100 Push-Ups (New Year's Resolution #1)

If you want to be able to do 100 pushups in a row, do not try to do as many pushups as possible every day. You'll probably injure yourself and end up unable to do any pushups at all. Training for competition requires an understanding of the stress-and-recover rule and the interval-sets rule. The best way to improve any athletic skill is to stress your body on one day and then allow enough time for your body to recover before you stress it again. On one day, take a hard workout. On the next morning, your muscles feel sore. Take easy workouts until the soreness disappears and then take a hard workout again.For your hard workouts, you can do far more work by exercising in sets, rather than continuously. If you can do six continuous pushups, you...

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Gain weight every year? You're not alone!

Most people become fatter with aging because they are less active, not because they eat more. Thirty minutes of exercise a day may be enough for heart fitness, but it is not usually enough to lose or maintain weight. Our grandparents doing heavy manual labor were active for 8, 10 or more hours every day. If you have a sedentary job, you need an exercise strategy that includes very vigorous exercise, more time spent in physical activity, or (preferably) both. Researchers from the University of South Carolina showed that the increase in body fat that accompanies aging can be completely prevented with prolonged vigorous exercise (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, August 2005.) The authors studied 60 thousand male runners and found...

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Blood pressure drugs: which are best for exercisers?

Several studies show that the drugs of choice to treat high blood pressure for most North Americans are calcium channel blockers and angiotensin II receptor antagonists.For many years the American Heart Association recommended beta blockers and diuretics as first-line treatment for people with high blood pressure. Beta blockers can cause impotence, tiredness at rest and during exercise, weight gain, and they increase risk for diabetes. Diuretics make you tired. Furthermore, a study from Sweden shows that beta blockers increase risk of strokes. There is no data to show they prevent heart attacks in healthy people.To help you understand blood pressure, read Systolic/diastolic (which is more important) and Why blood pressure rises with ageOther...

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Lactic acid helps muscles

You exercise so intensely that your muscles burn and you gasp for breath. Then you slow down for a minute or two, catch your breath, and then go very fast again. This training technique has been used in all endurance sports since the 1920's. Now George Brooks of the University of California at Berkeley has shown why interval training makes you a better athlete (American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism, June 2006).Inside each muscle cell are mitochondria, the little furnaces that burn fuel for energy. A major fuel for your muscles during exercise is the sugar, glucose. In a series of chemical reactions, glucose is broken down step by step, with each step releasing energy. When enough oxygen is available, the glucose releases...

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Interval Training

To become stronger and faster, athletes use a technique called interval training, in which they exercise very intensely, rest and then alternate intense bursts of exercise and rest until their muscles start to feel heavy. Intervals are a fixed number of repeats of a fixed distance at a fixed pace with a fixed recovery time. There are two types of intervals: long and short. A short interval takes less than 30 seconds and does not build up significant amounts of lactic acid in the bloodstream, so an athlete can do lots of repeat short intervals in a single workout.Long intervals take two minutes or more and are very tiring. In interval training, a runner may run a quarter mile 12 times, averaging 1 minute, with a 110-yard slow jog between each....

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Are You Fit?

The latest research shows that exercising for 30 minutes three times a week will not necessarily make you fit, nor does exercising for 60 minutes seven days a week. To become fit, you have to make your heart and skeletal muscles stronger. Exercising at a casual pace does not strengthen muscles. This means that going out and jogging slowly so that your leg muscles are always comfortable and do not burn will not make you fit. Lifting a weight ten times in a row and not feeling a burn in your muscles will not make you significantly stronger. When you exercise intensely, your muscles stretch and tear. It's the tearing that causes the burning during exercise, and leads to the soreness that you feel for the next day or two. When your muscles heal...

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Run faster!

If you don't run very fast in practice, you won't be able to run very fast in races.At the University of Copenhagen, Danish scientists studied experienced runners who had been running 60 miles a week at a fast pace. One group was told to cut their mileage in half to only 30 miles a week, but to run a series of around 50 to 100 yard dashes as fast as they could. The other group continued running 60 miles a week at a fast pace. Runners who ran fewer miles at a faster pace had a 7 percent improvement in their body's maximal ability to take in and use oxygen. Runners who did not increase their speed in practice did not improve, even though they ran twice as many miles. Jogging slowly reduces your chance of injury, but it won't help you to run fast....

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Warm up your heart

Most people know that you have to warm up skeletal muscles to help protect them from injury, but many do not know that warming up the heart muscle also helps to prevent heart attacks in people with blocked arteries leading to the heartBefore you try to run very fast, you can protect your muscles from injury by performing a series of runs of gradually-increasing intensity to increase the circulation of blood to your muscles. The same principle applies to the heart. Angina is a condition in which the blood vessels leading to the heart are partially blocked so the person has no pain at rest, but during exercise, the blocked arteries don't permit enough blood to get through to the heart muscles, causing pain. A study from the Quebec Heart Institute...

