Pay Attention To Pain & Soreness

When any workout or specific exercise causes you pain, pay attention. Knowing how to react can help you avoid a serious injury. Strength training can cause several types of pain including:

Muscle Soreness
When you use muscles you have not used for a while or try a new exercise or training technique, it is normal to feel a dull ache of soreness in the muscles that were trained. This pain is caused by microscopic tears in the fibers of the connective tissues in your body–the ligaments that connect bones to other bones, and the tendons that connect muscles to bones.

This microtrauma may sound harmful but is in fact the natural response of your muscles when they experience work. This is the primary reason it is so important that you get enough rest between specific muscle workouts. Each time you work out with weights, you cause this “damage”–these tiny tears in your muscles; they need ample resting time to rebuild and become even stronger, bigger, and more firm.

 Written by Chad Tackett

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Finding TIME for Exercise

 

If I had to make my list of the top 10 problems people have with starting a program, finding time for exercise would definitely be at the top of it. But here’s the thing: if you’re looking to find some spare time when you can fit exercise in, forget about it. We’re living in the early part of the 21st century. No one has spare time. It’s like “spare money.” You can choose to budget money and time any way you want, but none of it is extra, none of it is spare.

Time is the great equalizer. The poorest person on the planet and the richest have exactly the same amount of it, 24 hours per day. No more, no less. So let’s forget about finding extra time. (Where are you going to find it, under a rock?) Instead, let’s talk about developing a budget. Let’s talk about creating our life the way we want it to be.

Written by  Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

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CREATING ENERGY to Swing at Life from Any Angle

Okay, so golf isn’t your game; maybe its tennis, cycling, dancing, or simply a zest to live life to its fullest. Regardless of age, ethnicity, profession, or financial status, quality of life cannot be obtained while experiencing pain and inflammation, pain that affects the life of the victim, family and friends.

The world of medicine is undergoing a radical upheaval in its understanding of the debilitating, and often life-threatening, diseases of inflammation, including: heart disease, stroke, rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, macular degeneration, Crohn’s, allergies, and much more.

Inflammation is the body’s way of telling us that something is terribly wrong—a basic defense triggered by bacteria, virus, parasites, injury, trauma, surgery, and chemicals (environmental or ingested). If the inflammation continues, pro-inflammatory cytokines are produced by macrophages, which are chemical messengers that attack and clean up cells in the affected area; eventually cytokine production rises, destroying more and more cells, leading to organ damage.

Written by  Gloria Gilbère, DAHom, PhD

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Coconut OIL

In mid-2012, Nestlé Health Science acquired a stake in Accera®, the U.S. maker of Axona®, a medical food targeted at people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s. Aside from the fact that the purchase shows that Nestlé is placing a strategic bet on the future direction of medical food demand, this acquisition also is interesting for its potential validation of a tropical oil that alternately has been damned and praised for its role in health: coconut oil.

On the one hand, there are those who still maintain that coconut oil, a source of more saturated fat than butter, lard or beef tallow, is the devil incarnate for brain and heart health. On the other hand, current science is in the process of validating the high regard that the coconut oil enjoys in the Ayurvedic and Chinese traditions of healing.

Written by  Dallas Clouatre, PhD

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Have a Drink—The Importance of Water

Name a drink that can increase your alertness, prevent you from fainting after giving blood, and even promote a teensy bit of weight loss.

Think it’s one of those “miraculous” multi-level marketing elixirs made of exotic juices that sell for about 40 bucks a pop?

Well, think again…continue reading.

The drink I’m talking about doesn’t cost anything, yet most of us don’t get enough of it.

I’m talking about…water.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center led by David Robertson, MD, have shown that ordinary water—without any additives—does more than just quench thirst. It has some other unexpected, physiological effects. It increases the activity of the sympathetic—fight or flight—nervous system, which raises alertness, blood pressure and energy expenditure (a technical term for calorie burning).

