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 way to build muscle strength.
Older people lose coordination and are at increased risk for falling. T'ai Chi is a specific training program aimed at teaching people how to maintain balance...
Weak Muscles Predict Accelerated Aging, Disability and Death
A study of 1,275 men and women found that those who had very weak handgrip strength had signs of accelerated aging, as measured by deterioration of the DNA in their cells. The authors of this study cited earlier studies showing that grip strength appears to be a better predictor of life expectancy than blood pressure. Many other studies show that having weak muscles is associated with a host of diseases and premature death.
Arm Exercises: Conductors Often Have Long Lives
Eighty-year-old Ricardo Muti just extended his contract to conduct the Chicago Symphony to 2023. Pablo Casals, Nadia Boulanger, Arturo Toscanini, Arthur Rubinstein, Mehli Mehta and Paul Paray all conducted major orchestras into their nineties,. The constant exercise involved in the act of conducting may be a strong part of the reason for their long lives.
Exercise May Change Gut Bacteria for More Endurance
An interesting study showed that after finishing the 26-mile Boston Marathon, runners had changes in the bacteria in their colons that may have helped them to run faster and longer.
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.
Time-Restricted Eating for Serious Exercisers
Several recent research papers have found that time-restricted eating can help to prevent diabetes and heart attacks and prolong life. However, some people express concern that athletes and regular exercisers may develop low blood sugar and lose muscle if they go on a schedule of not eating for intermittent periods such as 6PM to 6AM. An exciting study now shows that time-restricted eating can improve health in serious athletes and may even help them to improve running performance by helping them to lose excess body fat.
How Protein Builds Muscles
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, it helps to understand how food can help your training program. Anything that helps you recover faster from a hard workout will allow you to do more work to make you stronger. Scientists have known for years that you recover faster by eating immediately after you finish your hard workout.
Strength Training Guidelines
1. People need to learn a correct range of motion for each exercise that is within their capability and practice that with lighter resistance. 2. There is not a lot of convincing data on repetition duration, but what there is including work we have done here, suggests for each exercise taking about three seconds for the concentric part of the rep, and three seconds for the eccentric part.
Can Intense Exercise Increase Your Risk for a Heart Attack?
The American Heart Association has cautioned that, "Exercise, particularly when performed by unfit individuals, can acutely increase the risk of sudden cardiac death and acute myocardial infarction in susceptible people." However, a recent review of 48 research articles found no reduction in lifespan, no matter how much a person exercises
Spot Reduction Doesn’t Work
You'll see lots of exercise programs, devices and machines in television commercials that claim to get rid of fat from your belly. While they can strengthen your belly muscles, there is no such thing as spot reduction.
When you take in more calories than your body burns, you store them as fat. Some people...
Cold Weather Exercise in 2021
This winter is more dangerous than previous winters because cold weather increases your risk for COVID-19, since it increases the time that people spend indoors where the virus can accumulate in the air. More than 95 percent of COVID-19 appears to be acquired indoors, particularly where people congregate.
How We Learned That Lactic Acid Is Good For You
In the 1920s, experiments suggested that the accumulation of lactate acid in the bloodstream interfered with a person’s ability to exercise by causing muscles to stop contracting. However, Carl and Gerty Cori won the 1947 Nobel Prize for discovering the “Cori Cycle,” in which lactic acid produced by reduced oxygen levels from intense exercise may be good for exercisers when it travels from muscles to the liver, where lactic acid is converted to the sugar, glucose, to be used by muscles to supply extra energy
Why Humans Can Run Marathons and Apes Cannot
Extensive research by Dr. Ajit Varki at UC/San Diego suggest that 2-3 million years ago, our pre-human ancestors had a single genetic mutation that could explain why humans can outrun their primate relatives.
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 no injections (Med Sci Sports Exerc, published online Nov 19, 2014).
The runners were initially evaluated with a 1.8 mile time trial. Then they were randomly distributed to either:
• take no...
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.
Electric-Assist Bikes and Trikes
I predict that in the next few years, virtually all cyclists will have motors on their bikes. I think that you can get a better training effect with a motor than without it. Anyone who has difficulty accelerating a bike will benefit from an added boost from an electric motor.
Retaining Strength with Aging
If you don't exercise regularly and vigorously, expect to lose a significant amount of muscle strength as you age, and expect that loss of strength to reduce the quality of your life. A 15-year follow-up study showed that older people who lift weights at least twice a week had a 46 percent lower death rate within the study period.
How to Prevent Wear-and-Tear Injuries
If you think that football is the sport with the most injuries, you would be wrong. Each year, 79 percent of long-distance runners suffer injuries that force them to take time off from running (Br J Sports Med, Aug, 2007;41(8):469-80). The most-injured part is the knee and the chance for an injury increases with running longer distances and having previous injuries.
Calculate Your Fitness Age
VO2max can be used to predict a person’s risk of premature death from a heart attack. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have developed a simple way to estimate a person’s VO2max, his maximal ability to take in and use oxygen.
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.
Sarcopenia of Aging: Loss of Muscle Size and Strength
Aging causes you to lose strength, no matter how much you exercise. Muscles are made up of hundreds of thousands of individual fibers, like a rope is made up of many strands. Each muscle fiber is innervated by a single motor nerve. With aging you lose motor nerves, and with each loss of a nerve, you also lose the corresponding muscle fiber that it innervates.
Too Much Intense Exercise May Harm You
Exercising regularly helps to prevent disease and prolong lives, and exercising intensely can prevent disease and prolong lives even more. However, a study from Karolinska Institute suggests that exercising intensely too often can harm your health, and perhaps even shorten your life.
Heat Stroke
Nobody should ever die of heat stroke, a rapid uncontrolled rise in body temperature that causes you to pass out. Your body sends you warning signals as your temperature rises.
Cupping for Faster Recovery
When Michael Phelps won a gold medal in the 4 x 100 meter freestyle relay at the Rio Olympics, he was covered with red circles on his back and shoulders from cupping. Many of the U.S. swimmers and gymnasts at the Olympics are using cupping, along with massage, saunas, ice baths and compression garments, to help them recover faster after a race or a hard training session.
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.
Intervals: The Best Way to Increase Intensity
The most efficient way to increase the intensity of your exercise program and feel less stress on your muscles is to use interval training. When you exercise, pick up the pace for a short period. As you start to feel burning or fatigue in your muscles, slow down. When the burning and fatigue are gone, pick up the pace.
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.
Flat Feet, Pigeon Toes and Bow Legs
Many of the world's great sprinters have flat feet. In the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Bob Hayes tied the world record when he won the 100 meter dash, and five days later, he ran the anchor leg in the finals of the Olympic 400 meter relay. He took the baton with the US team in fifth place and he passed Jamaica, then Russia, then Poland and then France to run his 100 meters in an incredible 8.6 seconds, the fastest of all time.
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.
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.
