Do me a favor... Take the back of your hand and place it on your forehead.. How do you feel? Do you feel warm? Feel cold? Does this remind you of what your Mom used to do to you when you complained about going to school because you thought you were sick??? Our body temperature is something we use as a metric to judge how well we are doing? But why and how was this standard developed? A new study recently came out which links your body temperature to a host of evolutionary and physiological attributes . Read on and find out some things that may get you paying closer attention to that thermometer!
The 98.6 Standard.
In 1851 a scientist by the name of Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich, German physician, began to collect sample temperatures from thousands of patients from around the city of Leipzig. To get the broadest array of data he was diligent to use Men, Women, Old, Young, Sick and healthy samples. Crunching data in that time, as you can gather, was quite tedious but he came out with mean number that represented the sweet spot for human body temperature, 98.6 degrees F, or 37 degrees C.
Using this standard, physicians gained a valuable metric to use when doing check ups on you. And this standard has stuck for quite some time.
But times have changed and a new study points to our overall body temperature in the industrialized world , DROPPING! Yes, we are resting at cooler temperatures than ever before. Men are generally siting at 1 degree less and women and .5 degree cooler than the standard set in 1851.
But why? Why have we gotten colder? This is the million dollar question that science has still yet to come back with because as you can guess, there are a massive amount of hypothesis. This is where our journey begins though. I have done research into some reasons why our body temperature is so important where it is and why we may be cooling off.
1. Fungus.
Not sure how many of you out there have Teenagers but if you do, you will understand the next analogy. Teens love to nest in their rooms, often this means leaving dirty clothes on the floor, food left in places it shouldn’t be and of course there are the smelly shoes and socks. Locked inside their nice warm rooms, things begin to manifest and usually you get tipped off by the smell. That smell is usually fungal growth. The right conditions in the room, the right ingredients to grow and you have a Petri dish. Well, The same would happen inside our bodies if we were to get much colder than where we sit now.
The body works in balance. Any warmer and we can kill off a lot of the beneficial bacteria in our GUT and tissues, and any colder, we risk an overgrowth of Fungus. The balance is real and one of the most important reasons our bodies live at the levels we do.
2. Inflammation.
Pouring over studies about inflammation and aging I found some very surprising articles. We know a lot about inflammation and it damaging effects on our performance. We also know that Balancing inflammation in the body is important because some is good, (ie. muscle breakdown and repair due to training). What was so surprising when it came to Body temperature and inflammation is that unlike our 1851 ancestors, we have dramatically less chronic inflammation in our bodies!
In the 19th century there were still many public health issues that plagued populations, like malaria, polio, and tuberculosis. These diseases produced prolonged inflammation in the body because our immune system responds to disease with protein called Cytokines. These immune boosting proteins ramp up the body temperature and metabolic rate, so much so that that the person can have fever like sysmtoms for months and even years!
Today we simply dont deal with many types of diseases and subsequent inflammation that we used to. Even with the amount of inflammation we put our bodies through due to consuming processed foods, it is offset by the decline in smoking and vaccinations.
3. Aging.
Time is an abstract illusion. We live in a world of Quantum Mechanics where gravity and heat are more of a reality than any chronological clock. Heat is what connects us to the past and is a large determinant of the future. How much heat you put off, through Body Temperature, can tell us just how much we are aging and what is going on in our DNA.
Kids are a perfect example of the Heat and aging. Kids run hotter than adults often because their cells are functioning at peak levels. What do I mean by this? The answer is quite cyclical.
Cells Function as power plants for the body. They take in nutrients, process nutrients, use that synthesis to produce energy and other cellular functions and then they expel waste. This machine produces quite a lot of heat in response to this, therefore we can look at our resting body temperature as a way to see how well our cells working and by extension see how “Young” they still are.
On the opposite end of the spectrum we see geriatric or sedentary adults with low body temperatures and are usually always cold. This is directly correlated to how well their cells are working.
So How Hot are YOU?