Written by  Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

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A Forgotten Nutrient Essential for Health

If you answered iodine, you’re correct. Before the widespread use of synthetic drugs, iodine was practically a universal medicine for everything, even in assisting the body to fight off cancer. Today, we find ourselves with skyrocketing cancer rates, an epidemic of thyroid dysfunction and auto-immune disorders, and toxic build-up in our bodies—could an iodine deficiency be to blame? I believe it is!

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE…

Iodine was discovered in 1811, isolated from the soda ash of seaweed, by the French scientist Courtors and used as a medical tincture in the Civil War. By 1874, it was found to be one of the most efficacious antiseptics, due in part to its low reactivity to proteins—allowing its I2 molecules to rapidly and thoroughly penetrate the cell wall of microorganisms.

Written by  Gloria Gilbère, DAHom, PhD

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Building a Healthy Metabolism with Protein

In order to maintain an efficient metabolism-especially while dieting, it is imperative to ensure adequate protein intake, with special emphasis on branched-chain amino acids.

Our bodies need protein to build bone, skin, hair, nails, and cell membranes, and to manufacture blood, hormones, neurochemicals, immune cells, and enzymes. That’s because proteins contain amino acids, a nutrient that provides our bodies with a constant supply of nitrogen and sulphur. Nitrogen and sulfur are also essential to the ongoing growth, repair and detoxification of all our cells. In fact, nitrogen balance (the measure of how much nitrogen is retained as opposed to excreted) is the measurement researchers use to determine protein requirements.

Twenty-three amino acids are considered biologically important. At least nine of these are deemed essential because our bodies can’t manufacture them on their own. That’s why we need a constant supply of complete protein from dietary sources such as beef, dairy products (especially high-alpha whey), poultry, fish, eggs, and vegetable proteins such as hemp, rice, alfalfa and Moringa.

Written by  Brad King, MS, MFS

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Choose Protein to Build Muscle & Burn Fat

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found eating a low-protein diet makes your body more likely to store fat around your liver, kidneys, and other organs. You might not think any type of body fat could be good, but trust me: fat hanging around these organs is especially bad. On the other hand, researchers here found a higher-protein diet increases muscle and boosts your metabolism.

The study recorded everything 25 people ate over 12 weeks. And I mean everything: these people were confined to a hospital ward and closely monitored. None of them were smuggling in Little Debbies or anything else not on the well-regulated menu. Researchers gave these participants about a thousand extra calories every day. One group got those extra calories as protein, the other from carbs.

Written by Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

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Take A Vacation from Your Low-Carb Diet

Can you take a five-day “vacation” from your low-carb diet every week and still burn fat? A study suggests that possibility. Researchers here found women who cut carbs for just two days each week lost more weight than women who stuck with a permanent calorie-restricted diet. In other words, for five days every week, the low-carb groups ate what they wanted and still lost weight.

The study, presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, randomly assigned 115 women with familial histories of breast cancer (in other words, they’re considered high risk) to one of three diets for four months.

1. One group ate a 1,500-calorie Mediterranean-type diet.
2. The second group ate their normal diet, but two days a week they cut carbs and also calories to about 650 on those two days.
3. The third group also ate as they pleased and low-carbed two days a week, but without any caloric restrictions.

Just to clarify, during these two low-carb days, researchers allowed the two groups 50 grams of carbohydrate. They could eat one piece of fruit each day as well as non-starchy vegetables. I say this because studies fluctuate wildly over what they define as a low-carb diet.

Written by  Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

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Optimizing Energy Production with Ribose—Feel better with a heart and muscle energy tune up!

Feel Like You Could Use More Energy?
One of the consequences of our stressful modern life is an increased need for energy. With less sleep and the depletion of nutrients in our food supply, however, it is getting harder and harder for our bodies to keep up.

There is a lot out there about how competitive athletes can up their energy. Although the approach we’ll discuss below is also excellent for athletes, it was developed, and is outstanding, for the rest of us. Whether you are a mom trying to juggle a fast paced hectic life, a student on a fast food diet, or just trying to optimize your day to day energy, here’s how to get from being fatigued to feeling fantastic!

Written by  Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

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