Synopses & Reviews
If youre interested in how things work, this guide will help you experiment with one crucial system you usually ignore—your body and its health. Long hours focusing on code or circuits tends to stifle notions of nutrition, but with this educational and highly useful book you can approach fitness through science, whether its investigating your ancestral health or using the latest self-tracking apps and gear.
Tune into components of your health through discussions on food, exercise, sleep, hormesis, and other issues—as well as interviews with various scientists and athletes—and discover healthy ways to tinker with your lifestyle.
- Learn to live in the modern digital world and still be physically vibrant
- Examine apps and widgets for self-tracking various fitness issues
- Zero in on carbs, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals
- Find and choose food, and learn when to eat and when to fast
- Reboot your system through movement in the outside world
- Select from more than a dozen techniques for your gym workout
- Fuel fitness by focusing on the science of nutrition and supplements
- Apply lifestyle hacks, such as high-intensity exercise and good stress
Synopsis
This educational and highly useful book shows the hacker and maker communities how to bring science into their health and exercise routine.
There's more to being a geek than most people think when they hear the word, just as there's much more to fitness than the infomercials tell you at 2 a.m. Fitness for Geeks will appeal to a broad audience of scientists, programmers, and anyone with an inquisitive mind who wants to experiment with health the way they tinker with technology. By applying the same technical approach they use to debug software or hack hardware, they will learn both what to do and why it works. Whether they have an established exercise routine and what to dig deeper to realize the physiology behind it, or if they're just looking for a way to get away from the computer to exercise in a way that speaks to them, this book helps readers discover a new method to building and maintaining fitness and a healthy lifestyle.
Just as Jeff Potter brought a new perspective to cooking in O'Reilly's bestselling Cooking for Geeks, Bruce Perry revolutionizes the way any curious person views their fitness in Fitness for Geeks.
About the Author
Bruce W. Perry played college soccer in New York, then amidst a varied career in journalism and software engineering finished literally (ask his knees!) hundreds of road races and multisport events. He's since moved on to family life and recreational alpine hiking, skiing, and resistance training. He has also written two recent software books for O'Reilly Media. After an unguided youth, he now hangs out weightlifting in gyms again, and climbs with guides now, recently Piz Palu in the Swiss Alps, Mt. Whitney's Mountaineer's Route, and Mt. Rainier.
Table of Contents
; Preface; METs Anyone?; The Food Angle; The Mashed-up Ancient Angle; Annals of Experimentation; The "Measure First" Mantra; How to Use This Book; Acknowledgments; Safari® Enabled; Chapter 1: Fitness and the Human Codebase: Reboot Your Operating System; 1.1 The Cubicle Blues; 1.2 Homing In on a Design Pattern; 1.3 Preinstalled Software; 1.4 Designed to Get Our Butts Kicked; 1.5 The Cranky Anthropologist; 1.6 Hey, the Stone Age Was a Nasty Time; 1.7 The Modern Diet--It's Lame!; 1.8 A Useful Template; 1.9 The Amazin' MET; 1.10 Force Quit--Reboot; 1.11 And Now for Something Completely Different; Chapter 2: Fitness Tools and Apps; 2.1 Quantified Self; 2.2 Sports and Fitness Tracking; 2.3 Personal Metrics; 2.4 Gear