Stress Fractures – Prevention and Treatment
If you are an exerciser and develop a sharp pain on a bone that hurts when you press directly on that spot and does not hurt to touch an inch away, you probably have a stress fracture. Stress fractures are very common injuries, particularly in runners.
How Exercise Prolongs Your Life
Several recent studies show that exercise helps to prolong your life by strengthening heart muscle, increasing the ability of the heart to pump increased amounts of oxygen through the body, reducing belly fat, and increasing the diversity of bacteria in your colon.
How to Do Interval Training
If you want to improve your level of fitness, you can try interval training, the technique used by athletes in sports requiring speed and endurance such as cycling, skiing, running or swimming. They exercise very intensely, rest, and then alternate intense bursts of exercise and rest until their muscles start to feel heavy or tired.
Brain Benefits from Exercise
Three new studies help us understand the many good things that exercise does for your brain. The first study shows that a regular exercise program alters blood flow to the brain to improve mental function in older people who suffer from mild cognitive impairment that often precedes dementia. The second study shows that exercise can improve thinking skills in people of all ages. The third study shows that exercise-induced muscle changes may help to boost mood in older adults
Carbohydrate Loading DOES NOT Work
"Carbohydrate loading" the night before a big race can harm your performance and your health. More than forty years ago, I reported the case of a marathon runner who had a heart attack after carbohydrate loading in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Oxygenated Water: Good for Fish, Worthless for Humans
Do you believe ads that claim oxygenated water cures tiredness, improves memory, prevents diseases, treats lung disease, helps you to exercise longer and makes you a better athlete? These and all of their other claims are not supported by scientific evidence. Lungs are the only organ humans have to provide adequate oxygen to the bloodstream. Water is not broken down into hydrogen and oxygen in your digestive tract; it is absorbed, used and excreted as water.
Cycling Cadence
Cycling is a power sport. The stronger you are, the faster you can go on a bike. Power = [force that your feet apply to the pedals] x [cadence, or how fast you spin your pedals].
Cadence is the number of pedal revolutions per minute (RPMs). Fatigue for a bicycle rider comes primarily from how hard you press on the pedals, not how fast you turn them.
Lactic Acid is Good for You: Why Everyone with a Healthy Heart Should Do Interval Exercise
Athletes use interval training to make themselves faster and stronger, and everyone with a healthy heart can benefit from this technique. A typical interval workout for non-competitive exercisers would be a session of jogging, walking or cycling in which they sarm up by moving slowly for about 10 minutes, pick up the pace until they feel a slight burning in their muscles (this usually takes 10-20 seconds), slow down as soon as they feel this muscle burning, and go slowly until the burning is gone and breathing is back to normal.
Exercise Improves Gut Bacteria
Many studies show that exercise helps to prevent heart attacks, and it may do so by changing the bacteria in your colon. A recent study from Finland shows that exercising for just six weeks can increase healthful anti-inflammatory bacteria in your colon.
You Can’t Be Too Fit
Dramatic results in a new study from the Cleveland Clinic show that you can't be too fit, and that not exercising is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes or heart disease.
Cooling Down After Intense Exercise
"Cooling down" means that after you exercise intensely, you slow down and exercise at low intensity for a while before you stop exercising for that session. The scientific literature is controversial on whether cooling down helps to reduce next-day muscle soreness to help muscles to recover faster.
Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)
To make muscles stronger, you need to exercise intensely enough to damage the muscles. You can tell that you are damaging muscles when you exercise vigorously enough to feel soreness in those muscles eight to 24 hours later, which is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS.
Exercise to Help Prevent a Heart Attack
The same training principles that improve athletic performance in competitive athletes also help to prevent heart attacks and prolong lives. The SUN Study on 18,737 middle-aged people showed that those who exercise intensely have half the rate of heart attacks as those who do the same amount of exercise less intensely.
Lifestyle Can Override Genes
Studies in the new field of Epigenetics are showing that lifestyle factors can change the way your body responds to your genes. In one of these studies, researchers were delighted to find a set of identical twins with vastly different lifestyles. They found that a lifetime of exercise is likely to give you the body characteristics of a healthy athlete, while an inactive lifestyle can give you body characteristics associated with increased risk for many diseases.
Weak Muscles Increase Risk for Dementia
Many studies show that having excess fat in your belly is associated with increased risk for dementia, but a new study shows that as a person ages, lack of muscle size and strength appears to be an even stronger predictor of dementia than having excess belly fat.
