Your Muscles Make Your Heart Stronger
When you contract your skeletal muscles, they squeeze the veins near them to pump extra blood back to your heart. The extra blood flowing back to your heart fills up your heart, which stretches your heart muscle, causing the heart muscle to contract with greater force and pump more blood back your body.
Should You Wear a Mask When You Exercise Outdoors?
The problem with wearing masks when you exercise outdoors is that they can limit your ability to breathe. This may not be an issue if you are doing casual exercise, but if you are running or cycling vigorously, you will probably find yourself gasping for air.
Why You Sweat More After Exercise
It's normal to sweat more after you finish exercising than you do while you exercise. Your body temperature varies throughout the day, going from around 97 degrees in the early morning to about 99 degrees in the early evening. Exercise raises body temperature considerably.
Which Burns More Calories, Running or Cycling?
Have you wondered whether you burn more calories when you run or when you ride a bicycle? Running requires the same amount of energy per mile at any speed, but cycling is slowed so much by wind resistance that the faster you ride, the harder you have to pedal and more energy you use.
Should You Exercise During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Committed exercisers should try to continue to exercise during this COVID-19 pandemic, but they should realize that both too much exercise and exercising while sick increase risk for medical complications, such as irregular heartbeats, and death
How Often Should You Lift Weights?
You can become very strong and grow large muscles just by lifting a single set of 6 to 12 repetitions of a weight that is 75 percent of your maximum, three times a week
Sleep to Recover from Hard Exercise
Sleeping can help to prevent exercise injuries. Healthy U.S. soldiers in training are less likely to suffer exercise-related injuries such as fractures, sprains and muscle strains when they sleep at least eight hours at night.
Keep Moving for a Longer and Better Life
Everyone should try to keep on moving their muscles every day. Sitting around for long periods of time can cause you to become diabetic and increase your risk for a heart attack, and lying in bed for long periods puts you at increased risk for heart failure and premature death
The Placebo Effect and Supplements
Fifty-two percent of North Americans spend $41 billion a year on over-the-counter food supplements. Athletes and exercisers spend more than 14 percent of the $41 billion, or $5.67 billion, for supplements that are supposed to make them faster or stronger.
All Exercisers Can Gain Health Benefits from Elite Training Methods
The training principles that improve performance in competitive athletes can be used by all exercisers, even those who have never exercised previously, and can help to prevent heart attacks and prolong lives. Exercise helps to prevent heart attacks because exercise makes muscles stronger, including your heart muscle.
Exercise Treats Insulin Resistance
Up to 70 percent of North Americans adults will develop diabetes or pre-diabetes, usually from insulin resistance caused by excess fat in the liver and muscles. Exercise helps to empty fat from the liver and muscles, so exercise helps to prevent and treat diabetes.
Is Napping Healthful?
Power napping for an hour can help you to learn, remember and interpret more efficiently. The frequency of daytime napping increases with age, and up to 70 percent of older adults around the world take daytime naps.
Challenging Your Brain During Exercise May Help to Prevent Dementia
Scientific American has a fascinating article that explains why you should exercise your brain while you exercise your body. There is evidence that you may be able to make You can make new brain cells as you age by exercising your skeletal muscles and brain at the same time
Running May Help to Protect Your Knees
Running a marathon may strengthen the cartilage and muscles in knee joints. Marathon runners their MRIs showed a remarkable reduction in the knee bone and cartilage damage and marked strengthening of the knees.
Creatine
Creatine is a substance found in muscle cells that helps your muscles produce energy, particularly while lifting heavy weights or exercising intensely. Your body makes creatine from three amino acids (protein building blocks) called L-arginine, glycine, and L-methionine. You also get creatine when you eat animal protein: meat, poultry or seafood.
Mary Cain and Forced Weight Loss for Sports
Mary Cain was unbeatable in high school races. At age 16, she became the youngest athlete ever to represent the U.S at a World Championship track meet, and at age 17, she was the 2014 World Junior Champion in the 3000 meter run.
Stretching Doesn’t Deliver
Whenever I see someone stretching before or after hard exercise, I worry that the person has gotten bad advice about training. You should not stretch before a competition because stretching weakens muscles.
Listen to Your Body
The best way to achieve a high level of fitness without injuring yourself is to listen to your body. Don't depend on heart rate monitors, fitness trackers or other gadgets.
Extra Protein Does Not Enlarge Muscles
A new review of 15 studies shows that protein supplementation offered no added benefit for older weight lifters.
Recovery: the Key to Improvement in Your Sport
If you want to become stronger and faster and have greater endurance, you need to exercise so intensely on one day that you damage your muscles and feel sore on the next day and then train at a reduced intensity for as many days as it takes for your muscles to heal and the soreness to lessen. Then you take your next intense workout.
Exercise Really Does Help You
Researchers reviewed eight studies that used accelerometers to follow 36,383 adults, 40 years of age and older, for six years. They found that exercising regularly, regardless of intensity, was associated with reduced risk for death during the study period, while sitting for more than nine hours a day was associated with increased risk of death.
Does Ultra-Endurance Exercise Harm the Heart?
Research evidence shows that exercise strengthens the heart, prevents and treats heart attacks and strokes, and prolongs lives (Circulation, 2018;137(18):1896-1898). The more frequently people...
Electric-Assist Bikes and Trikes
I predict that in the next few years, virtually all cyclists will have motors on their bikes. I think that you can get a better training effect with a motor than without it. Anyone who has difficulty accelerating a bike will benefit from an added boost from an electric motor.
How to Avoid Overtraining
Athletes and serious exercisers can get into an overtraining syndrome in which they become injured or suffer frequent infections, feel exhausted, don't perform up...
Short Intervals are Best
Interval training means that you alternate bursts of intense exercise with slow exercise until you feel tired. Short intervals are defined as lasting less than 30 seconds each, while long intervals usually last more than two minutes each. The most efficient, time-saving and health-benefiting way to exercise is to use short intervals
What to Eat Before, During and After a Bicycle Ride
Healthy and fit people usually don't need to eat during a ride when they cycle at a casual pace for less than two hours. However, you can prolong your endurance for a hard ride by taking a source of sugar when you ride very hard for more than an hour, and a source of salt when you ride for more than three hours.
Protein Shakes for Muscle Building May Not Be Safe
People who want to grow larger muscles spend more than 10 million dollars a year on whey protein shakes. A new study on mice shows that these whey protein shakes contain very high levels of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), which can reduce certain brain hormones to increase risk for obesity and premature death.
Research on Intense Exercise
The more intensely you exercise, the less likely you are to suffer a heart attack, even though heart attacks can be caused by intense exercise in some people who already have irregular heartbeats or blocked arteries leading to their hearts.
Don’t Use Aspirin or NSAIDs for Muscle Pain from Exercise
Some athletes and exercisers take pain medication (aspirin or NSAIDs) because they think it may prevent muscle soreness or will help them to heal faster after a workout. However, taking pain medicines before or during exercise will not block pain, help you to exercise longer or recover faster from exercise.
High-Intensity Interval Training Can Increase Injuries
A recent study shows that people who use high-intensity interval training (HIIT) are far more likely to become injured than people who use less intense exercise and that the highest injury rate from interval training is in men at ages 20 to 39, the ages when they are at their highest potential to be at their best competitive level to become champion athletes.
