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EUGENIZATION
a personal training blog

From the category archives:

Sports Performance

A Quick Thought About Genetics and Exercise.

by Eugene Thong on July 9, 2009

Joanne asks me:
What about (insert famous athlete’s name here)’s training program?  It got him/her to such success; shouldn’t we emulate it?
The short answer is no.  The reason?  You couldn’t survive his/her training program.  And even if you could, you might not have the same degree of success.
Shouldn’t we seek to emulate what the best performers [...]

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I Can’t Perform This Exercise.

by Eugene Thong on June 23, 2009

One of my young wards has an algebra final today that he has been dreading for the better part of the last two weeks.  The obvious reason: He’s “not so good in math.”  Now, mind you, he’s a thoughtful, insightful kid to whom most things (in school, anyways) come easy.
Often, when undergoing the learning process, [...]

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Make It An Event.

March 13, 2009

Body transformation is a long-term proposition.  But in those in-between moments when you’re eating and exercising properly and it looks like nothing is happening, it can be tough.  One useful method of tricking yourself into doing the right thing when your willpower is low is create an event for yourself.
Goals have the power of motivating [...]

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Core Training, Performance, and Training Time (a Rant of Sorts).

March 10, 2009

Picked this up from Conditioning Research (thanks Chris):
Optimizing performance by improving core stability and core strength.
Allow me to summarize the study for you:  There’s little to no hard science recommending core work for athletes.  Now, before you get all up in arms and start screaming about instability leading to injury and how the researchers probably [...]

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Neurological Efficiency and Recruitment.

December 29, 2008

In the previous post, I alluded to the terms neurological efficiency and neurological recruitment.  These terms sound similar but are quite different, not in the least in that neurological efficiency cannot be improved, whereas recruitment can be improved.  Consider this post an attempt to clear up confusion.
Both terms refer to what goes on in a [...]

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A Basic Model of Recovery.

September 24, 2008

A client of mine recently had a sit-down with her doctor; seems the doctor was alarmed at her recent hypertension (high blood pressure) and elevated heart rate and wanted to do more bloodwork.  While I’m no doctor, one thing became apparent to me after talking to this client for a minute or two – she [...]

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The Beauty of Chaos Theory (and my thoughts on Crossfit).

September 3, 2008

Over the weekend my friend Andrius asked me about Crossfit, given its popularity among BJJers and mixed martial artists. What I told him (or rather, what I hope I conveyed) amounted to the following:
1. Crossfit has a lot of good things going for it: It promotes athleticism, community, benchmarking, and it’s undeniably fun. [...]

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Michael Phelps’ Diet.

August 14, 2008

Today, as I trained my clients, not one session went by without talk about The Diet.
Yes, Michael Phelps‘ diet. I’ll refrain from passing judgment and try to talk about it from an athlete’s POV, as I feel news articles are sensationalizing Phelps – “What a freak.”
The question. “How can he eat all that [...]

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Basics, continued.

August 11, 2008

Olympics time is a great time to point out the obvious, which is that world-class athletes make things look easy, even when things aren’t.  In fact, you could argue that the very definition of a world-class athlete is one who makes the impossible (or the incredible) look easy.
This makes sense if you understand sport.  Sport [...]

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Viagra For Sports Performance?

June 11, 2008

The story? Move over steroids: Viagra is the new performance superdrug.  The NY Daily News alleges that Viagra improves nutrient delivery (when taken alongside other performance enhancers) and improves endurance.
The science: Sildenafil (the scientific name for Viagra), has been shown to be a performance enhancer at high altitudes.  Pubmed lists 3 studies that show sildenafil’s [...]

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