Fitness Bootcamps Arizona

In a study published in ,the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise the scientific journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, Australian researchers found that exercise helps the knee joint. Having reviewed 28 studies (about 10,000 participants) regarding knee health and its relation to exercise, researchers found the results conflicting. So they dissected the studies to analyze the effects on specific portions of the knees.

The researchers found that exercise does appear to promote the growth of osteophytes, or bony spurs, in the knee joint. But in the absence of accompanying cartilage damage, the researchers suggest, those spurs may simply be the body’s healthy response to ongoing mechanical stimulation from physical activity, not evidence of disease.

They further found that exercise did not narrow the joint space where knee cartilage is housed. Moreover, physical activity actually was associated with increased cartilage volume and fewer defects in the cartilage itself.

All this points put together led researchers to the conclusion that exercise does, in effect, help keep the knees healthy.

That is not to suggest that poor form will not cause pain. If you do suffer from knee issues, seek out the advice and instruction of a skilled professional. But now it’s tough to avoid exercise because you think it hurts your knees. Get out there and get stronger.

Downing a soda a day may bring the doctor your way, new evidence suggests.

Soda and other sweetened beverages like fruit drinks are associated with higher blood pressure levels in adults, a new study in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association finds.

In addition, those who consumed more than one soda/sugary drink on a daily basis took in nearly 400 more calories per day and had higher body mass indexes (BMIs) compared to those who drank less, according to the findings. “People who drink a lot of sugar-sweetened beverages appear to have less healthy diets,” explains Ian Brown, Ph.D., research associate at Imperial College London in an AHA Press release  about the study. “They are consuming empty calories without the nutritional benefits of real food. They consume less potassium, magnesium and calcium.”

Opting for diet soda may not be a healthier option. While the study didn’t find a high blood pressure link in diet soda drinkers, separate research presented this month showed daily diet soda drinkers had a 61 percent higher risk of vascular events (like stroke) than soda abstainers.

So Bottom Line — Soda is BAD !!!!!!!!

Myth 1: Temperature of foods or beverages does not matter.

Fact 1: The actual temperature of a food or beverage that you eat or drink can have a direct impact on how many extra calories your body burns throughout the day. Think of this as using what we eat or drink to force the body to be more inefficient at metabolizing food or beverages. Let me explain this concept to you this way: the body normally maintains a temperature homeostasis (around 98.7 degrees Farenheit). When we eat or drink foods/beverages that greatly vary from our normal temperature, the body must either “heat up” the item or “cool it down” while it travels from your mouth, through your esophagus and into your stomach. If we did not have this ability, every time you drank hot chocolate or ice cream, you would burn or freeze your upper GI tract and this clearly does not happen.

Myth 2: As long as you eat less than what you need, it does not matter what you eat.

Fact 2: The reality is that what you eat matters. However, there are many nutritionists and physiologists who only believe that as long as you eat less than what you need or burn more calories than you ingest, weight loss will result. Yes that is true, when you are in calorie deficit, you will lose weight over time. However, what you eat directly affects the type of weight loss that you can experience. For more information in this area, the Nutrition & Metabolism Society has great resources.

Myth 3: Eating spicy foods equals extra calories burned.

Fact 3: As much as when we eat a spicy pepper and it makes our insides burn, we may be burning “dinner” calories. Yes, there is some truth to the ability of hot peppers (capsaicin is the active ingredient) to help a person burn a few extra calories, but there is a catch. It seems that if you are obese or overweight as compared to being within normal healthy weight ranges, that you will not get the metabolic benefit of the spice. Therefore, for “normal” weight people, eating spicy foods helps maintain normal weight, but unfortunately if you are overweight/obese, you miss out on this benefit.
Myth 4: Fad diets work for permanent weight loss.

Fact 4: Fad diets are not the best way to lose weight and keep it off. Fad diets often promise quick weight loss or tell you to cut certain foods out of your diet. Diets that are NOT fads, no matter what anyone tells you include Atkins for Life, The Zone, Volumetrics, etc. Examples of fad diets may include the grapefruit diet, the peanut butter diet and so on. You may lose weight at first on one of these diets, but diets that strictly limit calories or food choices are hard to follow.

