How you manipulate people to achieve your goal

Imagine a scenario where you are 190 lb, and your opponents are also 190 lb. You decide to cut your weight to 170 lb and possibly you would get faster since you have less body mass to move, but then if you are in a close contact sport like Hockey, Basketball, Soccer, Football, then you are basically leaving yourself vulnerable to having enough strength and mass to absorb potential blows. In boxing and martial arts, you want to be fast, strong, and powerful in your proper weight class. A featherweight fighting a heavyweight would be life-threatening and dangerous, so it would also make logical sense that in a sport that involves elements of contact, you must be faster, stronger, and more powerful in the proper weight class. Unless you are overweight and your body fat percentage is above optimal standards, your primary goal is to get strong relative to your desired weight. For optimal speed performance, our research has found male body fat percentage at 6%, female body fat percentage of 9% with rock-solid muscle translates best. The correct approach is to get strong in conjunction with an optimal nutritional plan to get to the ideal body fat to lean muscle ratio. Conditioning is all about increasing your work capacity. This suggests that learning new arguments from the group changed how these individuals perceived the world, not just what they said to fit in. APPLICATION Polarization and Social Media These processes take on an expanded scope with social media. Social networking sites like Twitter and Facearticle give us unprecedented access to information and viewpoints about the major issues facing society. In an ideal world, this online media environment would resemble a national conversation in which individuals come into contact with information from diverse ideological perspectives and circulate those opinions to others. But in reality this environment more resembles an echo chamber, in which individuals selectively take in and share ideas that reinforce what they already believe. When Barbera et al. This was especially true for politically charged events and issues like the federal budget, marriage equality, and the minimum wage, as compared with less politicized events like the Winter Olympics. Once individuals embed themselves in an ideologically homogenous media environment, it's all too easy for them to gorge on a steady diet of arguments that persuade them that their attitudes are correct. The result? In a series of experiments at Hollie Putnam's lab at the University of Rhode Island, researchers exposed adult corals to increased temperature and acidification, and then exposed their offspring to the same situation. We found that there is potential for beneficial acclimatization, Hollie says.

The offspring show greater survivorship and growth rates if the parents have been previously exposed to short periods of adverse conditions. Hollie believes that here, too, the rapid adaptation is due to epigenetics. Are the results too good to last? But how long will these benefits last? Is the improved capacity to live in warmer water a fleeting phenomenon, like Cinderella's pumpkin coach, or is it passed on through future generations? Thousands of miles north, and on the other side of the globe, scientists in Maritime Canada studying winter skates--the fish, not the hockey equipment--found an intriguing way to explore that question. They studied genetic material from two populations of these cartilaginous fish--one that lives off the exposed coast of Nova Scotia in the chilly Atlantic waters, and one that lives in waters ten degrees Celsius (18oF) warmer in the southern Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The winter skates in the Saint Lawrence are dramatically smaller, an adaptation that enables them to live in the lower-oxygen conditions of the warmer water. It is your ability to go at maximal effort for a longer period of time. Period after period, shift after shift, you want to be capable of playing at a higher level with minimal fatigue. Conditioning is always done after power and strength work. It is a mistake to mix up power and strength work with conditioning as the body gets confused, and you can not build each quality efficiently and effectively. When you start the conditioning phase, you will inherently lose a bit of strength and power, and that is normal. For any given sport, in any given position, the ratio between strength, power, and conditioning is a balancing act. When you are over-conditioned, you become weak. Forget the fourth quarter when you cannot even perform in the first three. Vice versa, you cannot be a star for just one quarter and be completely gassed out for the second. Much like you will never see a 100m sprinter participate in a marathon, your body cannot have all the qualities to become a dominant athlete in every position. An increasingly segregated and polarized nation. In theory, social media sites connect us to diverse ideas and perspectives;

