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.
Competitive Athletes and Doping
An important article in the May 19, 2017 New York Times discusses the latest accusations that some of America's top athletes are using supplements, both legal and illegal, in the hope that they will improve athletic performance. I will present a brief review of some of the supplements that the accused U.S. athletes are taking and comment on their effectiveness or worthlessness, side effects and potential dangers to their health.
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.
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.
Weekend Warriors Gain Full Benefit From Their Exercise
A recent study found no significant difference in death rates between adults who exercised once or twice a week versus three or more times a week, as long as they exercised moderately for a total of 150 minutes or vigorously for 75 minutes per week. This study followed 350,978 U.S. adults for more than 10 years. The participants reported their activity levels and were divided into an active group and an inactive group.
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.
Running is an Effective Treatment for Depression
A new study supports several previous studies showing that running is as effective as anti-depressant drugs in treating depression and anxiety, and offers far more health benefits than drugs do. The study included 141 participants, average age 38, in which 45 participants received the antidepressant medication Lexapro (escitalopram), and 96 underwent 16 weeks of supervised 45-minute outdoor running sessions recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the American College of Sports Medicine.
Running Injuries from Over-Striding
A recent study found that the incidence of running injuries can be markedly reduced by increasing the cadence during running, which helps to reduce the impact force of your feet hitting the ground. Most running injuries are caused by the high impact of your foot hitting the ground, which is determined most by the length of person's natural stride
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.
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.
Spinning Classes
Whether you're out of shape or very fit, spinning classes can help you improve. You ride a stationary bicycle in a group, with a...
Achilles Tendinitis
Achilles tendinitis means you feel pain in the large tendon that extends from in the back of your heel to your calf muscle. It hurts most when you get up in the morning and when you start to walk or run. It will heal only if you stop running and find another sport that doesn't hurt when you do it, such as cycling, swimming, or pulling on a rowing machine.
Plantar Fasciitis
One of the most common injuries in tennis and jogging is plantar fasciitis, pain on the bottom of the heel. A band of tissue called the plantar fascia extends from your five toes, along the bottom of your foot to attach on the bottom of your heel. When you run, you land on your heel and raise yourself on your toes as you shift your weight to your other foot, causing all your weight to be held up by your plantar fascia.
High Fitness Level Linked to Reduced Risk for Cancers
A study that followed 170,000 Swedish men (average age 62) for 9.6 years found that high levels of physical fitness were associated with a markedly reduced risk for lung cancer or colon cancer, and reduced risk for death from cancers of the colon, lung or prostate. Physical fitness was measured by having the subjects exercise vigorously on a stationary bicycle to determine the maximal amount of oxygen they could use (VO2max).
Recreational Runners and Cyclists Should Lift Weights
To preserve muscle and bone size and strength, recreational runners and cyclists should do upper body and core weight lifting and resistance training. Everybody will lose muscle and bone size and strength with aging. Your bones weaken progressively after age 30, and between ages 35 and 50, about 28 percent of North American men and women suffer from bone weakening called osteopenia.
Even a 100-Year-Old Can Improve with Training
You can improve athletic performance at any age with proper training, even if you are over 100 years old. Traditional feeling among scientists is that aging is progressive and inevitable, and that your genetic programming causes you to age no matter what you do. This paper shows that physical training can reverse established markers of aging.
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.
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.
Prolonged Sitting? Get a Little Exercise!
Having a job that requires prolonged sitting is likely to be associated with increased heart attack and premature death risks unless you also exercise....
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.
Eat Carbohydrates During Competition, Not Fat
Taking extra fat during long distance running or cycling races will not help you to go faster or win the race. When you exercise intensely, your muscles burn mostly sugar and the more intensely you race, the greater the percentage of sugar that your muscles use.
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.
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.
Over-Training, or Too Much Exercise
A regular exercise program can help to prevent disease and to prolong lives, but every serious exerciser learns sooner or later that exercising too much can cause injuries and health issues. A recent study from Austria reports that emotional symptoms can often be an early sign that a person is exercising too much: restlessness, mood changes, irritability, emotional instability, recurring states of fear, emerging indifference and reduced performance motivation
Prevent Running Injuries with Shorter Strides and Orthotics
Chronic foot, leg and knee pain during running can be caused by the foot hitting the ground with excessive force and excessive rolling in of the feet after they hit the ground. These problems can often be alleviated just by taking shorter strides to reduce the force of the foot hitting the ground, and putting special inserts called orthotics in your shoes
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...
How to Prepare for Skiing When There’s No Snow
The best way to train for skiing is to ski, but snow isn’t always available. To prepare for a skiing trip, you need to strengthen both your heart muscles and your skeletal muscles. You can strengthen your heart for skiing with any exercise that will raise your heart rate for at least 10 minutes, at least three times a week.
Exercise to Reduce Risk for High Blood Pressure
The CARDIA study followed 5115 adults in nine separate examinations over a period of 30-40 years, from ages 18-60. By age 60, 73.1 percent of the subjects in this study had developed high blood pressure, and the lower the level of physical activity, the more likely a person was to develop high blood pressure
Muscle Stimulating Machines
Advertisements on television claim that you can wrap a special belt around your belly, plug it into an electric outlet, turn on the electricity,...
Build Muscle and Improve Balance with T’ai Chi
T'ai Chi can help older people improve balance, which can protect them from falling and breaking their bones. It is also a safe...
