Increase your flexibility and improve your life
(RealSimple.com) — You’ve managed to make it to spinning class (for the second time this week!), but as soon as the instructor starts the cooldown, you head for the door. Hold it right there. Turns out, stretching is just as important as getting on the bike in the first place.
Although countless studies have shown how beneficial exercise is for your body and mind (it may do everything from reducing the risk of some cancers to helping improve memory), less attention has been paid to flexibility.
But doctors and physical therapists agree that it’s a vital part of keeping your body fit and able. “Flexibility is the third pillar of fitness, next to cardiovascular conditioning and strength training,” says David Geier, the director of sports medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston, and a spokesperson for the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine.
In fact, flexibility can help your body reach its optimum fitness level, may play a role in injury prevention, and can even contribute to staving off conditions like arthritis and more serious illnesses.
Here’s how it works: When you stretch a muscle, you lengthen the tendons, or muscle fibers, that attach it to the bone. “The longer these fibers are, the more you can increase the muscle in size when you do your strength training,” says Geier. That means that a more flexible muscle has the potential to become a stronger muscle, too.
In turn, building strong muscle fibers may boost your metabolism and your fitness level. Flexible muscles also make everyday activities easier on your body and may decrease your risk of certain injuries.
Common behaviors, such as hunching over the computer, can shorten some muscles. That, along with the natural loss of muscle elasticity that occurs with aging, can set you up so any quick or awkward motion (lunging to catch a glass before it teeters off the table, for example) could stretch your muscles beyond their limit, resulting in a strain or a tear.
“Even if you’re aerobically fit, it helps to be limber, too, so your body can easily adapt to physical stressors,” says Margot Miller, a physical therapist in Duluth, Minnesota, and a spokesperson for the American Physical Therapy Association.
What’s more, stretching may improve your circulation, increasing blood flow to your muscles. And having good circulation can help protect you against a host of illnesses, from diabetes to kidney disease.
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Bad hot flashes? Try dropping a few pounds
(Reuters Health) – Overweight women who suffer from bothersome hot flashes may find some relief by losing some weight, hints a new study published today.
In the study, women who participated in a program that encouraged them to exercise more and eat less improved their hot flashes more that a group with little weight-loss coaching.
“We’re pretty excited to have this evidence that … women who lose weight can improve their symptoms,” study chief Dr. Alison Huang of the University of California, San Francisco, told Reuters Health.
At least 2 out of 3 women in the United States suffer from hot flashes at some point during menopause, and studies have shown that heavier women get more severe and more frequent hot flashes, Huang and colleagues note in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Huang and her colleagues followed a group of 338 overweight and obese women who were participating in a study for women with incontinence – which is not related to menopause symptoms, Huang said, and so shouldn’t have affected the results.
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Recalibrated Formula Eases Women’s Workouts
If you are a woman who exercises, get ready to do some math.
Last week, researchers at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago announced a new formula for calculating a woman’s maximum heart rate, a measure commonly used by athletes to pace themselves and monitor their progress. In a study of nearly 5,500 healthy women, scientists discovered that a decades-old formula for calculating heart rate is largely inaccurate for women, resulting in a number that is too high.
The news may be a vindication to many women who have struggled to keep up with lofty target heart rates espoused by personal trainers and programmed into treadmill displays.
The commonly used formula subtracts a person’s age from 220. But based on the data collected in the Chicago study, the right formula for calculating a woman’s maximum heart rate is a little more complicated: 206 minus 88 percent of a woman’s age.
The findings are significant because many runners, cyclists and other exercisers obsessively monitor their heart rates by taking their pulse and rely on the old formula to gauge the intensity of the workout. The typical goal is to stay within 65 to 85 percent of the estimated maximum heart rate, depending on whether the athlete is trying to build aerobic capacity or increase endurance.
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Study: Fat-Free Milk Helps Women after Workout
(WebMD) Women who do weight-lifting exercise routines may be better off drinking two large glasses of milk than sugar-based energy drinks after workout regimens, a new study shows.
McMaster University researchers in Canada report they found that women who drank two large glasses of milk after weight-lifting exercises gained more muscle and lost more fat than women who drank sugar-based energy drinks.
The finding is published in the June issue of Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise.
“Resistance training is not a typical choice of exercise for women, but the health benefits of resistance training are enormous,” Stuart M. Phillips, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, said in a news release. “It boosts strength, bone, muscular and metabolic health in a way that other types of exercise cannot.”
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