Maggie's Farm

What’s Your Type? The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing reviewed

Your internist might give you a Cardiac Stress Test every few years to check your cardiopulmonary function, but other than that never a physical fitness evaluation beyond, maybe, a body fat composition. A very thorough physical exam might include an SF-36. This is not used often enough. (It is used in $5-10,000 "Executive Physicals," but that is often because companies take insurance on the functioning of their essential execs.)

The reason doctors don't do it is because your physical fitness at any age is your problem, not his or hers. OK, they will advise "exercise," but they know you won't do much of it, or "watch your diet" but they know you will do no more watching than looking at what is on your plate.

Serious fitness evaluations are done by the military, police, fire departments, etc. For us civilians, the only people who will give us a serious fitness evaluation are skilled fitness trainers. Trainers tell me that 3/4 of their new clients are in terrible shape. That's why they are there. About 1/4 are in decent condition, but want to get to a higher level of fitness. 

Fitness evaluations include basic measures of cardio function, endurance, strength, agility, and balance. The Mayo Clinic offers this do-it-at-home fitness evaluation.

Regardless of age or level of condition when you decide to get serious about conditioning,  The Maggie's program of HIIT cardio, endurance cardio, calisthenics, and weights (plus proper nutrition for a svelte physique) addresses all of the areas of fitness.

The term has expanded in its use from the original idea of one person making another person doubt their sanity.

In current usage, it refers to any relationship abuse that seeks to distort reality to include things as far as, I think, major deceptions or major lying which puts a partner in another reality. Of course, in any given situation, either one or both people might actually be crazy or half-crazy but that is not about gaslighting.

Regardless of the extent of the sadism, narcissism, or destructiveness involved, it's a real thing and it is evil: Gaslighting.

Avoid sunburn, especially in youth. Problem is, youth don't avoid sunburn. 

In any event, getting some unfiltered sunshine is healthy, about 20-30 minutes/day, and a nice tan seems fine if you have the right skin for it.  One view: Is sunscreen the new margarine?

Pediatricians these days are complaining that the kids are sun-deprived, due to sun-phobia of parents.  

Keto-style nutrition (ketogenic) is only for people whose habits and life-styles tend towards excess fat deposits. There is no reason to fuss with your nutritional habits if you are in good shape and good conditioning. Food is not medicine - but if you lift heavy 2-3 times weekly, keep the protein up for muscle repair.

All "keto" means is that you are burning fat. Burning fat is difficult, because your body wants to hang on to it and exercise does very little for that at ordinary intensities and durations. 

Kruiser explains it here:  Jillian Michaels Is Mad That Keto People Lose Weight Without Buying Her Products

An interesting side effect of ketosis is that appetite tends to be reduced and energy increased. For people who are serious about it, you can buy Keto-strips to check your urine. That will instantly tell you whether you are burning fat or not.

If overweight, you probably have some degree of insulin insensitivity, sometimes termed "pre-diabetic" at some point. A keto nutritional habit can correct that, but remember that if you have ever been fat, your body will want to restore it back to where you set your highest weight. Fat cells are as greedy as governments and they never forget.

Is the masculine ideal obsolete? Outside the American Psychological Association, I think few men or women would agree.

However, there are many ways to be male, as many ways as there are to be female. During youth and adolescence, people develop what we term "ego ideals" - notions of what our best self might be. These come from family peers, from the culture, and from experience which teaches us what things are effective and what is not. 

Our ideals for ourselves are often at variance with our genetics and with our potentials.  Reality is the toughest teacher and toughest grader ever.

It's my experience that women prefer masculine men (however defined) but it rarely means brutal or unkind men. Men and women have ideals not only for themselves, but for partners and friends too. What is my ideal life partner? Strong mentally and physically, smart and savvy, athletic, brave and adventurous, high life-competence and adaptability, emotionally-reserved but open to friendship, and sexy and tender at times. I found one of those guys. The detail that he knows how to make money is just a bonus because I make a good living on my own. 

nb: I am not a Psychologist. I am an MD, a Psychiatrist. But we're all interested in people and what makes them tick or not tick.

People snark that Psychologists are not known to be the most manly guys or the most feminine women, but I wonder what readers think the APA is really trying to say? 

Misunderstanding Dunning-Kruger

Your basic physical architecture is a product of a genetic potential, a genotype. Your genetic potential (design) is effected to some extent by environmental influences: intrauterine nutrition, nutrition during growth, disease, physical activity during growth, and so forth. All the same, your genetic potential can not be exceeded because it is pre-programmed.

What do I mean by basic physical architecture? I mean things like basic body structure: height, bone lengths and widths, and number of muscle cells and their distribution (yes, you are born with all of the muscle cells you will ever have, and these vary a good deal between people).

As an adult over age 17- 21, your life-long basic physical foundation is complete. As with your IQ, personality strengths and weaknesses, athletic talents, what we do with our given physical architecture after that point is up to us. A good trainer, a physical therapist, or a sports physician can see through our appearance and phenotype and get an idea of our basic physical architecture and our potential for development of what we are.

