Focus On Healthy, Not Skinny Or Ripped

The average American male is 5' 9.5" and 200 pounds.  The average South Korean male is 5' 8.5" and 150 pounds.  I know that taller people are heavier but adding one inch should not add 50 pounds.  Yes, there are certainly genetic factors.  Most slim individuals are that way with little effort.  However, one cannot deny that the average American's diet is horrible, largely because of the mass production of readily-accessible, cheap, low-quality, addictive food items (e.g. candy, doughnuts, ice cream, French fries, fried chicken, beer).  There are people who aren't fat despite eating poorly but even though they look normal, they are still putting unnecessary strain on their bodies.

Here's a question.  Does an individual's appearance indicate healthiness or unhealthiness?  To a certain extent, of course!  If you are under 6' and weigh over 300 pounds, you are most likely obese unless you are a professional bodybuilder.  However, what about this guy to the right?  That is former Mr. Olympia, Frank Zane.  He was considered to be a very small bodybuilder (185 pounds) but extremely muscular by normal standards.  A lot of men consider his body to be the ideal male body.  On the other hand, any bodybuilder will tell you that bodybuilding is not particularly healthy.  They ingest lots of supplements and drugs, force feed themselves to gain unnatural amounts of muscle mass, abuse their bodies with intense weight training, and dehydrate/starve themselves (particularly of carbohydrates) when preparing for a photoshoot or a contest.

Our culture has a very bizarre way of looking at beauty.  We look at models and consider them to be the pinnacles of human physique when the truth is that they are genetic outliers who often put in lots of effort to achieve their desired figures for their profession.  In fact, we are so looks-obsessed that adopting a healthier lifestyle is sometimes just a byproduct of our goal to look more physically attractive when it should be the other way around.

An interesting phenomenon is how deluded we are in our physique goals to try to look sexy.  For most men, a thinner woman is not necessarily a sexier woman.  This is only true if she is really overweight.  The same thing is true for men.  After a certain point, any additional fat loss will not significantly add to your attractiveness and will actually reduce your attractiveness if taken too far.  Most men overemphasize muscularity and think that adding an extra half-inch to their biceps or refining their six-pack abs will make them so much more irresistible to women when very few women actually care for the bodybuilder look.  Most of us would prefer lean and fit and there can be a decent leeway for a spectrum of what that would constitute (e.g. David Beckham, Rihanna, Joseph-Gordon Levitt, Beyonce Knowles, Hugh Jackman, Maria Sharapova, Will Smith, Zhang Ziyi, Daniel Dae Kim, Jennifer Lopez, Keanu Reeves, Jessica Biel, you get the picture).

Also, we need to focus on fat loss, not necessarily weight loss, even if we only care about how we look.  We can actually look better and be healthier by gaining weight if we increase our muscle to fat ratio.  That can be done through resistance training using bodyweight, dumbbells, barbells, trapbars, weight vests, weight machines, bands, logs, sandbags, and more.  Don't be afraid to gain weight since fat loss should be the goal, not weight loss.

I am not a huge proponent of calorie counting.  I think the easiest way to lose fat is by lifting weights to build more muscle.  That way, your metabolism will increase so that you will burn more fat even when you are resting.  This can be supplemented with any other type of exercise: aerobics, Pilates, yoga, Zumba, martial arts, sports, swimming, running, rowing, biking, walking, dancing.  What is also important but more difficult to implement is to adjust what you put into your body.  This means getting rid of refined sugars, deep fried foods, and artificial flavoring and colorings that should not be considered real food and increasing your intake of fruits and vegetables in our diets.  Obviously, you should also reduce your intake of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, caffeine, and other drugs for a healthier body but you probably already knew that.

Main takeaway points:

1. An attractive body is not necessarily a healthy body.

2. A healthy body is almost always an attractive body.

3. If you are overweight, the goal is fat loss which is not always weight loss.

4. Becoming more physically active is easier than changing your diet so start exercising more instead of calorie counting.

5. Diet is important but don't over think it.  If you really have no idea what is a good diet, look into the Paleo Diet and the Zone Diet.  I wouldn't recommend the Atkins Diet.  The Slow-Carb Diet is okay and it worked for me but it depends on your goals.  I lost too much weight doing Slow-Carb and I ended up losing more muscle than I would have liked.