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Low testosterone - high cholesterol

A study from Italy shows that men with high blood pressure have low blood levels of the male hormone, testosterone, and make love much less often than men with normal blood pressure.How can this be? The male hormone, testosterone, was thought to raise cholesterol, stiffen arteries, and increase risk for heart attacks. But this applied only to the methyl testosterone that athletes used to take, not the testosterone produced by the body. Having high cholesterol, pre-diabetes or high blood pressure causes hardening of the arteries, which decreases blood flow to the testicles to damage the testicles and lower testosterone. High blood pressure and high cholesterol lower testosterone, so men with low testosterone are at increased risk for heart attacks....

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Fruit juices: better than soft drinks?

Researchers at the University of Houston reviewed scientific studies to explain why sugared drinks make people fat. (Nutrition Review, April 2006) and concluded that sugared drinks do not fill people up as much as solid food does. So calories in drinks do not suppress appetite as effectively as calories in food. Soft drinks average seven teaspoons of sugar per 12-ounce serving, so for each soft drink a child takes in, he gets 140 calories that do not suppress appetite as much as the same number of calories in solid food.Since fruit juices contain as much sugar and calories as soft drinks, it makes no sense to substitute juices for soft drinks. It’s far better to learn to drink water to quench thirst, and get calories, vitamins and other nutrients...

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Wrinkles: Can they be prevented?

Unfortunately, there may not be much you can do; a study from Denmark shows that skin wrinkling and aging are influenced heavily by genetic factors (Age and Aging, January 2006). However, this doesn’t mean that you can smoke or spend many hours in the sun, two behaviors that are known to increase wrinkling. The authors studied twins to show that skin aging is associated equally between genetic and environmental factors. They also found that looking older with severely wrinkled skin is associated with dying earlier. You increase your chances of having aged, wrinkled skin by smoking, exposing your skin frequently to sunlight or being very thin. Subscribe to my free weekly health and fitness newslet...

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Itching, can't see anything?

Itching can be caused by nerve damage associated with diabetes or lack of vitamin B12, skin diseases, an allergy to something touching the skin or inside your body or a hidden tumor or infection. See my report on neuropathy. Often doctors cannot find the cause.When more than one person in a family itches, the usually cause is scabies, a disease caused by a parasite that burrows into your skin. You usually cannot see the bug that causes scabies. Sometimes the only way that you can see it is in a piece of skin that has been removed from the body and has been placed under a microscope. You may see little bumps between your fingers, in your armpits and groin, at your belt line or on your back or chest. You also may see three or more bumps in a...

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Increase endurance with low-glycemic meal

The Glycemic Index measures how high blood sugar levels rise 30 to 120 minutes after eating a particular food or combination of foods. A study from Loughborough University in England shows that athletes in sports events lasting more than a couple hours may benefit from a pre-competition meal that has a low glycemic index (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, August 2006).How long you can exercise a muscle without hurting depends on how much sugar you can store in that muscle and how long you can keep that sugar in the muscle during competition. Just about everyone agrees that taking extra carbohydrates for two or there days prior to an endurance competition can help fill your muscles maximally with stored sugar and therefore increase endurance....

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High blood pressure during exercise: dangerous?

People with normal resting blood pressures who develop very high blood pressure during exercise are the ones most likely to develop high blood pressure later on. These people have arteries that do not expand as much as normal arteries when blood is pumped to them. When your heart beats, it squeezes blood from inside its chambers to the large arteries. This causes normal arteries to expand like balloons. If the arteries do not expand enough when blood enters them, blood pressure can rise very high.Normal blood pressure is 120 when the heart contracts and 80 when it relaxes. During exercise, the heart beats with increased force to raise blood pressure. It is normal for blood pressure to rise up to 200 over 80 during running, and to 300 over 200...

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Creatine: Will it prevent muscle loss with aging?

Each muscle has millions of muscle fibers, and each muscle fiber is enervated by a single nerve. With aging, you lose nerves and with loss of each motor nerve, you lose the corresponding muscle fiber. So the treatment of muscle weakness with aging is to increase the size and strength of each remaining active muscle fibers. You do this only by exercising against increasing resistance.Creatine will do nothing to stop the progressive loss of nerves that decreases the number of active muscle fibers. However, it can help you to exercise harder and longer, so it may help you to do the intense workouts that will build larger and stronger muscles. At this time we do not know whether there are any deleterious side effects in older people from taking...