Our naked physical appearance today may or may not tell us much about our basic architecture, because it might be hidden under layers of fat or simply unmanifested by lack of stressors and demands. In underweight people, it can be concealed by underdevelopment of potential.

It's common to talk about endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs, but that is simplistic because everybody is built differently. The length of your femur, for just one important example. 

Do these things matter in general fitness efforts? Not too much. Do they matter in physical training? Yes, because the architecture sets limits on, and offers opportunities for, what can be achieved.  Do they matter in athletic potential? Certainly, but it depends on the level which is aspired to. 

Despite my advice not to undertake a conditioning program in January (because few keep their resolutions), I know people who did and that some readers did. Oh well.

A reminder for those people:

1. If you've been away from exertion for a while, it's a good idea to begin with a month of daily or near-daily mixed cardio just to wake up your body, to alert your brain and neuromuscular system that you are going to make demands.

2. For Fitness for Life, after the above you will benefit most from a balanced program:

- Resistance (weights) for building muscle and bone strength. Start light with higher reps and work up gradually to higher weight and fewer reps. If not knowledgeable about weight work, get some instruction.

- Calisthenics for building general athleticism (balance, quickness, endurance, muscle conditioning, with some HIIT cardio)

- Mixed cardio for endurance and heart stress. Since you can hardly build endurance in a one hour session of speed walking, say, your cardio needs to be uncomfortable, a much higher intensity than recreational.  We think the Stairmaster machine is the best cardio trainer, but mixing it all up is the right idea. (Stairmaster tips: step on your heel more than balls of feet, stand up straight, and don't lean on the bars. Also, mix it up with double steps or high speeds if you can)

Adult males rarely want much for Christmas other than the company of family and friends and a glass or two of eggnog, but one material thing they always welcome are fun socks. It takes a serious male to wear fun socks. Trust me. Black socks are to make you appear serious. They do not make you serious.

The reason for black socks is No Sock Sorting. But that is just laziness.  Black socks are for mens' job interviews.

OK, let's discuss socks. In our house, we have work-out socks, tennis socks, skiing socks, hiking socks, dress socks (male), yard-work socks, etc. So do you, probably.

Nowadays, fun socks are always great for gals, and for guys they signal that you are confident enough to show some sense of fun.  

Here's one site: Fun Socks 

A solidly above-average IQ is handy for complex and especially abstract tasks. Also for difficult academic tasks. AVI muses on the topic here.

But let's leave aside things like SATs and IQ for a minute and consider the highly-adaptive, or maladaptive, character traits which can support or interfere with the pursuit of life goals regardless of IQ. That's where Psychology's Big 5 enter the picture. Briefly, they are:

- Openness to new experience (curiosity, adventurousness, risk-taking, inventiveness)
- Conscientiousness (dutifulness, energy, self-discipline, etc)
- Extraversion (taking some pleasure in others)
- Agreeableness (playing nice with others, making yourself welcome company)
- Neuroticism (being odd, difficult, etc. rarely helps unless a genius)

Is it true that "character is destiny"? Jordan Peterson always emphasizes something he terms "competence," along with some physical attributes to his list of advantages in life pursuits along with IQ and the above considerations, like attractiveness, fitness, and social skills.

Back to IQ, here Prof. Peterson discusses IQ and "the Jewish question" (yes, Ashkenazi Jews average one standard deviation above other Europeans. That's a lot.) 

Three one-hour-long sessions of heavy weight-moving (ie to the max you can perform 3-8 reps, or, in other words, 60-70% of one's one-rep max) definitely demands extra daily protein in a nutrition program. Probably extra food in general to repair and grow muscle. We would not recommend more than three days/week of heavy for any ordinary people.

Women are different than men, though, whether pre- or post-menopausal. Very few women spend 3 hrs/week on heavy weights (I only know one who does. I do weights twice weekly. I focus on calisthenics for my sports.). Heavy weight work for an osteopenia or osteoporosis diagnosis is a good idea. Twice weekly fighting gravity hard ought to suffice. Not to worry, gals. You will never become unattractively bulky. For guys who want to focus on strength and muscle development for a while, 3 heavy hours works at any age. Progress is just slower with age.

At Maggie's, we like to balance cardio, calisthenics, and resistance to maximize vigor, general life, and recreational activities. Readers know that calisthenics, hand weights, and cardio demand no special attention to protein intake. That is, just normal eating unless you want fat loss. 

Is weight training to muscle failure a good idea?  It depends.

With smaller muscle groups, we all commonly train to failure, or close to it, but more often just to the point of excess pain. I'm thinking of examples like curls, forearm exercises, pushups, pullups, cable pull downs and push downs, rows. In fact, many gym machines (which I rarely use) isolate smaller muscle groups in ways that lend themselves to high-rep muscle endurance work (ie 15-20 reps).

