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Showing posts from December, 2019

Exploratory Ice Climbing Deep in Wyoming with Aaron Mulkey

Tucked in northern Wyoming, where the old West still reigns, sits the small town of Cody, built in 1896. Past the museums, saloons and log cabins is Bighorn Basin, a labyrinth of steep mountains, cold rivers, and hidden slivers of frozen waterfalls. To self-professed ice climbing “addict” Aaron Mulkey, the mountains surrounding Cody offer a lifetime of adventure. Like a treasure hunter, he’ll ride snowmobiles for hours, and thrash up steep hillsides with hopes to find hidden gems. To date, he has more than 100 first ascents outside of Cody, some hanging ice daggers, some frozen smears of white, others a mix of ice and rock. “My passion has always been first ascents,” he says of his 20 years with the sport. Why So Many People Are Falling in Love With Ice Climbing Tools on the rock, feet in the air, another Mulkey first ascent. Mulkey is one of the country’s top ice climbers, and his favorite place to climb is in the hills surrounding his home. That’s why this year he’s writing a g...

The Best Adventure Sports Stories of the Decade

As our lives have become more wired and interconnected, increasingly Uber-ed and Insta-ed and Amazon Primed over the last 10 years, the need to disconnect is only more amplified. Finding the time to get away, and the means to unplug and test oneself in nature: That’s one battle. Finding the reason why is another. Over the last decade, our partners at the Adventure Sports Network Group toiled to provide that guidance, documenting the worlds of outdoor action and adventure sports by capturing the colorful lives of folks who put their interests outside the box first. We asked the editors from the group’s hallowed collection of titles to pick the long-form features that inspired deep thought and direct action (and impassioned reaction) from their core audiences. And sure enough, it was well-crafted profiles of the most committed characters and the overlooked destinations, the ones thriving on the margins that rose to the surface and provided the most profound revelations about who we are a...

Kombucha: The Easiest Way to Support Your Gut Health

One major concern this time of year is how to undo the excess of the holidays. Helping the gut microbiome is a start. Health-Ade Kombucha is a fermented tea that contains probiotics—the same stuff you get from miso, sauerkraut, and yogurt—which can help add to the healthy bacteria in your gut. Have a serving in the morning to aid in digestion throughout the day. The Healthiest Low-sugar Kombuchas on the Market Kombucha, whose roots extend back a couple of centuries to China, starts as black tea. It’s combined with bacteria—a big slimy mushroom-looking disc called a SCOBY—and for a few days to a week, the bacteria pull the sugar from the tea and turns it into a fermented, fizzy, sour drink. And while there’s not enough alcohol to get you drunk, there’s a slight bit of it in there as a byproduct of fermentation. (Health-Ade takes four weeks per kombucha brew.) Probiotic Beer is Here Whether We Like it or Not Of course, the probiotics are the star of the show. In addition to regulat...

Want to Lower Your Risk of Colon Cancer? Hit the Gym

Here’s some added motivation to hit the gym: People who lift weights weekly have a 25 percent lower risk of developing colon cancer than those who don’t, according to a study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise . Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., so scientists at the National Cancer Institute are eager to get a handle on prevention, so they launched a longitudinal study including 215,122 participants. While the link between regular aerobic activity and cancer reduction is relatively well-known , the NCI wanted to investigate weight lifting, specifically, and how effective it is at fighting colon cancer. Moderate Weekly Exercise May Negate Certain Negative Effects of Alcohol—Like Death From Cancer   Researchers found strength training about two hours per week reduced the risk of colon cancer even further. The reason: Developing more muscle helps maintain healthy blood sugar levels, which research shows is i...

Kombucha: The Easiest Way to Support Your Gut Health

One major concern this time of year is how to undo the excess of the holidays. Helping the gut microbiome is a start. Health-Ade Kombucha is a fermented tea that contains probiotics—the same stuff you get from miso, sauerkraut, and yogurt—which can help add to the healthy bacteria in your gut. Have a serving in the morning to aid in digestion throughout the day. The Healthiest Low-sugar Kombuchas on the Market Kombucha, whose roots extend back a couple of centuries to China, starts as black tea. It’s combined with bacteria—a big slimy mushroom-looking disc called a SCOBY—and for a few days to a week, the bacteria pull the sugar from the tea and turns it into a fermented, fizzy, sour drink. And while there’s not enough alcohol to get you drunk, there’s a slight bit of it in there as a byproduct of fermentation. (Health-Ade takes four weeks per kombucha brew.) Probiotic Beer is Here Whether We Like it or Not Of course, the probiotics are the star of the show. In addition to regulat...

