I’ve long thought some agility ladder training would help with my sword fighting. But never having trained with one, I hesitated to buy one. (Not so much for the expense—they’re cheap enough—as for having yet another thing to find space for, store, and keep track of.)
Instead I bought some sidewalk chalk and drew one. These squares are 18 inches each way which seemed kind of average. But a bonus of the chalk version is I can change it every time, if I want to.
Of course, as soon as I drew it, the dog wanted to participate.
Another bonus: although we have several nice days coming up, I know I need to start using it immediately, because it will get worn away or washed away soon enough.
Now I’m studying agility-ladder stepping patterns.
Light exposure is good for you. All the different frequencies are good for you. This has led many people to try to tweeze them apart: tanning beds, red-light panels and masks, therapy lights, etc. It turns out, sunlight is best consumed whole, just like food.
I should mention that by inclination, I’m rather vulnerable to getting this wrong. I wrote at some length about how, because of the sort of person I am, I simply like the idea of figuring out all the nutrients I need, and then trying to construct a diet that provides all those things. Similarly, I like the idea of coming up with a perfect workout plan, and then getting all the movement that I need by hitting all the right exercises. But, if you follow that link, you’ll see that I eventually realized the whole notion was just wrong-headed.
There is no need—in fact, no value—in tweezing apart the nutrients in food. Just eat a varied, whole-food diet and your body will get it right. The same with movement. Just engage in a wide range of diverse movement, and your body will become highly capable of moving in all those ways, (and if your “movement diet” is adequately diverse, your body will become fairly capable of all sorts of movements you don’t even practice).
The book is consciously modeled on Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, which systematically destroyed the notion that you could build up a diet that optimized all the nutrients. And it’s message is very similar. Sunlight is best consumed whole, just like food.
All of the different frequencies are good for you:
UV (to make vitamin D, and to release nitric oxide from the skin into the blood),
blue (to tell your brain it is daytime, and to tell your subcutaneous fat cells to release fat and signal your brown fat to burn it for energy),
green and yellow (to calm you down—I have written before about my theory of dappled shade, and for vision—you see shades of yellow better than shades of white, which is why yellow glasses are good for driving, shooting, and the like),
red light and infrared light (to boost energy production in your mitochondria and promote wound healing).
“But what about skin cancer!?!?” I can hear you asking from here.
The book is well worth reading, because just the information on skin cancer is worth the price of the book (and it takes half the book to adequately deal with the subject). Because there’s so much of it, it’s not really practical to try to summarize it here, so I’ll just mention that “Don’t get sunburned” is much better advice than “Put on sunbock,” or even “Stay out of the sun.”
I figured this out years ago. I’ll use sunblock if I’m going to be out in the sun so long that I might get sunburned—I needed it for a snorkling trip to Buck Island, for example. Otherwise, I use a combination of changing my clothes, taking advantage of shade, and limiting my time out in the midday sun. But I don’t minimize my time in the sun. I maximize my time in the sun, while making sure not to get sunburned. At this point in the summer (having gotten a modest amount of sun every day since the weather turned warm) I’m okay for up to about 40 minutes of mid-day sun. And I try to get that nearly every day.
Here’s one statistic, that I’ll let stand in for dozens of others about the advantages of sun exposure. The UK Biobank has data on health outcomes for hundreds of thousands of people. A researcher Jacobsen mentions went in and counted:
… in the fifteen years of tracking, a total of 40 people had died from skin cancer attributable to too much UV light, while 2,982 people had died from diseases attributable to a deficiency of sunlight.
The final third of the book is about artificial light, and makes the case that too much light at night is just as bad as too little light during the day.
Again, this is something that I figured out long ago. All the “sleep hygiene” stuff makes it clear that you want your sleeping space to be very dark, and there’s no doubt that getting enough high-quality sleep is probably the best thing you can do for your health, maybe even above good nutrition and plenty of exercise (both of which are easier to get if you’re sleeping well).
The prescription is almost trivially easy: Get outside at dawn. Get as much sunlight as you can without burning during the day. Within a couple of hours after sunset make your space as dark as possible and get some sleep.
It was a very nice day today—moderate clouds, not too hot, no rain—so I decided to go for a run.
