In the beginning, life was simple. Fat was bad. Thin was good. Then, in April of 2005,  researchers at that National Cancer Institute and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that a few extra pounds might be a good thing, because people who were slightly overweight appeared to […]

Saturday, May 28, is the day of the Mt. Wilson Trail Race, an 8.6 mile out-and-back event that was first run, for a $150 gold medal, in 1908. As described in this piece in the Los Angeles Times, the race starts in the California town of Sierra Madre and climbs […]

Sometimes a bike shop is more than a bike shop, as in the case of the West Hill Shop, in Putney, Vermont.  The New York Times writes about the remarkable physical plant, which is something less than a barn, and about the remarkable dedication of the proprieters, who are more […]

For some, the hardest part of a workout is not the physical challenge, it’s the mental test of keeping tabs on calories burned. No worries. As expected, technology has come to the rescue, in the form of a half-dozen cool gadgets from Nike, Polar Electro, Timex, and other companies. The […]

A few hours of exercise a week may offer as much protection against a recurrence of breast cancer as does chemotherapy and hormonal or drug treatments. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new study led by researchers at the Harvard Medical School and published in the Journal of the American […]

If you’ve been to the gym in the last five years, you’ve seen them, and most probably, stepped around them to get to some other piece of equipment that looks like it might be useful. Exercise balls are everywhere, but are they really good for anything, other than rolling towards […]

Finally, scientific research has drilled down deeper than an apple a day. We now know what kind of apple a day is most likely to keep the doctor away: Red Delicious, Northern Spy, and Ida Red, in that order. As this piece from Foodconsumer.org explains, researchers at Agriculture and Agri-Food […]

The new news on thin attributes it not to diet, not to exercise, but to movement, any movement, from strumming a guitar to chewing gum. As the New York Times reports, scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota wired up the specially-made underwear of 10 lean mean and 10 […]

Used to be, half of the homicide squad of the Boston Police Department would meet every week on the handball courts of Huntington Avenue Y, where they would do their best to work out the demons that crept in each day. Nobody plays at the Y these days, but it’s […]

Because Graphic designer Kevin Gillotti hates wasting time between flights, he started searching for gyms that were near enough to airports that he could  pop in for a quick workout. Then Gillotti had a better, and more generous, idea: he starting listing those gyms on a website that he calls, […]