Stress & Weight Management

Over the past twenty years or so, fitness and medical research has discovered a direct connection between individual stress levels and weight management issues. The only thing they don’t yet understand exactly is how or why these issues will occur. Weight management doesn’t necessarily mean weight gain either. Many people actually lose weight when they are under extended periods of stress - sometimes to dangerous levels. Weight gain is certainly one of the possible scenarios associated with stress and this sort of gain can easily perpetuate itself. A person can gain weight as a result of being stressed at work, home, or other emotional inlet and then can become further stressed by the societal implications of weight gain. Not a good cycle.

To better understand weight and stress related issues, we must first take a look at the two systems separately. The weight management system is actually the communication of your body when it is high or low on energy. Our energy is gleaned from food and drink and other ingested compounds and we are constantly monitoring this process unconsciously. Essentially this system determines hunger and thirst. When our body gets low on energy, we are supposed to become hungry, when it is low on water, we should get thirsty. But like any system, if there is a block or error in the chain of communication, the system breaks down and becomes confused. This may have happened at your work place once or twice.

The stress controlling system has to do with self-made products like hormones and enzymes. Our body creates it’s own communication devices out of protein and other elements to communicate with itself. If your gut wants your brain to know it’s hungry, it will release hormones into your blood which reach a part of your brain that tells you to recognize hunger. Stress, as it turns out, is a very powerful cause of hormone communication which should, in most cases, outweigh all other communications at the moment of stress. In fact some of the organs which release stress hormones into your body also manage the hormones for hunger and thirst. Evolutionarily, stress is the “fight or flight” response in our body. If we are in some sort of mortal danger, our system gets flooded with hormones that make us stronger, more alert, and more sensitive than we would be in a resting state. Whether our better choice in a stressful situation is “fight” or “flight”, because of these hormones, we will have the added energy and ability necessary to perform either.

There are three basic hormones that control the fight or flight stress response. While it’s not important to know exactly what their names are, it is of interest to note that two of these hormones actually suppress hunger, but the third encourages hunger. The two hunger suppressing hormones are released first in a situation of dire stress. If you are scared or in some kind of mortal danger, your body needs to be as responsive as it can to protect itself. It can’t bother with hunger at that moment, and it will therefore suppress this feeling in order to deal with the stress at hand. These two hormones only act for a short period of time, however - generally long enough to get us out of danger (not much more than a minute or two) and then they are consumed by our body. These hormones could be a reason that some people actually lose weight under stress. If someone’s body were unable to consume these hormones after the initial feeling of danger subsided, their hunger suppressing properties would still be active after the stress diminished. Since these hormones exaggerate alertness, it would be expected that a person having this sort of overload would also have trouble sleeping or comfortably relaxing in any situation.

It is potentially the third and final hormone, called cortisol, which gives people the most trouble with weight gain. If you are in a state of constant stress, though not such that you feel you are in mortal danger, you body would have released and consumed the first two hormones of the “fight or flight” response, but the third would continue to be released. Cortisol is the hormone which is necessary to maintain stability within the body systems during stressful situations. It is important to understand that cortisol causes neither weight gain or weight loss. It is simply a regulatory signal for your body systems to stay functioning since the other two stress hormones are so powerful. Because the other two do suppress hunger, cortisol helps to induce hunger - thereby negating the previous suppression.

If your body is in a state of constant stress, it is also frequently in a constant state of cortisol release. The glands which release the cortisol are under the impression that the other systems will require the stabilizing effects of this hormone. It is possible that a person who is under constant stress will too frequently become hungry.

The really messy part of stress and weight management occurs when one’s own fat cells induce stress. Yes, even fat cells release hormonal communication into the body. These hormones are related - not surprisingly - to energy and hunger. Fat in your body can serve as an energy source, but only when it exists in excess. Basic fat levels are necessary for protection of various organs like your heart and kidneys and also keep some internal communications like those for temperature and energy in a state of balance. Because the nature of fat is to maintain balance, when fat cells are in a state of loss (ie. fat burn from exercise), their first reaction is negative and perceived as stressful. In other words, when a person first starts exercising and dieting in an effort to lose weight, their own body is fighting them because this weight loss is adverse to the bodies understanding of its own current stasis. After a couple weeks or so this negative response is not perceived and normal weight loss can occur without much psychological effect, but your brain’s initial reaction to fat loss can be completely opposite of what you might expect.

Finally, in a worst case scenario - although not that uncommon - the ingestion of food will actually help to reduce stress in some people. The cycle here is not only obnoxious but difficult to recognize and often more difficult to break. Imagine you are constantly stressed. Maybe not to a perceivable level, but enough that your serum cortisol is high. This existence of cortisol makes you hungry. If you eat, you satiate the hunger only long enough to become stressed again. If you don’t eat, your stress level increases because now you are hungry and your gut is not receiving input that you are ingesting nutrients. Your body starts taking energy from fat. The fat gets mad and induces more stress so you become more hungry. Now the only way to feel better is to eat. So you eat a lot and for a brief moment you feel de-stressed until you get back in your car during rush hour or go back to your high stress job or have to deal with your difficult home life and the stress is back and the cycle starts again. It is not only extremely frustrating but also demoralizing to have the one thing you are trying to avoid - food - be the only thing that makes you feel comfortable. If you have these feelings, though, just realize that it is not because you are somehow weak or don’t have the will power to fight it. You just have to recognize that your body is constantly fighting your lifestyle (whether your chose that lifestyle or not) and the byproduct of your body engaging in this fight is for you to be hungry constantly.

With all these hormones running around, how do we know when is enough and how much is too much? Well, we don’t. This is the problem. A doctor can measure your “serum cortisol” levels in your body (essentially how much cortisol you have running around your system), but since cortisol itself is not a direct indicator of weight gain, this reading doesn’t tell us much. There are drugs which suppress the various stress hormones but these too do not affect one’s feeling of hunger. There are even drugs which suppress hunger but some of these actually induce a stress response so you can see why this may not work either. Unfortunately the answer to this problem is that there is as yet no simple answer. Since each person creates and reacts to stress differently, it is almost impossible to have a single fix to a problem which affects a good portion of this American population.

So far, the best way to combat stress and the weight management issues associated with stress is to actually take stock of and make adjustments to your life. Again, you may not immediately recognize that you are stressed because you haven’t felt the affects of those first two “fight or flight” hormones for quite a while, but the cortisol is still running around your body making you hungry. Or you may be under such stress that those first two hormones do get released way too often and you are losing weight to an unhealthy level. Either way, the first thing you have to do is recognize that you have some sort of stress in your life. One of the most common stressful situations is one in which have no control over changing or altering the stress. If you are in a difficult job or bad relationship or other stressful situation, the simple fact that you can’t alter that situation is stressful. Once you recognize that you have stress, you can take efforts to de-stress. You should have a chance to de-stress every single day if possible and if not every day then at least the vast majority of days in a week/month/year. You should spend at least an hour or more in this de-stressed mode whether that mode be exercising, meditation, taking yoga, watching television (without snacking), or sitting on the porch with a glass of wine watching a sunset, you need to do this activity often and without distraction. You may not be able to control the ability of your body to deal with stress the way you want, but you can manage that stress to the best of your ability. Sometimes you have to take care of yourself before all others. This may be the most effective method of stress and weight management you have. Find your best method to de-stress!

Injured... While Sleeping?

Every once in a while you wake up and your neck hurts. Sometimes it’s so bad that you feel you can’t even turn your head one way or the other. It feels stuck, achy and completely uncomfortable all day so you take some Ibuprophen, rub it here and there and try to stretch it as often as you can as the day goes on. But what happened? You can’t remember doing anything the day before that would have caused your neck to be sore. You don’t recall heading a ball in soccer or getting in a little fender bender or even banging your head against your office wall after you got of the phone with your controller. Still your neck is sore, the muscles are tight and it hurts to move. What you probably did - or didn’t do - is get what I’ll call a “sleep injury”. Exactly as it sounds, a sleep injury is a mild injury you probably incurred while sleeping. Not that you fell off the bed or managed to kick the dresser in the middle of the night, but your body ended up positioned in such a way as to force some part of you to be over-stretched or over-contracted.

Sleep injuries can most commonly happen in the neck, back, shoulders, knees, hips and under some circumstances even the feet. Do you see a trend here? Almost any joint can be the site for a sleep injury and it mostly depends upon what position you slept in that night. Each type of injury is similar in that the height of pain is early in the morning - when you get up and try to move the afflicted body part. Also, this injury can affect other activities. A hip or knees sleep injury can bother you while running or walking whereas the neck and back injury makes it hard to turn around or even sit up. Sleep injuries usually work themselves out because your body eventually recognizes that it is in the wrong position and will correct the situation in the next night or two. Some like knee and shoulder injuries could last a little longer, however. The important thing to remember about a sleep injury is to recognize it as such and try to avert the problem in the future. Each type of sleep injury has a particular cause and it’s own simple method for alleviating the pain in the future.

Physiologists have figured out that the anatomically correct position to sleep in would be lying on one’s back with their head elevated about 4 to six inches and their knees bent upward about 8 inches. Physiologists are silly - no one sleeps like this. We sleep on our backs with our arms over our head, or on our side in some sort of fetal position or totally on our stomach with our head turned to one side or any other number of awkward and sometimes alcohol induced positions. Under normal circumstances these positions should have no affect on the physical structures of your body if you are comfortable when you fall asleep. However, if your body is unable to obtain a restful sleep position because of stress or discomfort it may try to alter your position slightly in adverse directions for your joints. Identifying the type and likely cause of a sleep injury is the best way to avert the problem the next night.

