Posted by: Curt | Under: General Fitness | Add Comment
It is estimated that up to 75% of Americans have a magnesium deficiency and don’t know it. This is mainly caused by poor diet since most vitamins and minerals get stripped out of processed and fast foods- the main staple of Americans. There are several conditions that show themselves in magnesium deficient people including muscle twitches, headaches and high blood pressure. While magnesium can’t take care of severe blood pressure problems, it can definitely help. Since many people have high blood pressure and don’t even know it, getting more magnesium is simple, cheap insurance-although definitely not a replacement for proper screening and treatment. Still, with most people not getting even close to enough magnesium, it is safe to recommend that everyone take a supplement with at least 50% of the US RDA. Since it is cheap and easy to find even in the grocery store, pick some up and add it to your other supplements.
I Just Want to Get Toned- Not Big
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
This is something you hear from women all the time- and sometimes from men. The problem is that most people are already big (as in fat) and they need an exercise and diet plan to lose fat and gain muscle. For the most part, you are not going to get “big” by accident. It just doesn’t happen. Women don’t have the right hormones to gain lots of muscle mass easily and even men need to work very hard to gain the kind of muscle mass that would qualify them for a cover shot on Muscle and Fitness. So don’t worry about getting big by accident; worry about not making any progress because you won’t train hard enough to make a difference.
There is a good post over at Women’s diet and fitness that helps explain this.You really do need to push yourself or you will not make much progress and become disillusioned very quickly.
First off, getting “toned” really just means increasing muscle and decreasing fat to allow that muscle to show a bit more. And sure… lifting light weights for high reps is a decent workout program… but not for getting toned. It is best for increasing your endurance and burning calories.
Let’s dispute the first part of the post: women just don’t have the body or the hormones required to get all jacked up like a man. Those women you see on magazines or bodybuilding shows are not natural and the chances of you getting that big is very very slim.
Ok, so you want to get “toned” and you want to get slim… now what? Lift weight! Real weight, don’t be afraid to move up on the barbell rack and really push yourself. Instead of lifting light weights for 15-20 reps, aim for 6-10 reps but lift heavy enough so you can’t get past the 10th.
The Importance of Strategies for Training
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
Cosgrove has a good post on his blog about the importance of strategies for training and weight loss. This is actually one of the most important elements of successful training. If you don’t have a strategy and plan, you are doomed to failure just like businesses and organizations are. You can get by for a little while on natural ability and good luck, but eventually those won’t be enough and other forces will exert themselves and bring you down. Most everyone has experienced this and yet they think that somehow they can just “willpower” themselves to success. It almost never happens- not for pro athletes and not for you. If you don’t have a strategy for getting to the gym every day by scheduling it as a part of your daily routine, you won’t last very long. If you don’t have a strategy for controlling your diet, you will find yourself eating all the wrong things because your willpower is simply not enough. That is why the military spends most of their time training and developing strategies. When the fight starts, you better have a strategy!
…
So the key thing is to develop strategies to handle this. The first step is recognizing that there is an issue that isn’t optimal for you. Step two is to develop strategies to improve that situation or issue…
I was mentioning this to my friend Valerie Waters (- superstar trainer and creator of the rapid results Red Carpet Ready physique transformation program) recently – and she agreed that strategies were the key — she agreed that strategies were a key part of her clients success and added:
“Strategy even trumps willpower. Studies show that willpower is actually in limited supply. Meaning, resist the cookie now, it might be hard to resist it later. Therefore, I believe it is more important to build in good strategies. For example, if you eat ice cream every night, rather than trying to “be good” and resist it, simply remove it from the house. If you consistently visit the vending machine because you don’t have time to go to lunch, your strategy would be to pack your lunch the night before and bring it with you. Anyway, you get the point.”
What situations cause you to miss meals, or make less than optimal choices? What situations cause you to miss workouts? Start recognizing these limitations and develop strategies to allow you to succeed.
Aging, Quickness and Reaction Time
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, General Fitness, Seniors/fit, Sports | Add Comment
I think we all realize that as we get older, we slow down- in several different ways. But the reasons behind that have not been obvious. That is changing with new research like the study cited below. I can attest to the effects of this personally since I see my reaction time slowing in everything from video games to riding my motorcycle. I do think however, that the more active we stay as we age and the more activities we do that require quickness, the less we lose.
Scientists asked 72 men, ranging in age from 23 to 80, to tap their index fingers as fast as they could for 10 seconds. The researchers also did brain scans to measure in each subject the amount of myelin — a fatty sheath of insulation that coats nerve axons and allows for signaling bursts in our brains.
Both the tapping speed and the amount of myelin was found to decline “with an accelerating trajectory” after age 39.
Study leader George Bartzokis, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, called the results “pretty striking” and said: “That may well be why, besides achy joints and arthritis, even the fittest athletes retire and all older people move slower than they did when they were younger.”
The myelination of brain circuits was known to peak in middle age. Bartzokis and others have long argued that brain aging might be primarily related to the myelin breakdown.
Learning more about this decline in fine-motor-skills speed offers some hope for treating the aging brain.
Torn Cartilage and Knee Surgery
Posted by: Curt | Under: General Fitness | Add Comment
Dr. Minkin has a post over on his blog that pretty much blows the “common wisdom” about torn cartilage and knee surgery right out of the water. Basically, the new research shows that surgery to trim and remove torn cartilage is no more effective than doing nothing. I know so many people who have had knee surgery for torn cartilage and didn’t really think it helped much. Now we know why. It is crazy that it would take this long for researchers to discover this, but the problem with common wisdom is that is is generally accepted without much scrutiny. Note his advice to people with torn cartilage to not do activities and sports that require running and jumping. That doesn’t leave too many sports left – except fantasy football.