This can result in extreme, rigidly held worldviews. This layering is repeated until the image cannot be seen anymore. Trying to Be a Better Group Member If we apply social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) (article 5), we can explain group polarization as a result of normative social influence, which occurs when you conform to others' actions or attitudes to be liked (Myers et al. When individuals get together to make a decision, they often look around to figure out where the other group members stand on the topic at hand. Once it becomes clear what position the group is leaning toward, a cycle of comparison and amplification is set in motion: One person in the group tries to compare herself favorably with other group members. She wants to be a better group member, so she advocates the group's position but takes it a little further than everyone else: You guys seem to like this idea, but I love it! Seeing this, another group member tries to present himself to the group even more favorably, so he amplifies the group's position even more: Oh yeah? Their small size was achieved by epigenetically modifying their genes to make a physiological change. These two groups have been geographically separated for seven thousand years, yet they are genetically indistinguishable. Technically, the smaller skates have not evolved--their DNA is identical to the other population of skates. Instead, they've adapted their bodies to the warmer water by making a total of 3,653 changes in their gene-expression patterns. These epigenetic changes have developed and persisted over the course of 318 generations. And yet, because they do not involve permanent changes to the genetic DNA code, epigenetic changes are also potentially reversible--a quality that is driving a revolution in human medicine. The great potential for epigenetic therapies, write Nita Ahuja and her colleagues from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in a 2016 paper in the Annual Review of Medicine, lies in the fact that, unlike genetic abnormalities, epigenetic changes are reversible, allowing recovery of function for affected genes with normal DNA sequences. In other words, epigenetic therapies help reprogram cancer cells to return to the straight and narrow. Today a vast collection of medical and biological studies demonstrates how changes in temperature, along with hormones or other chemicals, affect DNA by modifying certain epigenetic factors, which instruct the genes whether or not to be expressed. It's a far cry from what people understood over a century ago about how environments create change. In a twelve-week program, we typically start conditioning about four to six weeks before the end of the twelve-week program. We aggressively attack conditioning or build in the conditioning by using my favorite strongman days with sled pulls and farmers walk.

I love farmers' walk because they simultaneously build grip strength, core strength, and ankle strength. While sled pulls using heavy weights helps build up lots of lactic acid tolerance, it helps athletes become stronger as they build up that conditioning part under load--which is more effective than just copious amounts of running without load. As we get closer to the end of the program, we do these conditioning sessions three times per week. I do not like to overdo these because you must also be building your conditioning from your skill work and practice games during the off-season. During the days off or recovery days, and there are no skills or practice games planned, I prescribe running hills because I believe it is a crucial part of conditioning. Find a decent hill about 60 meters or more. You run up the hill, walk down the hill for each rep. Your progression may look like this: I will fight tooth and nail for this idea! The net effect of this cycle is that the group shifts toward a more extreme position. As we would expect from this theory, group discussion is more likely to result in polarized positions when group members are motivated to be liked by other group members (Spears et al. Most of the examples and research findings we've used to discuss group decision making deal with informal group contexts and hypothetical decisions. In these contexts, where decisions do not have earth-shattering consequences and group members are not overly concerned with being right, it's not surprising that processes like group polarization can get in the way of clear thinking. What is surprising is when smart people have formal discussions about important topics and still end up making really bad decisions that can result in disaster. Consider this real-world example. On January 28, 1986, NASA launched the space shuttle Challenger. There was special public interest and excitement about the launch because one of the seven crew members was a private citizen and teacher, Christa McAuliffe. She was the first representative of the Teacher in Space Project, a NASA program designed to inspire students, honor teachers, and spur interest in mathematics, science, and space exploration. Back in the 1880s, German biologist August Weismann sought to understand how changes to one generation might affect the next by amputating the tails of five successive generations of mice. He concluded that the effects of an environmental stimulus (in this case, cutting off a tail) could not be transmitted to its offspring (the mice were all born with tails).

What Weismann failed to realize is that cutting off a parent's tail has nothing to do with whether or not a mouse will be born without a tail. Temperature or chemicals, not physical injury, trigger epigenetic factors. Plus, the capacity to be born without tails would have had to already exist within the genetic code of mice in order for this trait to ever be passed along or expressed. That said, astonishing examples of transgenerational resilience that defy belief continue to be discovered. For example, Mylene Mariette, a behavioral ecologist at Deakin University in Australia, was observing relationships between zebra finch parents when she heard a call she didn't recognize. Although she did not realize it at the time, it was the sound of a zebra finch calling to its chicks--chicks that hadn't hatched yet. Zebra finch parents were communicating to their babies still inside the egg. At first I didn't know the call had anything to do with temperature, Mylene explains. Week 1 - 1 set of 6 reps. Week 2 - 2 sets of 6 reps (seven minutes rest between sets) Week 3 - 3 sets of 6 reps (five minutes rest between sets) Week 4 - 4 sets of 6 reps (four minutes rest between sets) Week 5 - 2 sets of 6 reps (three minutes rest between sets) Week 6 - 5 sets of 6 reps (three minutes rest between sets) All the work needs to be done higher than 60% of maximal intensity. The training must be tougher than what you will go through on the ice, field, or the court. Running around, doing all these aimless conditioning at low intensity is a complete waste of time. The key is to build high intensity--fast reactive conditioning components where they are under fatigue and are mentally acute. Consequently, students in schools around the country watched the launch on TV. However, there were warning signs that the shuttle could malfunction.