Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, General Fitness, Health, Prime/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
After being in the gym for the past 30 years or so, I’ve heard all the stories about steroids- good and bad. I have to tell you, most of them are bad. Some are really bad, like death bad. So when I came across this article over at MSN, I had to link it. Usually after someone has been working out a while and hits a plateau, they start thinking about a quick fix. Well, there is no free lunch. You will always pay one way or the other. Don’t risk your long term health just to look good on the beach for the summer.
Summer is here, and I live in a beach community where the muscle-bound guys get the best girls. I was thinking that if I used steroids to get into shape it would be okay. I’ve heard that most of the bad effects are reversible and the real problems come only with long-term use.
I think I know how Dr. Billy is going to respond, but I’m hoping Leyner has a different point of view.
Please let me know ASAP. I am ready to start pumping iron.
— Eddie Wilson, Bradley Beach, New Jersey
Dear Juiced in Jersey,Well, you’re correct. There’s absolutely no way I’ll support even transient use of anabolic steroids. I would imagine that a simple list of the adverse side effects of steroid use would be enough to dissuade anyone. But I guess infertility, increased cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, liver cancer, fluid retention, infection, rage, aggression, mania, delusions, and suicide aren’t enough. Some argue that many side effects are reversible, but last time I checked, heart attack, stroke, cancer, and suicide were permanent.
Studies have shown that anabolic steroids cause irreversible enlargement of the heart. The risk of premature death among competitive powerlifters using steroids was shown to be 4.6 times higher than normal, and professional wrestlers are said to have a death rate about seven times higher than that of the general U.S. population.
…So, Eddie, let me take one last shot at appealing to your logical side. No, wait, forget that… let me appeal to your vanity, which is where this question came from in the first place. How does breast enlargement, shrunken testicles, male-pattern baldness, severe acne, and cysts sound to you? These are proven side effects—right away, no waiting—that probably won’t be too attractive to the women you meet on the beach. And if you actually care a little bit about your workout, here’s one last thing for you to think about: Steroid use also causes an increased risk for developing tendon ruptures. Sever studies have shown cases of triceps, biceps and bilateral quadriceps ruptures. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasue of speaking to someone who has experienced a bilateral quad rupture, but they say the pain is worse than childbirth, and the recovery time is months. Just keeping you informed so that you don’t turn yourself into a ticking time bomb…
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
Well, today is a pretty easy day. If you did legs yesterday, you are probably pretty tired and maybe sore so all we are doing today is abs. This will actually take less than 30 minutes, so don’t despair!
Start out by doing some light stretching and hanging from the pull up bar to stretch your abs and back. We are going to do a superset like all the other workouts, but for abs, we are only doing 2 exercises.
These are just regular slant board sit-ups. The angle is adjustable so as you get stronger, you can increase the angle. Start with your back on the board, but you don’t need to put you head all the way down- just until the middle of your back is flat. Notice that my hands are on the sides of my head and not behind my head. This is important since most people will pull on their head when doing sit-ups and possibly hurt their neck. Keep your hands on the side of your head. Sit up until your elbows just touch your thighs. Shoot for 15 reps where the last one is all you can do. When you can do more than 15, raise the angle of the slant board to make them harder. as you can see in the picture, my legs are slightly bent and my feet are hooked under the pads. This is the type of sit-up board you want to use since it takes the pressure off of your lower back.
This exercise works your abs with the emphasis on your lowers abs. All you have to do here is turn around on the slant board. You want to do these leg lifts starting with your heels just off the floor and raise them to where your legs are parallel to the floor.
Do 4 super sets of 15 each and you are done. If you find that these exercises are not hard enough, you can substitute Roman chair sit-ups (see pictures below) for the slant board sit-ups. The Roman chair is quite a bit tougher than a slant board, so work your way up slowly.
Posted by: Curt | Under: General Fitness, Health | Add Comment
If you live in one of the major metro areas, it very well could be… Forbes has an article describing the problem- and it isn’t just the normal pollution that’s killing you, it is stress, accidents and particulate pollution from big trucks. Once again, lifestyle choices play into the equation-
What’s really taking a toll on your health is the polluted air you’re breathing, lengthy traffic delays and dodging accidents to and from work. Even as the stress mounts, we put up with it, since most of us can’t afford to or don’t want to live near our offices.
“It’s a lifestyle choice,” says David Rizzo, author of Survive the Drive! How to Beat Freeway Traffic in Southern California. “We put our health second. To have a big house, we’re willing to put up with smog and a big drive. We sacrifice our longevity for short-term gains.”
“Particle pollution kills people, whether they’re breathing it in over a short period or day in and day out for a year,” Nolen says. “It’s not like being hit by a car, but it shortens the lives of people by months to years.”
