Our series Balance regularly seeks knowledge from scientists to help us better understand health, nutrition and exercise. Each Balance segment, Jamie Baum and Erin Howie Hickey not only share that information with us, but they're also always pursuing the latest information. This visit, Erin and Jamie discuss what they've learned at recent conferences.
Howie Hickey: I was in Salt Lake City for the American College of Sports Medicine. So it's our kind of gold standard professional body. They work a lot with sports medicine doctors and clinicians, but also personal trainers, the fitness industry, and then researchers and academics that are across this field, from sports medicine to physical activity and health.
Baum: I was at the International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, and it's a conference — it's pretty cool, because I learned about it actually from Erin, a few years ago in my career — where people come from around the globe and talk about the behavioral aspects of nutrition and physical activity, ranging from implementing changes in your daily life to changes in policy. And it's great to hear what other countries are doing, in addition to what we're doing, to build off what's been successful and learn from what wasn't so successful.
Kellams: So I thought for this conversation, for Balance, we'd talk about maybe what you heard and learned. And let me begin with a very general question. In an annual conference like this, do you pick up new information? Is there new information that you can bring back to students and colleagues?
Howie Hickey: Yeah, I think so. The conference that I went to is huge. They have thousands and thousands of people. So at any point there are 10 different sessions going on at the same time. And I always try to — sometimes I go to, obviously, the ones that I'm most interested in, so kids' physical activity, but then I try and force myself to go to other areas too. So I might not completely understand what they're talking about, but I kind of pick up those new things. And, where is the field headed? What are the latest things that people are learning in slightly adjacent fields?
Kellams: So what's something that either of you picked up from these late spring conferences?
Baum: I would say we both maybe got the same message in the end, that behavior change is hard. It doesn't matter if you're older or younger, if you live in Spain or Australia or the United States — it's hard to make changes and stick to them, regardless of nutrition or physical activity. So Jamie, when you're talking about behavioral nutrition, that's trying to eat better, trying to eliminate some of the sugar or fat or whatever we eat.
Baum: I think it could be a multitude of things. It could just be, like you just said, changing maybe salt intake, or maybe it's just increasing your fruit and vegetable intake. So people often understand why we need to change our behavior, but it's really hard, especially in places like the U.S., where a lot of our cities aren't walkable. We don't have easy access to fruits or vegetables or grocery stores. We often have to take transportation. It makes every step a little bit harder to make change long-lasting.
Howie Hickey: Yeah. And it was a similar theme. So we know exercise is good for you. There's some cool research looking at what's going on in the muscle and how it's good for your muscle, and in athletes, this specific type of training that they're doing — basically, it's all good. And the brain — so looking at specific molecules that change with exercise to make cognition better. And yeah, they all ended their talks the same way. Exercise is good for you, but we don't know how to get people to do it.
Baum: And I think that's the challenge. I mean, since the beginning of science and funding science, amazing discoveries are made. We know we need to work out more. We know proper nutrition helps with longevity as well. But we know the secret. We know the ingredients. And people know everything from basic molecular science to just everyday things like blood pressure. But that's the million-dollar question — we all know, right? How do we change it?
Kellams: So, Erin, our last conversation, we were talking about summer and making sure maybe the children in our lives ate better and got the exercise. You laid out that if you give options and give someone some control — you can do this or you can do that — that can help us improve or modify behaviors.
Howie Hickey: So we kind of know how we do — I think there's a lot of evidence and research on behavior change. And we talked last time about self-determination theory and autonomy, relatedness and competence, what we were talking about with kids. And I think — and the conference that Jamie went to is really big on it — it's also the individual level. We kind of know what works. But then there are all of these other influences at the system level, so the communities we live in, the policies that operate, that can make those things hard. So how do we give people adequate choices and access to the things that they would like to do? And those are big problems.
I think I was at a session that was actually about how you get kids more active. It was the second-to-last session of the conference on Friday afternoon, so it was not a quality attendance — not necessarily quantity. But I think one of the presenters gave a talk about how they were working with schools to make changes related to physical activity and nutrition. And it was really refreshing, because I've worked in school-based interventions for a while, and a lot of the time it's kind of the researchers working with the schools, and they come up with this program and it's like, OK, we're going to implement it. But this was even taking a step further back, acknowledging how hard it is to do that. Their whole, like, six-month-to-a-year "intervention," in quotes, was getting the team together to start the conversation — if we're ready to do an intervention, who do we need to have at the table? And I think they worked with 12 schools, and at the end of the whole process, 11 of the schools finished this conversation, these guided, facilitated conversations, and only five of them had decided that they were going to go forward with making these changes to promote physical activity. And I think that's a real thing that we need to acknowledge — that it's hard work and it takes time. And you have to acknowledge that you can't just give them a plate that says, OK, go, right? Because it's going to fail. And so that was — I thought that was really innovative, to actually work at making those changes.