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Cold hands

If your fingers turn white and start to hurt when you're out in the cold, you may have a condition called Raynaud's phenomenon. On exposing your fingers to cold, the blood vessels close, skin turns white and their temperature drops. When the temperature drops to 59 degrees, your body tries to save your skin by opening the blood vessels and the skin turns red and starts to itch and burn. If you warm your hands at this point, your skin will not be damaged, but if you do not get out of the cold, the blood vessels in your hands can close and the temperature in your hands can drop to freezing, resulting in frostbite.People who have Raynaud's phenomenon have blood vessels in their hands that do not open when the skin temperature reaches 59 degrees....

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Master athletes age better

Almost 50 percent of Americans die of heart attacks and strokes, diseases that are associated with a faulty diet and lack of exercise. Almost 80 percent are overweight or obese, which is also associated with lack of exercise. Yet only 13 percent of people over 65 engage in vigorous physical activity three or more days a week. Among those over 75, only six percent exercise regularly.Master athletes are older men and women who compete in sports at a very high level, no matter how old they are. They are healthier than age-matched people in virtually every category that has been measured (Nutrition Today, Volume 40, 2006). Of course they are more fit, as measured by their maximal ability to take in and use oxygen. They have lower cholesterols,...

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Why do athletes use asthma inhalers?

Drugs called beta-2 agonists, such as salbutamol, salmeterol and terbutaline, open the closed lungs of asthmatics and help them to breathe. They also increase the amount of fat in the bloodstream to increase energy sources of exercising muscles, help to preserve the muscles’ store of sugar, and help muscles to contract with more force. The common inhaled asthma medication called albuterol has been shown to improve athletic performance.These asthma medications are potent stimulants, so they could cause irregular heart beats. It is illegal for Olympic competitors to take albuterol pills. However, asthmatics need their medications, so the Olympic medical committee allows asthmatics to take these same medications by inhaler, provided that a doctor...

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Exercise prevents diabetes

A recent study shows that lack of exercise is a major risk factor for diabetes in overweight women, and these women can help prevent diabetes by exercising, even if they don’t lose a lot of weight. Before insulin can do its job of driving sugar from your bloodstream into cells, it must first attach to small hooks on cells called insulin receptors. Having extra fat in your body prevents insulin from attaching to these receptors, and prevents insulin from lowering blood sugar levels. Therefore the cells of overweight women cannot respond to insulin as well as those of their leaner counterparts. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst showed that overweight women who engage in vigorous exercise can respond to insulin as well...

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Caffeine increases endurance

Caffeinated drinks increase endurance during long events such as a marathon, triathalon or bicycle race. A study from the University of Birmingham in England shows that caffeine helps the body use more carbohydrates from drinks that you take during exercise (Journal of Applied Physiology, June 2006). Those who took sugared drinks with caffeine were able to absorb and use 26 percent more of the ingested sugar than those who took the same drinks without caffeine. Previous studies show that caffeine helps athletes run faster in both short and long-distance races. In short races, it makes athletes faster by causing the brain to send messages along nerves to cause a greater percentage of muscle fibers to contract at the same time. In longer races,...

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Lactic acid is good for you

Lactic acid is the most efficient fuel that your muscles can use, even more than sugar. When you exercise as hard as you can, it helps you to go harder. A paper from Aukland University in New Zealand reviews the latest research showing that lactic acid is good for you (Sports Medicine, Volume 36, 2006). Your muscles use carbohydrates, fats and proteins for energy. Enzymes in muscles break down carbohydrates in a series of reactions that release small amounts of energy at a time. More than 80 percent of the energy used to power muscles is lost as heat, so burning fuel instantly for energy would produce so much heat that it would burn your muscles.Enzymes require oxygen to turn food into energy. When you exercise so hard that you can’t get all...

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Cold hands

If your fingers turn white and start to hurt when you're out in the cold, you may have a condition called Raynaud's phenomenon. On exposing your fingers to cold, the blood vessels close, skin turns white and their temperature drops. When the temperature drops to 59 degrees, your body tries to save your skin by opening the blood vessels and the skin turns red and starts to itch and burn. If you warm your hands at this point, your skin will not be damaged, but if you do not get out of the cold, the blood vessels in your hands can close and the temperature in your hands can drop to freezing, resulting in frostbite.People who have Raynaud's phenomenon have blood vessels in their hands that do not open when the skin temperature reaches 59 degrees....

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Awkward running form

Many people look terribly uncoordinated when they run. Telling them to change their form will just make them more uncoordinated. If a coach criticizes a team member for poor running form and doesn't correct the underlying causes, the person is likely to become self-conscious about how he or she looks, and run even more slowly. Coordination usually improves just with repeated practice in the chosen sport.Running form can improve markedly if you can correct muscle imbalances and structural abnormalities with appropriate exercises and perhaps mechanical devices. A coach can videotape the athletes while they run, then review the tape in slow motion to analyze the mechanical defects. For example, leaning forward during running is often caused by...

