Obviously there is no easy translation for this German proverb: No sports, no sports is what Churchill said. Sport’s a killer, sport is murder doesn’t have the rhyme the German version has. Nevertheless, the people who say so are totally wrong. Exercise was the base that the human race could go where we are now, a overweight race with many problems due to sitting most of the time in our desk chairs while exercise is beyond the horizon and reserved to leisure. It had been just the opposite: running and hunting was the professional occupation and sitting at the fire the leisure. How time changes!

I was lead to this excurs by a review in Cell: Integrative Biology of Exercise by Howard and colleagues from Melbourne (Australia), Rochester (Maine), and Stockholm (Sweden). They bring the different aspects of Exercise into an systematic overview and nail the “Major Signaling Pathways Involved in the Control of Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy and Mitochondrial Biogenesis” down to one image. Exercise involves “Complex and Redundant Physiological Control” in CNS, muscles, heart, lung, in the metabolism and neuroendocrine systems. The pictures are straight forward and very instructive. 

Recommended!