I haven’t actually compared it to other runs this summer, but I’m pretty sure it’s my longest and my fastest.
4.88 miles in 1h 18 min.
I really mean to do two runs a week, but I’m probably not managing even half that. But this run still felt okay. I was tired at the end, but not too tired. My joints felt fine during the run.
Do you use an activity tracker? I have an Oura ring, a Google Pixel watch, and a phone which runs Google Fit. All of those count my steps, and each one does some additional activity or sleep tracking. I find them all fun and interesting, so I’m always amused when yet another article comes out warning of the dangers of activity tracking.
I mean, sure. If you’re really foolish, you can be seriously led astray by one of these. But you’d have to be really foolish. It’s like the early days of GPS map software, where they’d be giving you directions and say, “Turn left!” but if you turned left you’d end up in a creek. Sure, you could do that, but all you had to do was look where you were going, and you could avoid it pretty easily.
Although the article has five items, there are, I think, two fundamental issues that Bakr is warning about. The larger one is outsourcing our good sense to some external device. The smaller is an excessive focus on step-count as the measure of fitness activity.
Letting a device tell you to push hard when you’re feeling crappy is just stupid. (It is perhaps somewhat less stupid to let a device tell you to take it easy when you feel great. I have several times decided to push hard because I felt great, even though one of my devices was warning me that I wasn’t fully recovered. More than once when I did that, I ended up having a crappy workout, because the device was right and I was wrong.)
With their fixation on steps (because that’s easy for a device to measure), devices have a pretty limited insight into the full scope of your movement practice. This means that they’re never going to know if your strength training is covering all the major muscle groups, or if your volume and intensity are on point. But that’s not really different from training without a device. Really, it only makes things worse if you’re so foolish as to imagine that it’s got some insight into stuff other than your steps and heart rate (or whatever else its measuring). Just like it doesn’t know enough about your strength training to provide useful advice there, it also doesn’t know much about your skills training or your flexibility training.
A lot of my training is focused on specifically increasing the sort of fitness I need for my HEMA practice. None of my devices even tries to guide me as to whether I should do less lunging practice in favor of overhead pressing practice or vice versa. (And if they did, I wouldn’t pay much attention, unless they’d started getting me to upload my sparring footage. And maybe not then.)
Getting back to the fixation on steps, the device makers want to pretend that step counts gives them some sort of deep insight into a human’s movement practice, with a one-size-fits-all target of 10,000 steps.
Weirdly, I don’t think that’s crazy. I mean, steps are by no means the only aspect of a human’s movement practice that’s important, but it’s actually not a bad proxy.
Over an evolutionarily long period, walking and running have been critical to human success. Running and walking were key to our successes in both hunting and gathering, and probably led directly to our big brains.
All three of my devices count steps. All three track walking and running. (They all try to track other activity—cycling, swimming, gardening, housework—but do so pretty poorly. Walking and running, though, they pretty much have nailed.)
In my mid-20s I was working in an office, but getting out to hike at every opportunity, which didn’t come frequently enough. I remember thinking, “If only I could get out and hike a few miles every day! I’d be in great shape!” That turns out not to be true, but it’s not completely false either.
My point here is simply that step counts are by no means a terrible proxy for one’s overall activity level, and 10,000 steps is by no means a stupid target—it’s mildly ambitious, without being out of reach for anyone with a reasonable level of fitness and some spare time. (I admit that I might well think this because I’m a weird outlier. I’m a walker from way back. I’m retired, so I have all the time in the day to walk if I want to. And I have a dog who likes to walk a lot. The upshot is, my daily steps hit 15,000 nearly every day.)
All of which is to say that I find these devices useful. In particular, they’re good at observing that I’m not fully recovered, meaning I should take it easy, even if I’m feeling okay. I find them (mildly) motivating, in that I pretty much never fail to hit 10,000 steps (unless I’m sick, the dog is sick, or the weather is terrible). I find them somewhat entertaining, especially when their praise is so for stuff I consider pretty minimal. (“You’ve met your activity goal for the day!” My Oura ring will say at 10:00 AM.)
