:: Posted by nousdefions on 11-22-2011
“Attitudes are more important than facts”… Menninger
To help combat breast cancer, new research supports the concept that living a lifestyle which includes exercising may offer protection against developing breast cancer and recurrence for those who’ve survived.
The evidence indicating this protection, pre- or post-cancer event, states it may be on par with chemotherapy and even the newer hormonal treatments. Along with protection, a structured exercise program has been shown to improve the physical functioning of women with stages I and II breast cancer.
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:: Posted by nousdefions on 11-11-2011
“The play’s the thing”…Shakespeare
U.S. health organizations are concerned that our country is in a middle of a diabetes epidemic. This epidemic, experts worry, is not only a health issue it’s also an economic issue impacting our healthcare system. Complimenting the diabetes epidemic is the rise of obesity.
The catch is that as levels of obesity increase, so do cases of diabetes. On a optimistic note, both these threats can be contained with a little knowledge, discipline and old-fashioned muscle power.
What is diabetes? Diabetes is a group of disorders involving elevated blood sugar levels and insulin production. Insulin is a storage hormone vital to regulating cell metabolism.
There are two main types of diabetes; Type 1 begins in childhood, accounts for 5 percent of the all cases and requires treatments of insulin for life. To date, type one is not curable. Type 2 accounts for 90 to 95 percent of all cases, rarely requires insulin treatments and in many cases is preventable and reversible. It’s also the one trigged directly by obesity and physical inactivity.
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:: Posted by nousdefions on 10-18-2011
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it”…Thomas Jefferson
Every 60 seconds someone dies from an event related to heart disease. Those that survive will find themselves propelled into a world of intrusive surgeries and risky medications with questionable side-effects.
In the United States, heart disease is the leading cause of death. It is also the leading cause of death for women. Its toll as a killer of women is greater than breast cancer, ovarian, lung and colon cancers combined. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) approximately 61 million people in our country suffer from heart disease. The CDC also reports that health care costs in 2010 for heart disease totaled approximately $316.4 billion. This total includes the cost of health care services, medications and lost productivity.
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:: Posted by nousdefions on 08-04-2011
“What you see is what you get”…. Flip Wilson
THE FORWARD to MY NEW BOOK! Keeping Baby Boomers in The Game. A No-Nonsense Approach to Lifting Weights For Men Over 50. Forward Written by Dr. Erwin – Get Em While They’re HOT-
In the early 60s, industrial psychologist Victor Vroom upended the field of motivational psychology with his Expectancy Theory. Vroom postulated that the effort someone would expend at work (motivation) was the product of attainability times desirability, that is M = A x D. Therefore goals have to be attainable as well as desirable for motivation to be up there.
Low or zero attainability would mean that motivation would be nonexistent. One of the most vexing fitness problems for us baby boomers (yup, I was born in 1948 and less than a mile from the second McDonald’s built in this country in suburban Chicago) is that first we grew up with the physique images of Charles Atlas in our heads. Then in our middling years we’ve been cluster bombed by the sleek youth culture where six-pack abdominals reign supreme on both sides of the sexual fence.
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:: Posted by nousdefions on 06-02-2011
“All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming it”….Helen Keller
As we age, there is a significant decline in our neuromuscular reaction times, both simple and complex. Neuromuscular reaction time is the processing time it takes the body to react to a stimulus.
The condition of declining reaction time is directly related to the aging of the central nervous system (CNS), which consist of the brain and the spinal cord. One reason why this area of deteriorating function is so important, is that it plays a key role in a persons inability to prevent a fall. Simple, as you get older and you stumble, your body can’t react fast and you fall. Sometimes, with serious consequences. It’s been shown that well over 40% of older Americans fall each year, resulting in a vast array of injuries. Read the rest of this entry »
:: Posted by nousdefions on 05-17-2011
“Desire creates the power”……Raymond Hollingwell
Hey….. the mechanism of a man’s and woman’s libido is found in the androgens, or the “sex steroids”. In men these include dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) which is a building block for other hormones. Another is testosterone which, promotes male sex characteristics, controls muscle size, decreases body fat and is a key for a man’s sex drive.
In women, DHEA is also a building block for the female hormone estrogen which promotes females sex characteristics, controls the menstrual cycle, increases fat deposits and is the key for a woman’s sex drive.
There is no exclusively male or female hormones. The distinction comes from the actual concentration of these hormones. Both genders share some of the same sex hormones, but in varying amounts. In a women, the ovaries secrete small amounts of testosterone. In a man, testosterone can be converted to estrogen in the peripheral tissues. And, when it comes to increasing you sex drive, this fact plays a role.
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:: Posted by nousdefions on 04-12-2011
“There is nothing left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh”….. Zen Teaching
A) I recently ran into a friend of mine that I haven’t seen in sometime. Back in the day, I designed her fitness training program. In the years that followed, she decided to become a personal fitness trainer.
She was telling me that several months ago, she took an instructors position at a very large gym on the Jersey shore. She didn’t last that long. It wasn’t that she didn’t know her shit, she did. It was that the head trainer told her, “Make sure you change things every time you work with a client. That way you confuse them so they don’t know what to do on their own and they become dependent on you. That‘s how we make money.” That’s the state of personal training you’ll find in a lot of gyms in Jersey.
B) Not All Protein Bars Live Up to Their Good-For-You Image.
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:: Posted by nousdefions on 03-14-2011
“Everybody Lives by Selling Something”……Robert Louis Stevenson
It’s that time of year when many men and women will be heading to the gym (beach season). And, if it’s like every year in past memory, getting on an exercise program tops that list. If it doesn’t, then it should. That’s because it’s been shown that regular exercise improves almost every area of a person’s physiological functions regardless of age. These functions include; physique, mobility, posture, joint health, heart health, bone health, mental functions, sexuality and even social abilities. But can exercise be dangerous? Read the rest of this entry »
:: Posted by nousdefions on 02-26-2011
“Who has no faults? To err and yet be able to correct it is best of all”…..Yuanwu
As people approach their mid-thirties, some much earlier, there is a noticeable increase in body weight. This increase continues until they reach their late 60s. Most of this weight gain is an increase in plain old stored body fat.
Also during this same time period, lean muscle mass is decreasing at a disturbing rate. On average when people reach their late 60s, their total body mass begins to decrease, but there is an acceleration in gaining substantial body fat. While diet plays a role, the dichotomy of losing lean body mass but gaining body fat can be explained by disuse atrophy and the de-mineralization of the skeleton.
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:: Posted by nousdefions on 02-05-2011
“The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart”……Rumi
After a good training session, there are several post workout procedures you can use to help accelerate the body’s recovery process. These procedures aid in the removal of intercellular waste products, which can accumulate during a workout. It’s the retention of these naturally occurring cellular by-products that must be avoided, if full recovery from training is to be attained.
The first procedure is “hydrotherapy”. This means using water as a tool for speeding recovery. There are many forms of hydrotherapy. Whirlpool‘s, Jacuzzi’s, sauna’s and steambath’s all help. A hot shower is also an effective method to relax the muscles and stimulate the body’s recovery systems. A hot shower may be taken anytime, but they are particularly useful just before bed-time because they can induce deep sleep.
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