Eight Barbell Exercises For Athleticism

I will list barbell exercises that, in my opinion, require the most athleticism with either high reps or weights.  Strength is an important factor in determining an athletic display but so are power, speed, and mobility.  As you may guess, the barbell wrist curl will not be mentioned here.

Here are the top three:

1. Snatch- Its variations such as the power snatch and hang snatch are also great arsenals for developing athletic performance, but the full snatch combines an explosive deficit deadlift, a jump shrug, a high pull, and an overhead squat.  Even those individual movements are quite taxing on the body but to put them all together into one graceful motion requires extraordinary neuromuscular development.  You must be strong, powerful, agile, flexible, coordinated, and focused.

2. Clean- Similar to the snatch, the clean is a deadlift, a jump shrug, a high pull, and a front squat combined into one motion.  In Olympic lifting circles, the clean is often taught first because it is easier to grasp.

3. Jerk- Few people do much overhead pressing in the gym, even the men who only work their upper bodies.  For starters, you cannot lift as much as your one-rep max on the bench press.  Also, you need to stabilize your entire core to maintain your posture and have enough shoulder mobility to execute this movement in a full range of motion.  Combine this with an explosive leg drive to create the most efficient way of lifting heavy weight overhead.

After these ballistic movements, there is a huge drop off in athletic requirement as far as power generation goes.  I like to do the Olympic lifts and their variations every now and then to feel more nimble.  They are also good assessments for your physical fitness.  Here are seven more barbell exercises that require great overall kinesthetic ability:

4. Walking Lunges- Load a barbell on your back and do some walking lunges over a distance.

5. Rollout- This is great for strengthening your abdomen.  Alternatively, you can use ab wheel (which is what I personally use).

6. Barbell Row- Do this the way Arnold did.

7. Bench Press- Do this like a powerlifter.

8. Olympic Squat- Place the barbell high on your back and squat down until your buttocks are inches away from the ground.  Wearing Olympic weightlifting shoes to reach that depth will be helpful.

There is a good chance that even the gym-goers amongst you do not do most of these exercises.  This is probably because a majority people who go to the gym to lift weights do so with the purpose of bodybuilding or strength training.  These lifts can be very challenging so that factor may deter some people from ever attempting these.  However, you will feel a night and day difference in your overall fitness if you incorporate some of these movements into your training on a regular basis.

How To Learn Data Mining

Data mining is the science and art of extracting patterns and relationships between variables in datasets.  This is an exciting field that blends techniques from statistics and computer science and is increasingly more important as we enter the world of Big Data.  Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and many other tech companies use data mining to learn more about your computer-using habits to increase their profits.  Our government has (and probably still does) use data mining to combat terrorism (even though this may violate the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution).  For scientifically inclined individuals, I think this is one of the best fields to go into.  If you want to become very employable, learn how to mine data.

Learning to data mine is not always an easy process.  Make sure you have a sound foundation in linear algebra, multivariate calculus, probability, and statistics.  Lots of more basic data mining techniques are quite old such as linear/non-linear regression and linear/quadratic discriminant analysis.  After that, knowing at least one computer programming language is beneficial.  MATLAB, R, and STATA are popular among scientists.  Computers are used because the datasets are often very large, even if the statistical algorithm is fairly straightforward.  However, there are some techniques that are purely from computer science such as support vector machines, requiring no knowledge of statistics or probability.

I used this textbook for a data mining course at Columbia University (which was mostly geared towards statistics graduate students): http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

Here is a free, more advanced textbook you can use that is fairly popular: http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/

I would follow the order presented in the books.  They focus on supervised learning where you know what sort of relationship you are looking for between the variables.  For example, you look through sample data containing information about 10,000 Americans (e.g. sex, age, height, weight, IQ, religion, ethnicity, region, income) and you want to know if there's a relationship between weight and income.  Unsupervised learning is where you do not know what sort of relationship you are looking for because the dataset is not labeled.  An example would be seeing a bunch of data points on a graph but noticing that they are spread in certain clusters or in a certain shape.

This is definitely a subject that is more fun to do than to write or read about.  The point of this article was simply to give more exposure to an important topic.  If you have an interest in anything science-related, look into data mining and data science more generally.  Taking a course in it is probably one of the quickest ways to land a decently paying job.  I even know an actuary and a physicist who left their jobs to work as data scientists.  Those are just some things to consider.