ONE great thing about CrossFit as an activity (besides it being a strength and conditioning program) is that it's tremendously sociable and a fantastic way to meet people.
With me now doing my coaching apprenticeship at a facility with around 600 members, I get to meet lots of new faces (and also forget many names of people I am introduced to, but I'm working on that).
Slowly, I'm starting to remember them, though. Maybe my brain power isn't what it once was or I'm just meeting too many people in one swoop for my grey matter to deal with.
The brain is an interesting subject. Soon after I arrived in Vancouver one girl in a class I was helping to coach - Julie is her name - offered me a ride home (as she lived near to where I am located).
During conversation she told me she was a brain professor at the University of British Columbia.
Since that initial meeting, Dr. Julie has kindly driven me home several times and we always get talking about something interesting.
As she's an authority on the subject of the brain, the other day she helped me bury a few myths: 1. that we cannot produce new brain cells; 2. that we only use a small portion of our brain in a lifetime.
She said both those alleged 'facts' are baloney, explaining that from information on a new science paper she had just read we do produce new brain cells all the time and, interestingly, that whether those cells live or die is often dependent on whether we are learning new things.
Funnily, if what we are learning is difficult and painful it helps those cells to survive, which made us both laugh considering we do CrossFit.
As for us only using a small part of our brain in our lifetime, she said all our brain is in use all the time. Who am I to argue? She is a brainy professor after all.
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