Each injury has its own cause(s) and, therefore has its own simple treatment. Remember, any sleep injury will induce the most pain in the morning. It may even take you a few moments before you can get out of bed at all. Sometimes these injuries may be associated with mild numbness of the extremities as well. I’ll go through each common type of sleep injury and simple ways to alleviate the pain but if you try these methods and pain persists, consider talking to your doctor or accepting the possibility that you don’t have a sleep injury at all but rather the pain is caused by some other means.

Neck Injury: I’ve already described a typical neck injury in the first paragraph. This is one of the more common sleep injuries and, fortunately, often one that manages to handle itself within a few days without any changes made by the sufferer. Neck injuries are usually caused when your head gets in an awkward position relative to your torso. This can happen if you sleep on unnatural surfaces like on a chair or couch or in a car for instance or if your head happens to be in an odd position in bed. If your head is elevated too far from your shoulder in any direction or if it is turned too far from center relative to the natural flexibility of your body, this over-stretched position could cause pain if the position is maintained over time (like several hours of sleep). Neck injuries in bed could be caused by a new pillow or a pillow that is too low or high in the first place. Or, if you sleep on your stomach, it could be the result of just turning your head too far to the side. In any case, try adjusting the size or number of pillows under your head and if you sleep on your stomach, try putting a pillow under the arm and should which lie on the same side as your face.

Shoulder Injury: A sleep shoulder injury will usually cause pain in the back or top of the shoulder joint and sometimes slightly down the back of your arm. This can come from one of two probable reasons. First, if you have a tendency to sleep on your back, and your arm ends up over your head for the night, this could cause compression in the joint capsule between a couple bones. If you were to hold this position for a few minutes, it may not feel like much but after several hours, your shoulder will have had enough and it will tell you in the morning. Another position which can cause shoulder injury is lying on either your side or your stomach with your arm turned over in front of your body such that the shoulder capsule is stretched rather than pinched. Both result in a similar pain, however, and the important thing to remember is that these tissues have likely been over-stretched so don’t try to stretch them more when you get up in the morning. Rather, try moving the arms up and down and out to the side slowly to allow the arm to warm up then add a little weight to the movement with cans of food or rocks or weights - anything slightly heavy. If the weight hurts, stop moving that way. To avoid the same situation try hugging a pillow when you go to sleep. This should keep you from rolling onto your arm in the first place.

Back Injury: A back injury will usually happen if your whole body is somehow twisted. If by some odd movement your torso faces one way and your legs face another, your back muscles will try to stabilize your spine and they will get tired by the time the night is over. This, of course, is painful. If you have a back sleep injury, you can attempt to stretch it mildly but it would be helpful to warm-up a bit first. To avoid the back injury, hug a pillow like you might for a shoulder injury but to keep your legs from flailing, try putting a pillow down under or between your legs as well. This should keep you from twisting into the odd position again.

Hip Injury: Hip sleep injuries are most common in women for anatomical reasons. Adult women have wider hips than men and their hips, therefore, create greater angles relative to the position of their legs in many situations. If you sleep on your side - particularly the same side every night - you may find yourself with some hip pain the next morning. The pain you would feel is again an over-stretching of tissues on the outer portion of the hip, so don’t try to stretch these. Rather get up and walk around for a bit then try to balance for a few seconds at a time on alternate legs. This should help to work it out some. You get to use the pillow trick again for hip pain, but in this case, you want to put the pillow between your knees while you lie on your side so that your top leg is slightly elevated. This will help to align your leg more properly with your hip.

Knee Injury: The knee injury is tricky. Mostly because there are so many ways to hurt the knee that it is hard to identify a sleep injury of the knee. Again, pay attention to the time of day that the pain occurs most often and with the greatest intensity. If it is early in the morning when you first try to get out of bed, the culprit may be your sleeping position. Knee sleep injuries occur when your thigh is somehow braced and your lower leg hangs limp in a direction other than the natural bend of the knee. This can happen if you sleep on your side and one leg sits atop the other with the bottom leg bent or if you sleep on your stomach and one leg ends up extending off the side or end of the bed. The result will be a general ache in the sides or back of the knee again from over-stretching. Try to walk around a little until the pain goes away and to avoid this problem the next night, try using the same pillow trick you would with hip pain, or just make sure that both knees sit on the bed at about the same height.

Fortunately your body is usually pretty good at avoiding injury while you are asleep. If you are in an awkward position, you may just wake up or your body will move itself to avoid the continued stretch. If you are particularly exhausted for some reason or if you fall asleep under the influence of depressants (alcohol) your body may not be aware enough to adjust your positioning. And as some of us know, you can potentially sleep in any number of awkward situations when severely under the influence. Most sleep injuries wont last more than a few days and will go away on their own, but if your positioning continues, the injury may become more chronic and cause continued pain during other activities. In these cases the various pillow and positioning remedies I have given should help alleviate the problem. But, if the pain still wont go away - of course, see your doctor.

A Necessary Warm-Up

Getting a proper warm-up before physical activity is one of the most essential facets of an exercise routine or any other labor intensive endeavor. Although many people consider a warm-up a waste of time, properly initiating activity for your body can help your performance in sport, reduce the likelihood of injury during activity, encourage proper utilization of nutrients and body energy and even in a severe extreme, save your life. Warming up your body is a fairly simple procedure and can be accomplished many different ways but the simple inclusion of a warm-up to your activity can have immeasurable benefit.

The definition of a warm-up is just what it sounds - an slight increasing in body temperature. This is accomplished by simply moving around for a little bit before tackling the task at hand. In some sports like baseball and golf for instance, an athlete will not only warm-up before starting a match but also during the match. Have you ever seen either one of these athletes take a practice swing before attempting to connect with the ball? This quick little practice is going to increase their body temperature very slightly but more importantly for them it is also initiating an musculo-neurologic (muscle and nerve) memory pattern. Warming up is also necessary for loosening stiff and tightened tissues both within joints and your blood and lymphatic vessels. Finally warming up can help to encourage passage of essential nutrients and water in and out of your cells to keep up their energy and enable your body to work at a higher level longer.

Types of Warm-Up:

Cardiovascular - A cardiovascular warm up is simply a method of gradually increasing your body’s temperature, breathing patterns and heart rate to a level elevated above rest enough to allow you to safely perform exercise. This is probably the most common warm up in a gym or fitness setting as cardiovascular equipment is usually readily available. To achieve cardiovascular warm-up simply initiate movement (biking, jogging, rowing, swimming, elliptical) at an easy pace for five to ten minutes or until your body feels loose. Don’t attack the machine right away. Rather ease into the exercise starting at a slow pace and slowly increase your intensity until your breathing, heart rate, and body temperature have risen.

Stretching - Stretching can be used as a warm up as long as the body is not too cold initially. Dancers, athletes, and even heavy laborers will often use a mild stretch to get their body ready to tackle the coming activity. Both static and dynamic stretching are acceptable means of warming up the body, although the dynamic method may take a little less time because of the greater amount of energy needed to engage in a dynamic stretch. (See “Is Stretching Necessary?” in February of ’08 for more information on types of stretching.) When stretching for a warm-up, like the cardiovascular method, the initial stretch should be mild and should gradually increase in intensity as your body adjusts to the activity. Be sure to stretch the parts of the body which you intend to use, as a simple stretch of body parts unrelated to your endeavor won’t be as productive. A static stretch warm-up will usually last about 10 to 20 minutes depending on the ensuing activity and a dynamic stretch will require between 5 and 15 minutes for a proper warm-up.
NOTE: Some professionals will distinguish between stretching and calisthenics for warming up, but in this context, mild calisthenics falls under the dynamic stretching category.

Breathing and Meditating - These methods of warm-up are derived from eastern practices like yoga and martial arts and may be a bit more difficult to engage for satisfactory results. It is possible to increase one’s breathing, heart rate, and even your body temperature through sheer concentration and methodical breathing methods, but again, this is a skill unto itself and is not usually successful without proper training. If you are capable of proper meditation or pranayama yoga, you can use these energies as a successful warm up but it may take 15 minutes or more. Many people who engage in such eastern practices find them to be the most soothing manner of initiating a new activity, but they are not for everyone.

Benefits of a Warm-Up:

Musculo-skeletal (muscles and bones) - In a sedentary state, the one part of our body that possibly gets the most rest is our structure. Our muscles require an incredible amount of our internal energy to enact movement and, naturally, more aggressive or intense movements increase that energy expenditure. Therefore, when our muscles don’t have to do anything, they don’t. Neither do the tendons, ligaments, and other soft tissues associate with our physical internal structure. Because they are relatively inactive in a resting state, they are not prepared to immediately initiate high intensity movement. Muscles and other structural soft tissues in your joints and along your bones require great amounts of fluid and lubrication as well - much like the moving parts of a car. When active, these tissues are flooded with lubrication and energy to keep the body moving. When inactive, however, imagine these tissues as a sponge that sits on the side of your sink - when it’s not being used, it slowly dries out and becomes brittle - so too do our tissues. To warm-up the sponge we need simply to run it through water. To warm-up our muscular and connective tissues, we need to engage in one of the three aforementioned methods. Imagine how that sponge would feel if you tried to wash a cheese grater without putting some water on it first? This is how your joints feel without the proper warm-up, and they’ll let you know by aching later.