In any case, I find them quite harmless. They don’t make me feel anxious or shamed. I’ve seen no sign that they are prompting disordered eating. I’m amused by their fixation on step counts, but not troubled by it. (I occasionally miss my 10,000 steps, usually when I’ve spent the day sitting in a plane, train, or car. I am not bothered when my devices observe that this is the case.) I care deeply about getting in my mobility work and my strength work, even if the devices don’t track it adequately. I take great joy in my movement—click any of the tags over there with “movement” in the name and find yourself taken to dozens of places where I’ve celebrated my movement practice, starting from before I had any devices, and continuing to this day. Finally, I am merely amused if my device dings me for not doing enough, as my Oura ring does if I sit for more than 50 minutes. (In fact though, these past few years, I can only barely sit still that long anyway.)
The key paragraph from the article:
For users, the first shift is to treat tracking as information rather than instruction. A watch can tell you what it has measured. It cannot tell you what your body needs today.
I mean, I know I’m a movement weirdo, but really? Who would do anything else?
“One study he mentions analysed the skin of lifeguards at the start and end of a summer season during which they were heavily exposed to the sun. By summer’s end, their skin was enriched with microbial “beneficial bugs” that protect against UV radiation. A square centimetre of human skin contains millions of microorganisms, some of which produce compounds that kill cancer cells without harming normal ones.”
I mean, really. We know the UV rays are actinic, as are the blue-green rays (tell your brain it’s daytime), and the red and infrared rays (promote healing at various depths of skin and below the skin). I don’t know about all the other wavelengths, but I’m willing to bet that they all do something.
Humans evolved in the sun, and evolved different skin pigmentation that varied with latitude (and, I suspect, varied with other things as well). The idea that our skin can’t handle a perfectly ordinary amount of sunlight is just silly.
As you’ll know if you subscribe to my newsletter (sign up in the sidebar), my brother and I are attending SFWA’s Nebula Award Conference in Chicago.
Today Steven had SFWA board stuff all day, so after breakfast I went to the hotel fitness center for a workout.
Normally I always do a full warmup before a workout. (This is slightly problematic, as too often I just do the warmup, and then need to walk the dog and fix lunch, and end up never getting to the workout.) Today, because the scheduling seemed to work better, I did the workout first, right after breakfast. Then I did my morning exercises in the early afternoon.
That worked out surprisingly well.
One reason it worked out well was that I did most of the workout on new-to-me machines, so I started with reasonably low weights and worked my way up to working weights, which basically amounts to a warmup all by itself. I did:
Single-leg Romanian deadlifts with a 25 lb dumbbell 3 x 5 left/5 right (my only non-machine exercise)
I forgot to do goblet squats! There wasn’t a leg-press machine, and I kept thinking, “What can I do to work my glutes?” But I didn’t think of goblet squats. I can do those tomorrow, as well as hitting the other machines (leg curl, biceps curl, and chest press are the ones I didn’t do today).
In con-related news, I have successfully registered! I have a name badge, a program, and tickets for a promised book bag.
I’m expecting Steven’s board-related activities to wrap up shortly, and then we’re talking about heading out to a margarita bar. Or, if his thing runs too late, maybe just having a beer here in the hotel.
A while back someone among our local group shared a link to a set of books they’d found on the internet, with interpretations and drills for Meyer’s Art of Fencing. Word among the local group was that the people behind the books publish stuff “based on interpretations that are… subject to debate,” and suggest taking all of it with a grain of salt.
What caught my eye, though, was not the interpretations, but rather the suggested drills.
They reminded me of the sort of drills you find in a certain class of music texts, where they’re going to go on to the advanced stuff, but they want to make sure you’ve got the basics down, so they’ll have exercises like, “Play every major and minor scale in every key for every octave.” Which, you know, if you can’t do it pretty smoothly, you’re going to have trouble doing the advanced stuff, so you might as well know that right from the start.
And that’s what these drills are like. One is to stand in each guard and cut, thrust, or shift to every other guard. Then take a few quick notes. Did moving from that guard to this or that other guard seem easy and comfortable? Did it seem like it would be useful, or just leave you open for your opponent to take some advantage?
The next drill was to stand in each guard, and then execute each of Meyer’s cuts and thrusts. Again, take some notes. What seemed like it worked?