How Inactivity Can Cause Heart Failure
People who lie in bed without moving day after day suffer progressive weakening of their heart muscle. Eventually the heart becomes too weak to pump enough oxygen to the brain, they stop breathing and die from heart failure. A recent study on mice shows how this is likely to happen.
Lack of Vitamin D May Harm Exercisers
A study in mice suggests that having low levels of vitamin D may harm athletes and exercisers by limiting how long they can exercise. Many exercisers and competitive athletes are vitamin D deficient even if they live in the sunbelt.
Running Stride Length and Speed
Your most efficient stride length is determined by what feels most comfortable to you. You cannot run faster by consciously trying to increase your stride length. When you run, your foot hits the ground with great force. The tendons in your legs absorb some of this energy and then contract forcibly after your heel hits the ground, so you regain about 60 to 75 percent of that stored energy. When you try to take a stride that is longer than your natural one, you lose a great deal of this stored energy, tire much earlier and move your legs at a slower rate.
Physically Active Jobs vs Leisure-Time Exercise
A review of 17 studies, covering almost 200,000 people, found that men who work at the most physically active jobs have an 18 percent higher risk of premature death compared to people with less physically-demanding jobs. The authors did not find that women who had to keep moving at work had shortened life spans, probably because work-related physical activity for women is usually not as demanding as it is for men.
Warming Up
Warming up before you exercise helps to prevent injuries and lets you jump higher, run faster, lift heavier or throw further. Your warm-up should...
Some Health Benefits of Exercise May Come from Changes in Colon Bacteria
A six-week program of exercise markedly increased the types of healthful colon bacteria and their functions in healthy but previously sedentary people. At the end of the six-week exercise program, the lean group had more of the healthful types of colon bacteria that ferment unabsorbed soluble fiber into short chain fatty acids (SCFAs).
More Reasons to Exercise as You Grow Older
Muscles are made up of thousands of muscle fibers just as a rope is made up of many strands. Each muscle fiber has a nerve that innervates it. With aging you can lose nerve fibers that, in turn, cause you to lose the corresponding muscle fibers, but exercising against resistance will make the remaining muscle fibers larger so they can generate more force. The repetition of a regular and consistent training program teaches your brain how to contract your muscles more efficiently.
Fruit Beats Sports Drinks for Exercisers
Many studies show that you can exercise longer and more intensely and recover faster when you take a source of sugar during vigorous exercise. Dozens of brands of sports drinks are promoted to fill this need, but a new study from Appalachian State University shows that a banana appears to offer superior results, specifically helping athletes to recover faster from intense exercise.
Good News for Male Cyclists
Cycling is not associated with increased risk for impotence or urinary symptoms. The largest and best study on the subject to date shows that serious cyclists are no more likely to suffer impotence or urinary problems than swimmers or runners.
Cyclists Age Better
Two exciting new studies show that older men and women who have cycled for many years do not have the markers of aging found in non-exercising people. Their muscle size and strength, amount of body fat, levels of hormones such as testosterone, and blood cholesterol levels were close to those of much younger people.
How Exercise Helps to Prevent Diabetes and Heart Attacks
Everyone should try to exercise every day because exercise helps to prevent diabetes and heart attacks by lowering high blood sugar and stabilizing plaques. A review of 12 studies shows that exercising within three hours after eating lowers blood sugar levels significantly because contracting muscles remove sugar from the bloodstream at a very high rate and don't even need insulin to do so.
Intervals for Everyone
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) surveyed more than 4,000 fitness professionals and found that High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is the most popular trend in fitness for 2018. All healthy people can benefit from some form of interval training. They can pick up the pace for a few seconds while walking, running, cycling, swimming, skiing or skating, and then slow down when they feel the least discomfort.
Strength Training May Reduce Deaths from Heart Attacks and Cancers
You can expect to lose muscle size and strength as you age. Between 40 and 50 years of age, you lose more than eight percent of your muscle size. This loss increases to 15 percent per decade after age 75. The people who lose the most muscle usually are the least active, exercise the least and are the ones who die earliest.
Exercise Promotes Good Gut Bacteria
Good bacteria that live in your gut can help to keep you healthy, while the bad colon bacteria increase your risk for heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, certain cancers and autoimmune diseases. Exercise encourages the growth of good bacteria in your colon and reduces the number of bad ones.
Mitochondria and Gut Bacteria Work Together for More Endurance
Endurance training for six weeks in humans and mammals has been shown to increase mitochondrial content from 30 to 100 percent and volume density up to 40 percent.
