A Question Sun and muscle are often seen together, compare the sunshine on Muscle Beach to the fog of Ocean Beach or the before and after snapshots found in supplement testimonials, you will find a nearly ubiquitous pallor in the former and the bronze kiss of the sun in the latter. One explanation for these […]

A Question Symmetry is beauty and beauty improves the likelihood that your genes will be recombined and transmitted to the next generation. That is the conclusion that I came to after reading Nancy Etcoff’s Survival of the Prettiest (a book I highly recommend). While facial right/left symmetry is the strongest predictor of attractiveness, asymmetries in […]

A Question I sit a lot. I am sitting as I write this, you might even be sitting as your read this. There is also a good chance you sit lot throughout the day, especially if you are a student. I take stretch breaks, I used the standing workstations in the library and I do […]

A Question Take a look at your leg. Straighten your knee and feel the quadriceps on the front of your thigh contract. Now imagine being so weak in the quadriceps that you are unable to straighten your knee. Imagine being not only weak but unable to even contract the muscle. If you can’t wiggle your […]

A Question Last year in Pt school we had a lecture series on the physiology of aging accompanied by the Online Curriculum in Geriatrics and Gerontology hosted by the UCSF Academic Geriatric Resource Center. I highly recommend the online course as it was both informative and entertaining (gerigero-onlinecourse.ucsf.edu) but the experience left me wondering if […]

A Question I recently watched a documentary on people who live in jungles worldwide called The Human Planet: Jungles. A theme I noticed from theBayaka of the Congo,Awa Guaja of the eastern Amazon and theKorowai of Papua New Guinea was that the men were extremely lean and muscular but many of the women were not. […]

A Question I saw a a two year old take off at full speed only to fall on his face about ten steps later. After repeating this process a few times, his father stopped and took off the child’s boots after which he ran barefoot without falling.   Do shoes change the way children walk […]

A Question About fourteen days a year the fog takes a vacation and the sun shines a few rays on Golden Gate Park. Besides forestalling a few diagnoses of seasonal affective disorder, this phenomenon triggers a veritable explosion of joggers that resembles emergence of the seventeen-year cicada in the eastern United States. Watching these curious […]

A Question When I was sixteen I took Hapkido every day for two weeks with my brothers. It was a two week promotional offer which met our fiduciary capacity at the time. I still remember most of what I learned in those two weeks. My brothers and I were especially enthralled with a leg stretching […]

A Question How often have you heard someone say that their knees are worn out from years of exercise? The idea that the knees can just wear out from use seems quite intuitive. After all, this is what happens to the myriad of machines we use throughout our lives. Bicycles, cars and blenders all wear […]