Muscles and protein

Many body builders and weight lifters are overly concerned about what they eat and what food supplements they take. If you want to grow larger and stronger muscles, you should concentrate on lifting weights, but you can help muscles grow larger by understanding how what you eat affects how you recover from hard exercise. Just exercising will not make you strong and it will not help you to grow large muscles. If exercise made you strong, marathon runners would have the largest muscles. The only stimulus to make muscles larger and stronger is to stretch them while they contract. When you lift a heavy weight, your muscles start to stretch before they start to contract. This tears the muscle and causes soreness on the next day and beyond. If you rest and let the muscle heal, it will be stronger than before you stretched it lifting weights.

This training principle of stress-and-recover is so strong that you can enlarge a muscle by lifting weights even if you are fasting, losing weight and all your other muscles are getting smaller. In one study, obese, un-athletic women were instructed to restrict food and lift weights. They averaged a weight loss of more than 35 pounds in three months and gained a lot of muscle.

Training for sports is done by taking a hard workout and then having sore muscles on the next day. Then you take easy workouts or you take off until the muscle soreness disappears. You improve by taking hard workouts and your muscles grow and heal while you recover on your easy days. Of course, if you could recover faster from a hard workout, you could do more work and be a better athlete. Scientists have known for years that you recover faster by eating carbohydrates immediately after you finish your hard workout. New studies show that eating extra protein on the day that you take hard workouts helps you recover even faster. Eating extra protein reduces muscle damage during hard exercise (3). Eating carbohydrates along with a protein building block called leucine helps you to recover even faster.

Chronic muscle fatigue in athletes is associated with low blood levels of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The sooner you eat protein after you finish your hard workout, the quicker you will recover. The benefits of eating protein soon after you lift weights does not apply just to elite athletes. A study from the University of Arkansas shows that eating meat helps older people grow large muscles when they also lift weights. Muscles are made primarily from protein building blocks called amino acids. Muscles heal from a hard workout when amino acids and other nutrients travel from your bloodstream into the muscles. Eating food, particularly protein, immediately after you finish your workout helps muscles heal faster. This study shows that men between the ages of 51 and 69 recover faster and grow larger muscles when they include meat than when they eat only dairy, fruits, vegetable, whole grains, beans, seeds and nuts. Journal references for this article

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Fructose is Not Better than Other Sugars

Fructose is processed differently in the body than the far more common sugar, glucose. Glucose causes the pancreas to release insulin which drives sugar from the bloodstream into cells. Glucose causes fat cells to release leptin that makes you feel full so you eat less; it also prevents the stomach from releasing ghrelin that makes you hungry. On the other hand, fructose does not cause fat cells to release leptin and does not suppress ghrelin. This means that fructose increases hunger to make you eat more. Furthermore, the liver converts fructose far more readily to a fat called triglyceride, than it does with glucose. High triglyceride levels raise blood levels of the bad LDL cholesterol and lower blood levels of the good HDL cholesterol, which increases heart attack risk.

Large amounts of fructose appear to cause insulin resistance, impair glucose tolerance, produce high levels of insulin, raise triglycerides, and cause high blood pressure in animals. Not all of these studies have been replicated in humans, but there is every reason to believe that large amounts of fructose will have the same adverse effects. High-fructose corn syrup is found in almost all non-diet soft drinks and fruit beverages, and in a wide variety of processed foods. However, high-fructose corn syrup is no more significant as a dietary source of fructose than ordinary table sugar. It is only high in fructose compared to ordinary corn syrup.

Several recent studies show that drinking large amounts of soft drinks is associated with increased risk for obesity and that the extra gain in weight is not due just to the calories in the soft drinks. Calories consumed in beverages do not fill you up the way calories in solid foods do. High fructose corn syrup is the leading sweetener in the United States today, with 4.5 billion dollars worth sold each year. High-fructose corn syrup first appeared in the American market in 1966, and now the average American takes in 62.6 pounds per year. Check the list of ingredients in the foods you buy.

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Swollen feet and ankles

Your leg muscles function as a second heart to pump fluid from your legs to your heart. When your leg muscles relax, the veins near them fill up with blood. When your leg muscles contract, they compress the veins and squeeze blood up toward your heart.

When you stand still, your heart has to work very hard to pump blood against gravity from your feet to your heart. When your feet are above your heart, gravity works with you to help blood and fluid return to the heart. Eight hours of standing or sitting causes your feet to swell up to more than 110 percent of their size. This can make your shoes feel tight and your feet hurt.

