Year: 2018

December 14, 2018 at 12:41PM If your childhood school days were anything like mine, at some point, your teacher divided you and your fellow classmates into three types of learners: visual, audio, or kinesthetic. Since then, you’ve wrapped some fraction of your personality around the fact that a chart is the key to your heart, or that you’ll retain plot points better if you listen to an audiobook. Well, I’m here to tell you, my friends, that it might have all been a lie. Researchers have found evidence to suggest that this model of prescribed learning styles, which is called VAK for short, might very well be a “neuromyth.” A 2004 study found that catering to a students’ VAK didn’t result in better learning outcomes, reports Scientific American. And more recently (in 2010), Cedar Riener and Daniel Willingham, both cognitive psychologists, wrote an article—which is really more of a takedown, TBH—about why the categorization just doesn’t work. “Students do have preferences about how they learn. Many students will report preferring to study visually and others through an auditory channel,” the article says. “However, when these tendencies are put to the test under controlled conditions, they make no difference—learning is equivalent whether students learn in the preferred mode or not.” Until researchers find definitive proof that changing the format of a lesson actually leads to better learning outcomes, they argue that you can’t consider this a reliable format for understanding how you commit information to memory. “The big issue is that when we classify students into

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December 14, 2018 at 12:18PM As a runner, some days I’m able to happily gallop across a field (okay, the street) or on the treadmill as though it’s the easiest thing in the world and my legs are made of springs. Other days, though? My legs feel 100 times their normal weight—almost impossible to get moving—and I find myself stopping to walk way too frequently for my liking. And so the run, rather than being an easy glide around the park, becomes a torturous task that feels akin to climbing Mount Everest. I know that my seemingly polar running days aren’t a foreign occurrence, though. Other runners agree that this happens to them as well, but still—none of us have a clue why this variation in running stamina happens. And so I set upon a quest to finally figure out why there are good and bad run days. The factors that influence your run You know how some mornings you can practically leap out of bed and others require hitting the snooze button several times? Your body just functions differently every day—and a lot of variables contribute to this. “It all depends on your sleep, diet, and exercise recovery,” says Krista Stryker, fitness expert, 12-Minute Athlete creator, and author. “Some days you’re just going to naturally feel stronger and more energized than others.” Sleep is your number one recovery tool, she says, so if you don’t sleep well, it’ll definitely affect your workout. Also important? What you eat. “Did you eat

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December 14, 2018 at 11:40AM You definitely want strong arms (you know, so that you can lift things and open pickle jars). But the traditional means to achieving that end can be a little, well, boring. Honestly—who wants to do bicep curls or tricep dips or straight-up push-ups for 20-minutes straight? The good news is that you don’t have to burn-out your arms that way. The secret, according to Obe trainer Amanda Kloots? Do arm workouts on your knees. “I find that if you are on your knees doing arms, it’s harder because you don’t have your legs to help you, so you really isolate the muscle and you have to really just focus on using your arms,” she says. “When you have your legs and your feet planted on your floor and your knees bent, you have the support of your lower body, and you can use your lower body to help you move your arms up and down. But when you go down on those knees, you don’t have that—so you really put all that weight into your arms.” Essentially, when you take your arm workout to the floor, you’re making it more efficient by isolating the muscles since the rest of your body can’t help you out. Kloots likes to use this method to target deltoids, triceps, and lats—sometimes all at once. “I was a dancer my whole life, so I’ve always been trained to use your back muscles to lift your arms, and that’s killing two birds

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