Neuro-muscular (muscles and nerves) - In order for our body to work, your muscles must be in constant communication with your nerves and your control centers in your brain and spinal column. If you are going to engage in a task of skill in which the motions of the task are unnatural or require practiced precision, a warm-up will be necessary to initiate and enhance proper neuro-muscular pathways. This is one reason a baseball player and golfer will take a few practice swings before attacking the ball. Other activities require similar nervous stimulation: just about any sport, dance, or labor which will require a good deal of physical control. You may not need a warm up to pick up a pencil, but its a good idea to warm up if you are going to repeatedly lift and carry bags of concrete for instance. And remember, if you were in a resting state before tackling the activity, your muscles are in a state of lethargy anyhow so they need a little kick start.

Cardio-vascular (heart and blood vessels) This is where a warm-up can be life saving. As we age, all of the tissues in our body lose their structural integrity to some extent. Our soft tissues become harder, and our hard tissues become softer and more brittle. It is just the way nature takes its toll on your body over the years. Some of the soft tissues in your body make up your heart and blood vessels. These too will naturally harden as you get older. If you combine this natural hardening with the additional stiffening and blockage caused by excessive cholesterol you could have a small bomb waiting to go off in your body. If you increase your blood pressure too quickly by engaging in severe activity without warming up, this fragile point in your blood vessels may not be able to take the strain and could rupture. This, of course, is not good. However, even if you do have a blockage of some sort in your arteries, a nice, slow warm up will help the stiff tissues loosen and decrease the chance of an increase in blood pressure causing a rupture. If you are elderly, or are at risk for blood pressure related maladies, discuss with your doctor the necessary precautions for starting an exercise program. A good cardio-vascular warm up could take 10 minutes or more if you are in a risk category.

Cellular - This benefit was discussed in relation to both muscle tissue and heart and vessel tissue. A good warm-up promotes fluid and nutrient exchange within our cells. This exchange is vital to keep our joints lubricate, our nerves communicating, our muscles moving, and our heart, vessels, and lungs flexible to the onset of a new activity. Every change in our body happens at a cellular level and your whole body is of course made of cells. This means that every part of your body benefits from a warm-up.

The last thing to note about a warm-up is that it has to be in immediate proximity to the activity in which you will be partaking. You can’t warm up at home then drive to the gym and expect it to still be effective. Your body is too quick to recover and much of your tissue will have returned to it’s dry sponge state from sitting in the car. A warm-up needs to occur immediately before the exercise. Different people find they require different amounts of time to warm up. The recommended time frame is 5 minutes for most activity, but I personally like 10 because I feel my body is not yet ready to perform optimally with 5 minutes. Some people who have chronic pain or other conditions may feel best from a full 15 to 20 minute warm up such that they are nearly sweating before even beginning the task at hand. In general, you can’t warm-up too much as long as your temperature increase is mild and gradual. You can easily, however, not warm-up enough or, heaven forbid, not at all...

Hydration

Literally every single cell in your body contains water. In fact most cells - besides fat cells - comprise more water than other solid materials. There is an occasional debate between scientists and doctors as to how much of your body weight is water - some say about 65% others give numbers up to 85% - but either way it is a lot. A 185 pound man holds about 120 pounds of water! A popular TV show once called humans “ugly bags of mostly water”. I don’t agree with the ugly part, but we certainly are mostly water.

As it turns out, water is a very active molecule. Science bases much of its points of reference on the properties of water. Compared to other molecular compounds, water is transferred from solid to liquid to gas fairly easily. Because water is so productive, however, it constantly needs to be cycled within our body. The cycle is simply the regular intake, decomposition, and expulsion of the H2O water molecule. Remember, water is in every single cell in your body, but each cell may use that water a little differently.

Interestingly, water is actually a waste product of a variety of chemical processes in the body as well as a nutrient and source of energy. With all this water moving around inside of you, your body has also evolved in such a manner that makes it very good at releasing this molecule into the air. You continuously excrete water through your skin - albeit slowly - and as we all know, if your body temperature rises, you release a combination of water and electrolytes called sweat. Every time you breathe, blow your nose, or make that trip to the rest room, you are releasing water. You body doesn’t have any direct means of putting that water back, however, at least not without some conscious action from you.

It is very easy to take in water. Because there is water in every living thing, each time you eat or drink anything, you get a little water in you. Usually, if something is in liquid form such that it is drinkable, it is because that substance is full of water so drinking, as you would expect, is the best way to replace water. Drinking pure water is the best way to ensure that your body can do with your new hydration what it likes as well. If you drink something - fruit juice, soda, alcohol - that contains some flavoring or other components other than the basic water, those components have to be digested and used like anything else. Your body actually measures its necessity for nutrients and food based upon the balance that exists between various essential minerals and electrolytes and water. If you have too much water, your body will simply tell you to go to the rest room. If you have too little, you will feel thirsty. Oddly enough, though, over time our sensory perception of thirsty has become muddled a little bit. Sometimes the sensation of thirst can be confused with the sensation of hunger so instead of drinking something, we eat something - forcing our body to use water to digest - making us more thirsty. It is sort of a goofy conundrum.

In order to digest just about anything your body combines the food with water and flushes it out of your system. If you drink a soda which is loaded with water, sugar (even fake sugar) and caffeine, you’ll actually have to release the water in order to digest the other substances. The same is true for fruit juice, although some of the substances found in fruit juice are helpful in their own right. Alcohol actually goes beyond the regular combining process for digestion and attracts extra water, forcing your body to release even more of it’s hydration that it typically might. It is, therefore, important that we drink pure water frequently - several times a day. This is not to say that we shouldn’t indulge in juice, soda or even alcohol, but you aren’t helping your body as much as you can if these are the only substances you are willing to drink.

So how much water do we need? Basic health information dictates that we should drink eight, eight ounce glasses of water a day at minimum. An eight ounce glass of water is only the volume of one cup so it’s not that hard to get this amount of water into yourself at one sitting. If you are active, you are probably creating sweat and increasing your breathing meaning you need to replace more water. If you are consistently active, look to taking in 12 to 15 eight ounce glasses of water per day. Carrying a water bottle around with you and taking frequent sips or gulps is a great way to constantly hydrate yourself. Most individual size water bottles contain between 12 and 16 ounces. If you manage to drink the water contents of that bottle five or six times in a day, you’ve got plenty of water in your system (remember that you will take in water from other sources as well).

You can actually tell if you are drinking enough water each time you go to the rest room. If your urine is clear, it means that your body is releasing more water than other nutrients and, therefore, has plenty of water to keep itself going. If, however, your urine is a dark shade of yellow, your body is actually releasing nutrients in an effort to hold onto water in your system. These nutrients could have been used if you had enough hydration to handle them, but your body needs to conserve water so do it a favor - drink a glass or two. The exception to this indicator occurs if you take vitamins of some sort. Usually vitamins contain much more of a particular compound than your body needs at that moment so it will use what it can and release the rest, causing your urine to be a bright yellow. If you are taking a vitamin and drinking enough water, this yellow excretion should only happen once a day within a few hours of taking the vitamin.

Because your body operates on a balance of nutrients and water, we can assume that proper hydration is also a function of correct amounts of elements like sodium, potassium and other electrolytes in your system. This balance is the reason we now have sports drinks. The creators of these drinks recognized that a highly active person will lose significant amounts of nutrients along with water loss when they sweat and consume energy. Sports drinks contain elements like potassium, sodium, sugars and occasionally other vitamins and minerals which may aid the body in recovery of worn tissues and lost energy. The key to the purpose of these drinks, however, is for whom they were designed - highly active people. There is a lot of sugar in sports drinks. It is put there intentionally to replace lost energy as a highly active person is exerting work. These sugars are simple and quickly absorbed into the body and, if you are working very hard, quickly used as energy. If you are not a highly active person and if you are not engaging in extreme activity at the time you take a drink, there is no reason to need a sports drink.

Also, sports drinks are often very concentrated when bought off the shelf both to replenish nutrients lost from highly active athletes and for taste. Ultimately there is too much sugar in these drinks for the average person or even the average workout. I as a personal trainer who engages in very difficult workouts, wont consume a sports drink at its full concentration. Certainly the electrolytes in these drinks help during a workout so one way to get those nutrients and some of the energy necessary to complete your exercise is to cut the regular concentration of the drink with water. Pour out and save half of your regular sports drink, then refill the bottle with water. At this concentration you will have plenty of electrolyte replenishment for your workout without excess sugar.

Believe it or not, it is possible to drink too much water. This rare condition occurs when the body contains so much water relative to its accessible electrolytes that it literally shuts down because there ceases to be proper nutrient passage between cells. Hyper-hydration or the excess of water in balance to electrolytes is very dangerous and frequently fatal, however it is a condition which is very difficult to achieve. If you are a very long endurance athlete like a marathoner, distance triathlete, ironman/woman, or other extreme distance competitor you may need to consider hyper-hydration. Because your body releases electrolytes in sweat, if, during your extended activity (over the course of several hours) you only replenish yourself with water, you have a chance to create this imbalance. If you are in an organized even, the organizers are usually aware of this problem and will offer more than just water at check-stops. Now you’ll find sports drinks, energy bars, fruit, and even gummy bears to replenish the sugars in your body as well as the water. These other items can be helpful in maintaining the balance in your system. Another way to induce hyper-hydration is simply to drink too much water at one time without allowing your body to release it. You’d have to drink water at a magnitude of several gallons in an hour to achieve this level of imbalance. No one is ever that thirsty, and you stomach would be painfully full before you manage to drink too much. A radio contestant once managed to drink so much water as to induce hyper-hydration, but this was a contest and essentially no one does this on their own.