The best way to prevent swelling is to elevate your feet. The next best way is to move your feet and toes frequently while you are sitting or standing. This can reduce swelling by more than 50 percent and will usually prevent the pain that it causes. If your feet still swell, check with your doctor. You may have a more serious cause, or you may need diuretics or compression stockings.

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Back Pain? Choose the Right Exercise

Runners who develop back pain often ask me if they can continue running.
People with back pain need to exercise as much as everyone else, but they should not do any exercise that causes pain. The bones of your spine are located one on top of the other, separated by pads called discs. Bones are much harder than discs, so when spinal bones are compressed and move closer together, they can flatten the discs like pancakes. Since the discs are then shorter, they have to go somewhere else, so they widen and press on the nerves near them, causing pain. This is called a herniated disc. Anything that presses the bones closer together squashes the disc further and usually makes it hurt more. During running, the force of the foot striking the ground is transmitted up the leg to the back, which can compress the discs and cause pain.

The best sports for people with back pain are those that do not hurt when you do them. Riding a bicycle, walking slowly and swimming do not exert a jarring force on the discs to compress them, so these exercises are recommended for people with back pain as long they don’t hurt while they exercise. Doctors often recommend special exercises to flatten the lower back, strengthen the belly muscles and stretch the lower back muscles. The key to exercising when you have a compressed disc is to stop exercising when you feel pain. You may need to try several different activities to find the right one for you. Treatment of back pain

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Why the DASH diet lowers blood pressure

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have shown why the DASH diet lowers high blood pressure to normal in more than 80 percent of people with high blood pressure. On the DASH diet you eat lots of leafy green vegetables that are rich sources of nitrites, common salts that your bloodstream, can be converted to nitric oxide which opens blood vessels.

This means that nitrites could be a new treatment for high blood pressure, heart attacks, sickle cell disease, and blocked arteries leading the heart, brain and legs. Hemoglobin is the red pigment in red blood cells that carries oxygen in your bloodstream. When hemoglobin releases oxygen, it converts nitrites to nitric oxide, to widen blood vessels. Blood nitrite levels are low in patients with high blood pressure.

However, at high concentrations nitrites are toxic, so you must take limited amounts. Leafy greens are rich sources of safe amounts of nitrites. The nitrites go into the bloodstream, where exposure to oxygen converts nitrites to nitrous oxide which dilates arteries and lowers high blood pressure. Hypertensives should also eat lots of other plants for the same reason and cut back on meat and chicken, that are rich sources of sodium that can raise high blood pressure.

The modified DASH diet I recommend will also lower cholesterol and help you lose excess weight; it is the most effective diet for preventing or controlling diabetes. Journal reference for this report

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Blood Pressure Drugs Can Interfere with Exercise

The beta blocker drugs used to treat blood pressure and heart problems can markedly impair your ability to exercise, according to a study from Switzerland. How hard you can exercise is limited by the ability of your heart to pump blood from your lungs to your exercising muscles. Beta blockers markedly reduce blood flow and oxygen supply to muscles. Beta blocker brand names include Toprol, Inderal, Blocadron, Coreg, Inopran, Levatol, Pindolol, Sectral, Tenormin, Timolol Trandate, Zebeta and Bisoprol.

Beta blockers are prescribed to treat people who have had heart attacks, heart pain, heart failure, rapid heart beat and atrial fibrillation. However, even though many physicians prescribe beta blockers to treat high blood pressure, there is no data show that they prevent heart attacks in healthy people. If beta blockers interfere with your ability to exercise, ask your doctor if you can take other types of medications such ace inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers or calcium channel blockers. Better yet, control your blood pressure with diet. More information on blood pressure drugs; Journal reference for this article.

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How to Jump Higher

When former NBA player Kent Benson arrived at the University of Indiana he could jump only nine inches off the ground. That's an embarrassing jump for a seven-foot All- American. One year later, he was able to jump three times that high because he had a good coach.

How high you can jump is determined by the force that you can exert when you contract your leg muscles against gravity. so strengthening your muscles will help you to jump higher. However, you must exercise your muscles against resistance in the same way that you use them when you jump. You can bend your knees and hips and straighten them by performing leg presses up while lying on your back, sideways while sitting in a chair, or down against the ground when you squat in the upright position.

Basketball players who want to be able to jump higher should set up a schedule of weight training moderately on Monday, easy on Wednesday and hard on Friday. On days when your muscles feel sore or tight, skip your weight lifting workout. How to run faster

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