Fitness Reads: Who does CrossFit exclude? What’s up with outdoor fitness?

What did the SNEWS team read this week that other industry insiders might find interesting? Read on to find out!

• Outdoor Fitness doesn’t just mean adult playground jungle gyms in city parks, it means fun activities like stand up paddleboarding. For Lisa Gonzales, the woman featured in this Daily Sparks Tribune story, stand-up paddleboarding is a way to sneak in a workout the way one sneaks vegetables into delicious treats.

• We all know about all of the bad diseases that good exercise prevents, but here’s one more to add to the list: Newsday recently reported that routine vigorous exercise can lower the risk of epilepsy in young men, which researchers remind us is disabling and life-threatening.

• Forget biking and running to work every day. That’s simply not for Liao Chaodong of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province in China who kayaks six kilometers to his workplace from his home in the morning, and back home again in the evening a few times a week. Check out this story. Kayaking to work may be the future of the paddlesports industry.

• As we get older, our ideas of fun change, our sense of style changes, but how should the way we work out change? It shouldn’t really, according to this Baltimore Sun story, which reports that we have to maintain a combination of cardio and strength to remain healthy as we age.

• Being newbies to weight lifting, we’re kind of clueless as to how much protein we should be ingesting after before, during and after workouts. This Tampa Tribune article somewhat cleared it up for us. Forget focusing on the grams of protein, rather focus on incorporating proteins into your meals and snacks.

• With all this news about how overweight and under-exercised our kids are, it was refreshing to read this New York Daily News story about how in the past decade teenagers are eating healthier and exercising more than previously thought.

• After a grueling workout, we prefer a green smoothie that includes spinach and blueberries, among other pieces of nature’s candy. Turns out we’re doing something right as blueberries, combined with exercise, have a ton of great benefits such as elevated metabolism, reduced inflammation and heightened ability for the body to burn fat, according to this story.

• We spent a few days at the Health and Fitness Business Expo this week, and saw a lot of CrossFit-specific products being offered by traditional fitness companies. CrossFit’s a-boomin’ these days and manufacturers are trying to bank on that, but is the popular activity excluding some people? According to this story, it is. CrossFit has managed to attract a mostly white, well-off clientele and lacks diversity like many other industries.
• People these days are looking for variety in their workouts and they’ve found it by working out outdoors. For the fitness industry, it isn’t just about lacing up hiking shoes and going for a hike, rather it’s cross training, martial arts and body-weight training conducted in the great outdoors. Check out this Business-Standard article on the phenomenon.

• Advertisements for the iPhone 5S are everywhere. FitBit, Jawbone and other fitness trackers are everywhere. Can they both be popular with consumers or will the iPhone 5S take the place of other tracking devices? This story ponders that question and reports on the M7 motion coprocessor that’s in the iPhone 5S that does everything fitness trackers do.

Did you read anything interesting this week? Email it to us because we want to read it, too.