So even with water - as anything - going overboard can be detrimental to your body. Fortunately water is one of the main driving forces of life as we know it so too much water is a condition very difficult to achieve. Too little water, however, is frequently a problem afflicting many people in regular life. You need to make sure your body is getting plenty of pure water every day - to keep you systems running properly, for nutrition, and even to ward off infection. Just remember, at least 8, 8 ounce glasses per day and more than that if you are going to do anything active. Make sure that your body remains “mostly water”.

Is Stretching Necessary?

The simple answer to the question, “is stretching necessary?”, is no. Stretching is not a completely imperative part of physical health. It is, however, extremely beneficial to stretch and maintain flexibility.

Your body is very good at adapting to the various stresses you put on it every day. Whether those stresses require mild exertion like sitting at a desk or great exertion like playing professional sports, your body will adapt to that particular activity in more ways than you might expect ... and in some ways you wish it wouldn’t. Sitting at a desk all day forces parts of your body like your back and your hips to be in a state of constant stress due to the weight of gravity on your body. Over time (maybe a few years) your body will adjust its structure to better suit the stresses of sitting at a desk. Unfortunately, the rigors of sitting at a desk don’t translate well to the rigors of walking or other exercise and, therefore, this new structure your body is creating is causing other activities to become more difficult.

A professional athlete is similarly afflicted with a body that gets very good at one or a series of movements. Because these movements are repeated over and over, the athlete’s body adjusts for those movements and doesn’t account for others not associated with the sport. Look at a tennis player’s arms for instance. The arm they use to swing the racket is going to be much more defined and often larger than the one that doesn’t do the swinging. This sort of imbalance is not going to affect the tennis player that much because they never really need that secondary arm for their daily activity. In contrast, if your body is adjusted to sit at a desk, it may be much less comfortable standing upright - a position which is certainly necessary for every person.

Maintaining flexibility is one way to counteract the affects of your body’s adjustment to your common activities. If your tissues remain flexible, your body will at least have the ability to achieve a task you don’t require of it very often. If you sit at a desk frequently, but enjoy playing golf once in a while for example, the two activities don’t work well together. Stretching and flexibility are imperative for golf even though your body is trying to deny you those traits by adjusting to sitting in a chair.

Essentially stretching helps your body maintain what is called a normal range of motion or ROM relative to your bone and muscle structure. Certainly some people are genetically more flexible than others, but this does not mean that they should not or need not stretch. In terms of health and balance, we can’t easily compare our body to someone else's because they have different genetics and may engage in different activities than we do. The best way to determine our relative flexibility is to compare alternate sides of your own body. If your right leg stretches more easily than the left, we need to spend more time stretching the left. If you can bend your body to the left more easily than the right, you need to work on bending to the right. Keeping your body in a balance of flexibility helps maintain a proper ROM for the activities you plan on pursuing.

Recently, it was also discovered that static stretching after a strength workout actually increases strength gains by as much as 5%. So even if your goal is to have the appearance of large, solid muscles, keeping them flexible will help in your pursuit.

There are three basic types of stretching: static, dynamic, and ballistic. Static stretching is the classic method of lengthening a muscle or group of muscles and holding that position for a period of time. Touching your toes, splits, and hurdler stretches are common versions of static stretching. The static stretch is the one which is most effective at the end of a strength workout. A static stretch should be held for at least 30 seconds to maintain current flexibility and longer if you wish to increase your flexibility. Holding a static stretch for only a few seconds may actually be detrimental to your ROM if you don’t return to that static stretch again several times in succession. Another method for static stretch, therefore, is to hold a position for 5-10 seconds, relieving that position and then repeating the stretch for several bouts of 5-10 seconds each.

Dynamic stretching is the most natural stretch and is the reason that a tennis player’s dominant arm, while larger than the secondary, is often more flexible and has a greater ROM. Dynamic stretch is the result of repeatedly exceeding the traditional range of a muscle structure and then exerting force with that same structure. A good example of a dynamic stretch would be a dancer or martial artist swinging their leg forward and back to the limits of their muscle range many times in a row (about 30 or more). Similarly, swimmers dynamically stretch their shoulders each time they take a stroke. Unless you are well familiar with the function of the human body, it is difficult to create your own dynamic stretches, but there are several publications out on the subject if you want to incorporate this type of stretching into your workout. Dynamic stretching is also an excellent alternative to the traditional warm up for most activity.

Ballistic stretching is very similar to dynamic stretching and often looks the same but the effects are nothing alike. Ballistic stretching involves actively exceeding the natural ROM of a particular body part like dynamic stretching, but it does not include a full contraction of the same muscle group to return to the original un-stretched position. Ballistic stretching is traditionally known as “bouncing” in an otherwise static position. This sort of technique can actually serve to restrict, not enhance the ROM of a structure and often fatigues essential mechanisms in your muscles and tendons which are designed to protect your body from dislocated joints. Regular ballistic stretching practice will often contribute to future injury and may even be the cause of injury. Ballistic stretching is an unnecessary practice and should be avoided.

Whatever type of stretching you engage in, you should incorporate it into your regular exercise routines frequently if not every day. Maintaining ROM not only ensures that your body will be capable of doing tasks other than those you regularly engage in, but also helps keep your tissues young and flexible - helping to stave off afflictions like arthritis and bone growths. Although there is no data showing that stretching is exclusively necessary for health, with all of the ways it does help to improve your body, there is little reason to exclude a good stretch.

Exercise and Aging

As people live longer, most everyone in America has heard how important exercise is for your body as it grows older. The question is why is exercise important and the answer is very simple : flexibility. After age 30, the number one component of the body which fails most quickly is within the flexibility of the body’s tissues. This doesn’t just mean your ability to touch your toes or swing a golf club, although the lack of flexibility due to aging will be a key component for both of these activities. Flexibility is also related to non-structural tissues such as blood vessels, nerve casings, organ tissues, and even the viscosity of various fluids in your body.

Many health professionals will emphasize strength training for the aging population. This is due to recent studies which show that the body can lose 10% or more of its strength and muscle mass each decade after the age of about 35. Bone loss is also a very common boon to the aging process. Since strength training addresses both muscle and bone strength and integrity, this sort of exercise is often suggested to many people attempting to subvert the physical aging process. Strength training is an excellent method for slowing the degradation of bones and muscles, but it doesn’t address other issues like mental capacity, heart and lung strength, and ability to fight disease.

Before I go any further I should mention that aging is a very complicated process and its affects alter greatly from person to person based upon genetic factors, prior history of individual health, and current and future activity levels. Just because you exercise does not necessarily mean that you will all of a sudden live longer or more functionally than your neighbor who does not. You can’t base your own progress on someone else’s results and, therefore exercise will serve to improve your life relative to how that life would have been without the exercise, not relative to your neighbor (unless that neighbor happens to be a relative). Don’t get discouraged if you aren’t seeing as good results as your friend working with you, just remember that your body is handling your longer life of exercise the best way it knows how.

Everyone, no matter what their genetics or chosen path in life, can benefit from a healthy dose of cardio-vascular exercise in their daily life. For the younger population, this type of exercise usually means improved heart, lungs, veins and arteries, coordination, and joint and muscle function. For someone over 35 all of these characteristics apply as well as the added benefit of maintaining brain function, maintaining reproductive organ function (not necessarily the ability to bare young, but at least assisting in the absence of abnormality), maintaining digestive function, and hindering the effects of arthritis. Frequent and varied cardio training from hiking and biking to swimming or skiing is so important as we get older that practically every body system benefits as a result.

As many of us know, activity helps maintain flexibility in the physical tissues like muscles, bones, and joints. Frequent movement - tennis, walking, dancing or any other physical activity helps to maintain the inherent strength and integrity of the body structure and the muscles which hold it together. Freedom to move is one of the simplest feedoms we have and can be well maintained with proper repetitive activity. With lack of movement, the tissues and semi-liquid portions of your joints start to harden - both restricting mobility and causing pain. The only way to avoid this hardening is to keep exercising. Even your bones have flexibility related to the manner in which they consume nourishment and go through their natural building and rebuilding processes. Bone flexibility ensures fewer breaks related to impact and other unforeseen mishaps we may encounter in our daily lives.

A hardening of veins, arteries and lymph vessels (part of your immune system) restricts the ability of these systems to work properly. When your vessels harden you are more susceptible to internal pressure problems, scarring, clotting, and rupture all of which result in very serious and sometimes life threatening conditions. Again the flexibility of these tissues can be maintained with some form of cardio exercise.

It was classically thought that people could keep their mental acuity by doing “mental exercises” such as thinking games, reading, and puzzles. Thus far, there is no conclusive evidence that these activities actually maintain brain function. I’m not saying stop doing them - just because proof hasn’t been found yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist - but I am noting that the only result these activities have shown is better capability at solving thinking games, reading and puzzles. Cardio-vascular activity, however has actually been found to force the body to nourish the outer covering of nerves and nerve endings called the myaline sheath. In some extreme cases some studies have actually shown an increase in brain mass as a result of adhering to a new cardio routine. These results are not terribly conclusive, but even the possibility is encouraging.

