- In the 1940s, William Herbert Sheldon, Jr. invented somatotypes to differentiate male bodies.
- Understanding your physical composition can help you choose a workout plan and diet.
- There is variation between heights and muscle composition, so fine-tuning is necessary.
Yesterday morning I was discussing body types with my workout partner. I mentioned what it would take for me to put on mass—quite a lot. At 6'3", I've weighed roughly 175 pounds for 25 years. In somatotype terminology, I'm a classic ectomorph: tall and ropey, with broad shoulders (fortunately) and thin legs (unfortunately). My friend is a standard mesomorph, so it's easier for him to put on mass, though a double-edge sword as that mass can go to his center if he's not mindful of his diet.
Psychologist William Herbert Sheldon, Jr. dreamed up somatotypes in the 1940s to differentiate male body types. He also stereotyped each somatotype with psychological qualities that didn't reflect reality in any way, making him a minor laughing stock on the psychology scene. Yet his body typing system remains influential, and for good reason: look around.
With so much emphasis on female bodies in the media, we sometimes forget that males have body issues too. Given the number of men I regularly see pulling up their shirts to stare at their abs in the gym, how they look is of utmost importance. And if they want to optimize their workout and diet, each one has to come to terms with their genetics.
Endomorphs are short and stocky, making it easy for them to put on muscle yet challenging to keep off fat. Mesomorphs are the average of averages, in the 5'9" to 6'0" range that can be bulkier or leaner. Finally, ectomorphs are the gangliest of the bunch, though, as with all types, categorization is not destiny; we can bulk up with some work or tone with plenty of lean muscle.
Within each type, Sheldon scored on a one-to-seven scale; it's quite possible to be short and thin (like many world-class marathon runners) or tall and bulky (NBA and NFL players). Understanding what you're best suited (or not suited) for helps you devise a plan of action.
Endomorphs
According to the trio at Bony to Beastly, short guys are built to throw weights around: lift them above your head, push them away from you, swing them in circles. Denser bone structure supports higher loads, as in bench pressing and squatting. By design, weights are to your advantage, with shorter lever lengths and explosive force coming from thicker musculature:
An endomorph's muscles respond well to lifting too. According to the research of Dr. Casey Butts, guys with thicker bones are able to build muscle far more easily than those with narrower bones, and ultimately become far more muscular.
By contrast, cardio is tougher; the added density creates more impact force when running. Of course, this would not affect them as much when cycling or swimming, and everyone needs to get their V02 max levels in order.
On the dietary front, BTB recommends foods rich in micronutrients while low in calories. Junk food is not your friend—but really, beyond occasional satiety, when is it?
Mesomorphs
Photo: Quino AI / Unsplash
Average height has advantages, such as a tendency to be constructed with leaner middles and better muscle composition. They're also more coordinated than guys shorter or taller then them. As can be expected, recommended workouts and diet is, well, average. You can pretty much go anywhere with it.
If they want to get leaner, they'll want to eat more like an endomorph, but may need to be more wary of losing muscle mass. If they want to get stronger, they'll want to eat more like an ectomorph, but may need to be more wary of gaining fat.
Common sense. They also recommend a 40-30-30 macronutrient guideline, which is the basis of The Zone diet, and where did Barry Sears get us? The problem with diets in general tend to be less on what food we're consuming and more on what time (and how often) we're eating. The median timeline for the majority of Americans is 14.75 hours, meaning they eat pretty much from waking to sleeping. That is not a good approach for any type. Of all the types, however, mesomorphs seem most flexible.
Ectomorphs
Apparently, however, the tallest among us have the least problems keeping weight off—though, as BTB notes, there are plenty of overweight taller people. They advocate for 50-60 percent of calories from carbs, though as I've written about extensively, lowering my carb intake cleared up many long-standing problems. I'm not a fan of gorging junk food, the following makes a bit of sense, given how many shorter people I've known that eat very little and still cannot lose weight:
Because of our smaller appetites, rampaging metabolisms, higher carb tolerance, and higher calorie tolerance, we don't need to focus as much on restricting junk food as the other body types. It helps to think about eating more good stuff, not less bad stuff. Otherwise, it's going to be too hard eat enough to grow bigger, stronger muscles and denser, sturdier bones.