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Weight lifting for children

The best time for future Olympic athletes to start training is before they reach puberty. Having large strong muscles makes you a better athlete, and starting training before puberty enlarges the bones that are used primarily in that sport. Muscles growth is limited by the size of the bones on which they attach. The larger the bone, the stronger the muscle. Children who start to play tennis before they go into puberty have larger bones in the arm that holds the racquet. They also have larger bones in their tennis arm than those who start to play tennis later in life. The larger and stronger your muscles, the harder you can hit a tennis ball.Lifting weights during growth does not prevent children from growing to their full potential height....

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Are you pre-diabetic?

You can tell if you are at high risk for diabetes if you store fat primarily in your belly. Pinch your belly; if you can pinch an inch, you are at increased risk and should get a blood test called HBA1C. Having high blood levels of triglycerides and low levels of the good HDL cholesterol that helps prevent heart attacks also increases your risk for diabetes. When you eat sugar or flour, your blood sugar rises too high. This causes your pancreas to release insulin that converts sugar to triglycerides, which are poured into your bloodstream. Then the good HDL cholesterol tries to remove triglycerides by carrying them back into the liver, so having high blood levels of triglycerides and low blood levels of the good HDL cholesterol are both individual...

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No weight loss from exercise?

When people start an exercise program, some lose a lot of weight, while others lose nothing. An effective exercise program for weight loss should be 1) continuous, 2) use all of your major muscle groups, 3) include one intense workout a week for each muscle group, and 4) be done on land, rather than in the water. Stop-and-start exercises, such as lifting weights, do not require that you use your muscles continuously enough to burn a lot of calories. Those that use just one muscle group, such as doing situps or pushups, won't help you to lose a lot of weight because the stressed muscle groups tire quickly so you can't exercise very long.Exercising at a leisurely pace won't help you lose a lot of weight either. You burn calories while you exercise...

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Urinary tract infections: treat with antibiotics

Many men suffer from constant irritation in their urinary tubes, urinating frequently at night, urgency to urinate when their bladders fill, and discomfort during urination. Often doctors do a culture which shows no cause, so they prescribe doxycycline antibiotics for a week or two, and their patients get no relief. A study from Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden shows that many of these patients are infected with a bacteria called mycoplasma genitalium which cannot be cured by taking doxycycline, but can be cured by taking an erythromycin antibiotic such as Zithromax, or Biaxin (Sexually Transmitted Infections, August 2006). If you are a man or woman who suffers persistent urinary symptoms, check with your doctor and ask for a urine...

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Cross-training for fitness

Every time you exercise vigorously your muscles are injured, and the harder you exercise, the longer it takes for your muscles to heal. You are not supposed to exercise vigorously again until your muscles stop hurting. You can exercise hard on one day and easy on the next few days, or you can train in two sports. This is called cross-training, and it can make you very fit and help to prevent injuries.Each sport stresses specific muscle groups. Cycling stresses the upper legs, while rowing stresses your back and upper body. If you cycle and row on the same day, you stress your upper legs and upper body on the same day. To reduce your chances of injuring yourself, you should take the next day off, or at least exercise at a very low intensity....

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Pedal faster to ride better

All cyclists should learn to pedal at a fast cadence, whether you are an experienced racer or a novice recreational rider. Muscle fatigue and damage are caused by excess pressure on the pedals, not by how fast you pedal. Pedaling at a faster cadence with less pressure allows you to pedal longer and harder. However, several researchers have expressed concern that pedaling very fast could decrease blood flow to muscles and thus decrease athletic performance. A study from Kansas State University shows that pedaling fast does not decrease a muscle's flow of blood or ability to extract oxygen from the blood (European Journal of Applied Physiology, March 2006). Once again athletes and coaches find new training and competing methods and years later,...

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Diabetes risk screening tests

The best predictor of diabetes is a test called Hemoglobin A1C (HBA1C), which measures the amount of sugar stuck on cell membranes. At the American Diabetes Association meeting in June 2006, Dr. Peter Baginsky of Santa Rosa, California showed that HBA1C can be used not only to identify people who already have diabetes, but also as a screening test to predict which people are likely to develop diabetes in the future. This allows doctors to treat pre-diabetes before people suffer their heart attacks, strokes and other side effects that can be the first sign that the person has diabetes.He also showed that people who have HBA1Cs above 5.8 have a 92 percent chance of being diabetic as determined by a fasting glucose tolerance test. The HBA1C test...

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Should you restrict all fats?

