My favorite time of the year – fall. The best flyfishing of the year, partridge season, deer season, AND FOOTBALL! This weekend is the start of the high school and college football seasons, 
with several local high schools in action. Mount Anthony goes to Fair Haven on Friday night. With a new coach and a new offense, they should be fun to watch. Schuylerville goes to Cambridge on Saturday. Schuylerville looks tough this year, with a veteran team. Cambridge, led by Shea Bromirski at QB, is young, but has looked good in scrimmages. My money is on Cambridge, and that’s not just because Shea is my nephew. This team will surprise this year - very well coached and a great tradition. Hoosick Falls plays Lake George – the Panthers lost a lot from last year, but they seem to be in a reloading, not a rebuilding mode right now. I’m going with Hoosick Falls.
The biggest game of the weekend? The Cambridge Youth Flag Football game against Stillwater on Saturday. That’s one of the players on the left. He’s got number 31 – that was the number of Paul Posluszny, one of the greatest linebackers to ever wear a Penn State uniform.
Now, what about the big boys? As a Penn State graduate, I admit it, I drink the blue and white kool aid. With this in mind, Penn State will beat Florida International by 40 this weekend and go on to win the Big Ten title. They may even play LSU for the national championship (I think USC loses a game this year). Then again, they may lose to Michigan and Wisconsin and end up playing in the Outback Bowl again.
In other area news, MAUHS boys soccer is off to a good start with a victory over Fair Haven, and the field hockey team beat Springfield to start the season. Girls soccer starts tonight. Enjoy the weekend! Did I say football is starting?
I was up at the Cambridge track tonight training a high school athlete. As two people walked past us, getting some exercise, my client asked me if that was “really any good for you”. These people were walking kind of slowly.
Well, like most things, it’s all relative. Is a walking program good for you? Sure, I recommend it to patients all the time. Could you be doing something better? Maybe. What it comes down to is something called a window of adaptation. Take an olympic level weight lifter – if he or she improves a lift by a quarter pound, this is a huge deal. This is an individual who is near
the top when it comes to performance – their body, technique, strength, and neural conditioning are so finely honed that even a tiny improvement is quite a feat. This person has an extremely small window of adaptation.
On the other hand, take you or me – we have huge windows of adaptation. Pretty much anything we do beyond the ordinary is going to provide some benefit. In this way, if a deconditioned person begins a walking program, they are going to see improvement - the trick is to maximize the potential for improvement. I mean, after all, walking to most of us is a common, everyday activity, as are using stairs, chasing kids, etc. What we need to do is find an activity that actually taxes the system a bit – the more stress (within reason), the greater benefit.
So, if you are a person who has taken up something like walking for better health, I applaud you, and keep it up. But put some thought into maybe stepping things up a bit – do some research or speak to a professional. Oh yeah – and always, always, always consult your doctor before beginning or modifying an exercise program.