Have you ever been in the midst of an exercise, say squat jumps, and suddenly felt a cramp in your calf muscle that forced you to grab your aching leg? Exercise cramps are painful, and they can interfere with or cut short a good workout, although they usually resolve fairly quickly. Muscle cramps brought on by exercise are common and most people have had one at one time or other. Although the exact cause isn’t clear, one theory is that muscle … [Read more...]
5 Things to Consider Before Taking a Supplement
Around 77% of Americans take one or more nutritional supplements, and the number of people popping supplements is on the rise. Some of the most popular are supplements for heart and immune health. Supplement taking is highest in middle-aged men and women. But not everyone who takes one or more supplements does it for the right reasons. Some buy a new supplement because a friend recommended it, or because they saw a catchy ad that pointed out its … [Read more...]
Is Stretching More Effective Than Walking for Lowering Blood Pressure?
For heart health and longevity, blood pressure matters! A study published in the journal Hypertension found that women and men with normal blood pressure had a total life expectancy 4.9 and 5.1 years longer relative to those with hypertension. Plus, controlling blood pressure and keeping it in a healthy range reduces the risk of heart attacks, stroke, kidney failure, aneurysms, dementia, and visual loss due to retinal damage. Fortunately, … [Read more...]
5 Things You Should Know About Bone Spurs
What are those strange things called bone spurs that show up on an x-ray? Also known as osteophytes, these bony protuberances are most likely to appear after the age of 60. Bone spurs are areas where the bone overgrows along the edge of a joint. Should you be concerned if you have them? You can develop bone spurs in a number of places, including your heels, spine, hips, knees, toes, and hands. Yet there are a lot of misconceptions about bone … [Read more...]
Mediterranean Diet and Atherosclerosis: Why the Mediterranean Diet is the Best Choice for Heart Health
The word “diet” has a negative connotation. In fact, it’s a word you might want to purge from your vocabulary. No wonder! The word diet conjures up images of hunger, deprivation, and unhealthy fad diets people adopt to lose weight fast and often lead to frustration and hunger. Not a pretty picture, right? But there’s one type of eating plan that offers diversity, flavor and is naturally nutrient-dense. It’s the … [Read more...]
3 Best Exercises for Building Wider Shoulders
Are you struggling to get that wide-shoulder look? Having wider shoulders makes you appear stronger and more confident! Plus, you ARE stronger when you strengthen your upper body. At one time, it was popular to wear shoulder pads to get that broad-shouldered look, but that’s an illusion. The best way to get them for real is to weight train in a way that hypertrophies your shoulder muscles. Since you can’t change your bones, the only way to get … [Read more...]
7 Ways to Protect Your Knees When You Exercise
You need your knees to last a lifetime. However, surgeons perform around 790,000 knee replacements each year for knees that were no longer healthy enough to be functional. Unfortunately, knees, especially older knees, are prone to injuries and degenerative conditions such as osteoarthritis. Even with a total knee replacement, the replaced knee is often not as functional as healthy, natural knees. On a brighter note, there are ways to lower your … [Read more...]
Is There a Cure for Stretch Marks?
Pregnancy can be one of the happiest times in a woman’s life, but the stretch marks that show up afterward are a source of frustration. The medical term for stretch marks is striae, and they look like bands or stripes on the skin. Striae can occur in women and men, although women get them more often. When men get them, it’s usually due to gaining or losing a lot of weight over a short time. Bodybuilders are also prone to stretch marks … [Read more...]
How Healthy is Your Heart? A Simple Exercise Test You Can Do at Home
How healthy is your heart? It’s probably not something you think about daily but it matters for health and longevity. Many people who have cardiovascular disease don’t know it, as they may experience few symptoms in the early stages. It’s only when heart disease progresses that the characteristic shortness of breath, fatigue, and chest pain alert you that something is wrong. Although there are tests a doctor can perform to determine whether you … [Read more...]
Exercise and Vasomotor Symptoms: Do Workouts Reduce Hot Flashes?
One symptom many women are familiar with after menopause is hot flashes. For some unlikely women, those flashes of intense heat, also known as vasomotor dysfunction, or vasomotor symptoms, begin even before menopause starts, during the perimenopausal period, and worsens as menopause draws closer. What do vasomotor symptoms, specifically a hot flash, feel like? Hot flash sufferers experience the sudden onset of heat, often followed by profuse … [Read more...]