A team of researchers at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario have shown that arthroscopic removal of loose cartilage and trimming of knee cartilage is no better than doing no surgery at all (NEJM, September 11, 2008). The only other study that also used sham surgery was done at Baylor Medical School and showed the same results (New England Journal of Medicine 2002;347:81-8). The procedure is done when a surgeon inserts small tubes through the skin into the knee joint and trims the edges of cartilage and removes loose pieces of cartilage from the joint.
…If you hurt your knee and the pain persists, your doctor will probably order an MRI. If it shows that you have a crack in your cartilage, you should never run or jump again. When you run, the force of your foot striking the ground is transmitted up to your knee and can extend the existing cracks. Running 6-minute miles exerts a force exceeding three times body weight. Landing from a jump exerts even greater force on your knee joint. You can usually ride a bike safely because you pedal in a smooth rotary motion that exerts little force on your knee joint. Swimming is also usually safe for your knees.
Posted by: Curt | Under: General Fitness | Add Comment
Good article from Men’s Health over at MSNBC. Guess what guys (and girls)- there are no free lunches. You always pay… somehow, somewhere. All the guys I know at the gyms I have worked out at who used steroids eventually had health problems- and 2 of them are dead. Be smart, train hard, eat right and get enough rest and you will make gains.
Now, six years and about 12 cycles later, I weigh a solid 240 pounds, although I diet down to 210 when I enter bodybuilding competitions. My arms are up to 19 inches, and, although injuries have kept my strength from improving dramatically, I’m finally close to the look I always wanted.
That muscle came at a price. I’ve spent close to $30,000 on steroids and now stay on them at least two-thirds of the year. I have masses of scar tissue in my glutes from hundreds of injections. People I meet are intimidated, and some automatically assume I’m a jerk, which I’m not. But that’s all trivial compared with this: A few months ago, after a cycle in which I had used a lot of oral steroids to prepare for a contest, a blood test showed liver damage comparable to that of a hepatitis patient.
High vs Low Intensity Training for Fat Loss
Posted by: Curt | Under: General Fitness | Add Comment
Alwyn Cosgrove has an interesting post on his blog about a new study that compares high and low intensity exercise for fat loss. As you ought to know by now, high intensity wins, but the exact reasons are unclear except for the fact that we know that higher intensity exercise changes your metabolism more dramatically that low intensity. While walking on a treadmill for 1/2 hour may help some people who are extremely out of shape (which actually is most people) it does not kick the body into fat burning mode like high intensity training does. Something is better than nothing, but if you are going to spend an hour at the gym, you might as well get all you can from it.
This is where the results are interesting. Despite burning the exact same amount of calories over the sixteen weeks – the low intensity group did not see any changes in abdominal fat. The exercise program did not do anything. However the high intensity group saw a significant reduction in abdominal fat.
Over 50% of Americans Have Blood Pressure Problems
Posted by: Curt | Under: General Fitness | Add Comment
New data (well, not so new since it only goes up to 2004) shows that only 41% of adult Americans have normal blood pressure according to this article. With this being almost 2009, I am willing to bet that the numbers are far worse than that. Those are scary statistics even though a lot of headway has been made in getting people to monitor and treat their blood pressure. The problem of course goes back to the usual suspects- lack of exercise and poor diet leading to obesity and weight problems. How you get people to do something about this instead of asking the Dr. for a pill is a problem yet to be solved…
High blood pressure can lead to stroke, heart attack, heart failure or kidney failure. It is sometimes called the “silent killer” because it has no symptoms, and many people have it for years without knowing it.
Data spanning six years through 2004 showed that 29 percent of U.S. adults had high blood pressure, compared to 24 percent in the six-year period ending in 1994, the researchers said.
Another 30 percent of Americans in the most recent period had a condition called prehypertension with slightly elevated blood pressure levels that often worsens into full-fledged high blood pressure, the researchers said.
That means that only 41 percent of Americans had normal blood pressure levels, the researchers said.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Spiritual/Emotional, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
I saw this over at MSNBC and thought that someone could use the info and inspiration in their weight loss battle. The illustrations at the end about portion size and calorie count should be an eye opener for most Americans who eat huge portions and think that it is normal. It is not normal or healthy.
Until you are very experienced at knowing what and how much you can eat from experience, you really need to measure and count your calories because we always underestimate how much we are eating. Its a law like Murphy’s Law except it says “You are always eating more than you think you are!”
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Supplements, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
Reuters has an interesting article about the connection between obesity and diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, etc. The researchers speculate that overeating and obesity trigger an auto-immune type reaction in the body. It has long been know that obesity causes chronic inflammation in the body which is particularly damaging to the heart and other organs.
WASHINGTON – Overeating makes the brain go haywire, prompting a cascade of damage that may cause diabetes, heart disease and other ills, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.
Eating too much appears to activate a usually dormant immune system pathway in the brain, sending out immune cells to attack and destroy invaders that are not there, Dongsheng Cai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found.
The finding, reported in the journal Cell, could help explain why obesity causes so many different diseases. It might also offer a way to prevent obesity itself.
So what do you do? The obvious answer is to lose weight and control your diet. But adding 30 minutes/day of exercise will make a huge difference as well. Doing both together will put you on the road to health and longevity.