Almost 50,000 women in the Women's Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial from Harvard Medical School were given dietary counseling to reduce their fat intake to less than 20 percent of their daily calories (Clinical Diabetes, July 2006). This intense dietary counseling did not reduce the incidence of heart attacks, strokes, or cancers even though the women reduced their intake of fat by 8.2 percent.Their data from the eight-year follow up show that it is difficult to reduce total fat intake, and that dietary counseling to reduce total fat intake does not reduce the risk of heart attacks or cancers. It lowered weight only an average of three pounds and diastolic blood pressure only slightly. However, other studies have shown that reducing...

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How to do sit-ups

Sit-ups can strengthen your belly muscles, but doing them incorrectly can hurt your back. Sit-ups should be done while you lie on your back with your knees bent enough for the soles of your feet to touch the floor. Place both hands on your chest and slowly raise your head off the ground. Raise your shoulders about one foot and then lower them to the ground. Do this slowly ten times, rest a few seconds and then do two more sets of ten. After a week or two this exercise will feel easy, so add a light weight held behind your neck or on your chest. As you become stronger, you can use heavier weights.There's no need to do more than 30 sit-ups in one workout. To strengthen your belly muscles, you increase the resistance, not the number of repetitions....

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Children's exercise

Children need at least 90 minutes of exercise a day to avoid heart disease when they are older, according to a new study reported in Lancet (July 23, 2006). The old guidelines recommending 30 minutes of exercise three times a week, or even an hour a day do not appear to be adequate for preventing obesity and heart disease. Researchers used heart rate monitors to measure the activity of 1700 nine- to-fifteen-year-olds in Denmark, Estonia, and Portugal. They then calculated a heart-attack risk score consisting of blood pressure, cholesterol, insulin resistance, and skinfold thickness.They compared physical activity from the heart rate monitors with the heart attack risk-factor score and found that the more active the child, the lower the heart...

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Sports Drinks or Water?

Drinks that contain salt and sugar are better than just plain water during exercise, unless you are also eating foods. A study from the Medical College of Georgia shows that tennis players have lower body temperatures when they drink fluid with electrolytes and sugar, rather than just plain water (British Journal of Sports Medicine, May 2006). Higher body temperatures during exercise slow you down and tire you earlier. More than 80 percent of the energy that supplies your muscles is lost as heat. Less than 20 percent drives your muscles. So during exercise, your heart has to cool your body by pumping hot blood from your muscles to your skin, as well as pumping oxygen-rich blood to your muscles. If you heart has difficulty serving both functions,...

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Second wind

Second wind means that when you run very fast, you reach a point where you gasp for breath, slow down but keep on pushing and after a few seconds, you feel recovered and pick up the pace. Some people think that you just slow down and allow yourself enough time to recover from your oxygen debt, but research from the University of California in Berkeley may give another explanation.When you run fast, your muscles use large amounts of oxygen to burn carbohydrate, fat and protein for energy. If you run so fast that your lungs cannot supply all the oxygen that you need, you develop an oxygen debt that causes lactic acid to accumulate in your muscles to make them burn, and you gasp for air. The muscle burning and shortness of breath caused by the...

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Marathon training

Many runners have the mistaken impression that they have to run a lot of miles every week to be able to run fast in a marathon. Most will find that running too many miles slows them down. To run fast in races, you have to run very fast in practice. However, on the day after you run very fast, your muscles will feel sore. If you run fast while you are sore, you are likely to injure yourself and not be able to run at all. Take easy workouts until your muscles feel fresh again. Most competitive runners set up their programs so that they run fast on Tuesdays and Thursdays and longer on Sundays. The rest of the time they run slowly or not at all.Before you increase the intensity of your running program or any other exercise, check with your doctor....

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Exercise prolongs life

Dr. Todd Manini of the National Institute on Aging reports that older active people who walk, climb stairs, do household chores, or even wash windows are 69 percent less likely to die in a year, compared to people who are far less active (JAMA, June 2006). This study was far more dependable than previous studies because, instead of using a questionnaire, researchers measured how active a person was by measuring the metabolic end products of activity. They used a doubly-labeled water method that directly measures carbon dioxide production over an extended period, the most accurate estimate of energy expenditure. If you are inactive, you should check with a cardiologist who will do a stress test. If you pass, you should start an exercise program....

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Weight lifting helps to prevent diabetes

One third of Americans will become diabetic because they eat too much and exercise too little. A study in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise (July 2006) shows that lifting weights can help to prevent and to treat diabetes.Extra fat prevents your body from responding normally to insulin. Before insulin can do its job of driving sugar from the bloodstream into cells, it must first attach to little hooks on cell membranes called insulin receptors. Having extra fat in cells turns these receptors inward, making it far more difficult for insulin to attach to the receptors. This prevents insulin from doing its job of lowering blood sugar levels, even though your body is making plenty of insulin. That’s why anything that makes you fat increases...

