Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

I cannot claim an affinity for sauna based on heritage, any more than I can claim a fondness for Citroen cars or BMW motorcycles based on heritage. Despite my name, I'm a mutt of European ancestry; I'm no more Scandinavian than I am anything else. Despite my lack of ancestral inclination to sauna, however, I've always been drawn to the intense heat of sauna, sweat lodge and hot springs. When I was a student-athlete at the University of Minnesota, my track coach encouraged sauna to expedite recovering from hard workouts. Even at that young age, I eagerly followed coach's advice, at least when it involved sauna. Upon graduation, I immediately embarked on a years-long, back-to-nature period that included lots of sauna (albeit wearing less clothing than during my varsity athlete days!) I've long been partial to hot springs, sweat lodges and saunas. Once I settled in the rural hill country outside of Madison 25+ years ago, my sauna-philia only increased. From Se...

When I was first introduced to the Speed Play approach to running, I was wholly underwhelmed. I had little (almost none) sense of where my limbs were at any given time, and running was a less-than-satisfactory experience. Various coaches suggested that I run cross country in order to improve my coordination, and I obliged by running cross country in 1980 and 1981. Training was painfully challenging, and the high point of each workout was hanging out with my teammates at the close of practice. At the time, I could scarcely imagine that nearly forty years later, I'd be joyfully doing Fartlek workouts. Some workouts are a pleasure - some aren't. The workout, Fartlek, derives from the Swedish word for speed play . I've just returned from 90+ minutes of Fartlek running in Blue Mound State Park ; delighted in the interplay of running slowly, darting up hills, and coasting along flats. Rather than structuring a workout into discreet bits of this and that, the Fartle...

In my previous posting, I explored some of the choices I've made with regards to strength training. Every system has its tradeoffs, and each of us is left to decide what tradeoffs (risks) are acceptable, and which are not. I've landed on working out 2-4x per week on the Pilates equipment, supplemented with some dumbbell and bodyweight exercises. After weighing the available information and feeling how things land in my body, I'm of the opinion that this combo satisfies my desire to maintain (and hopefully build) muscle mass... done within the frame of mindfulness that I came to appreciate through my years of Yoga practice. In training cardiovascular (aerobic) fitness, there are various options. Some trainers advocate a primary focus on lower-intensity work done for longer periods of time, while other trainers are partial to high-intensity intervals, done for shorter periods of time. Each camp cites evidence supporting their approach, and claim many adherents who are mo...