Even your organs benefit from this heart pumping exercise. Cardio encourages your body to utilize oxygen and electrolytes which acts as the energy and nourishment for every one of your cells. Your liver, pancreas, stomach, lungs, intestines, and sex organs all benefit from continued activity in older age.

Hopefully I have convinced you that exercise - both cardio-vascular and strength - is extremely important as we grow older. The only question now is how much of each? Certainly it doesn’t make much sense to be doing more activity as we get older than we did when we were young and spry in our teens and early 20’s. Your body will slow down and natural processes will indeed make it more difficult to physically perform the way you did when your body was younger, but this means that to maintain some level of strength, balance and flexibility as we age, we must in fact put more effort into that maintenance. If you have the time, spend more time exercising when you are older than you did when you were young. Certainly not to the intensity you did when you were younger and don’t just jump right into it if you have been without exercise for a while, but your body will respond to exercise as you age the same as when it was younger - just more slowly. If you have the time to invest three or four hours a day of good physical activity whether that activity be in the gym, on the golf course, or anywhere else ... do it! Keeping your body active truly is the secret to everlasting life - at least everlasting capability and independence through a longer life.

How Much Weight Training?

Similar to the “how much cardio” question I tried to answer earlier, some people want to know how much strength training to do in a given week. Opinions vary widely on this subject, but research data shows some basic fundamentals which can be applied to most people’s work out routine on a regular basis. Similar to cardio training, the frequency of strength training will depend greatly on your physical goals and what you plan to accomplish in the gym. Some people are interested in gaining strength, others are looking to gain size (they go hand in hand, but there is a difference). Some want to maintain strength, and still others want to maintain structures other than their muscles, such as their bones. In any case, there is a certain amount of strength training which is required to accomplish specific goals and I’ll try to order those goals from least time necessary to greatest time necessary here-after.

No matter what your goal, you should first understand the concept of “over-training”. Over-training is no simply doing to much but rather an actual condition of excessive fatigue your body can undergo if you are training at a level which exceeds your bodies capabilities to recover. Over-training is marked by a constant feeling of tiredness - particularly during a workout - muscle aches, joint aches, an elevated heart, weight loss and a rather than gain of strength. If you goal during strength training is to increase size, you must pay careful attention to what you eat and drink as well as how much you work out. You will be putting great demands on your body’s metabolism as well as your muscles and you must give it time to allow your body to rebuild from intense exercise. As a rule, your muscles need about 48 hours of rest time to recover from a loaded workout. Thats two days with strength expenditure of the utilized muscle group not exceeding about 50% before returning to fatigue training again.

As I mentioned, every one’s body operates under certain general rules of strength gain, loss, and recovery. If a muscle or group of muscles are enabled to maintain a certain amount of strength, say the chest and arms can do ten pushups, then that amount of strength will generally be maintained with as little as one day of strength training per week. As long as that muscle or group of muscles is brought to fatigue once every seven days, it will likely be able to maintain the strength it has for an extended period of time. After seven days, the body starts to lose a little muscle and, therefore, a little strength. This is by no means a drastic change, but going without strength training for a week or more will result in a little loss. So in order to maintain strength, each muscle group should be fully fatigued under load (with weights) at least once a week. This can be accomplished in one training session if that session is efficient and does in fact target all major motions for strength maintenance (See Major Power Movements of the Upper and Lower Body from January 08).

If you are trying to gain strength, you need slightly more activity out of your muscles than once a week... Twice a week. A second workout which again fatigues all the major movements of the body is enough to gain strength - not much, but a gain is possible. So if you want to increase your pushups from ten to fifteen, you could do so by adding a second strength workout a week which included pushups both times. You body would catch on relatively quickly and you’d probably be able to eek out those five extra repetitions within a month or two. After a certain period of time, your body would become used to the two workout per week regiment and you would need an alteration to your routine in order to continue gains, but increasing frequency would not necessarily be the answer.

For some special occasions your doctor may suggest strength training as the most productive alternative to various medical conditions or ailments. Osteoporosis and fibromyalgia are two of the more common maladies which can be managed and in some cases improved upon with proper loaded or strength training. Although the style of training one would perform to address these issues would not be the same as say, an athlete, the necessity for consistency is very similar. With conditions such as these, your body is essentially fighting itself and the best way to combat the poorer performance of your body is to maintain a higher standard than the average person. If you have one of these doctor prescribed conditions, strength training three, four, or sometimes even five days a week can reduce symptoms, reduce pain, and even slow or on rare occasions improve the processes which cause the degeneration in the first place. All the normal precautions for over-training should be managed as well as added considerations for managing the appropriate affliction, but this should not deter someone from pursuing strength training as a treatment.

Because it is so physically and even fairly mentally demanding, body building or gaining size requires the most strength training in the gym. In order to gain size, you must eat constantly and not small portions. You must also eat properly, indulging in foods which are easy for your body to use for energy, muscle rebuilding, and joint laxity. Body building is a very complex sport and only a few professionals succeed in managing the rigors of this sort of training. In order to appropriately grow muscle you must not only eat a significant amount of the correct food, but you must fatigue your muscles in a manner unlike all other gym goers. It is not uncommon for a body builder to spend 30 or more minutes fatiguing one muscle group (not in constant motion, but in cumulative effort). Thirty minutes spent on each of the upper and lower body power movements would amount to four and a half hours of training. However, the upper and lower body power movements are not exclusive for body building and there must be other actions taken to specify additional muscles in the body. To gain proper muscle weight it will likely take an hour and a half, four to six days a week of intense strength training along with appropriate eating. To gain the status of a body builder, you will likely spend two to four hours training each day you are in the gym. It is a rather significant undertaking. Even at such gregarious expenditure, the regular rules of the body apply. You have to give each muscle group at least 48 hours to repair itself after it has been fatigued so your work out schedule will need to be tightly managed.

Similar to cardio training, the time put into strength training varies greatly based upon your expected output. Unlike cardio training, however, strength training is not usually a necessity for survival. Often basic but precise movement is enough to maintain the strength necessary for your body to operate properly. In other words, in order to keep the strength your body needs to do the activities you frequently do, you need only continue to perform those activities. The weights in a gym are used to exceed these minimum strength requirements and are certainly another form of keeping your body healthy. Like cardio training also, they should not be pursued lightly and without guidance as doing so offers your body to great injury - and no one likes to back track.

Exercising While Sick

Although I don’t imagine it crosses most peoples mind, I have been asked on occasion whether I think it is a good idea to exercise when you’re sick. Like so many other questions, I would have to answer this with extreme vacillation and say “yes and no”. Exercise is always important for your body - especially if we define exercise as simple activity as opposed to inactivity - but there are times when your bodies metabolic processes need to be focusing their attention somewhere other than external exertion (like combating an illness).

If you’re young, the answer to this question is often intuitive and, in fact, made for you... If Mom says stay in bed, you stay in bed. Even at a young age, however, perhaps as you progressed through college you noticed that nothing about your body was quite the same when invaded with some or another virus or parasite. Your attention may not have been as sharp, your energy depleted, even your coordination could have seemed muddled. We have a tendency to pay less attention to such details as we grow older and certain activities like playing football, studying all night or throwing a wad of paper at the cute girl across from you become less important and, therefore, less indicative of our overall well being. Certainly being sick on the job will result in a tough time, but it doesn’t always compare to the stress of being sick during finals.

Ultimately, if you have a mild illness, it is not a bad idea to get up and move around a little. In this case, we’ll define “mild” as little to no fever, and annoying but not habit altering symptoms like sneezing, headache, body ache, cough etc.. If you take this sort of mild intrusion on your body as a signal to shut down and you lie in bed until the symptoms subside, you may in fact be aiding the illness, not your body. The reason for this is found in the body’s complex transportation system for nutrients, fluids, and our battle systems like antibodies and white blood cells (although white blood cells rarely get involved with mild illness). This transportation system is based upon pressures, changing pressures which require alterations back and forth between and within vessels to keep the transport going. If we lie stagnant, our body is only able to utilize the natural pressure gradients which already exist in the vessel systems. If we move, however, the contractions of our musculature helps change the pressure as well, making transport easier. Thereby, as your body goes through killing the bug in you, it has an easier time both getting new combatants to the intruder in the first place and in removing the illness once it has been found. Lying in wait may allow a mild illness to spread more easily since it is not necessarily bound to the same sort of transport as your body’s defenses. All of a sudden your mild illness is no longer mild in a few days.

The flip side of this equation is a more severe illness - usually associated with more severe symptoms like high fever, possible rashes, mouth or nose sores, and a cacophony of other fun things no one wants to think about unless they find reading medical journals entertaining as I do. In this case you are probably under the supervision of a doctor (or at least Dr. Mom) and you do as they say. A more substantial illness will invoke further defenses in your body to work like the white blood cells I mentioned earlier. In this case, movement doesn’t assist your body in the creation of these cells no matter what you do. In fact, the added metabolic energy required to produce your new combatants puts such a strain on your system that using further energy for exercise can be damaging to your cause. In this case, you should move only when necessary - for food or when nature calls - and all other time should be spent in rest. Most people don’t have the inclination to exercise with this sort of illness - in fact they are not inclined to do much of anything, but if you are a die-hard, take careful account of what your body is telling you. If you get up to go to the bathroom and you’re exhausted by the time you return to your bed, don’t try to eek out a light run later that day after you’ve had a quick nap.

