Cannes Film Festival
Waking up with an overwhelming feeling of hope is an odd thing – Hello. Adele (singer) is 23, James Cracknell OBE (Olympic rower) is 39 and Richard E Grant (actor) is 54 today. People were voting all day yesterday to give Nick Clegg a boot in the ballots, a kick up the constituencies, a smack round the marginals and a rap to the regions proportionally all over. Poor Nick but there were always going to be compromises.
Glossy magazine ‘Vanity Fair’ is not throwing their annual, lavish bash at the Cannes Film Festival which is due to start on Wednesday. Since the film industry is tightening it’s belt there will be less of Hollywood in town and fewer parties in £multi-million chateaux or on private yachts. A reduced level of celebrity excess is bound to take away from the spectacle and from the entries which depend so heavily on the surrounding hype.
Although high levels of activity in our ancestors contributed to the general fitness of the men and women who were selected to survive, it didn’t mean every individual had the same athletic abilities. The athletes of today fall into a range of categories between short burst, power events such as sprinting or weight-lifting and those designed for endurance events like running or rowing. Specific physiological traits and specialist training helped James Cracknell to win double Olympic gold.
All animals are designed for movement, as evolution led to larger and more complex organisms which needed to travel from place to place to find more to eat. Over millions of years a system based on muscles developed to propel them around the water, land or air. In the primates, those muscles and skeletons through which they operated became the greater part of the body. Today nearly ¾ of our body is dedicated to movement.
What, when and how much you eat before exercise will affect your performance, strength and endurance. Paradoxically, consuming carbohydrate increases carbohydrate burning in the muscle cells yet still delays the onset of fatigue. Numerous studies have concluded that consuming carbohydrate before exercise results in improved performance when compared with exercising on an empty stomach.
If you exercise early in the morning on an empty stomach the amount of fat that leaves the fat cells and travels to the muscles (where it is burned) is increased. Although this may lead to earlier fatigue and therefore a decrease in the level of exercise intensity – as a result you burn fewer calories. A short sharp burst of exercise first thing in the morning can be a good thing and a great way to start the day, just not for too long?