With the powerlifts, we do not recommend lifting to failure very often. Just occasionally, to beat the heck out of yourself, and with a spotter. Rule of thumb with powerlifts is mostly to do the number of reps you can manage to accomplish 4-8 times in a row. If you can, for example, deadlift a weight 12 times, raise the weight right away to get down to 6-8 reps for each set. 

 You Need to Know About Muscle Failure

3 in 4 Americans Struggle With Loneliness

That is heartbreaking. Why can't these people find each other? 

Studies have found that creating more opportunities for social interaction, or even improving social skills, doesn’t really help reduce loneliness. Why not?

Loneliness is a tough problem. We live in a world full of all sorts of people, but connecting beyond a superficial level takes a special and complex combination of factors, circumstances, serendipity, and opportunity. Another problem is that we aren't necessarily all that appealing to many people, but we can hope we are appealing to a few people who appeal to us. We all reach out to people who we enjoy, and sometimes it works.

As the article points out, loneliness can spiral into excess neediness, or avoidance, distrust, and isolation. That's not a happy life. 

The Loneliness of the Middle-aged Man

Guys need guy buddies to hang out with as much as gals need their gal buddies. 

Kidnapping, Halloween, snowballs—in 2018, we freaked out about all of them, and so much more. Here are the year's ten most vexing moments for the Let Grow parenting movement

How does screen time affect kids’ brains? The first results of a landmark study are alarming.

Watch the brief video at the bottom. Your brain is being hacked.

I have warned about people who make New year resolutions to exercise but, in case you are one of those who do so, do me a favor and get a Stress Echo first if you are a male over 40 or in bad shape over 30, a post-menopausal woman, or anybody who fatigues with either extended activity or exertion.

A Stress Echo not only can identify heart issues before they appear in daily life, but can give you a metabolic physical stress tolerance baseline.  Most Stress Echo protocols push you to your max unless you have prior identified cardio-pulmonary disease, so the attending cardiologist will be able to give you a thorough cardio fitness assessment and a numerical metabolic fitness level. (This test is required regularly for firemen, pilots, athletes, etc.) Serious fitness trainers also want an OK before pushing their clients hard.

If you do, you are statistically almost certain to fail in an exercise program. If serious about it, you will begin today. Of course, January is when gyms make all their money and when they are busiest. By March, they have collected all those fees and are right back to their usual daily volume of people.

As they say, "Someday" is not one of the seven days of the week.

I want to say a few words about exercise goals because it only makes sense to define, or re-define, exercise goals. I don't mean specific goals, like being able to bench press 300 lbs, or to run 10 miles at a 7.5 mph pace. I mean general goals. Your goals will determine your program.

For examples:

- Specific goals, like the two I mentioned above, require very specific training approaches designed by experts.

-  Weight loss: Forget exercise. Eat right and body fat will melt away. Some cardio might help prime the pump, but not necessary.

- Psychological goals. Any form of daily exertion (not walking) is excellent for mental attitude.

-  Body-building. This requires a specific sort of program to look buff. Focus a lot on isolated muscles. It's not functional so much as an aesthetic. I think it's silly, but to each his or her own.

- Strength training. This entails 4 days/week of heavy weights, powerlifts, with some accessory weight exercises.

-  General conditioning for out of shape people. This is the bread and butter of professional trainers, and in some ways the most rewarding for them because these people, if dedicated, can make the most dramatic progress because they have so far to go. I have seen schlubby people make remarkable changes in one or two years. Including grandmas.

- "Functional fitness".  This is the goal for most people aged 30-80, and why Crossfit is so popular. This is about building or even just maintaining strength, agility, balance, power, appearance, endurance, speed, athleticism, etc. for a vigorous life. All that is a lot to ask for, which is why we feel it takes 6-7 hours/week. It won't make you a marathoner or an impressive lifter, but should make you ready for anything life offers - especially sports and recreation.

The Maggie's Fitness For Life (where is that TM thing?) is for Functional Fitness. We sometimes have good ideas for conditioning, but once basic conditioning is achieved (ie fat control, ability to participate in exercise classes, ability to jog a mile, basic hand weights and cables) is where our ideas come into play. Calisthenics, Heavy weights, HIIT and Endurance Cardio.

HIIT and endurance exercise are good for your telomeres. I hope that that is true. HIIT probably more than slow "cardio."

Whatever "anti-aging" is, it sounds good to me. So fit those things into your program. What we feel is important, at least to us, is "Fitness for Life" which means Strength, Endurance, and Athleticism. So, without neglecting your telomeres, it's good to get balanced fitness so as to be as fully in life as possible. 

No exercise can extend your life to any important degree (for life extension, try not being heavy, and getting full medical check-ups every few years) but a balanced fitness program can keep you active as long as you do not do too much road running. That destroys joints and cripples many people.

In one way or another, most books are about human nature. This one is now a best-seller: The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. 

Have not read it, just noting it.