“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.” – Albert Einstein
My calm, loving Labrador Retriever, Halo, gets up and runs for a few seconds like a mad dog at full speed around the backyard several times a week with no encouragement or prompting. Seeing her glowing example a few years ago, I suspected there must be some strange health benefit to mad-dog sprinting. I took it up.
Then I came across a woman’s blog who said that her life transformed dramatically after doing high-intensity interval training. So I doubled my efforts on my treadmill. But I didn’t run at full capacity. Rookie mistake.
And I sprinted on my toes, intending to conserve my knees. It turns out that sprinting on your toes for a year or two gives you Morton’s neuromas. Live and learn.
Here’s a spell-binding, science-based video that shows how to do this entire thing right, and why it’s magic for your mitochondria and brain health.
Professor David Bishop (Victoria University) took muscle biopsies of a test group (high intensity) and a control group (endurance aerobic exercise) and found up to a 30% increase in the test groups’s muscle fiber’s ability to use oxygen to produce energy after 4 weeks of high-intensity interval training. The control group’s muscle biopsies showed NO improvement.
I wonder if this has any relevance to Eliud Kipchoge’s phenomenal running career: The first (and only) man to run the marathon distance in less than two hours was a sprinter in the early years of his career. (Did he increase his mitochondria’s ability to use oxygen more than the endurance runners who likely spent their entire careers in distance training?)
Reading the comments below the video, I noticed that it disappointed several people to learn that the workout Anja Taylor did took “30 minutes” instead of the six minutes set forth in the video’s title. So I left a comment to this effect:
If you rest 4.5 minutes between sprints, as Anja Taylor did, it takes 20 minutes per workout session (not 30).
She did four 30-second sprints with four 4.5 minute rests after each sprint, totaling a workout time of 20 minutes per session. She did three sessions per week for four months.
So each session took 20 minutes. But you don’t have to rest as long as she did. If you rest 1.5 minutes between 30 second sprints, the total workout time per session is 6 minutes, as advertised. To me, resting a minute and a half after sprinting 30 seconds is more than adequate.
The question from a scientific perspective would be whether the resting time between sprints would change the outcome for the mitochondria. Intuitively, I suspect a shorter resting time adds work stress to the mitochondria, causing greater positive adaptation and a more favorable outcome in terms of mitochondrial capacity to use oxygen. But that’s a guess. I could be wrong.
Anyway, you will really enjoy this video. Especially if you’re a writer working at a desk all day.
Summertime love to you and yours,
Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD
PS. Please check with your doctor before starting this workout routine. But give it a go if she/he says it’s OK for you.
The End of Alzheimer’s, by Dale Bredesen, MD, is finally out. I’ve been waiting for this forever. All the details of his protocol are now available to the public!
This book may save your mind and the minds of your loved ones. Buy it. Read it. Loan it to your doctor. 🙂
Clinical studies using Bredesen’s ReCODE protocol are showing breakthrough results in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s Disease as well as pre-Alzheimer’s. Over 200 patient success stories exist, many are breathtaking. In each case, the disease was well documented before treatment.
Bredesen’s ingenious basic science research on Alzheimer’s Disease has been published in peer-reviewed journals for 28 years, yet strangely his successful clinical protocol papers have received a cold shoulder from the medical establishment.
Is this because Bredesen is going after causes while mainstream medicine is interested only in masking symptoms? No. It may seem that way sometimes, but the truth is much more interesting.
It boils down to a rigid devotion to traditional experimental design which insists that each component of any therapy must be studied separately. Yes, rarely the medical gatekeepers will make an exception and study two medications simultaneously for certain diseases, but the moon has to be just right for such madness.
Historically this monotherapy approach has worked fairly well for diseases with single causes, but it creates a roadblock to clinical research on complex diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Though the evidence against monotherapy for Alzheimer’s Disease is a billion-dollar wasteland of failed clinical trials, medical authorities cling to their linear way of thinking, blindly following the sacred tradition of scientific fundamentalists throughout history who have uniformly obstructed all major paradigm shifts with their flawed scientific beliefs and assumptions.
In the case of Alzheimer’s Disease, the belief is simple: if you don’t isolate one thing at a time, you’ll never know exactly what that one thing does in isolation.
Brilliant deduction. The assumption, though, is that knowing what each thing does in isolation should always be the ultimate goal of science and medicine.
This is narrow reductionism – dissecting a thing with the mistaken belief that answers can only be found in the parts.
But as Emerson said, “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” Sometimes the destruction of a forest cannot be prevented by focusing only on the trees.
In medical science, understanding a system as a functioning whole in both disease and health is more central than reductionism to the overall goal, which is saving patients’ lives.
Bredesen’s protocol is doing exactly that, as documented in peer-reviewed journals.
Disease complexity is why monotherapy experimental design has made no significant progress against Alzheimer’s Disease. This is a disease with at least 36 to 50 different “things” that can go wrong in various combinations that cause the mind to fail. The numbers and mixes of partial causes differ from one patient to the next, but three broad categories have emerged: Inflammatory, atrophic and toxic.
All three produce the same pathognomonic plaques and tangles under light microscopy, so pathologists consider Alzheimer’s a single disease, and drug companies target amyloid with their failed monotherapies.
It’s not as simple as they assume.
Clinically testing Bredesen’s therapies for each of the 36 to 50 causal elements in isolation, if it were possible and fundable (which it’s not), would take many decades and result in falsely negative and/or equivocal outcomes. This is because:
1. Each component of Bredesen’s protocol reverses only a small fraction of the 36 to 50 disease-promoting processes, and those processes are not uniformly distributed in the Alzheimer’s population. So any one of them tested in isolation would not likely have enough overall effect to achieve statistical significance. It’s like firing a shotgun one pellet at a time expecting to stop a serial killer in your bedroom. Stupid, right? Bredesen’s total protocol (tailored to each patient with lab tests) is needed to reverse mild to moderate Alzheimer’s Disease.
2. The synergistic effects of therapeutic components are foolishly eliminated by linear monotherapy-biased experimental design. Keep red and green separate and you won’t discover yellow.
Ignoring Bredesen’s work, as the orthodox mainstream currently prefers to do, is the moral equivalent of physical abuse to Alzheimer’s patients.
The mechanisms producing Alzheimer’s Disease take decades to produce symptoms, so when memory loss or difficulty with word-finding shows up, the disease has already been silently progressing for decades. The earlier you treat it, the better your chances for complete reversal. The worst thing you can do is wait for early symptoms to progress.
If you know anyone with subjective cognitive decline or mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease, do them the biggest favor of their lives. Read Dale Bredesen’s breakthrough book for yourself and share your knowledge. Maybe the person you care about won’t be fooled by the supercilious, confident, sophisticated-sounding monotherapy zombies who feel they must watch their patients die while waiting for a prescription pill from a drug company.
Sorry, that sounds harsh. But people are dying in the worst imaginable hell while a scientifically documented breakthrough is ignored. It’s astonishing!
The problem is that most MD’s are too busy to read extensively and learn how to distinguish good science from unsubstantiated claims. So they blindly listen to authorities who have the power to take away their licenses.
In medical school, we studied our lecture notes and books with virtually no impetus to learn to critically evaluate journal articles. We had one brief class in statistics.
Anyway, here’s a video interview of Dale Bredesen discussing the groundbreaking, unprecedented results of his ReCODE protocol. Enjoy!
Learning the truth is always fun, and…
“It’s fun to have fun, but you’ve got to know how.” – Dr. Seuss.
Storiform.com 