Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

The deep freeze

In an earlier column, I wrote about that secret Russian treatment for injuries, ice! Well, those brilliant, devious, physio-scientists are at it again. They have invented the cold plunge pool, coming soon to a fitness center near you!

We are not talking the oh-so-back-in-the-day barrel filled with ice and water. No, now we have the ultra-modern, like a hot tub, but very cold, bubbling, freeze-your-tail-off pool!

Yesterday, I had one of those workouts! You don’t know about those? I started off with a seven-mile run in the never-popular Florida summer heat, followed by 30 minutes HIIT on the Stairmaster at the gym. Then a body weight workout, which consisted of chin-ups, pull-ups, lateral grip pull-ups, dips, push-ups, and various abdominal exercises.

A little later it was a workout on the speed bag, heavy bag, and for fun, a full karate workout, which felt great! I knew, however, that great, after all that, was a relative, and transient condition! That is where the cold plunge pool really comes in handy! First a short visit to the sauna to break a serious sweat, then shower and into the cold plunge.

WOW, it’s cold! Ccaann wwee ssaayy ccoolldd? But soon I get used to it, and you know, it feels so good, and the best thing is, today, I hardly feel sore at all!

In addition to the cold plunge, my fitness center has a warm pool. If you have arthritis, or some similar ailment, the recommendation is three to four minutes in the cold followed by three to four minutes in the warm. This is repeated four or five times.

The theory is that the repeated pulsing of cold and warm will dramatically increase blood flow to affected areas and speed healing. If you want to use the cold pool as I do, for acute workout trauma, four to five minutes of just the cold pool will be very helpful. In this case the cold dramatically decreases the post-activity inflammation to lessen discomfort and hasten muscle recovery.

One day, I saw a man up to his chin in the cold pool. I asked him how long he stayed. His reply: “30 minutes! It’s not too bad, everything stops shaking after 15!”

“You would have been the only survivor of the Titanic,” was all I could think of!

Eating like a pig

Many columns ago I told the joke that you can’t teach a pig to ride a bicycle because the pig can’t do it and you will annoy the pig. Well, maybe pigs can’t ride bikes, but there is one thing they are very good at. They can eat!

Wild pigs forage for food all day long, eating little, and often! However, when pigs are raised in farms, they are fed the ever-popular three large meals a day. Well inquiring minds decided to look further into this discrepancy. The results of their investigation are quite interesting!

Eva Persson, from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, explains:

The natural feeding behavior of pigs is searching for feed by rooting activities throughout the day; self-feeding pigs randomly space their activities and generally consume between ten and twelve meals in an average day. By replicating this pattern in conventional indoor kept pigs, we had hoped they would fare better than those fed the traditional three meals.

Fare better has a different meaning for pigs than for people!

All of the 360 pigs in the study received the same amount of food per day, spaced out into either three meals or nine. Contrary to what may be expected, feeding the pigs in a more natural way did not result in a better outcome. In fact, the pigs fed three times per day gained over 100g more per day than the pigs fed more frequently.

Now we are finding out what’s important for pigs!

As Persson reported, “increased daily feeding occasions among group-housed pigs resulted in a poorer daily weight gain and an increased number of stomach problems.”

There is one important confounding factor, and that is vigorous physical competition for the available food at each feeding led to some increased exercise for the pigs that worked out nine meals a day versus three. Perhaps a little too much HIIT? Nonetheless, the results are noteworthy!

It is somewhat amusing that the pigs that fattened up faster were the study’s stars! Instead of looking to lose weight, the successful dieters were the ones that gained the most weight in the shortest time!

However, when the data is looked at from our unenviable position of people wanting to gain the least weight or even lose weight, eating several small meals a day seems supported in this study. Perhaps even a little competition at the table will further increase the loss, but may increase mealtime stress, so I do not recommend it!

The Wright sister

Have you heard the saying, “never send a boy to do a man’s job…send a woman?” Seldom has it been truer than with the story of the flight of the second Wright flyer!

It all began in Dayton, Ohio, during the early 1900s. Most everyone knows about the Wright brothers, Wilber and Orville, but did you know there was a Wright sister also? No, she never flew the plane. That was to come 100 years later, but she played a large part in her brother’s lives, and they repeatedly credited her with doing many things for them and other family members without which their historic flights would never have happened.

For the 100-year anniversary of that amazing day in December of 1903, several aviation interested organizations decided to recreate that first flight. They constructed a brand new Wright Flyer using the same techniques and tools the Wright brothers did.

Their plan was to be at Kitty Hawk (Kill Devil Hills) on the day, December 17, and just fly it like Orville did! So there they were, on that sacred ground, using the same sled track that the brothers had. Everything was go! Engines running, pilot ready, launch!

What happened? Nothing! Couldn’t get off the ground! The weather was too rainy. The ground was too wet. The winds were too low and in the wrong direction. Probably a few other factors also played a role, but the important thing is, it’s hard to be the first people to invent the airplane!

There was a lot of luck involved with that first flight. Everything had to go right, and at the same time also! The Wright brothers had said later that if they had not been successful that day, they would have had to abandon the attempt, and they were not sure they would have returned to try again.

A few months later, a daring team returned to Kitty Hawk and successfully launched the flyer, recreating the original 120-foot flight with a woman pilot at the controls! They had the right sister this time! I think Katharine Wright would have liked that!

(Send your questions for Dr. J to calorielab@gmail.com or leave a comment. If your question is used by Dr. J, CalorieLab will send you a $25 Dining Dough restaurant certificate — limited to U.S. residents. More Dr. J posts can be read in our archives.)

Subscribe to our RSS feed | Weekly e-mail updates | Follow us on Twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 and is filed under Diet Tips, Dr. J will see you now, Exercise and fitness, Food miscellaneous. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Permalink.