Movement That Matters: Exercise With a Greater PurposeWritten by Gillian Hood-Gabrielson
You’ve seen commercials – “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” While this has been a topic of many jokes and late-night comedy skits, reality is falling is a very real danger for many people. Too often falls can lead to broken bones, hospitalization, and sometimes life-threatening illnesses due to being confined to a bed while recovering. A less extreme, but still real situation is when a person lacks leg strength to get out of a chair. Or someone who throws out their back just picking up a child or groceries from trunk of car. Did you know that this is not inevitable? With consistent and effective exercise, you will maintain your daily activities without injury well into your sixties, seventies, eighties, and beyond. You may have heard buzzwords “functional training” and “core training” mentioned in latest fitness magazines. While these terms sound complicated, they are really terms for most effective and exciting system of strength training being used today. Functional training strengthens your body for everyday movements it has to perform. This could be any type of movement, whether for a sport, your job, or just picking up your kids. Most injuries occur in course of our everyday lives. Strengthen your body for these activities and you will sustain less injury. Functional training also improves balance. This is essential for preventing falls. A combination of strength and balance will give you confidence to move through your day with ease! Core training works on strengthening your “core”, your abdominal and low back muscles. Just as a house needs a foundation to build upon, so does your body. Work on core first and every other exercise you add will be more effective and make you stronger. Many functional training exercises incorporate core training. There are also exercises that isolate core for maximum benefit. Core training is idea behind Pilates and is also used in yoga.
| | The Eight Week Cholesterol ChallengeWritten by Barrett Niehus
The Eight Week Cholesterol Challengeby Barrett Niehus http://www.freetrainer.com When I first started down this path I was looking for something to reduce my cholesterol levels without giving me a heart attack. My doctor recommended Lipitor, but I had read an article in American Heart Associations web site that indicated Lipitor and other statin drugs may possibly be worse for me than my high cholesterol. (The article that I read is here: http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3001036 ) Subsequent research led me to two compounds that have been clinically proven to improve cholesterol levels without side effects. Being a chemical engineer myself, I was skeptical about any claim that did not have sufficient research behind it. However, two compounds that I found have been clinically verified to be effective in improving cholesterol levels. It was these two compounds that have dramatically changed my condition, and motivated me to solicit this challenge. What are two compounds? Well, first is niacin. That’s right, inexpensive mineral that is occasionally listed on food label of our bread, breakfast cereal, sports drinks, or other enriched food. The other compound is pantethine. Strangely enough, pantethine is a compound that our body makes as it created Co-Enzyme A which eventually creates cholesterol. Between these two chemicals, extensive research has demonstrated dramatic, statin-like, effects on cholesterol levels. In addition, because they are already needed by your body, two compounds don’t create dangerous side effects that have been demonstrated with statins. The two compounds act together to balance out levels of bad (LDL) cholesterol and good (HDL) cholesterol in your blood stream. Clinical trials have demonstrated that niacin is effective in reducing level of bad cholesterol in your blood stream. In addition, clinical trial on pantethine in Japan have demonstrated that compound significantly improves level of good (HDL) cholesterol in your blood stream. Subsequently, combination of two may have an amazing effect on your overall cholesterol level.
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