How to Strengthen Your Immunity
If you want to protect yourself from infections, exercise regularly and lose weight if you are overweight. A new study on mice shows how exercise helps to strengthen your immunity. Exercise that is vigorous enough to damage muscles stimulates the same immune cells that heal muscles to help your immunity respond to and kill invading germs.
How to Keep Your Maximum Heart Rate Up as You Age
Your maximum heart rate is the fastest your heart can beat and still pump blood effectively through your body. As you age, your maximum heart rate drops. This means that your heart is weaker and more susceptible to damage, and you can't exercise as fast over distance as you could when you were younger.
How to Keep Running as You Age
I do not run anymore and virtually all of the runners who ran with me in the 1940s through 1960s don't run either, mostly because of the very high rate of running injuries. Eighty percent of long-distance runners suffer injuries that force them to take time off from running each year.
Exercise Preserves Brain Function
People who exercise into later life are smarter than those who do not exercise. To prove that exercise preserves brain function, studies must show that the loss of brain function with aging is not just genetic. Identical twins have exactly the same genes, so a study on twins can yield stronger results to show which environmental factors help to prevent loss of brain function.
Low-Carbohydrate, High-Fat Diets for Endurance?
Can athletes improve their performance by following a diet that is low in carbohydrates and high in fat (LCHF)? Several popular sports magazines have carried articles advocating LCHF diets, even though at present there is no data to support this regimen for sports that require speed, including marathon running and long-distance bicycle racing. LCHF diets can slow you down in both training and racing.
Sitting Will Not Harm Vigorous Exercisers
I think that asking people to stand at work, rather than sit, is harmful advice because standing and not moving is no better than sitting and is just going to make you too tired to exercise vigorously when you are not working.
What to Eat Before Prolonged Exercise
Eating a meal three hours or less before exercising can prolong your endurance and improve your performance. This applies whether you are going on...
Eating During and After Intense Workouts Makes You a Better Athlete
Eating during and after long, intense workouts helps competitive athletes recover faster from their workouts and therefore helps to make them stronger and faster. It is the intense workout that makes you stronger and faster, so the more rapidly you recover from an intense workout, the sooner you can take your next intense workout and the more improvement you will gain.
Why Ice Delays Recovery
When I wrote my best-selling Sportsmedicine Book in 1978, I coined the term RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) for the treatment of athletic injuries (Little Brown and Co., page 94). Ice has been a standard treatment for injuries and sore muscles because it helps to relieve pain caused by injured tissue. Coaches have used my "RICE" guideline for decades, but now it appears that both Ice and complete Rest may delay healing, instead of helping.
The 30-20-10 Plan to Boost Your Exercise Progam
If you hate the idea of intense exercise, try the 30-20-10 Plan developed by Jens Bangsbo at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Dr. Bangsbo asked 132 middle-aged recreational runners to replace their casual workouts with his 30-20-10 Plan.
Inactivity Causes Muscle Loss
Even short periods of inactivity cause dramatic loss of muscle size and strength. After just two weeks of having one leg put in a cast, all 32 men in the study lost a tremendous amount in all measures of physical fitness, strength and muscle size in the immobilized leg. After six weeks of pedaling a bicycle for rehabilitation, they still did not regain all of the strength that they had lost
Exercise Every Day or Every Other Day?
The old guideline recommending 30 minutes of exercise three times a week just isn't enough, according to the latest research. Athletes know that they need to work out every day, and all people who just want to stay healthy can benefit from the same type of exercise program.
Exercisers – Know the Side Effects of Your Medications
If you are an exerciser, make sure you know about the side effects of any medications or over-the-counter drugs you take. They may hinder your exercise program or cause harm if you fall.
Strengthen Quad Muscles to Help Your Knees
Having weak quad muscles (in the front of your upper legs) increases risk for damage to the cartilage in your knees. A study from Purdue University showed that strengthening these muscles slows down knee cartilage damage and may even improve knee function.
Sleep to Recover
Every athlete who trains for competition in sports that require endurance learns sooner or later that after exercising long and hard, you feel sleepy and need to go to sleep to recover. Older people may need even more sleep after intense exercise than younger people. If you don’t get lots of extra sleep when you do prolonged intense exercise, you don’t recover as quickly and are at increased risk for injuring yourself.
Exercise-Induced Asthma (EIA)
Exercise-induced asthma (EIA) is wheezing and shortness of breath that occur during exercise. It can occur in people who never wheeze at any other time, those who wheeze only when they have an infection or allergy, and those who have asthma at other times.
Slow Runners Don’t Come Out Ahead
A Danish study agrees with most previous studies that regular joggers as a group live longer than sedentary non-joggers (Journal of the American College of Cardiology, February 2, 2015). However, most of the news media reported that this study showed that slow, low-intensity joggers are less likely to die than intense exercisers ("Slow Runners Come Out Ahead," proclaimed the New York Times headline). The joggers who ran faster than 7 mph for more than four hours a week had the same death rate as the non-joggers.
Cold Weather May Help You Lose Weight
A new study shows that exposing mice to cold temperatures increases their body’s production of calorie-burning "brown fat" (Molecular Cell, published online Jan. 8,...
Placebos to Race Faster
Fifteen endurance-trained runners, average age 27, ran three kilometers (1.8 miles) 1.2% faster after injecting themselves with a placebo than they did after taking...
More Mitochondria for Better Athletes?
The huge number of mitochondria in dogs' muscles explains why sled dogs can run more than 100 miles a day, at sub-8-minute-mile pace for weeks on end, while humans could not possibly run as long or as fast and recover from such abuse of their muscles.
Sugar for Prolonged, Hard Exercise
If you are going to exercise at a relaxed pace for a few hours, you rarely need to eat or drink unless you feel hungry or thirsty. However, if you are going to compete in sports or exercise intensely for more than 70 minutes, you should take sugar just before you start and while you exercise.
Families with Diabetes Produce Strong Athletes
A study from Italy confirms that elite track and field athletes who have a family history of diabetes have larger muscles, weigh more, and...
Belly Cramps During Exercise
The most common cause of belly cramps during exercise is having a full colon. The best way to prevent exercise-induced belly cramps is to...
No More Junk Miles
Junk miles means adding extra miles to your training plan with no purpose other than to increase the number of miles that you ride or run each week. They are done at such low intensity that you do not become short of breath and you do not push yourself very hard.
What is Lactic Acid?
When you exercise, sugar is broken down into different chemicals, to produce energy for muscles. As long as you get all the oxygen you need, the final products are carbon dioxide and water, but if you exercise so vigorously that you can't get the oxygen that you need, the reactions stop, causing a chemical called lactic acid to accumulate in your muscles and spill into you bloodstream.
Runner’s Knee (Knee Cap Pain)
The most common long-term running injury is runners knee, pain behind the knee cap during running. You probably have runner's knee if your knee cap hurts when you walk or run, particularly when you walk down stairs; and it hurts a lot when you push the kneecap against the bone behind it.
How to Get Your Second Wind
When you run very fast, you reach a point where you gasp for breath. You keep on pushing the pace and after a few seconds, you feel that you have recovered and that you can pick up the pace again. It’s called second wind and your apparent recovery is caused by lactic acid.
Interval Training Helps Your Heart
A heart attack is caused by lack of oxygen. Anything that increases the supply of oxygen to the heart markedly reduces risk for suffering...
Don’t Just Sit at Any Age
Older people who move around live longer than those who are consistently sedentary, and sedentary older people who become more active live longer than those who remain sedentary.
Interval Training for Sports
If you want to compete in sports that require speed, such as running, cycling, swimming, skiing, skating, or team sports such as football, basketball,...
