Staff Pool Party

August 30, 2012

10 Signs You Need A Rest Day

Problem is, if you don't take time for proper R&R, your body won't adapt to the stress of your training—you won't get stronger or faster, explains Stacy Sims, Ph.D., at the Stanford Prevention-Research Center, School of Medicine. Neglect recovery for too long, and you will start to lose strength and speed. You'll sink into the black hole known as overtraining.

First, your sleep patterns and energy levels will feel the effects. Eventually, your immune system crashes, and you lose your appetite. It's like burning out your engine. And you don't have to be logging 100-mile weeks to suffer. Recreational runners can overtrain, too. "With deadlines, chores, bills, kids, and lack of sleep, it's more challenging to recover properly from your runs," says Sims.

Cooling Glove - Better Than Steroids

"Equal to or substantially better than steroids … and it's not illegal."

This is the sort of claim you see in spam email subject lines, not in discussions of mammalian thermoregulation. Even the man making the statement, Stanford biology researcher Dennis Grahn, seems bemused. "We really stumbled on this by accident," he said. "We wanted to get a model for studying heat dissipation."

But for more than a decade now, Grahn and biology Professor H. Craig Heller have been pursuing a serendipitous find: by taking advantage of specialized heat-transfer veins in the palms of hands, they can rapidly cool athletes' core temperatures – and dramatically improve exercise recovery and performance.

Mo Rocca on The Right To Vote
Short doc for the New York Times about our lack of a universal right to vote.
(Did you kind of think we had that in America?  Turns out we don't.)

On The Road With The XX
It's been three years since the xx released their debut, xx, in the summer of 2009. That album took them out of their parents' bedrooms, where they wrote it — at night, quietly, so as to not wake anybody up. Artists with hit debut albums are always going on about how they never expected anyone to hear the songs on their hit debut albums. With xx, though — a piece of music so hushed it's almost radical — you believe it when they say it. Watch old clips of the three on YouTube getting a microphone jabbed at them by some U.K. TV personality, and you can see the trio going bug-eyed with incredulity:You're asking us questions? About this little album we made? Us? In September 2010 they were nominated for the very-big-deal Mercury Prize, awarded annually to the best album in Britain.

Today's Photo:

STAFF PARTY!!