"Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis: All things change and we change with them.

Posture. I don't talk about it much here because it seems a little, well, boring. On the other hand, when it comes to fitness, it's of major, major importance: where your 'neutral' is determines everything about the way you move, how the various parts of your body are stressed all day, every day, indeed, it determines a lot about how you're going to age: whether you're going to look vigorous and fit in old age or more like Liam Neeson in Ethan Frome after the sledding accident (obscure movie reference alert!).

Most health-conscious people know this already, however, and many will take steps to improve their posture in the gym--some by doing core exercises, some by working the scapular retractors, some by doing lots of low-back movements. As far as I can see, however, trying to 'fix' your posture through traditional exercises is almost always ineffective.

Here's the trouble with postural exercises as I see them: optimum posture is not really a matter of muscular strength, or even muscular endurance. In many, perhaps most cases, flexibility or joint mobility isn't really the major key either. So working to improve posture by addressing only muscular strength, flexibility, and/or joint mobility, though it would seem to solve the problem, only addresses the symptoms of the root cause of bad posture.

A few months ago we read--and mostly conceded--that exercise alone doesn't work for effective weight loss.

Now a study has emerged suggesting that dieting doesn't either.

As if we needed a reminder that diets mostly fail, The New England Journal of Medicine has published a new report on an intense, tightly controlled experiment involving more than 300 moderately obese people. After two years of effort the dieters lost, on average, 6 to 10 pounds. The study, funded in part by the Atkins Research Foundation, seemed designed to prove that low-carb diets trump low-fat diets. But in the end, all it really showed is that dieters can put forth tremendous effort and reap very little benefit.

This is interesting, in a way: the nutrition folks had themselves a nice little party at the expense of the gym rats when the now-infamous TIME article came out back in August; now the workout folks get a little payback.

Trainer-stud Bret Contreras, aka "The Glute Guy" has published a couple of interesting articles recently detailing some mini exercise-physiology experiments he performed on himself over the last months. This one, which details the results of his extensive work on glute exercises; this one, which addresses shoulder and trapezius movements, and the one below, in which he talks about general lower-body exercises, and details his methodology:

As you can see if you watch the video, Contreras' methods are almost ridiculously simple. In short, he tapes EKG electrodes to the muscles whose activity he is trying to monitor, performs various strength-training movements, and reports which exercises result in the greatest activation--and, presumably, growth stimulus--in the muscles he's monitoring. His sample size is exactly one--himself--but, he argues, fairly persuasively, that although there might be some subject-to-subject variation in muscle activity throughout these exercises, it won't be terribly significant.