Among some of the other interesting points in the article are to check your urine color - ie check your hydration, check your sleepiness, monitor your heartbeat after exercise.  The PERF acronym is to remind people to get produce (fruits and veggies), exercise, relaxation (laughter and fun time for 15 minutes…) and fiber (beans, grains, you know the drill)…

Think PERF To Monitor Your Health.

But very soon, New York will be home to a very huge new gym in brooklyn called Brooklyn Boulders.

I stopped by the other day to check out how things were coming along.  It is just huge.  The pictures don’t do it justice.  The ceilings look to be close to 40′ high, although they told me 32.  They looked pretty high to me.  And there are a bunch of large rooms.  The space as you walk in is kinda a U shape, with a large lead wall.  Along the side are two additional bouldering rooms, and then through the brooklyn bridge shaped doorway there’s another large room.  All of these areas will be wall to wall climbing with routes everywhere.  Yippee…

Check the site for monthly and yearly membership prices.  The gym is nicely situated a quick 5 minute walk from Atlantic + Pacific station which brings in tons of trains or the Union Street Park Slope station, which is a block away.

Here’s a whole article on how to use and train with them.

The Right Way To Train With A Heart Rate Monitor.

As a trainer I can confirm one of Ratey’s first observations that a client “felt more passionate about life once he got into an exercise routine.”  He goes on to talk about what became known as the “endorphin rush”…

“Candace Pert had recently discovered that there were opiate receptors in the brain, meaning the body had a built-in way of killing pain with molecules that worked like morphine.  Endorphins, as they became known, dulled pain in the body and produced euphoria in the mind.  When elevated levels of endorphins were detected in the blood samples of a group of runners, everything seemed to fit.  The theory that exercise fills your brain with this morphinelike substance matched the good feeling everyone got.  It gave us the expression “runner’s high” an extreme version of the effect.”

“Blumenthal concluded that exercise was as effective as medication.  This is the study I photocopy for patients who are skeptical of the idea that exercise changes their brain chemistry enough to help their depression, because it puts the issue in terms that are as black-and-white as psychiatry can hope to deliver, at least for now.  The results should be taught in medical school and driven home with health insurance companies and posted on bulletin bouards of every nursing home in the country, where nearly a fifth of the residents have depression.  If everyone knew that exercise worked as well as Zoloft, I think we could put a real dent in the disease.”

“In short, exercise affects so many variables in the brain that its nigh impossible to isolate its effect as we’d like — in the name of hard science.  But the evidence is there, from the action of microscopic molecules to massive surveys of tens of thousands of people over the years.  Yes exercise is an antidepressant.  But it is also much more.”

“At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effets of chronic stress;  it can also reverse them.”

“The advantage of using exercise to inoculate the brain against stress is that it ramps up growth factors more than other stimuli do.”

He talks about what he calls the “ever-widening gap between the evolution of our biology and our society”…  and goes on to talk about our paleolithic ancestors.  “Our average energy expenditure per unit of body mass is less than 38 percent of that of our Stone Age ancestors…  Paleolithic man had to walk five to ten miles on an average day, just to be able to eat.”

In his conclusion he really drives home the points about stress, and I want to quote that more fully here.

“Both stress and inactivity — the twin hallmarks of modern life –  play big roles in the development of arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and other autoimmune disorders.  Reducing stress by any means, and especially exercise, helps patients with their recovery from these diseases.  The diseases result from a weakened immune system, and as is evident in the example of Robert Pyles, exercise can dramatically improve immune function.”

It’s a little bit geeky at the beginning but well worth a listen.

“There is just a flock of evidence for the benefits for depression, anxiety, panic disorder. Part of what the real message is, is that if you activate your brain with exercise, you’re gonna release a lot of the neurotransmitters we aim with in psychopharmacology, you know, our drugs that we use, serotonin drugs, dopamine drugs, neurepinephrine drugs, all tend to try we think to elevate the levels of these neurotransmitters. Well exercise does that pretty quickly!”