Finally, workouts: big cardio fans they are. Again, you have to look big picture—longer lever lengths make joints less stable. I've torn my labrum a few times and have had one knee surgery thanks to running. I generally stick to cycling and HIIT now, along with rowing and the assault bike. Bulking up, well…
While our hearts are strong, our bones and muscles are not. While we can quite literally run a wildebeest into the ground, we may have quite a lot of trouble picking it up afterwards.
To be clear, strength is subjective as well. Are you strong enough to pick yourself up off the ground? Can you move objects pain-free? While a fan of throwing kettlebells around, we also need to stay focused on the goal: living a healthy life. Loading is essential for your bones and muscles, especially as you age, though it's not the final marker of health. How heavy isn't the real issue. Sometimes "some" is an appropriate response.
Yet being realistic is important. Goals are important, but if you're overly ambitious and unrealistic as to your type you're only going to be disappointed. Instead of focusing on what's not going to happen, start where you are and see what's possible. A good roadmap is handy, but it's never the territory.
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Some scientists have studied near death experiences (NDEs) to try to gain insights into how death overcomes the brain. What they've found is remarkable, a surge of electricity enters the brain moments before brain death. One 2013 study out of the University of Michigan, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found they entered a hyper-alert state just before death.
Scientists are beginning to think an NDE is caused by reduced blood flow, coupled with abnormal electrical behavior inside the brain. So the stereotypical tunnel of white light might derive from a surge in neural activity. Dr. Sam Parnia is the director of critical care and resuscitation research, at NYU Langone School of Medicine, in New York City. He and colleagues are investigating exactly how the brain dies.
Our cerebral cortex is likely active 2–20 seconds after cardiac arrest. Credit: Getty Images.
In previous work, he's conducted animal studies looking at the moments before and after death. He's also investigated near death experiences. “Many times, those who have had such experiences talk about floating around the room and being aware of the medical team working on their body," Dr. Parnia told Live Science. “They'll describe watching doctors and nurses working and they'll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them."
Medical staff confirm this, he said. So how could those who were technically dead be cognizant of what's happening around them? Even after our breathing and heartbeat stops, we're conscious for about 2–20 seconds, Dr. Parnia says. That's how long the cerebral cortex is thought to last without oxygen. This is the thinking and decision-making part of the brain. It's also responsible for deciphering the information gathered from our senses.
According to Parnia during this period, "You lose all your brain stem reflexes — your gag reflex, your pupil reflex, all that is gone." Brain waves from the cerebral cortex soon become undetectable. Even so, it can take hours for our thinking organ to fully shut down.
Usually, when the heart stops beating, someone performs CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). This will provide about 15% of the oxygen needed to perform normal brain function. "If you manage to restart the heart, which is what CPR attempts to do, you'll gradually start to get the brain functioning again," Parnia said. “The longer you're doing CPR, those brain cell death pathways are still happening — they're just happening at a slightly slower rate."
CPR may help retain some brain function for longer. Credit: Getty Images.
Dr. Parnia's latest, ongoing study looks at large numbers of Europeans and Americans who have experienced cardiac arrest and survived. "In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of 'love,'" he said, "we're trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we're all going to have when we die."
One of the objectives is to observe how the brain acts and reacts during cardiac arrest, through the process of death, and during revival. How much oxygen exactly does it take to reboot the brain? How is the brain affected after revival? Learning where the lines are drawn might improve resuscitation techniques, which could save countless lives per year.
"At the same time, we also study the human mind and consciousness in the context of death," Parnia said, “to understand whether consciousness becomes annihilated or whether it continues after you've died for some period of time — and how that relates to what's happening inside the brain in real time."
For more on the scientific perspective on a near death experience, click here:
As he described it, “In my mind's eye I saw many, many things: children that I hadn't even had yet, friends that I had never seen but are now my friends. The thing that really stuck in my mind was playing an instrument". Then Tony landed on his head and lost consciousness.
When he came to at the hospital, he felt like a different person and didn't want to return to his previous life. Over the following weeks, the images kept flashing back into his mind. He felt that he was “being shown something" and that the images represented his future.