Either way, if you do decide to exercise while you are sick, scale back your activity immensely. Wether a strong or weak illness, your body is still focused on removing that illness at the moment and is not going to perform up to a normal high standard you may ask of it. Usually just getting up and walking around 15 minutes once or twice a day is plenty. If you choose to go to the gym, a very easy cardio workout of no more than half an hour may be acceptable if you are naturally used to exercise when healthy. Sitting on a recumbent bike at a low resistance or walking on a treadmill at 2-2.5 miles per hour will increase your heart rate enough to help the transportation processes I mentioned earlier without totally exhausting you. Strength training should be generally avoided because you are not in a physical condition to make progress with a strength workout and strength workouts don’t inherently maintain a high heart rate which is the necessary component for pressure changes.

Finally, pay attention to your body. If just getting to the car to go to the gym is a struggle, don’t pursue a workout! If, on the other hand, you have been lying in bed for 3 days and your symptoms just wont change or go away, try getting up and moving around a little bit - not too long - but see how it feels. You may be hastening your body on the road to recovery.

Shin Splints

“Shin splints” is the common term health professionals and athletes use to describe general shin pain during activity. In and of itself, shin splints are not a defined medical condition but rather the feeling that results from several different lower leg conditions which cause pain through the shin.

Shin splints are most commonly incurred from too much running or walking, or improper technique doing either running or walking. Believe it or not there is a right and wrong way for your body to run and walk within the confines of physical laws and if your body operates slightly differently, you will most likely have to change something or become injured. While the physical structure of the body is designed to walk and run, I personally feel that it was not meant to do either in a straight line for an extended period of time as in a marathon or long charity walk. I’m not saying that these endeavors should not be pursued, just understand that doing these activities offer your body to an inherent likelihood for injury.

Pain in your shin often stems from a break down in the ability of the foot and lower leg to support your bodies impact with the ground during walking or running. Each time you take a step walking, your heel pounds on the ground with a force up to four times your body weight! If you are running, this impact can be increased to nearly ten times your body weight! Imagine a thousand pounds of force striking the small bones of your foot all at once. That is what walking and running do and in point of fact, that is how the body is designed to work. Because you have so many bones in your foot and ankle, your leg is able to absorb and disperse the shock of impact with the ground evenly and without damage to surrounding tissues. If you have an imbalance in these absorptive abilities, however, one of the common results is shin splints.

Shin splints feels like a bunch of small pins being stuck into your leg up and down the length of your tibia which is in fact your shin bone. Like so many other pains, this comes from a swelling of flexible structures (muscles, tendons, fascia, connective tissue) in and around the shin location. Initially, shin splints are annoying and simply cause a little pain at the beginning of running or walking. If not treated, however, they can become debilitatingly painful and even be responsible for structural damage to the bones of the shin and ankle.

The most common causes of shin splints are weaknesses in the muscles of the lower leg relative to one another. If your calf is much tighter and stronger than its contrasting muscle, the tibialis anterior, running could cause you shin splints. To find the tibialis anterior muscle, put your hand over the front of your shin with your foot flat on the ground. Now, keeping your heel on the ground, lift your toe and the ball of your foot as high as you can off the ground. That shifting muscle you feel to the right of your right shin or to the left of your left shin bone is the tibialis anterior. Weakness in this muscle will eventually force surrounding support muscles to become overworked as you run or walk in an effort to do that movement you just performed - pulling your foot upward - a necessary movement for ambulation (walking or running).

Another possible weakness could be in a similar muscle called the tibialis posterior. This muscle can’t easily be felt because it sits on the under side of your shin bone. The tibialis posterior is a very strong tendonous structure that helps lower and lift the big arch of your foot properly each time you step - again to absorb impact. If this muscle is weak or overworked because of some other weakness (like the tibialis anterior), it will become inflamed and painful. This is the most common pain someone will experience with shin splints.

Shin splints are most frequently caused by trying to do too much too quickly. If your body is not recently used to running or walking on an extended basis, it will need a proper progression of increased use in order to acclimate it to the new activity. Even if you used to be a runner, if you haven’t done it for a few months, you will need to alter your training scheme to allow for a rebuilding phase to take care of your lower leg and re-acquaint it with the rigors of consistent running.

If you already have shin splints, you need to back way off of your current training routine. Stop running or walking and take up swimming, biking, rowing or some other activity that doesn’t involved repetitive foot impact with the ground. Stay away from running or walking until at least two weeks after the pain subsides all the while taking a mild anti-inflammatory drug like ibuprophen or acetominophen. Ice your shins after every workout and continue taking the drug and applying the ice when you are finally able to return to your walking or running. You will probably experience a little shin pain when you return to your impact activity, so start out slow - only 10 to 20 minutes at the start and work up to longer times as your body allows. Remember to ice after every workout!

To help avoid shin splints in the first place and to help your body rehabilitate from existing shin splints, try the simple exercise of walking around on your heels a few times a day. Any time you are walking around - in the kitchen, at work, around the house, or even at the mall if you are so inclined, walk exclusively on your heels with your toes pulled up toward your shin as high as you can get them. Continue walking this way for 3 or more minutes. Your shins should burn pretty significantly by the end of the timed period. This burning is sort of what mild shin splints would feel like. Doing this exercise for a short period of time (like 3 minutes) forces those support muscles of the foot and lower leg to work harder than they normally would by removing some of the absorptive ability of your foot, thereby strengthening the support. Similar to a baseball player swinging a heavy bat before going to the plate, this strengthening helps your body be stronger than the future stresses you will be enacting upon it.

Shin splints are no small matter. They definitely hinder performance and can indicate irreparable damage being done to your body so don’t try to “work through the pain”. At minimum an ice treatment should be followed after every physical activity but the best way to remove them is stop the activity that is causing the pain all together and then slowly work back into that activity (running or walking) after your body has healed. If you ignore nagging injuries like shin splints they will just spell more debilitating problems down the road.

How Much Cardio?

How much cardio should I be doing in a week? This is a question I get all the time. The answer to this question depends, of course, on what you are trying to achieve. The American Heart Association and the American Medical Association both recommend Americans get at least 30 minutes of consistent activity five to six times per week. “Activity” in this case simply means walking - being up and mobile for a total of 30 minutes. This guideline, however, represents the absolute bare minimum of aerobic activity people need to attempt to stay healthy with a relatively sedentary lifestyle. If your job entails a lot of moving around like being in construction, repair, or other labor industries, you may already get enough activity to reach this bare minimum. If you spend most of your day sitting, however, whether it be at a desk, in a car, on an airplane, or on a couch, the AMA and AHA believe you need this half hour of activity just to keep your ticker ticking.

By releasing these minimum requirements, the AMA and AHA are attempting to combat the number one killer in the US - heart disease. They are not suggesting that a half hour of walking will do anything for your figure nor will it guarantee good health. Studies have found that some people move less than 1 mile per week under their own power! Instead they rely on cars, elevators, rolling chairs and other such devices to travel for them. Imagine moving only enough to cover 1 mile of ground per week! So when you read these half hour standards, understand that this sort of activity is not what the models in magazines or athletes are doing to carve out the beautiful bodies they possess. That being said, is it really your goal to look like a model or athlete? If it is, think about their professions - they are paid to exercise and paid handsomely. Therefore, these people often spend four to six or more hours per day doing rigorous physical activity. Can you really imagine trying to devote a full four extra hours a day to working out?

Try to make a reasonable goal for yourself rather than trying to be someone else. Rather than measuring your weight, measure how you feel or how your body works. Perhaps buy a pair of pants that is the next size below yours and work to fit into them. This is the sort of reasonable, achievable goal one can reach rather than looking like some 18 year old model in a magazine. So now how do we reach our new reasonable goal? Remember, a half hour of walking is the minimum for health so that is just a starting point. Which means from that starting point we must increase time and/or intensity of cardio exercise to achieve physical progress.

First of all, what constitutes cardio? Cardio-vascular activity is essentially any activity which increases heart rate and breathing. So going from a seated position to walking is technically cardio. Both heart rate and breathing do elevate in order to accomplish this change in energy expenditure, but we need to do more to force our bodies to fatigue more quickly thereby further improving our heart and lungs and enticing our bodies to burn fat as energy rather than the simple sugars and carbohydrates we ingest each day during meals. The first step to increase our cardio, then, is to increase a walking pace. Go from casual to brisk - this will further elevate heart rate and breathing. Still this is not enough for fat burning activity.

Now lets increase the walking pace again and add an extra fifteen minutes to each work out. So 45 minutes, 5 to 6 times per week at a pretty good walking pace. Now we are getting somewhere - we’re breathing heavily, our heart is pumping quickly and we’re breaking a pretty good sweat before the exercise is over. This is a good start. If you are tackling cardio exercise for the first time in a long time, this level of activity will help an overweight person loose a few pounds. (Not without some attention to diet, however).

What if you are already in decent shape - not lean and toned like a high class athlete, but not unhealthily overweight either. You want to make progress. You are going to have to work even harder than your previously sedentary counterpart. You could do a brisk 45 min walk with relative ease. You’d get the same sweat and your breathing would increase, but it wouldn’t seem that hard. So increase time and increase intensity. Its time for you to start running - and not just 45 minutes either, most likely you’ll need to be at it for 60 to 75 minutes. So already we’ve reached a threshold of an hour of cardio and we’re still wearing a 40in waist for men or a size 12 for women. Your goal is to lose more.

