Six-Minute Workout Miracle

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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.

This man could save your life.

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Einstein began as an outsider. If today’s gatekeepers had run the journals in 1905, Einstein’s “miracle year” papers would have been rejected because he wasn’t employed and controlled by a university.

After he pulled the ripcord on space and time, Einstein faced rejection by his peers. That’s said to be the single most depressing thing that can happen to a person.

Physicists called him a mathematician. Mathematicians called him a physicist.

When the Nobel Committee finally realized his new-fangled universe wasn’t going away, they awarded Einstein the Nobel Prize for a fairly concrete paper he wrote on the photoelectric effect. With narrow minds, they passed over his impossibly radical discoveries — the flexibility of time and space, the equivalence of mass and energy, and the gravity of General Relativity.

To be fair, all of us have sacred-cow beliefs that we “know” are accurate beyond question. The Nobel Committee of the early 20th Century wasn’t so different from the rest of us.

But today, science’s devotion to skepticism has become a reflex for protecting certain key dogmas and assumptions that are felt to be “proven,” when in fact, some of them are not even testable.

An example would be “scientific materialism,” an assumption that is mistakenly considered to be foundational to science.

It’s the belief that the universe is composed of matter and energy alone. Nothing else. Therefore all information in our heads or in our DNA, as well as our sense of personhood are ultimately derived from matter and energy through random interactions that have accidentally created in us an “illusion of consciousness” with a sense of purpose which, like everything else about us, doesn’t actually exist except as a cruel and false illusion.

Scientific materialism, if anyone thinks about it, is as untestable as the assumption that intelligent consciousness is somehow at the foundation of the Universe and is the one thing that can’t be divided into mindless components.

Either way, the assumption is a choice that most of us make subconsciously without knowing when we made it.

Especially the highly educated people — we swim in a sea of scientific materialism. Like fish, we don’t focus much on what we’re swimming in until an outsider’s net hauls us into an unfamiliar world where air replaces the thing we’ve assumed was unchangeable.

So no one should be surprised that an outsider has hauled mainstream medicine up in his net.

This time it’s Ivor Cummins, an engineer with no medical background — the perfect outsider.

Listen to this guy, now. His speech could easily save your life if you can understand and remember it in full detail…

Cummins is teaching the medical establishment the shocking truth about two of today’s top killers, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. He tells us that…

  • Type 2 diabetes (including “pre-diabetes”) causes the vast majority of heart attacks (MI’s).
  • Between 49 and 65 percent of adults in the US have type 2 diabetes or “prediabetes” (which is a fairly unscientific division).
  • Testing insulin response (not glucose) for five hours after a glass of glucose gives the most accurate and info-rich diagnosis of type 2 diabetes (and “prediabetes”), as well as a uniquely valuable MI-risk predictor.
  • A $100 scan of the heart’s arteries (a coronary calcium scan) performs far better at determining MI risk than the various cholesterol measurements we use today in the US.
  • Improving your insulin response to sugar (by limiting carbohydrates, which reverses insulin resistance) prevents heart attack (MI).
  • Simply grinding up healthy food into powder causes an unhealthy insulin response in lab mice. The same thing probably applies to humans, but who would you ask to fund the study, C&H Sugar?

Why is an engineer able to put the vast and complex medical literature on heart disease and diabetes together logically, while the entire medical establishment can’t do it?

  1. Ivor Cummins is an unbiased thinker who personally faced a high risk of fatal heart disease despite his quite “healthy” lifestyle.
  2. As an engineer, he specialized in fixing novel problems within various complex systems. MD’s don’t have “complex systems analysis” as a specialty.
  3. Medicine is divided into specialties and subspecialties that cater to the info limits of the human mind. Busy MD’s struggle to stay current within their own specialties and rarely if ever do an exhaustive literature search outside their own narrow focuses, let alone doing an original analysis on a broad literature review outside their given specialty.
  4. Money influences the medical literature more than we care to admit. In the same way biased news is easily created by a bias selection of news stories, so modern medical science is hindered by an unbalanced selection of things to be studied. For instance, imagine there’s a plant in the rainforest that cures a disease. Scientists are unlikely to obtain funding to discover the plant and far less likely to find a grant large enough to cover the huge costs of the randomized, blinded trials required to show its worth to the FDA. Why no funding? Because a wild plant cannot be patented. This fact alone has created a gigantic bias in mainstream medical literature. The result is a multi-billion dollar industry of over-the-counter “dietary supplements” that go permanently untested and unapproved by the FDA.

If Ivor Cummins message doesn’t save your life, he does offer you another gift… the wisdom to refrain from shouting down the outliers in your fields of expertise. The wisdom to listen respectfully to those who “couldn’t possibly” be right because you already know the truth.

The greatest scientific, political and spiritual breakthroughs of history have come mainly from outsiders who were free of the mainstream dogmas and assumptions of their time.

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD