Health Round-Up: Brown Fat and T'ai Chi

When I was but a wee speck of a muscle I read an article in a bodybuilding magazine about something called "brown fat," which I dimly recall was partly responsible for regulation of body temperature.  The article suggested that you could burn fat calories, through some mechanism in these grizzly-bearskin fat cells, by hanging out in cold rooms.  If you lived in a cold climate, they suggested you sleep with your window open so you burned fat while you slept.

It sounded like a good enough theory; back then such 'scientific' articles often shared editorial space with articles about how Nautilus machines were going to make barbells obsolete, but I was too young to tell the difference, and gave it a try for about a few weeks in the middle of a particularly frigid New Hampshire winter.  I'd lay there with the window cranked all the way open, the subzero Atlantic air cutting through  the pathetic threadbare sheet I allowed myself.  I lay there shivering away, teeth chattering, with only my dreams of ultimate leanness getting me through the night.

I didn't get any leaner, just colder.  My parents received a massive heating bill at the end of that month, saw the the icicles appearing on my doorknob every morning and connected the dots.  I was back to sleeping in a normal-temperature room.  I was relieved, but I resolved to sleep in the cold every night as soon as I got my own place. 

I had relegated this personal anecdote to insanity based on chicanery until I saw this article in the New York Times:  brown fat is for real.  Lean people have more of it; heavy people less.  It plays a role in weight control, and being cold does burn it up. 

The doctor consulted laughs about opening a "frosty spa" at the end of the article.  He's joking--but mark my words, it will happen. 

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T'ai chi is good for restoring balance and coordination in stroke victims, says this article.  Maybe it's because I'm approaching 40, but the "softer" forms of exercise are holding a lot of appeal to me of late:  Feldenkrais, Z-Health, T'ai chi and other coordination-building, flowing forms of movement whose primary target is the nervous system, rather than muscle tissue, are at present making lots of sense to me:  why keep overloading the muscles again and again when the nervous system--all the stuff that leads from your brain to your muscles--is significantly more responsible for movement quality and health than the muscles themselves? 

We all know that the difference between a good athlete and a great athlete is rarely something so easily measured and detected as strength:  more often it's finesse, flair, 'game sense,' awareness.  These qualities are also trainable:  just not in the weight room under hundreds of pounds of iron. 

Note, I'm not knocking strength-building, which is, of course, the backbone of what I do and teach.  I'm just suggesting that muscles aren't the whole story.