Myth 5: Avoiding high-glycemic foods aids in weight loss.

Fact 5: High-glycemic foods are those that typically affect blood sugar in a rapid way. That can be a double-edge sword. Making your blood sugar rise can also lead to a greater amount of triglycerides being formed and ultimately deposited in your body as fat tissue (added body fat). Further, there is a chance that over time, if you are overweight or obese, eating a high “GI” diet can worsen your condition and affect insulin regulation. However, the one time that you want to utilize high-glycemic foods is in the anabolic window for post-workout nutrition. The post-workout shake can contain high-GI carbs, along with protein for recovery. Otherwise, these are not foods for your diet mainstay.

In a Presentation to the Association of Orthopedic Surgeons, reported that stretching prior to running did not help to prevent running related injuries. Chalk it up to another bold step the medial community is taking in catching up with the fitness community. Doctors, puleeese…….
In a three-month randomized trial, self-reported injury rates that prevented running for more than three days were 16% both among the 600 participants who stretched before starting their regular runs and in the 798 who were told not to stretch.
Edward McDevitt, MD, a sports medicine specialist in Arnold, Md., said that that it’s hard to imagine that stretching wouldn’t be beneficial. “I don’t have to believe every study I read,” he joked. McDevitt, who called himself an advocate of stretching, said he couldn’t find fault with the new study’s methodology but nevertheless was reluctant to accept the results. But he said the findings suggested that more research is warranted.
I’m not a doctor, just a  trainer, but here’s how it works: if you want your body to be prepared for exercise, you must warm the body up and send it a message that you’re about to start exercising. Stretching is great for releasing tensions and allowing the free flow of blood, fluid and nutrients throughout the body. But if you are about to run, ya gotta get those muscles fired up to work. Period.

Endurance events such as road cycling, long-distance swimming, marathon, triathlon, and 10K run all require a high level of endurance and place a relatively low premium on anaerobic power. These events force competitors to perform at the margin of their maximal aerobic capabilities over long distances. As training, nutrition, and selection of athletes in endurance sports improve, records continue to fall. This suggests that doing the right things can and will result in moving the known envelope of speed in endurance events. The winner of the marathon at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996 won with an average running pace of slightly under a 5-minute mile, a feat that is not commonly achieved. Despite this incredible speed, the athlete had to maintain this pace at a level that allowed a sufficient oxygen uptake to sustain, primarily, aerobic muscular metabolism. That is, the majority of all muscular work took place with fuel being burned in the presence of oxygen. This is an efficient means of obtaining energy, allowing the athlete to sustain muscular work for long periods of time.

Aerobic training does some wonderful things to the athlete’s ability to use oxygen. The intermediary (type IIa) fibers, which tend to behave more like fast-twitch (power) fibers than slow-twitch (endurance) fibers, dramatically increase in mitochondrial content and the in enzymes involved in oxidative metabolism. The training impact on oxygen usage is well known. In studies looking at blood lactate concentration, trained athletes are far more capable of tolerating high levels of blood lactate than are untrained subjects doing the same intensity of work. The conversion of the behavior of the intermediary fibers results in an improvement in the athlete’s aerobic endurance. The increased ability to use oxygen results in an improvement in the ability to burn fat as a primary fuel, reducing the reliance on carbohydrates.

Since even the leanest athletes have a great deal of energy stored as fat, this increased ability to burn fat dramatically improves endurance. However, since carbohydrate is needed for the complete combustion of fat, carbohydrate is still the limiting energy source for endurance work because athletes have relatively low carbohydrate stores. This is clearly demonstrated by findings that athletes consuming a high-fat diet have a maximal endurance time of 57 minutes; on a normal mixed diet their endurance rises to 114 minutes; and on a high-carbohydrate diet, their maximal endurance rises to 167 minutes.