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Dizziness on changing position

Athletes and other very fit people may feel dizzy when they rise from lying to standing because of their slow pulse rates. Exercise makes your heart stronger so it can pump more blood with each beat and it doesn't have to beat as often. A slow pulse rate can be good. Since your heart doesn't beat as often, it has more time to rest between beats. Like a low-mileage used car, perhaps this will mean it takes longer to wear out. But a slow heart rate can make you dizzy when you change position. When you raise yourself from lying to sitting, or from sitting to standing, the force of gravity pulls blood down from your brain towards your feet and your blood can't get back to your brain until your next heart beat. If you have a pulse rate of only 50...

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Rosacea: red in the face

Many people develop a red scaly rash on their faces as they age, particularly in the center on the nose and cheeks. They flush or blush and often also have small acne-like bumps on their faces, swollen noses and prominent red blood vessels. Sometimes, this same rash may extend to the shoulders, chest and back. It's called rosacea.Nobody knows what causes rosacea, but most doctors feel that it is a genetic disorder associated with other skin conditions, seborrheic dermatitis and psoriasis. They may also have terrible dandruff, scaly ears, thick big toe nails, and sometimes thick skin on their elbows and knees. The recommended treatment is to take an antibiotic such as doxycycline 100 mg twice a day plus an antibiotic cream such as metronidazole...

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Caffeine

Two recent studies show that too much caffeine may cause problems for some people. Researchers at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario report that caffeine, in coffee, tea, chocolate, and most colas, raises blood sugar levels in healthy people and diabetics, which cannot be reversed by exercise or weight loss (1).When you eat, your blood sugar level rises. If it rises too high, sugar sticks to cells, and once stuck on cells, it is converted to sorbitol which destroys the cell to increase risk for heart attacks, strokes, blindness, deafness, kidney failure and other effects of diabetes. Anything that increases blood sugar levels increases risk for diabetes. So, most doctors recommend restricting refined carbohydrates, in sugar and flour. Exercise...

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How to Warm 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 involve the same muscles and motions you plan to use in your sport. For example, before you start to run very fast, do a series of runs of gradually-increasing intensity to increase the circulation of blood to the muscles you will be using. Muscles are made up of millions of individual fibers, just like a rope made from many threads. When you start to exercise at a very slow pace, you increase the blood flow to muscle fibers, increase their temperature, and bring in more oxygen, so the muscles are more pliable and resistant to injury. When you contract a muscle for the first time, you use less than...

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Bonking: low blood sugar

Yes, I know the word has another meaning. But in sports, bonking is running out of blood sugar. If you watch a major bicycle race on TV, you have to be impressed by how the riders can eat enough to sustain them through races that require more than five hours of near maximum effort. If a rider does not get enough food during his or her ride, he can fall off the bikes, lie on the ground unconscious and start to shake all over in a in a massive convulsion. This is called bonking, or passing out from low blood sugar. Your brain gets almost all of its fuel from sugar in your bloodstream. When your blood sugar level drops, your brain cannot get enough fuel to function properly, you feel tired and confused and can pass out. There is only enough...

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Belly fat: why it's dangerous

Storing fat primarily in your belly increases your chances of suffering heart attacks and diabetes. When you take in more calories than your body needs, your liver turns them into fat. Fat cells in your belly are different from those in your hips. The blood that flows from belly fat goes directly to your liver, whereas the blood that flows from your hips goes into your general circulation. The livers of those who store fat in their bellies are blocked from removing insulin by the extra fat and therefore do not remove insulin from the bloodstream as effectively as the livers of those who store fat in their hips and have less fat in their livers.People who store fat primarily in their bellies are called apples, while those who store fat primarily...

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Interval training

To become stronger and faster, athletes use a technique called interval training, in which they exercise very intensely, rest and then alternate intense bursts of exercise and rest until their muscles start to feel heavy. Intervals are a fixed number of repeats of a fixed distance at a fixed pace with a fixed recovery time. There are two types of intervals: long and short. A short interval takes less than 30 seconds and does not build up significant amounts of lactic acid in the bloodstream, so an athlete can do lots of repeat short intervals in a single workout.Long intervals take two minutes or more and are very tiring. In interval training, a runner may run a quarter mile 12 times, averaging 1 minute, with a 110-yard slow jog between each....

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Warm up your heart

Most people know that you have to warm up skeletal muscles to help protect them from injury, but many do not know that warming up the heart muscle also helps to prevent heart attacks in people with blocked arteries leading to the heart.Before you try to run very fast, you can protect your muscles from injury by performing a series of runs of gradually-increasing intensity to increase the circulation of blood to your muscles. The same principle applies to the heart. Angina is a condition in which the blood vessels leading to the heart are partially blocked so the person has no pain at rest, but during exercise, the blocked arteries don't permit enough blood to get through to the heart muscles, causing pain. A study from the Quebec Heart Institute...