Even if you live in a city with low pollution levels, don’t kid yourself; that doesn’t necessarily mean your commute is healthy. A 2007 report by the Clean Air Task Force that investigated diesel exhaust levels during commutes in New York, Boston, Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio, documented diesel particle levels four to eight times higher inside commuter cars, buses and trains than in those cities’ ambient outdoor air.
I live in the Atlanta area (rated the #2 worst city), and I can tell you that the pollution here is very bad, especially during the summer months. Fortunately, I work from home so I don’t have to commute each day, but I still have to do a lot of driving. It seems that in Atlanta, every third vehicle is a big truck since Atlanta is a major distribution point for the southeast. Sometimes the diesel smoke is almost choking on the interstates and I don’t see things getting better any time soon. Probably the only real solution is electric vehicles and they are still a decade away.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Supplements, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
MSNBC has a good article on the role of Omega 3 fatty acids and the best foods to eat that contain them in sufficient quantities. I admit, I’m not a fish lover, so this is hard for me. I do like tuna, so that helps but if you are like me, you need to be a little more deliberate in how much you eat.
Omega-3s are polyunsaturated fats found in fish, nuts and green vegetables. They can fend off prostate cancer, protect your eyes from macular degeneration, cut risk of heart disease and fight diabetes. A recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that those who routinely consumed at least 300 grams (about 11 ounces) of fish per week had 29 percent less risk of irregular heartbeat than those who consumed less.
Our bodies produce a small amount of omega-3s, but most of what we need has to come from our diet or supplements. The richest food sources of omega-3s are oily fish such as salmon, tuna, trout, herring and sardines. Fish and shellfish contain eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), the two most potent forms of omega-3 fats.
If you’re not a fish fan, you can get a good supply of another omega-3 fatty acid, alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) from plant foods such as flaxseed, walnuts and canola oil. Unlike EPA and DHA, ALA cannot be made in the body, so it needs to be obtained from food. Not enough dietary ALA can cause scaly skin, poor healing of cuts and bruises and delayed growth.
So, if you are not getting enough Omega 3’s from your current diet, consider adding some of the foods recommended in the article. Here is a site that has a good recipe for grilled salmon.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
If you are like me, sometimes you just want something different than your usual diet but you also want to make sure that it won’t mess up your diet. Well, there are tons of good recipes on the internet and a lot of them are at big corporate sites like Quaker Oats and Mrs Dash.
Since I love oatmeal and pretty much anything made with it, I checked out the recipes at Quaker Oats and found some good stuff. They rank each recipe by sugar content, fat content and heart healthiness. Check it out and you’ll probably find something that looks good to you and is also healthy for you. Here’s one that I particularly like- Oatmeal muffins.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
The New England Journal of Medicine has published a study that shows just how important social connections are in the obesity epidemic. It is a little dry, but lots of good info. Basically, they have shown that eating and weight gain are tied to our family and friends. So if your family and friends are overweight, you are very likely to be overweight too. This shouldn’t surprise us since the same type of behavior is seen with smoking, drug use and a lot of other destructive tendencies. World of Psychology has a good synopsis of the study and its implications.
While of course you can’t blame your friends for being overweight or grappling with eating issues, it does seem that there is a friendship- and close relationship influence that should be taken into account when trying to lose weight. The researchers attribute this finding to a social contagion — that seeing others overweight makes it seem more okay. This makes sense and has a rich history of peer-influence research to back it up.
…Is this result really surprising? People smoked because other people smoked and made it seem both cool and acceptable. People do drugs for much the same reason. People get up and dance when they see others get up and dance. And I’ve never been to a dinner with friends where if one couple was having dessert, the rest didn’t follow with their own dessert orders.
So you can see that as I have been saying for a while now, abnormal has become normal for most people in America. When everyone is overweight, there is no real social pressure to lose weight- or not gain it in the first place. Add to that tendency to live in denial over the health consequences, and you can see the problem we have facing us.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, General Fitness, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
A great 6 pack really makes a huge difference in how you look and feel. Most people think that well defined abs are impossible for the average person and are inherited by the lucky few. Not true- everyone has those muscles. They are just hidden on most people!
MSN has an article from Men’s Health on the 6 greatest ab exercises. A lot of times articles like this are mostly filler, but these are all good ab exercises. My own personal ab routine is different than this (I will post it with pictures Monday) but these are fine if you are looking for some new exercises or are just starting out. Remember, don’t overdo it on your first day, or you will have trouble getting out of bed the next day! Take about 2 weeks to work your way up to the full routine of 3 exercises in a superset. Then you are ready to really go.
Posted by: Curt | Under: General Fitness | Add Comment
This is a really cool story by Jonathan Alter at Newsweek about an amazing man. The author rightly points out how obsessed with superficial and trivial things we are in this country…
It’s a trifecta much bigger and rarer than an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony. Only five people in history have ever won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal: Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel … and Norman Borlaug.
Norman who? Few news organizations covered last week’s Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for Borlaug, which was presided over by President Bush and the leadership of the House and Senate. An elderly agronomist doesn’t make news, even when he is widely credited with saving the lives of 1 billion human beings worldwide, more than one in seven people on the planet.
