a 2^3 machine, so you get two primes. A 16-bit machine is (2^2)^2), so you get three
primes. A 32-bit machine has only two primes, *BUT* you get both an even and an odd prime (much like the 8-bit machines).

This area of computer science is pretty empirical, though. We know what runs faster, and have some hypotheses about why, but the theory is pretty weak. You might want to google for "P versus NP" (short for prime versus non-prime) to get some sense for how primes and non-primes interact in computers (you may have to wade through a lot of pages on polynomials that are unrelated to this ... don't give up).

"And I didn't realize that thing about the months until you pointed it out. Is that why things always lasted for hundreds or thousands of years back before the Greeks invented prime numbers, because the months just went on and on?"

Yep. Months is a human construction (partially based on primes) and years are a physical phenomena (going around the sun).


-Mark Roulo

Glen said...

I tried reading a little of that P & NP stuff, but those guys don't even know if Prime=Non-Prime. Duh. Like you explained about months, their explanations go on and on without reaching the prime part. Even they admit that their lectures have a "halting problem."

Catherine Johnson said...

well...back to exercise: I have exercised before breakfast every day since .... uh .... two days before January 1.

And I have discovered a decent latter day jump rope: a beaded thingie with plastic handles and no ball bearings.

Just to be consistently off-topic.

Catherine Johnson said...

I'm going to check out the interval training website...

TerriW said...

Catherine:

I "jump rope" a lot, but I never use a rope. I couldn't do it when I was a kid, and I'm even worse now as an adult. On the other hand, it's great and super convenient for anytime/anywhere exercise. So, yeah, I just use my Pretend Rope.

Also, the Michael Olajide Jr. videos are really good, if you're looking for something to keep you going through 40-60 minutes of it without losing your mind to boredom.

TerriW said...

Speaking of videos -- my very favorite high intensity videos are:

* Cathe Friedrich's High Intensity Interval Training. Wonderful, love it, do it once a week, sometimes twice. Can't say enough good about it. Three separate HiiT Workouts -- one 40/20 (40 seconds work, 20 seconds rest), one 30/30, and one pyramid (20/20, 25/25, 30/30, 35/35, 40/40, 35/35, etc, then two waves of that.) It is all plyometrics, and even though you're not working for a long period of time, it is a killer. My heart routinely gets up into the 160s with this one.

* Cathe's Cardio Core Circuit: Less intense than the one above, but about twice as long. It has a smattering of plyometrics mixed in with core work, than back to plyometrics. (Plyo can be tough on your joints, but they really do scorch your heart rate in the shortest amount of time. I can't effectively do Tabata-style work unless I'm doing plyometrics or sprinting or spinning. Can't get my heart rate high enough, quick enough otherwise.)

* The second workout on Kelley Coffey Meyer's 30 Minutes to Fitness: Cardio Blast. More plyo (sorry!) but way lower intensity than the Cathe ones. Good way to ease you into it.

I also have liked Bob Harper's Body Rev Cardio Conditioning (also his Pure Burn Super Strength). I also like Jari Love's Ripped 1000 video for strength. And, really, just about anything from Cathe Friedrich. Her videos are more expensive than your typical mass market exercise video, but the quality is worth it.

Aside from videos, my very favorite thing to do is to use an indoor track -- like I had access to this past weekend at my in-law's retirement community gym. A few laps slow jog, one lap all out sprint, then repeat, then one lap walk, then repeat the whole thing.

Or, if I really want to see results, I will warm up, then sprint all out one lap, then come to a corner and do push-ups, then sprint all out, come back and do sit-ups, then sprint then squats, repeat, repeat, repeat, until your heart explodes. OK, maybe stop a little before then.

I wish I could have lost all this weight with doing nice little jogs around the neighborhood with my dog, but I couldn't. But the stuff above did the trick.

Catherine Johnson said...

I "jump rope" a lot, but I never use a rope. I couldn't do it when I was a kid, and I'm even worse now as an adult. On the other hand, it's great and super convenient for anytime/anywhere exercise. So, yeah, I just use my Pretend Rope.

Jump rope is amazingly difficult!

I jumped rope all the time as a kid, but picking it up again as an adult produced yet another Reality Bites moment or two.

Especially with the PRECISION BALL BEARING jump rope Ed bought. Good Lord.

I'm recovering my balance now.

Before I found the plastic bead jump rope, I was doing pretend jump rope, but I didn't like it -- and that, too, got weird....you don't have the sound of the rope to mark where you are in the jump, or where your arms are supposed to be.

Catherine Johnson said...

Jen - did you do an olive oil diet?? We used the Shangri-La Diet for several months. Jimmy lost a huge amount of weight, and Chris lost some. Can't remember if I lost any; I think I did.

Ed, who is naturally thin (and naturally dislikes junk food), was scornful throughout.

I still think Seth Roberts is onto something about the nature of appetite - but we found we couldn't sustain the diet. We all got off it.

I now think that's just as well; I don't think it's a particularly healthy diet.

But it worked for a while.

Catherine Johnson said...

The "China Study" diet is bulletproof.

whole foods
plant-based
no added fat

I don't think it's possible to be overweight on that diet.

It's reasonably sustainable, though I couldn't deal with the no added fat.

Catherine Johnson said...

Writing that last comment, I remembered a scene in The Big Bang, where Raj complains that Howard ditched him for a date with a girl, forcing Raj to take a vegan class in Indian cooking alone.

"Do you know what chicken and rice is for a vegan?" he says.

"It's RICE."

Catherine Johnson said...

the Michael Olajide Jr. videos are really good, if you're looking for something to keep you going through 40-60 minutes of it without losing your mind to boredom.

OK, I am THANKING GOD I have a fast metabolism right about now.