1/3 over

Sunday is May 1st. One third of 2011 is over. How is it going so far? If you vowed to lose 30 lbs. this year, you should be down 10 by now, correct? The end of May marks the unofficial start of summer - Memorial day. Soon you will be regularly wearing shorts and tank tops, no more long pants and sweatshirts/sweaters. I hope you have been working hard on your fitness goals.

And if you haven't, now is the time to start!

Exercise grossly underprescribed for chronic neck pain: Duke, UNC researchers

Exercise grossly underprescribed for chronic neck pain: Duke, UNC researchers

Common hypertension drugs can raise blood pressure in certain patients

ScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2010) — Commonly prescribed drugs used to lower blood pressure can actually have the opposite effect -- raising blood pressure in a statistically significant percentage of patients. A new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University suggests that doctors could avoid this problem -- and select drugs most suitable for their patients -- by measuring blood levels of the enzyme renin through a blood test that is becoming more widely available.

The study appears in the online edition of the American Journal of Hypertension.

"Our findings suggest that physicians should use renin levels to predict the most appropriate first drug for treating patients with hypertension," says lead author Michael Alderman, M.D., professor of epidemiology & population health and of medicine at Einstein. "This would increase the likelihood of achieving blood pressure control and reduce the need for patients to take additional antihypertensive medications."

OK, another reason to avoid drugs and just eat right and move more.

Motivation

Motivation: The choice between two possible outcomes.

That seems over-simplified. But is it?

Yummy dessert vs. no yummy dessert

Yummy dessert: short-term win
No yummy dessert: long-term win

What is your motivation?

Free Statins???

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100812083608.htm

"Fast food outlets could provide statin drugs free of charge so that customers can neutralise the heart disease dangers of fatty food, researchers at Imperial College London suggest in a new study."

Really???? How about just making better choices. Why are we always looking for the easy way out?

This sounds almost as dumb as wearing "toning sneakers." But that is another topic alltogther

Skip Breakfast - Lose Fat?!?!?!

Skip Breakfast before exercise to burn more fat- this according to a recent article in USA Today. The article states that European researchers found that cyclists that trained without eating burned more fat than those who did eat. The higher fat burning was due to having less carbohydrate reserve.

In a similar study, researchers found that people that didn’t eat had a decline in performance during intense activity. So we see from these studies that if you don’t eat before exercise you will burn a higher proportion of fat to carbs but you also show a decline in exercise performance.

Which begs the question; is it better to burn a higher percentage of fat or train harder?

In one study they did a comparison between 20 weeks of steady state cardio and 15 weeks of interval training (notice the 5 week difference). What was found was that although the interval group burned fewer calories during training, they also burned 9 times the subcutaneous fat as the steady state group.

Exercisers have to realize that their training response shouldn’t be just the one hour session but that what ultimately burns fat is the effect on the metabolism the other 23 hours of the day.

So what do we do? By looking at these studies if you are going to do some light cardiovascular exercise go ahead and do it on an empty stomach (keeping in mind any medical conditions that may contraindicate this). But if you plan on training with any intensity at all you are much better off having something in your system. The intensity of your exercise will always determine your results. Eating insures that you will have adequate intensity and we wont find you passed at somewhere with low blood sugar.

By the way, none of this crap matters if your nutrition strategy includes Diet Coke with Bacon!

Most internet-based sports medicine information is incorrect or incomplete: study

The internet can be a good thing if you have an injury, sometimes.....
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-07/aaoo-c070210.php