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Prepare for skiing

If you plan to ski this winter, start getting ready now. The best way to train for skiing is to ski, but snow isn't always available. To prepare for a skiing vacation, 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, three times a week. However, to prepare your muscles for skiing, you have to use activities that use your upper legs, such as skating or riding a bicycle. The average bicycle rider is far better prepared for skiing than the average runner. Many joggers who can easily run ten miles find that they can't ski very long because their upper leg muscles tire and hurt after just a few minutes of...

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Recurrent sore throats

If you have recurrent throat infections with staph or strep bacteria, check your toothbrush, your nose and your mate. One study showed that beta strep, which causes rheumatic fever, was grown from toothbrushes of 30 percent of children who were infected with that germ. Beta strep can persist in unwashed toothbrushes for 15 days and in washed toothbrushes for 3 days. Another bacteria called staph aureus can persist in the noses of people even after they have taken the appropriate antibiotic. Having staph in your nose also prevents simple cuts from healing.Staph grows so luxuriously in the wet nasal membranes that it is difficult to cure by taking oral antibiotics. You can also be re-infected by a mate who has no symptoms at all. If you suffer...

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Will vinegar help me lose weight?

Vinegar is an excellent preservative and a good household cleaner, but it is not a medicine or a weight-loss drug. Several popular books claim that vinegar prevents cancer and heart disease, lowers high blood pressure and helps you to lose weight, but here is no evidence to support any of these claims. One of the books explains that vinegar helps you to lose weight because oil and vinegar don't mix, so vinegar and your fat won't either. Vinegar is nothing more than a mixture of 95 percent water and around 5 percent acetic acid, made from grapes, apples, rice, potatoes or other fermented plants. It is very low in calories, but the only way vinegar could possibly help you to lose weight is by causing you to eat lots of salads while you cut back...

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Push-Ups: Train to do the most

If you want to be able to do 100 pushups in a row, do not try to do as many pushups as possible every day. You'll probably injure yourself and end up unable to do any pushups at all. Training for competition requires an understanding of the stress-and-recover rule and the interval-sets rule. The best way to improve any athletic skill is to stress your body on one day and then allow enough time for your body to recover before you stress it again. On one day, take a hard workout. On the next morning, your muscles feel sore. Take easy workouts until the soreness disappears and then take a hard workout again.For your hard workouts, you can do far more work by exercising in sets, rather than continuously. If you can do six continuous pushups, you...

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Know when to change sports

If your favorite sport causes chronic pain or an injury that does not heal, you should probably switch to another sport. Two recent studies from the Argentine Tennis Association followed players with knee and shoulder problems (British Journal of Sports Medicine, May 2006). In the first study, men who had anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears showed a great drop in their tennis performance. The knee is just two sticks held together by four bands, called ligaments. Two ligaments are located on the outside of the knee and two ligaments cross in the middle of the knee joint. The ACL runs from the bottom of the upper bone of the knee joint forward to the top of the lower bone of the knee joint. It prevents the upper bone of the knee joint from...

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Statins and muscle pain

Some patients with high cholesterol levels are afraid to take statins because off fear of developing side effects such as muscle pain. A study from Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego reviews the latest data on side effects of statins (The American Journal of Medicine, May 2006). This review found that statin- induced muscle damage is more common in Asians, people who exercise, have had recent surgery, have kidney, liver or thyroid disease, or have high triglycerides. The incidence of muscle pain and damage from statins is extremely low in non- exercisers, three to ten percent in those who exercise, and very high in competitive athletes. Most athletes refuse to take statin drugs because they train by taking a hard workout that damages their...

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Are any weight loss drugs safe and effective for teenagers?

Researchers from St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia recently reported that metformin, a drug used to treat diabetes, can help obese, non-diabetic teenagers lose weight (Endocrine Society Annual Meeting, June 2006). Many previous studies show that short-term use of metformin can help people lose weight.Metformin prevents the liver from releasing sugar into the bloodstream. When taken before eating, it markedly reduces the rise in blood sugar. A high rise in blood sugar after eating causes the pancreas to release large amounts of insulin which acts on the brain to make you hungry, on the liver to make more fat, and on the fat cells in your belly to fill with fat. This study shows that metformin along with a low-refined-carbohydrate...

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What should I eat after a hard workout?