Drills like that don’t seem like they would depend on the author’s hot takes on anything about Meyer. In fact, they seem great on every level. I can get an idea of what might or might not work. I can get some practice doing each of the cuts and thrusts. I can spend some time standing in each of the guards.
Those are all things I can benefit from.
So I started doing some drills along these lines today, starting with Right Ox and Dempfhau.
Me in Right OxA Meyer rapier fencer in Right Ox
I want to get a little lower in my fencing stance, and maybe hold my sword a little more forward, but it doesn’t seem as bad as I imagined.
Although Meyer doesn’t say so anywhere I’ve found, Right Ox is the guard you’d find yourself in at the end of drawing your rapier from a sheath. (Thibault says this, I think.) If your opponent drew before you, the very next thing you might need to do is fend off an attack, which suggests to me that Dempfhau might be very useful. So that’s one thing I drilled: Dempfhau from Right Ox followed by a thrust into Longpoint, followed by falling back down on the sword that I’d dempfhaued, and then moving to Iron Gate or back into Right Ox.
Besides that, I did some moving from Right Ox to several other guards (High Guard, Left Ox, Low Guard (on the right and on the left), Iron Gate, Plow, and Longpoint). I need to look more at the low guards and at plow, but the point of the drill is to start putting in the time, not to already be doing everything perfectly.
I have been meaning for a while to write about how I seem to need more recovery from exercise now than I did five or six years ago. Back in 2020 I could do a hard workout one day, take one rest day, and then come back and do another hard workout. This year I seem to need more rest days to recover. A couple of times recently, I seemed to need six days to recover from a hard lifting session or a long run.
When I mentioned this to my family I got back a chorus of variations on “Getting old sucks.” And it is entirely possible that my recovery capability took a dramatic hit between age 60 and 66. But I didn’t want to just assume that it was aging. I wanted to see if I could figure out if that was actually true.
(I mean, I know that there are a bunch of other changes between than and now that might make a difference in how much recovery time I need. One is that I walk my dog a lot. Although I don’t count those walks as “workouts,” they are still physical activity that requires some amount of recovery. I didn’t have a dog in 2020. I walked plenty then too, but I didn’t go for a long walk every day. Probably only once a week did I walk as far as I do almost every day now. Another is that now I’m trying to train for sword fighting. Those training sessions aren’t usually extremely intense, but sometimes they are, and they’re also somewhat unpredictable, meaning I can’t always line those sessions up with days when I’m ready for a hard workout. Plus, they’re fun—which makes it much easier to end up overdoing it.)
Fortunately, I have my workout logs from 2020—starting right before the pandemic, when I rediscovered the fact that consistency beats intensity when it comes to exercise, and then from the couple of years after that, when the ongoing pandemic meant that I didn’t have to do anything else, and could just exercise as much as I wanted.
I have at least two ideas about things I might do to analyze this:
Look at the logs. Is what I’m trying to do now (that seems to take so much recovery) more than what I was doing then?
Replicate those workouts. An experiment I could do is just take a few weeks and do roughly the same workouts I did back in 2020. If that goes well, then maybe my recovery capabilities haven’t gotten worse. Maybe I’m just doing harder workouts. Or anyway, workouts that are harder to recover from
So, I did take a first look at those logs, looking to see how much exercise I was doing for the first 30 or so weeks starting right before the pandemic, and how much recovery I was getting. I remember thinking at the time that I should aim for a workout every other day, accepting the reality that I’d occasionally miss a day, and end up hitting about three times a week, which seemed like a good goal. It turns out that, during this period of initial consistency, I was getting in almost three workouts per week as intended: 2.89 ± 0.83 workouts. The numbers showed a slight upward trend, with a few weeks with 4 workouts and almost none with just 2 in the last few weeks.
So that’s a first thing to try: Exercising roughly every other day, rather than overdoing it for several days and then needing several days to recover.
Every-other-day isn’t the only good workout schedule. Since I like working out, I kind of like exercising almost every day. Separately from that test, maybe I can come up with a six-day-a-week schedule that doesn’t overdo it: Just one or two exercises per day, focusing on different muscles, different body parts, and different energy systems from one day to the next.
I have so many things to try! (Along with trying not to overdo it.)