The next step is to further increase the time or intensity. If you have the time to spend, try running for 90 -120 minutes. This is starting to become a pretty big chunk of the day, however. We’re starting to approach that athlete/model activity level. So if you don’t have that kind of time to devote to the exercise, you are going to need to maximize your output at a lesser time of 50 - 75 minutes. Now you have to start trying techniques like sprint intervals where you run easy for 4 minutes then run as fast as you possibly can for 60 seconds and repeat that 4minute/1minute pattern for 50 - 75 minutes. In order to achieve the goal, you need to put in the work.

Fortunately there are alternatives to simply running and then running faster. Some high intensity cardio activities like martial arts, boxing, soccer, basketball and surfing can accomplish the same type of calorie burning cardio exercise that running fast would but they are usually a little more interesting. Low and behold all of these activities are sports! Now all of a sudden to look like athletes, we start playing and exercising like athletes.

Again, the answer to the “cardio question” depends on your goals. But understand if you have lofty goals, you are going to be required to work harder and longer than just about all of your counterparts. From the health perspective, 5 to 6 days with thirty minutes of cardio is barely sufficient. To make any progress, you need to do much more than that. 45 minutes of running is starting to get you physical and 90 to 120 minutes of constant intense activity is what it takes to build an athletic body.

Selecting Running Shoes

Proper equipment is an essential part of any athlete’s performance arsenal. This statement is no less true for a runner who, in the grand scheme of sport athletes, has very little equipment to contend with. A runner’s shoes, however, are an integral part of their success and consistency capabilities for running. No matter what your distance as a runner from 100 meters to 100 miles, your shoe is the only buffer your body has with the ground besides the natural impact reduction capabilities of your body. Your body is designed to disperse the stresses of impact with every step and you need to make sure you have a shoe which encourages and even assists this dispersal rather than hinders it.

The first thing a runner needs to know about shoes is that only designated running shoes are actually designed for running. There is quite a bit of biomechanical engineering that goes into the design of any shoe and running shoes receive perhaps the most technical attention due to the brevity of their use. If you run on a track frequently, you should own track shoes, if you run long distances, you should own distance running shoes. Not doing so is just offering your body up to injury for an entirely fixable reason.

The body is actually designed to run without shoes and a some cultures in the world still operate almost entirely in this manner. If a developing child never wears shoes, their feet will become externally tough yet internally extremely mobile allowing for that proper absorption of the forces of walking and running. Shoes were originally designed and are still necessary for foot protection in a modern world. They protect from the elements, from objects on the ground, and from impact with external structures (no stubbed toes). Since your body was designed to run without shoes, shoes which you do wear should impede this design as little as possible. The first thing to remember when you look for running shoes is - you should never have to “break in” running shoes. They should be instantly comfortable and impede your movement minimally. If you so much as feel a chafing of your ankle or your toes occasionally touch the sides or end of the shoe upper, you need a different pair of shoes.

Because of aesthetics, many people make poor decisions when purchasing new shoes. There are types of shoes, like high heels, which our bodies were never meant to wear. Heels are unfortunately societally attractive, but extremely detrimental to the body of the wearer. In the same vain, people will sometimes buy running shoes for their appearance rather than their fit. Just because you like the look of a shoe doesn’t mean that shoe is good for you! Buying shoes that are too small or have awkward stability is a bad idea if you actually want to wear them frequently or during activity. Make sure none of your toes touch the end of your shoe. If they do, this restriction will impede the ability of your foot to properly propel you forward and absorb the shock of impact with the ground - whether you are running or walking.

Be careful of arch support. Depending on your foot structure, too little arch support will force your foot to flatten out too much and you will strain structures of the foot and lower leg. Too much arch support my restrict the ability of your foot to flatten properly and thereby causing the opposite problem of the former situation. Again, the shoe should feel immediately comfortable when you put it on. You shouldn’t feel like you have an arch support lump in the middle of your foot, nor should the shoe sag to the inside because of too little support.

The final thing to keep in mind about running shoes is that they need to be replaced. If you are going to use your shoes for impact exercise like running on a regular basis, you will need to replace your shoes at least once a year. If you have high mileage goals in your running routine you will need to replace your shoes much more often, perhaps as frequently as every three months. The reason for this is simple physics. The material that is used to make the soles of running shoes starts as a liquid. Over time, liquid evaporates and becomes more solid. In the case of running shoe soles, this means the cushion part of the shoe becomes harder and harder over their life span. For this reason it is also not a good idea to buy shoes that have been sitting on a shelf for more than a year. Try to buy current models of shoe. These shoes are generally more expensive but the cost of the shoe will outweigh the cost of recovery from an overuse injury you will most likely incur as a result of poor equipment.

Probably the best way to select running shoes is to go to a premium store where the staff members can do a custom gate fitting for your body. These professionals fit shoes every day and take a lot of time matching different body types and foot configurations to different types of shoes. This kind of service is expensive, but if you are a serious runner, it is extremely important. If you are simply running for recreation you still need properly fitting shoes and you should follow the guidelines of size and comfort I have mentioned previously. When making your purchase, consider how you plan on using these new shoes. If you are only wearing them to walk around a gym and perhaps do some strength training, you shoes won’t affect your performance too much and a cheaper option is viable. If, however, you are planning to wear the shoe frequently and get a lot of use out of it for cross-training or running, it is in your interest to spend a little more to get the proper fit and remove yourself from the possibility of equipment injury.

Defining PAIN

Pain. Nearly everyone has it at some point in their life. (There is a medical condition with which a person cannot feel physical pain but this is very rare). Whether that pain is from over activity or lack of activity, pain is the tactile response the body gives your brain to signify when something is amiss. Although it is uncomfortable, the existence of pain is usually a good thing. Pain signifies that your body is functioning properly and it knows when it has worked too much or too little. If part of your body is in pain, it is not the end of the world, and rather than be avoided, pain should be embraced as a signal from your body to change something. Not that one should try to induce pain upon themselves! Pain is still a signal that something is wrong or was wrong with the body and needs attention, not exacerbation.

Pain comes in many different forms that we can describe in different ways. The feel of different types of pain often signify different things. If you pinch yourself, you receive one kind of pain, if you get your hand caught in a door, you feel a different kind of pain, if you get hit or scraped or burned - all of these induce slightly different negative feelings which we can categorize as pain. Usually when we have pain from an external wound, we can identify the source and the reason for the pain - we can see it. The hard part is taking this understanding of pain and recognizing signals of internal pain as well.

Pain on your skin and pain within your body is actually very similar. In both cases, you can feel burning, tingling, pressure, sharpness, and nagging ache. We can see the source of any one of these pains on the surface, but it is much more difficult to identify the sources inside your body. So lets go through some types of pain and what these various pains could mean. NOTE!!!! If you are injured and any kind of pain persists beyond your control, you should not try to self-diagnose any malady you may have. Defining pain doesn’t mean you can cure it! You should seek professional assistance for any pain you cannot safely manage yourself but by defining the pain, you can give that medical or health professional a better understanding of what may be going on in your body.

The most common source of pain at any point in the body from arthritis to tendonitis to heart attack is swelling. Swelling is just an increase in blood flow and fluid movement within a certain area. All of the pain signals described above can be the result of some sort of swelling or inflammation. When your body is injured it will try to send more blood and healing fluids to that injured site to help in the repair process. The collection of fluid hurts - sometimes a little or sometimes a lot, but it will always hurt. Medical jargon defines swelling in confusing ways - edema, any word that ends in “-itis” - but ultimately it is all swelling and can be treated to some extent through simple maintenance procedures.

Now that we understand there are different types of pain, the next step is to understand what different types of pain may mean. Again, all pains could ultimately be the result of inflammation, but some locations of inflammation is more dangerous than others (like in the heart). Here, I’ll describe the different types of pain you could experience from physical activity as in a fitness gym.

D.O.M.S. - DOMS, or Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness is actually one type of pain that doesn’t necessarily come from inflammation, however you experience it quite frequently after periods of high activity. DOMS is the normal result of a workout in the gym, shoveling snow, doing a difficult hike, or any other activity you haven’t engaged in for a while. DOMS occurs within the belly of the muscles, that is, not in and around joints, and not near internal organs. You don’t get DOMS in your elbow, nor would you experience DOMS in your pancreas. To be honest, the health industry is still not sure exactly what the direct cause of DOMS is, other than to recognize that the pain experienced from DOMS is not an indication of injury, merely an indication of fatigue. If you don’t feel DOMS once in a while in the day or two after your workout, you may not be working quite hard enough. On the other hand, if you experience this type of soreness for five days or more, you may have overdone it a little bit.

Ache - The word ache is almost synonymous with soreness. Ache is essentially the feeling one would use to describe the feeling of DOMS within the muscle. Ache is also frequently associated with conditions like tendonitis, arthritis, fasciitis ... notice all the “-itises”. NOTE: a headache is not usually a condition of physical strain and should be considered differently than other aches in the body. A headache may, however, evolve from other aches within the neck, back or shoulders. Ache is often the result of simple lack of movement or over movement of a particular structure. Aches are usually most evident when the body is or has been at rest for an extended period of time like after sitting or sleeping. Aches are often affected greatly by weather conditions and barometric pressures. The “ache” pain can frequently be alleviated with mild movement of the afflicted area. General simple activity which increases blood flow and allows tissues to move properly like taking a walk or doing some other mild exercise for over 5 or 10 minutes time will often help relieve the ache feeling. The ache will return, however, when the body has cooled and slowed its metabolic processes. Ache in organs should not be overlooked for more than a few days as it could be indication of a greater problem. Aches which occur in joints and other parts of the extremities shouldn’t last much more than a week or two. Again if they continue, seek professional examination.