Eating a protein-rich meal as soon as possible after this hard workout hastens muscle recovery. Intelligently-increased workloads make an athlete stronger, and anything that helps you recover faster allows you to do more work. When you feel the burn during intense exercise, you are damaging your muscle fibers. The pain that you feel 8 to 24 hours after a hard workout is due to muscle damage. It is now fairly well established that your muscles recover faster if you eat protein as soon as possible after a hard workout or competition. You’ll be happy to know that a study from Indiana University in Bloomington shows that chocolate milk helps athletes to recover faster from hard exercise than drinks that replaced only carbohydrates or fluid (International...

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Stand still or keep moving between bursts of hard exercise?

If you compete in sports that require repeated short bursts of very fast running, such as in basketball, soccer, or football, will you recover faster by standing still or by continuing to move at a slower pace? A study from Brooklyn College in New York showed that it doesn’t make any difference (International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, February 2006). Researchers asked fit athletes to perform multiple bouts of exercising to exhaustion. Between the bouts of vigorous exercise, one group spent 12 minutes staying completely still, while the other group continued to exercise at less than 20 percent of their maximum workload. Athletes in both groups showed equal recoveries and performances.However, those who stayed still...

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Is exercise before sleeping harmful?

Many fitness instructors give you bad advice when they tell you not to exercise within three hours of going to sleep. The old argument was that vigorous exercise causes your body to produce large amounts of its own stimulants, adrenalin and noradrenalin, that make your heart beat rapidly, raise body temperature and prevent you from feeling tired. More recent research shows that exercising vigorously before going to bed does not interfere with sleep. We also know that exercise helps to prevent disease, prolong life and make you feel good. So it is better to exercise whenever you can, even if it's just before you go to bed. For help with your exercise program, visit my Fitness and Health Forum and subscribe to my free weekly e-Z...

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If I replace salt after exercise; won't this cause osteoporosis?

Athletes must eat large amounts of foods to take in enough calories to fuel their muscles during exercise. A high salt intake in athletes does not cause osteoporosis because they eat so much food that contains calcium and potassium that the amount of salt they take does not cause blood calcium levels to drop, so calcium does not leach out of bones. As a general rule, taking extra salt causes the body to retain extra fluid, which expands blood volume and increases blood flow to the kidneys to increase loss of calcium in the urine. This lowers blood calcium levels, so calcium has to be taken from bones for replacement. Sodium salt also causes the kidney tubules to lose more calcium. However, potassium blocks the exchange of sodium for calcium...

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Do protein drinks increase speed during competition?

Adding protein to a sports drink does not help athletes cycle faster in a 50-mile time trial, according to a study from McMaster University in Ontario (Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, August, 2006). Many studies show that taking in a carbohydrate drink helps improve performances in athletic events lasting more than an hour. Two recent studies showed that adding protein to a carbohydrate drink improves performance even more. However, in these studies, cyclists worked at a fixed rate of effort, rather than using spurts of energy as athletes do in competition.When you compete in an athletic event lasting more than an hour, you need fluids and calories. In events lasting more than three hours, you also need salt. Calories come from...

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Knee cartilage does not grow back

When all the cartilage in your knee is gone, the only effective treatment is to replace the whole knee. Knee replacements are now lasting for twelve to twenty years or more, and most remain pain-free. The ends of bones are soft, so they must be covered with a thick white gristle called cartilage. Once damaged, cartilage can never heal. An affected person spends the rest of his life losing cartilage until the cartilage is completely gone and the knee hurts 24 hours a day. The only effective treatment at that time is to replace the entire knee. However, the artificial knee can become dislodged from the bones and may need to be replaced after several years. The area will be so full of scar tissue that a second surgery is far more difficult than...

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Bleeding gums need attention

One in 10 people suffers from periodontal diseases, characterized by bleeding in the gums when you brush your teeth, loosening of the teeth and damage to the structures that help the teeth stay in place.They are caused most commonly by infections by three Gram-negative bacteria: Porphyromonas gingivalis, Bacteroides forsythus and Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans. The body responds to these infections by producing various cytokines (IL-1, IL-6, IL-8, TNF-alpha), inflammatory mediators (PGE2), and matrix metalloproteinases (MMP-2, MMP-3, MMP-8, MMP-9). Viruses, such as cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus) can also cause periodontitis. Conventional treatments for periodontitis aim to eliminate bacterial plaque by scrubbing, cleaning and...

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Belly fat is worse than hip fat

Storing fat primarily in your belly increases your chances of suffering heart attacks and diabetes.When you take in more calories than your body needs, your liver turns them into fat. Fat cells in your belly are different from those in your hips. The blood that flows from belly fat goes directly to your liver, whereas the blood that flows from your hips goes into your general circulation. The livers of those who store fat in their bellies are blocked from removing insulin by the extra fat and therefore do not remove insulin from the bloodstream as effectively as the livers of those who store fat in their hips and have less fat in their livers.People who store fat primarily in their bellies are called apples, while those who store fat primarily...

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