Want to Lower Your Risk of Colon Cancer? Hit the Gym

Here’s some added motivation to hit the gym: People who lift weights weekly have a 25 percent lower risk of developing colon cancer than those who don’t, according to a study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise . Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., so scientists at the National Cancer Institute are eager to get a handle on prevention, so they launched a longitudinal study including 215,122 participants. While the link between regular aerobic activity and cancer reduction is relatively well-known , the NCI wanted to investigate weight lifting, specifically, and how effective it is at fighting colon cancer. Moderate Weekly Exercise May Negate Certain Negative Effects of Alcohol—Like Death From Cancer   Researchers found strength training about two hours per week reduced the risk of colon cancer even further. The reason: Developing more muscle helps maintain healthy blood sugar levels, which research shows is i...

Big-Wave Surfing's 5 Most Pivotal Moments of the Decade

The twenty-tens. Can you believe they’re over? From the tragic death of Andy Irons, the birth of the WSL, the Brazilian storm, the wavepool revolution, and so much more , the past 10 years were packed with unforgettable moments and historical significance. But, at this point, it still feels too early to define it. Was there any clear theme or direction? Or did the surf world move in a hundred directions all at once? That’s hard to say today. Maybe later. The 10 Best Feature Stories of the Decade From SURFER Magazine That said, there were many individual standout moments that we won’t soon forget. So, in the interest of defining them, we asked four experts for their opinion on what the most important moments of the decade were, in four different areas: big-wave surfing, aerial surfing, women’s surfing and longboarding. First up is three-time Big Wave World Champ, and 7-time XXL winner, Grant “Twiggy” Baker, who gave us his insights on which waves–and which days—helped define the dec...

Skateboard Icon Danny Way Talks Olympics and the Absence of the Mega Ramp

This is Part 3 of my ongoing conversations about the upcoming Olympics (Read Part 1 with Josh Friedberg here and Part 2 with Tony Hawk here ). Skateboarding being in the Olympics is a funny thing. Everybody has an opinion on something that has never happened. I would chalk that up to how much each and every one of us loves skateboarding as it is—pre-Olympics—and our fears, real or imagined that being a part of the biggest sports event on the planet might change that. For this installment, I checked in with Danny Way—on the eve of him celebrating 30 years of professional skateboarding—to get his two cents on how he thinks Tokyo 2020 will affect the broader culture and specifically the counterculture of skateboarding. I also asked him—as arguably the founder of the Mega Ramp—what his response was to the absence of one at Tokyo next year. And finally, as a company owner (of Plan B and with deep ties to DC Shoes) I wanted to know how Way felt about Nike’s outsized role next year dressing...

How Ditching High-Salt Foods Can Keep You Smart

We all know that excess salt is bad for the heart. Now researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City suggest that too much salt in the long run can hinder a person’s ability to think. The resulting study, published in the journal  Nature , linked high-salt diets to cognitive impairment in mice. Their work showed that in mice, the salt lowers nitric oxide levels in the brain’s blood vessels. This decrease produces a rise in certain enzymes that alter important proteins in neurons, which then hinders neuronal pathways involved in cognition. In lab animals, a brain change happened in two months. The change also shows an accumulation of tau deposits, or fully saturated proteins, that presage Alzheimer’s disease . The Best Way to Reduce Your Sodium Intake Neuroscientist Costantino Iadecola says humans would notice poorer cognition after several years on a high-salt diet. But there is good news for those who have overdone the salt: “Going back to a regular diet completely rev...

Henry Cavill on His Favorite Fights and Monsters From 'The Witcher'

Even though it only came out on December 20, The Witcher  is already making a big impact. The fantasy series starring Henry Cavill became one of Netflix’s top 10 most popular shows of 2019 and Cavill’s shirtless scenes have been made into some hilarious memes . How Henry Cavill Got His Abs to Pop for Those Shirtless Scenes in Netflix's 'The Witcher' While the series has some major Game of Thrones -vibes, it has its own style—and some incredible fight scenes. As he’s shown in the past while playing Superman in Batman v Superman and in other movies like Mission: Impossible – Fallout , The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Immortals , Cavill sure knows his way around a brawl. Now that the series is fully streaming, Cavill was asked about his favorite fight scenes and monster moments in the series so far while playing the main character of Geralt of Rivia. In an interview with The Wrap , Cavill said that among the monsters on the show , it wasn’t a battle with a striga , golden ...