#exercise research

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Hypokinesia & Sarcopenia. What The Heck Are They And What Can You Do To Head Off #2?

First off, sarcopenia just means the degenerative loss of muscle mass which is in turn mainly caused by hypokinesia, otherwise known as sedentary living or the couch potato lifestyle. Years of hypokinesia leads to sarcopenia progressing rapidly the older you get.

So, all those fancy words to say that; as you get older, muscle mass decreases from a combination of

Aging

Inactivity, the main contributor

What can you do about it?

For one thing, you can get off your ass and start moving more!

By age 30 your muscle mass starts decreasing by as much as 1% per year if you don’t do anything about it. By the time you reach 80, you can have lost up to half the muscle mass.

UCLA researchers have confirmed that the more muscle mass you have as you age, the longer you’re likely to live. They also deduced that it’s not just BMI (body fat) you need to be looking at. Body composition (ie. muscle mass) was the determining factor in how long the senior subjects lived. They suggest that there’s been too much focus on body fat.

This means you need to work on getting fit, not skinny. If you’re just getting started, do simple exercises to get familiar with how your body moves. Learn how to breathe and pay attention to every movement you make.

Read about the UCLA research findings here:

    New UCLA research suggests that the more muscle mass older Americans have, the less likely they are to die prematurely. The findings add to the growing evidence that overall body composition — and not the widely used body mass index, or BMI — is a better predictor of all-cause mortality.

The study, published in the American Journal of Medicine, is the culmination of previous UCLA research led by Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, an assistant clinical professor in the endocrinology division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, that found that building muscle mass is important in decreasing metabolic risk.

“As there is no gold-standard measure of body composition, several studies have addressed this question using different measurement techniques and have obtained different results,” Srikanthan said. “So many studies on the mortality impact of obesity focus on BMI. Our study indicates that clinicians need to be focusing on ways to improve body composition, rather than on BMI alone, when counseling older adults on preventative health behaviors.”

The researchers analyzed data collected by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) III, conducted between 1988 and 1994. They focused on a group of 3,659 individuals that included men who were 55 or older and women who were 65 or older at the time of the survey. The authors then determined how many of those individuals had died from natural causes based on a follow-up survey done in 2004.

The body composition of the study subjects was measured using bioelectrical impedance, which involves running an electrical current through the body. Muscle allows the current to pass more easily than fat does, due to muscle’s water content. In this way, the researchers could determine a muscle mass index — the amount of muscle relative to height — similar to a body mass index. They looked at how this muscle mass index was related to the risk of death.

They found that all-cause mortality was significantly lower in the fourth quartile of muscle mass index compared with the first quartile.

“In other words, the greater your muscle mass, the lower your risk of death,” said Dr. Arun Karlamangla, a professor in the geriatrics division at the Geffen School and the study’s co-author. “Thus, rather than worrying about weight or body mass index, we should be trying to maximize and maintain muscle mass.”

This study does have some limitations. For instance, one cannot definitively establish a cause-and-effect relationship between muscle mass and survival using a cohort study such as NHANES III. “But we can say that muscle mass seems to be an important predictor of risk of death,” Srikanthan said. In addition, bioelectrical impedance is not the most advanced measurement technique, though the NHANES III measurements were conducted in a very rigorous fashion “and practically, this is the best situation possible in a study of this size,” she noted.

“Despite these limitations, this study establishes the independent survival prediction ability of muscle mass as measured by bioelectrical impedance in older adults, using data from a large, nationally representative cohort,” Srikanthan and Karlamangla write, adding that BMI’s association with mortality in older adults has proven inconsistent. “We conclude that measurement of muscle mass relative to body height should be added to the toolbox of clinicians caring for older adults. Future research should determine the type and duration of exercise interventions that improve muscle mass and potentially increase survival in (healthy), older adults.”

SOURCE: Enrique Rivero at the UCLA Newsroom

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Try This 2 Minute Exercise To Relieve Neck Pain At the Office

Sitting for extended periods of time at a desk working on a computer creates neck pain in a lot of people. Repetitive daily movements and static postures cause the body to tense up and you need a way to release this tension.

If this is you, then there’s a simple way to relieve neck pain and it only takes 2 minutes out of your day! The study reported below shows that a simple lateral raise can have profound effects over time. The study found that a 2 minute exercise had the same effect in reducing pain over time as a 12-minute one.

Two things that we would add to this:

Make sure your shoulders are dropped when doing the exercise and;

Breathe in on the downward motion, exhaling on the lift.

Obviously you don’t need this particular brand and you can have the same effect without the resistance band by slowing down through the whole movement, using the effect of gravity for the resistance.