How to Boost Muscle Hypertrophy By Working Your Muscles from a Stretched Position
Bodybuilders are always looking for ways to boost muscle growth by switching or upgrading their strength-training techniques. There’s no shortage of ways to change the stimulus you place on your muscles. For example, you can change the resistance, number of reps, number of sets, lifting tempo, number of exercises, how often you train, or the exercises you do. Another way to change the stimulus on your muscles and enhance muscle growth is to work … [Read more...]
How to Lower Your Risk of Back and Shoulder Pain When You Do Overhead Presses
Are overhead presses, also known as the military press, part of your shoulder routine? They’re a favorite of bodybuilders who want strong, well-defined shoulders, and it’s one of the best exercises for working the shoulders and upper body. If you could choose only one exercise for broadening your shoulders, this would be it! The overhead press activates the anterior deltoids the most, followed by the medial deltoids, and to a lesser degree the … [Read more...]
4 Hybrid Vegetables That Are Jam-Packed with Health Benefits
With so many vegetables to choose from, it’s hard to get bored with the plant-based world. Plus, plants are chock full of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants, the components we need for health. If you’re a veggie-lover, you’re in luck! The number of options at supermarkets and natural food markets continues to expand, as farmers grow more vegetable hybrids. Many of the most successful and healthiest hybrids are in the cruciferous … [Read more...]
How Range-of-Motion Affects Strength Training Results
Are you getting the full benefits from your strength-training routine? Many factors affect the results you get from strength training. These include the resistance you use, the number of repetitions and sets, frequency of training, choice of exercises, the tempo you use when you train. But what about the range-of-motion that you use when you do each repetition? Intuitively, you might think that using a full range-of-motion on exercises would … [Read more...]
Lifting Heavier May Boost Muscle Efficiency More Than Lifting Lighter Weights
Studies show you can hypertrophy muscles by lifting heavy weights or lighter weights. However, if you lift lighter, you’ll need to do enough repetitions to thoroughly fatigue the muscles. If you’re trying to build strength, lifting at a high percentage of your one-rep max maximizes strength gains. However, you don’t have to lift at a high percentage of your one-rep max to gain muscle, as long as you fatigue your muscles and do a high enough … [Read more...]
Cathe’s January 2021 Kickstart Workout Rotation
What better way to make sure we kick the year off right than with my new intense January 2021 Kickstart Workout Rotation ! Whether you’re setting fresh goals or continuing where you left off last year, this rotation is sure to burn off some extra Christmas cookies! This rotation mixes my newest series, Perfect 30, with the Ripped with HiiT series for an intense, super sweaty month of challenging workouts! Each week will include one day of yoga … [Read more...]
The Stress-Relieving Benefits of Green Tea
Do you take your tea green or black? For more people than ever, the answer is green, although black tea is still the most popular type of tea worldwide. Although both forms of tea come from the Camellia sinensis plant, green tea is less processed than the more familiar black tea since it is less oxidized and is also lighter in color. Being less processed, green tea is richer in key compounds called catechins, compounds with antioxidant and … [Read more...]
Can You Still Get Vitamin D if You Wear Sunscreen?
One reason your body needs vitamin D is to support bone health. Vitamin D helps your intestinal tract and kidney absorb calcium, so your body has more available to build healthy bones and keep your skeleton strong and mobile. There’s also evidence that vitamin D matters for a healthy immune system, too. In fact, many immune cells have receptors for vitamin D on their surface. Are there other health benefits of Vitamin D? Whether getting more of … [Read more...]
Stubborn Muscles: 5 Reasons Your Muscles Aren’t Growing
It’s frustrating when you’re training to build muscle, putting in the work, but not seeing muscle growth. You might question whether you’re doing something wrong and what changes you need to make to jumpstart muscle growth, but first, you need to know why you’re not getting results. Here are five reasons your muscles may not be growing. You’re Not Training for Hypertrophy Working your muscles against resistance doesn’t always mean you’ll … [Read more...]
5 Factors that Increase the Risk of Exercise Related Injuries
If you exercise, you might worry that you’ll sustain an injury that keeps you on the sidelines for days, weeks, or months. Injuries like muscle sprains, shin splints, or a mild case of tendinitis are inconvenient, but they don’t usually keep you from exercising for a prolonged period of time. However, some injuries, like muscle or ligament tears, serious sprains, or a stress fracture can take you out of commission for a while or even require … [Read more...]
Does Exercise Slow Tendon Aging?
One reason we strength train is to reduce the loss of muscle tissue that occurs with aging. Research shows that working muscles against resistance and increasing the resistance over time slows age-related muscle loss. Even if you don’t start until later in life, studies show you can build strength and muscle size and that makes a big difference in how functional you are now and later in life. This is one of the many perks of strength … [Read more...]
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 202
- Next Page »
