Drink Sugar and Caffeine Only During Vigorous Exercise
I have often recommended that exercisers take a sugared, caffeinated soft drink for a performance boost during prolonged vigorous exercise. I still think this is good advice, but people who are exercising at a casual pace for an extended time may want to restrict their intake of soft drinks
Eating Carbohydrates Before Lifting Weights Can Help You Lift Heavier Weights
It is well known that taking carbohydrates before and during endurance exercise helps to increase both speed and endurance. It is not as well known that taking carbohydrates before and during resistance training for strength can increase intensity and duration of workouts. A review of 21 randomized controlled studies that included 226 young adults found that taking carbohydrates before or during lifting weights increased training volume, and caused higher peak blood lactic acid and sugar levels
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.
Piriformis Syndrome
If it hurts to touch a point that's in the middle of one side of your buttocks, you probably have piriformis syndrome. This chronic condition is very difficult to diagnose, because other injuries may produce exactly the same symptoms.
Get Stronger in 30 Minutes a Week
Most competitive bodybuilders spend hours trying to do many sets over and over again. You don't need to do that. Various studies show that you can gain up to 80 percent of your maximum strength by picking out four to eight specific lifts, lifting one set of ten of the heaviest weight in each, and repeating your program two or three times a week.
Orthotics
Orthotics are special custom arch supports that help to absorb shock and prevent foot pain. To see if orthotics are likely to help you, ask your podiatrist to strap your foot with a special taping procedure called a low-dye strap. If this reduces the pain, you probably will benefit from custom orthotics.
Creatine
Creatine is a substance found in muscle cells that helps your muscles produce energy, particularly while lifting heavy weights or exercising intensely. Your body makes creatine from three amino acids (protein building blocks) called L-arginine, glycine, and L-methionine. You also get creatine when you eat animal protein: meat, poultry or seafood.
Electronic Ab Machines
Your brain does send an electrical impulse along nerves that enter muscles to cause them to contract. The electrical impulses generated by ab machines are so weak that they can't possibly cause contractions that strengthen muscles significantly. If they did give you enough electricity to strengthen your muscles, they would give you a very painful shock.
Isometric Exercise
Can you become very strong by doing isometric exercises in which you push against something that doesn't move, such as a wall?
The single stimulus to make a muscle stronger is to exercise a muscle against a resistance; therefore, you can become strong by doing isometric exercises. However, there are two drawbacks: isometrics can...
Mitochondria and Gut Bacteria Work Together for More Endurance
Endurance training for six weeks in humans and mammals has been shown to increase mitochondrial content from 30 to 100 percent and volume density up to 40 percent.
The Rime of The Ancient Marathoner
At age 86, I can look back at more than 75 years of daily exercising and can tell you that there is a huge difference between the way that your body responds to exercise when you are young and when you are old. The key to healthy exercising for younger people is to try to put some intensity into some of their workouts.
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...
Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) Tears
The anterior cruciate ligament runs from the top bone of the knee to the bottom one and prevents the top bone from sliding forward when the foot hits the ground during running and walking. If it is torn, the knee becomes so unstable that a person will have difficulty walking, so all torn anterior...
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.
Intervals for Everyone
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) surveyed more than 4,000 fitness professionals and found that High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is the most popular trend in fitness for 2018. All healthy people can benefit from some form of interval training. They can pick up the pace for a few seconds while walking, running, cycling, swimming, skiing or skating, and then slow down when they feel the least discomfort.
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.
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.
Research on Intense Exercise
The more intensely you exercise, the less likely you are to suffer a heart attack, even though heart attacks can be caused by intense exercise in some people who already have irregular heartbeats or blocked arteries leading to their hearts.
Exercising in Air Pollution
It's healthy to exercise and harmful to breathe polluted air. Many people wonder if they will do more harm than good by exercising on days when the air is heavily polluted.
The worst time for pollution is when clouds cover the sky and automobiles fill the roads. Automobile exhaust fumes are the principal source of...
Should You Cool Down after Exercise?
Cooling down means that after vigorous exercise, you move far more slowly for several minutes before you stop exercising for that session. The main reason for "cooling down" is to keep you from feeling dizzy or passing out after very vigorous exercise
Preparing for Baseball
Parents often ask me what their children can do to prepare for their baseball season. Because training is specific, they should be training for baseball 12 months a year. There are very few kids who are so gifted that they can be very good in several sports. Many children start training in one...
Cyclists Age Better
Two exciting new studies show that older men and women who have cycled for many years do not have the markers of aging found in non-exercising people. Their muscle size and strength, amount of body fat, levels of hormones such as testosterone, and blood cholesterol levels were close to those of much younger people.
Standing Is Not Much Better Than Sitting
A recent study from New Zealand compared the effects of prolonged sitting, prolonged standing or taking regular activity breaks on blood flow and insulin levels. We know from earlier studies that prolonged sitting increases risk for forming clots, but this new study suggests that people with jobs that require them to stand for long periods may be even worse off.
Protein Supplements Don’t Make You Stronger
A researcher posing as a 15-year-old football player called 244 health food stores across the United States and asked if they would sell him protein supplements to give him larger muscles. More than two-thirds of sales attendants at the health food stores recommended that he buy the protein supplement, creatine.
Principles of Training
You will not become more fit by doing the same training regimen every day. Athletes train by taking hard workouts on one day, feeling sore on the next, and not taking another hard workout until the muscles stop feeling sore.
Cycling Cadence
Cycling is a power sport. The stronger you are, the faster you can go on a bike. Power = [force that your feet apply to the pedals] x [cadence, or how fast you spin your pedals].
Cadence is the number of pedal revolutions per minute (RPMs). Fatigue for a bicycle rider comes primarily from how hard you press on the pedals, not how fast you turn them.
Triathalon Training
Will training for a triathalon make you a better cyclist? World-class triathletes are slower runners, swimmers and cyclists than athletes who compete in only one sport. A study from the University of Toulon-Var in France shows that swimming before cycling slows you down (Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology, August 2005). Well-trained male triathletes pedaled...
Exercisers Should Follow a Heart-Healthy Diet
Exercise helps to prevent heart attacks, but exercise does not prevent plaques from forming in arteries. What you eat is far more important in determining how much plaque you have in your arteries, so even competitive master athletes should follow a heart-healthy diet. A recent study showed that lifelong male athletes older than 40 had increased markers that doctors use to predict a future heart attack.
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
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.