Burning - Burning is kind of an odd pain. Burning feeling can result from both the feeling of too hot, but can also be the result of feeling too cold. Anyone who has been skiing in thin socks knows this. The sensation of burning isn’t necessarily a heat related response (although it is frequently) but rather another indication of something wrong with your body. If you touch something too hot or too cold for long enough you will feel burning, but the same kind of sensation can occur on the inside of your body as well. Unless you have a fever, your internal temperature doesn’t rise or fall much past the well known 98.6°F, so burning isn’t usually in response to a major temperature change. Rather burning is usually inflammation again often caused by chafing. Not so much the type of chafing you would experience from sitting on a horse saddle too long, but rather the chafing of one structure (like a tendon) over another (like a bone). NOTE: Persistent burning in and around your chest cavity or stomach can be indication of a serious problem! Contact emergency personnel immediately if this type of burning reaches and unbearable state or doesn’t diminish within a few hours! Burning in and around your joints is more common after exercise. Burning in your muscles is common during exercise. The burning in your muscles is actually necessary and is cause by acid which your body creates in response to using energy. If you are trying to strengthen muscles and they don’t burn, they aren’t being strengthened. Burning in and around joints is often related to another -itis. Usually an -itis like burn is not exclusive, however and will be accompanied by other sensations like tingling or numbness which we will discuss later.

Pressure - This is an odd sensation. Pressure doesn’t necessarily always hurt. Sometimes more serious injuries such as a broken bone or impaling will initially feel like pure pressure for a moment before other pain receptors alert you to the fact there is something really wrong. Pressure is often associated with aching when it does start to hurt but can lead to a very intense pain if the pressure persists and grows. Pressure, of course, can also be a sign of inflammation due to an excess of fluid in a certain area, but if a pressure sensation does persist and increase to unbearable levels, seek emergency help immediately! Pressure isn’t usually used to describe injuries unless they are injuries of inactivity. Someone may feel a pressure or stiffness in certain areas due to a lack of movement as opposed to excessive movement. This sort of pressure, like aching, may be alleviated with mild repetitive movement or stretching, but is not usually detrimental to the structure feeling the pressure. Rather it is another one of your bodies indicators that something is amiss.

Sharpness - Sharpness is the most cut and dry kind of pain. If you feel sharp pain, usually your body will react without your conscious control to alleviate that pain as quickly as possible. Sharp pains are rarely indications of minor maladies and should not be overlooked. Rather than “-itis”, sharp pain is more often associated with words like tear, break, or rupture. Much more gruesome sounding words for much more serious injuries. Sometimes sharp pains happen within a very specific range of movement and can be avoided, but unfortunately, the body can rarely heal the cause of a sharp pain without some kind of medical help. Sharp pains frequently require minor surgery to remove and can be the cause of greater problems if they are not addressed promptly. Your body will compensate to avoid the sharp pain, thereby creating some other imbalance in your structure which will most likely initiate a whole new pain in time.

Tingling or Numbness - Tingling or numbness are probably the most fickle of all pain feelings mostly because they don’t actually hurt. Tingling is not usually excruciating and numbness simply means lack of feeling period so there is no pain associated. These two sensations are, however, indicative of the most potentially dangerous conditions. All pain is a recognition and response of the nervous system. Tingling or numbness, on the other hand, frequently means that the nervous capability of the associated part is being restricted or completely cut off. Numbness should never be overlooked - even if it afflicts only a few fingers or toes because this could be a strong indication that something is wrong in some other part of your body - not necessarily the finger or toe that feels nothing. Tingling is more like a severe warning. If you feel tingling doing a certain activity and continue with that activity, there is a good chance you can do irreparable damage to some part of your body. Tingling is often felt in tendonitis in the knee or foot from activities like heavy weight lifting or running. If you persist with the activity that causes this tingling, the sensation will never go away and eventually the structure causing the sensation will break down and cease to function properly. If you have persistent numbness or tingling of any part of your body over a few weeks, seek medical advice.

No pain should be taken lightly. That being said, not all pains are an indication that something is injured. The muscle burning found in exercise is actually a good pain and one that should be sought during training activity. Burning in joints is a different circumstance, though, and must be addressed. If you have pain, pay attention to it. Thats what it is there for. Some part of your body is uncomfortable for some reason and wants to be noticed. Take note of how the pain started: What you were doing? What time of day? Was it consistently before or after a particular activity? Did it persist? Does it increase or decrease with activity? How bad is the pain? Can I make it worse? Can I make it better? These are all questions to ask yourself and tell your health professional the answers to these questions if you happen to seek ones advice. Most minor pains can be reduced and sometimes removed with the help of anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprophen or Aspirin and application of ice to the afflicted area. Major or consistent pains should not be overlooked and need to be addressed before irreparable damage is incurred. Most of all, listen to your body - pain is it’s way of talking to you!

Basic Lower Body Power Movements

A “power movement” is any movement of the body which can be accomplished with the addition of external weight above and beyond body weight. Power movements are the basic form of exercise used for weigh lifting both on machines and with free weights. Because the resistance of free weights is in the direction of gravity rather than the pre-positioned direction of an weight machine, free weights do resemble real life situations outside of the gym more directly. Almost every object we move outside of the gym exerts its resistance on our body through the weight of gravity and is therefore a free weight.

Power movements of the lower body are slightly more complicated than power movements of the upper body because they rarely occur in isolation in real life. Power movements of the lower body only apply loosely to the regular motion of our body. The power movements of the lower body include, bending the leg at the knee, straightening the leg at the knee, pointing the foot at the ankle, raising the foot at the ankle and lifting the entire upper body to a standing position from a leaning forward position at the waist.

Standing the body from a leaning position at the waist - This is the least obvious power movement of the lower body. Generally if we think of standing up from a leaning position at the waist we envision our back doing most of the work. This is not the case, however, because muscles of the back don’t cross the line of the hips into the legs. Therefore, they mostly offer support to the spine during this movement rather than exerting much of the power to lift the body. The muscles that actually raise the torso from a leaning position are primarily in your rear end and in the back of your thigh - your hamstrings. These muscles right the pelvis which is attached to the spine, and through the use of those back muscles, the body straightens up. To picture this, imagine a bath tub lying on it’s side. The bath tub is your pelvis. Now picture several people trying to right the tub by pulling on the high edge of the tub. These several people would represent the major muscles of your lower body trying to turn the tub upright - which would right your pelvis, and in turn raise the rest of your upper body. These movements are most commonly practiced with dead lift or occasionally good morning exercises. They require extreme attention to proper technique to avoid injury.

Bending the leg at the Knee - The back of your leg, your hamstrings, have another function - lifting the lower leg off the ground. Any time you pull your heel upward or backward toward your rear end, you are contracting the hamstring muscles. A basic hamstring or leg curl machine forces this motion under stress. If you think about this movement, however, you’ll have trouble finding an activity which would mimic this type of strength outside of the gym. Leg curls are designed to make the backs of the legs larger and stronger.

Straightening the leg at the Knee - This is the opposite movement of bending the leg at the knee. In this circumstance, the muscles in the front of your thigh, your quadriceps lift the lower leg from a bent position to a straight one. This movement is similar to kicking as in sports like soccer or martial arts but again is not something we would naturally engage in while in a seated position (as most leg straightening or leg extension exercises position us). This motion is designed to strengthen and increase the size of the front of your thigh.

Pointing the foot at the ankle - If you point your toe, straightening out your foot, you are pointing the foot at the ankle. There are some tendonous muscles at the bottom of your foot which help do this movement but most of it is a function of the powerful muscles in your calf. In regular movement, this pointing of the toe will often happen in conjunction with a bending of the leg at the knee - allowing processes like walking or running. Restricted to weight bearing isolation in the gym, we strengthen the calf by using calf raises, donkey calf, or heel raise exercises. Although it is possible to gain size in the calf it is rather difficult because of the tendonous nature of these muscles.

Raising the foot at the ankle - This is the least utilized motion in traditional strength exercise. The muscles which allow you to keep your heel planted on the floor but lift the ball of your foot off the floor are actually located in the front of your lower leg next to and around your shin bone. This movement of the leg is much less significant in regular mobility of the body, so the muscles are much smaller than the contrasting calf and, though they can be strengthened and size gained, they will not have nearly the pure strength of the calf muscles on the back of the leg. They should not be neglected, however, as they are an integral part of balancing the joints in the foot, ankle, and knee.

Truly, the lower body is active in almost any movement we make unless we are sitting or lying down. Even under those circumstances, our legs and rear may counter balance movement of the torso and arms. Properly isolating the lower body is somewhat precarious and easily offers one up to injury. This is not to say that lower body isolation is wrong - just difficult. Care must be taken to perform power movements of the lower body with precision and as full a range as can be stably maintained. Our bodies were certainly meant to do lower body power moves - every time we sit down, we both squat and dead lift our own body weight. So go ahead, make your lower half stronger, just make sure you know what you are trying to do before you undertake the challenge!