Borlaug’s success in feeding the world testifies to the difference a single person can make. But the obscurity of a man of such surpassing accomplishment is a reminder of our culture’s surpassing superficiality. Reading Walter Isaacson’s terrific biography of Albert Einstein, I was struck by how famous Einstein was, long before his role in the atom bomb. Great scientists and humanitarians were once heroes and cover boys. No more. For Borlaug, still vital at 93, to win more notice, he would have to make his next trip to Africa in the company of Angelina Jolie.
Born poor in Iowa and turned down at first by the University of Minnesota, Borlaug brought his fingertips and mind together in rural Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s to develop a hybrid called “dwarf wheat” that tripled grain production there. Then, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, he brought agronomists from around the world to northwest Mexico to learn his planting and soil conservation techniques. “They [academic and U.S. government critics] said I was nutty to think that it would work in different soil,” Borlaug told me last week. The resulting “nuttiness” led to what was arguably the greatest humanitarian accomplishment of the 20th century, the so-called Green Revolution. By 1965 he was dodging artillery shells in the Indo-Pakistan War but still managed to increase Indian output sevenfold.
Borlaug, who launched the prestigious World Food Prize, has little patience for current agricultural policy in the developed world. “The claims for these subsidies today by the affluent nations are pretty silly,” he says. So far, Congress isn’t listening. The octopus-like farm bill does little to curb the ridiculous corporate welfare payments to a tiny number of wealthy (and often absentee) “farmers” who get more than $1 million a year each for subsidized commodities that make our children obese. (Did you ever wonder why junk food is cheaper than nutritious food? Because it’s taxpayer-funded).
That last statement is worth thinking about in light of out current weight and obesity problem. If we can’t get the big food companies to change the way they produce and market food, I’m not sure we will ever be able to change the way Americans eat. I’m wondering how long it will take until the average life expectancy actually starts to decline after decades of increasing…
Posted by: Curt | Under: Children/fit, General Fitness, Youth/fit | Add Comment
This is a really interesting trend- professional training for kids. Like just about everything in our culture, youth and children’s sports are incredibly competitive. So the market has adjusted and pro training facilities have popped up to gobble up the cash that parents are willing to spend to make their kids the best. I have mixed emotions about this. One the one hand, it is great that kids are taking sports seriously and willing to put the time into being really good at something. On the other hand, it really favors kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. The world has never been a fair place, but something about this just bugs me… From the NY Times linked over at MPF.
BRACE yourselves, parents. Besides shuttling the kids to cello lessons, algebra tutoring, soccer matches and basketball practice, there’s one more activity emerging to give prepubescent go-getters a leg up these days: sports performance training.
Because many team coaches don’t have the time or the expertise in exercise science to make their troops faster and stronger, specialty programs — part gym, part pro-training camp — have stepped in to fill the need. For roughly $35 a session, they provide rigorous conditioning for any aspiring child, regardless of ability, using the kinds of practices that have set apart athletes like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters.
Velocity, at more than 75 locations, had almost 47,000 children participate in 2006, four times the enrollment in 2004. Athletic Republic, until recently known as Frappier Acceleration Sports Training, worked with roughly 36,000 children last year, up from 27,000 in 2005. CATZ, a chain in four states, trained 6,500 youngsters for the year ending June 2007, up 150 percent from the same period in 2006.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, General Fitness, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit | Add Comment
My sister had to have disc surgery to repair one of her cervical discs last year and I was surprised to find out just how many people have similar problems. This article from ScienceDaily explains a new procedure using an artificial disc that significantly reduces recovery time and helps maintain mobility. Very cool stuff. It is amazing how many people have this problem and don’t even know it-
The neck and arm pain caused by degenerative cervical (neck) disc disease may be eliminated by replacing the problem disc with a metal-on-metal artificial disc, said Loyola University Health System neurological surgeon Dr. Russ P. Nockels…
It is estimated that more than half of people ages 40 and older have cervical disc disease, characterized by degenerative changes in the upper spine. Cervical discs are located between the seven vertebrae of the neck…
The new artificial disc, placed through an incision at the front of the neck, is designed to alleviate neck pain and other ailments associated with disc herniations, spinal arthritis and other spine degenerative conditions. The disc consists of a stainless-steel ball and trough that functions as a joint. It is attached to the vertebrae with screws. The components are designed to act as a pivot point, which may allow the spine to move more naturally.
Loyola was one of 20 centers nationwide evaluating the device in a study monitored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“The new device eliminates the need for transplanted human bone, which is required with spinal fusion,” said Nockels. “In addition, it permits more motion of the neck. This reduces the likelihood of stress on the surrounding vertebrae, which could lead to further degeneration in adjacent discs.
If you have any of these symptoms, you really should see your doctor about it since it can be a crippling condition.