Later, Tony saw a picture of a saxophone and recognized it as the instrument he'd seen himself playing. He used his compensation money from the accident to buy one. Now, Tony Kofi is one of the UK's most successful jazz musicians, having won the BBC Jazz awards twice, in 2005 and 2008.
Though Tony's belief that he saw into his future is uncommon, it's by no means uncommon for people to report witnessing multiple scenes from their past during split-second emergency situations. After all, this is where the phrase “my life flashed before my eyes" comes from.
But what explains this phenomenon? Psychologists have proposed a number of explanations, but I'd argue the key to understanding Tony's experience lies in a different interpretation of time itself.
When life flashes before our eyes
The experience of life flashing before one's eyes has been reported for well over a century. In 1892, a Swiss geologist named Albert Heim fell from a precipice while mountain climbing. In his account of the fall, he wrote is was “as if on a distant stage, my whole past life [was] playing itself out in numerous scenes".
More recently, in July 2005, a young woman called Gill Hicks was sitting near one of the bombs that exploded on the London Underground. In the minutes after the accident, she hovered on the brink of death where, as she describes it: “my life was flashing before my eyes, flickering through every scene, every happy and sad moment, everything I have ever done, said, experienced".
In some cases, people don't see a review of their whole lives, but a series of past experiences and events that have special significance to them.
Explaining life reviews
Perhaps surprisingly, given how common it is, the “life review experience" has been studied very little. A handful of theories have been put forward, but they're understandably tentative and rather vague.
For example, a group of Israeli researchers suggested in 2017 that our life events may exist as a continuum in our minds, and may come to the forefront in extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress.
Another theory is that, when we're close to death, our memories suddenly “unload" themselves, like the contents of a skip being dumped. This could be related to “cortical disinhibition" – a breaking down of the normal regulatory processes of the brain – in highly stressful or dangerous situations, causing a “cascade" of mental impressions.
But the life review is usually reported as a serene and ordered experience, completely unlike the kind of chaotic cascade of experiences associated with cortical disinhibition. And none of these theories explain how it's possible for such a vast amount of information – in many cases, all the events of a person's life – to manifest themselves in a period of a few seconds, and often far less.
Thinking in 'spatial' time
An alternative explanation is to think of time in a “spatial" sense. Our commonsense view of time is as an arrow that moves from the past through the present towards the future, in which we only have direct access to the present. But modern physics has cast doubt on this simple linear view of time.
Indeed, since Einstein's theory of relativity, some physicists have adopted a “spatial" view of time. They argue we live in a static “block universe" in which time is spread out in a kind of panorama where the past, the present and the future co-exist simultaneously.
The modern physicist Carlo Rovelli – author of the best-selling The Order of Time – also holds the view that linear time doesn't exist as a universal fact. This idea reflects the view of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that time is not an objectively real phenomenon, but a construct of the human mind.
This could explain why some people are able to review the events of their whole lives in an instant. A good deal of previous research – including my own – has suggested that our normal perception of time is simply a product of our normal state of consciousness.
In many altered states of consciousness, time slows down so dramatically that seconds seem to stretch out into minutes. This is a common feature of emergency situations, as well as states of deep meditation, experiences on psychedelic drugs and when athletes are “in the zone".
The limits of understanding
But what about Tony Kofi's apparent visions of his future? Did he really glimpse scenes from his future life? Did he see himself playing the saxophone because somehow his future as a musician was already established?
There are obviously some mundane interpretations of Tony's experience. Perhaps, for instance, he became a saxophone player simply because he saw himself playing it in his vision. But I don't think it's impossible that Tony did glimpse future events.
If time really does exist in a spatial sense – and if it's true that time is a construct of the human mind – then perhaps in some way future events may already be present, just as past events are still present.
Admittedly, this is very difficult to make sense of. But why should everything make sense to us? As I have suggested in a recent book, there must be some aspects of reality that are beyond our comprehension. After all, we're just animals, with a limited awareness of reality. And perhaps more than any other phenomenon, this is especially true of time.
Steve Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Leeds Beckett University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