Kellams: So it sounds like — and this makes sense — but part of the change that allows people to maybe eat better, or maybe allows them to be more active, isn't just internal, isn't just medical. It starts at city hall or state legislatures.
Baum: I think it's kind of bidirectional. So in the lab or in our research, we provide the proof of concept, or proof of principle, to help convince legislatures. But it is about, in the end, policy and resources, I think, across the spectrum, if you want to implement something.
Kellams: All right. Did you come back with anything positive, or —
Baum: I don't know a lot about behavior research. I've learned what I know from Erin and got introduced to it. So for me, I always learn something new, and I think the older I get, I'm more interested in why we do the things we do and how, versus the molecular mechanisms, which shaped the beginning of my career. And it's nice to know that the U.S. isn't alone. It's not an American problem — it really is a global problem. But also, Erin, you were talking about some cool stuff. You learned about GLP-1 medications and physical activity. So, just timely, I think.
Howie Hickey: There were lots of talks about weight loss and medications for that, and how it really needs to be paired with exercise to maintain lean mass. So strength training was a common theme, and how important it was. And actually, the American College of Sports Medicine just came out with a new position stand. They revised their recommendations on strength training, with the general gist of, you should do it — anything's better than nothing. And they did make one change that I think is helpful. So they used to make recommendations based on one-rep max. Have we talked about that before?
Kellams: No, no.
Howie Hickey: So basically, it's like the max amount of weight you could lift. So maybe you do a bicep curl and you can do 50 pounds. So you do 1 at 50 pounds —
Kellams: Yeah.
Howie Hickey: — but you couldn't do any more. That's your max. And then we would prescribe your strength training exercises based off of a percentage of that.
Kellams: I see.
Howie Hickey: So I would say, OK, you're going to start at 60% of your one-rep max. It's a lot of math, and it's super complicated. And most people don't know their one-rep max, and it can be unsafe for people to actually find out.
Kellams: Yeah. To find out — I mean, there's a chance you're going to do something really bad.
Howie Hickey: Yeah. So now they're actually talking about reps in reserve, which sounds fancy, but it actually makes a lot of sense. And it's kind of how we've been talking in our classes with special populations — older adults, cardiovascular disease, people who are new to strength training — on how do you know how much weight to lift? And so they recommend, like, you should do a weight or a resistance — if you're using resistance bands, that you could do maybe one or two more, but that's about it. So it's kind of this idea that you're going almost to as many as you can do, but you still have a little bit left in the tank. So if you want to do eight reps with two reps in reserve, or whatever, you would pick a weight that you could do eight times, and by the end of that, you'd be pretty tired. You could probably still do one more or two, but it's hard to do.
Kellams: Gotcha.
Howie Hickey: So it's more about relative difficulty than lots of calculations. I like that.
Kellams: Yeah. All right, final question about this. So you go to your conferences, you get information, you learn the studies, you do your research, you have students — how does some of this new information, like you were just talking about with the reps, get disseminated to those of us who are in the general public?
Howie Hickey: Yeah. Well, I think this conference is a really exciting one, because a lot of faculty who are teaching go to it. They have kind of a teaching track. And ACSM is really good about putting information out to people who are teaching and updating these position stands, which are like recommendations, updating their textbooks that we use in lab classes. And so we have a pretty large contingent of faculty that go to the conference and then come back. But also there's a lot of grad students — so people who are TAing classes but also going to be future faculty. And there's a few undergrads that go too. So I think it's a lot of just keeping up to date on what the latest recommendations are, and then updating content to our undergraduate exercise science students that come through our classes.
Baum: And I do think that's the challenge — how do we take what we learn at any scientific conference? Because sometimes it's such a minute detail that it may not mean much to the general public. So that's how Erin said — translating it into the classroom. But, because I have a 25% cooperative extension appointment — I guess when you teach long enough, or talk to people long enough, you can incorporate these new learnings into just conversation, or the lectures we give throughout the state. And that's something I think, since I started working at the university and having this extension appointment, I see people want to have access to, but they don't normally come in contact with professors like Erin and myself, because our universities are spread throughout the state and not everyone has that outreach mission. And we're not really trained on how to do outreach, because what may make sense at a lower level to me may still be at too high of a level for the general population to understand. So I just find coming here and doing Balance is a way to communicate new findings. Like, even I didn't know what a one-rep max was used for till today.
Howie Hickey: Yeah. And a great example — we're just doing an extension program with DFEND that we've just started. And so we'll probably start talking about reps in reserve and what that means, and how do you know how much to lift.
Kellams: All right. Well, I hope you both have a wonderful summer.
Jamie Baum and Erin Howie Hickey regularly visit the Carver Center for Public Radio for our series Balance, about health, wellness, nutrition and exercise. Jamie Baum is an associate professor in the University of Arkansas Department of Food Science and director of the Center for Human Nutrition at UofA, and Erin Howie Hickey is an associate professor of exercise science.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