A study recently published in BioMed Research International showed a 40% decrease in neck and shoulder pain intensity and a 6% increase in isometric muscle strength for participants in a 10-week, two-minute daily elastic resistance training program. The study, conducted at the National Research Centre for the Working Environment in Copenhagen, Denmark, investigated the effects of resistance training on occupational muscle activity in 30 female office workers with chronic pain.

“The increase in the number of individuals working in sedentary careers coupled with their time spent in front of a computer increases the time of static body postures and repetitive movements of the arm, shoulder and hands, which has been associated with the development of musculoskeletal disorders,” stated Lars L. Andersen, PhD, researcher with the National Research Centre for the Working Environment. “This has both individual and social consequences as neck and shoulder pain has been show to increase the risk for long-term absence from work. Females may be at higher risk due to the differences in work tasks, work techniques and possible lower muscle strength. Review of previous studies show that women with a history of neck pain are the strongest predictors for the development of neck pain for those working with computers, thus our study included only female participants.”

This 30-participant study is nested in a larger randomized control trial of 198 participants. That trial utilized Thera-Band® Elastic Tubing with handles for an exercise routine using only one exercise for either two or 12 minutes and participants were randomly assigned to either a non-exercising control group, a two-minute exercise group, or a 12-minute exercise group. The exercise groups performed a lateral raise with the arm slightly in front of the body while using elastic tubing for resistance. After 10 weeks, both exercise groups significantly reduced their neck/shoulder pain and tenderness, and significantly increased their strength compared to the control group. There was no significant difference between the exercise groups.

For this recent 30-participatnt analysis, half of the workers participated in the daily two-minute training program while a control group of 15 received weekly e-mail information on general health. The researchers were particularly interested in the mechanisms of pain reduction in the group performing a single set of exercises to failure within two minutes and the resulting EMG measurements. These time-consuming daily measurements were not possible within the larger trial.

After the 10-week program, the researchers concluded that the single set of two-minute TheraBand exercise to failure can significantly reduce pain and tenderness in female office workers with neck/shoulder pain.

SOURCE: PRWEB

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Researchers Confirm That Exercise Brightens Mood & Reduces Anxiety

Scientific research is catching up with something that a lot of us have already known. Exercise brightens your mood and improves response to stress.

This article examines research that has been done to try and confirm this connection. The research on rats shows that exercise changes your brain. And rats, as you well know, they’re a lot like us.

The more you exercise the better you feel and are able to cope with stresses that create anxiety. Great news and more motivation to get exercising!

A neuron in the brain. Joubert/Photo Researchers, Inc

Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats. Scientists have known for some time that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells (neurons) but not how, precisely, these neurons might be functionally different from other brain cells.

In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains. (The researchers could tell which neurons were activated because the cells expressed specific genes in response to the stress.) But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

For years, both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, it has been a given that exercise enhances mood. But how exercise, a physiological activity, might directly affect mood and anxiety — psychological states — was unclear. Now, thanks in no small part to improved research techniques and a growing understanding of the biochemistry and the genetics of thought itself, scientists are beginning to tease out how exercise remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress. In work undertaken at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for instance, scientists have examined the role of serotonin, a neurotransmitter often considered to be the “happy” brain chemical. That simplistic view of serotonin has been undermined by other researchers, and the University of Colorado work further dilutes the idea. In those experiments, rats taught to feel helpless and anxious, by being exposed to a laboratory stressor, showed increased serotonin activity in their brains. But rats that had run for several weeks before being stressed showed less serotonin activity and were less anxious and helpless despite the stress.

Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

The stress-reducing changes wrought by exercise on the brain don’t happen overnight, however, as virtually every researcher agrees. Dr. Greenwood added that it was “not clear how that translates” into an exercise prescription for humans. We may require more weeks of working out, or maybe less. And no one has yet studied how intense the exercise needs to be. But the lesson, Dr. Greenwood says, is “don’t quit.” Keep running or cycling or swimming. (Animal experiments have focused exclusively on aerobic, endurance-type activities.) You may not feel a magical reduction of stress after your first jog, if you haven’t been exercising. But the molecular biochemical changes will begin, Dr. Greenwood says. And eventually, he says, they become “profound.”

SOURCE: Gretchen Reynolds at The New York Times

I've been reading some seriously interesting articles today.  Check this one out then after you read it, go for a run, build some new brain cells, and lower your anxiety/stress.

Studies in animals have shown that physical exercise creates excitable neurons in abundance, especially in the hippocampus, a portion of the brain known to be involved in thinking and emotional responses.

But exercise also has been found to reduce anxiety in both people and animals.

These experiments seem to show that small doses of epicatechin, a flavonol in dark chocolate, are correlated with new muscle capilaries and mitochondria along with better muscle endurance. 

Just mice in this study though, who wants to be the first to try it for themself?  :-)