So on one hand my fins gins have lead us to feel quite good bout ourselves as a race. We have conquered some of natures most viscous diseases and essentially helped to take a population of Billions and give them a better quality of life. But Body Temperature is also a direct link to our mortality. We can supplement, train, and do as many cleanses as possible to keep our bodies in top shape but the fact remains that we will all someday die. Our Cells are finite and so are our bodies. What we can do is monitor our Body temperature, paying keen eye to our inflammatory markers and pray we inherited good DNA from our parents.
Either way, I love you. Ill be here to keep dropping knowledge on you and digesting the latest science as it becomes public knowledge.
In Health,
Eric
Programming Notes 1/27-1/31 *** This week its all about intervals. Power Intervals associated with the strength work we have on Monday and Wednesday. The aerobic piece this week will be Thursday with a long running workout. Off setting the Pressing work on Wednesday with pulling on Tuesday and Thursday. And we test out a fun 1:1 interval workout on Friday that Im excited to try.
1/27
Baseline:
Every 4 Minutes for 16
10 Cal Row
5 Burpee broad Jumps
10 Jump Squats
Squat Flow: Squat Flow: Kang Squat, Internal Rotation, Ankle Roll Out, Bootstraps, PNF Stretch, Squat W/ T Spine Stretch
Strength :
Tempo BackSquat
6X2
(3,2,1)
Conditioning:
1 Round for Time
75 Cal Row
50 lateral burpee Over Rower
75 Back Rack Reverse Lunge 135/115
1/28
Baseline:
3X
8 Scapula Pull Ups
8 Kip Swings
:10 Chin Over the Bar Hold
5 Jumping Pull Ups
Banded Mobility:
Lat Band Stretch
Bully Stretch
Scapula Distraction Stretch
Gymnastic Skill Work:
Bar Muscle ups
3 X Max Sets
*Rest and Scale as needed
*Use bands or Jumping MU to scale
Interval Work:
3 Rounds
A) Bike 1.5 Miles -Rest 1:1 (keep RPM High)
B) 15 Weighted Pull Ups - Rest 1:00
C) 15 Weighted box Jump Overs - Rest :30
1/29
Baseline:
4X
12 Dumbbell Push ups
10 Dumbbell Plank Row
8 Dumbbell Thrusters
20 Banded Pull Aparts
*Move Quickly From one exercise to the next
Shoulder Prep W/ 5# Plates:
-Bent Scarecrow + External Rotation
-Bent Reverse Flys
-Bent Scarecrow + Press
-Bent Supermans
-Standing Corkscrews
-standing front Raises
-Standing Lateral Raises
-Standing Y Press
-Standing Cross Over Presses
Strength:
Press
5-5-5 -Building
Push Press
5-5-5 - Building
Push Jerk
1,1,1,1,1 - Building
Conditioning:
10 Minute AMRAP
50 Double Unders
15 Kettlebell Swing 53/35
1/30
Baseline:
Agility Warm Up @ 10m Each
High Knee Pull
Quad Pull
Squat 180 **stepping the leg high over hip, swing opposite leg to 180, squat
High Knees
Butt kickers
Marching High Kicks
Groiners
Straight leg shuffles
A Skip
B Skip
Fig 4 Drill
Lateral Shuffle
Carioca
Lateral Bounding
Sprint W/ Change of Direction
Lunge Flow:
-Ankle Roll Outs
-Hamstring Pulses
-Elbow To Instep W/ Reach
-Samson Lunge + Reach
-Bootstraps
-Pigeon Stretch
Aerobic Conditioning:
10 Rounds For Time
200m Run
50’ Sandbag Carry 150/100#
2 Rope Climbs
1/31
Baseline:
3X
6 Barbell Good Mornings
6 Barbell Muscle Cleans
6 Barbell Front Squat
6 High Pull
6 Sumo Deadlift High Pull
Clean and Jerk Warm Up:
7@ Each
-Barbell Deadlift
-Shrug+ High Pull
-Muscle Clean
-Front Squat
-High Hang Clean + Strict Press
-Mid Hang Clean + Push Press
-Clean and Jerk
Interval Work:
AMRAP 7
Wall Balls
-Every Minute on the Minute, 3 Power Clean 245/145
Rest 7 Minutes
AMRAP 7
Sumo Deadlift High Pull 135/95
-Every minute on the minute, 12 Wall Ball.
