Health and Fitness

We are approaching the time of year when you might be starting to think about and plan your winter holiday, skiing is a popular winter holiday past time, probably the most popular resort with UK Holiday makers would be the French Alps.

Skiing is not only fun but also a very strenuous sport using all the muscles in your body but some more than others, in order to get your moneys worth and spend as much time on the slopes as possible without injury you would be well advised to properly prepare your muscles prior to the trip itself.

The last thing you want to do is spend out all that money and after the first day or 2 spend the rest of your holiday nursing sore muscles or worse still broken bones, statically most skiing injuries occur on the first or second day of the skiing holiday usually in the afternoon, this is due to a lack of stamina and loss of concentration.

Preparing your muscles for skiing

Skiing uses all of your muscle groups but it puts the most strain on your legs, strengthening your upper leg muscles is key if you want to avoid injury when skiing, it also helps to have a good level of cardio fitness cycling would be perfect preparation for your skiing holiday as would some regular resistance training using kettlebells.

Circuit training can offer you an excellent time and cost effective way to prepare for your skiing holiday, heres some beginner circuit training advice.

Origins of the Kettlebell

Kettlebells originate from Russia where they are called Girya, the kettlebell is a cast iron weight with a handle on top.

Kettlebells have started to become very popular of late hailed for the benefits they offer, the kettlebell itself is not a new phenomonom however. Kettlebells have been around in Russia for a very long time, so popular were they that Russian strongmen and weightlifters were referred to as “kettlebell men.”

What are the benefits of Kettlebells?

Kettlebells offer excellent fat burning workouts due to the type of movements you can use them for (compound movements) involving the main muscle groups, kettlebells also increase overall body and core strenght.

Many proffessional trainers now include kettlebells in their clients training programs due to the fact they offer excellent benefits for:

• Active Recovery
• Increased Cardio Fitness
• Increased Fat Burning
• Overall Body Strenght Conditioning
• Increased Emphasis on the core

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Since Wimbledon starts today and you’ll all be getting the tennis bug like everyone in the U.K does at this time of year I thought we’d look at Tennis elbow, you don’t have to play tennis to get it. 

Tennis elbow (medically known as Lateral epicondylitis) is a condition characterized by excruciating pain over the outer aspect of your elbow. This is one of the most prominent overuse injuries you can get. This is a misnomer; the disease can occur in other activities which also which involve extensive use of the forearm.

The main symptom of tennis elbow is recurrent pain over the outer aspect of upper limb, near to the elbow. Sometimes, the pain can radiate up to the wrist joint. The person can not lift or grasp any object; even writing becomes difficult in advanced cases. You can not extend your hand fully; pain in the elbow will restrict your normal activities.

Once started, the acute stage of pain will last for at least 6-12 weeks. It can remain for up to years in a milder form.

The cause of Tennis elbow is repeated minute tear in the tendons of the muscles. Initially the tear heals itself. But with repeated tear, the muscle and the whole tendon becomes inflamed. Collagen tissue comes out and aggravates the situation. There is formation of granulation tissue in the places of normal tendinous tissue. The friction against the bony prominence makes the condition worse.

The best way to treat a case of tennis elbow is complete rest. This will normalize the situation early. You may have to stop playing games if the condition does not improve.

Gradual stretching exercise will help in the betterment of the situation. Corticosteroids may be prescribed in refractory cases.

If medical management fails, surgical removal of the inflamed tendon and lengthening of the tendons will definitely improve the condition.

Amino acids are precursors of protein. Several different amino acids after joining by chemical bonds form a protein structure. The chemical and other properties of protein depend upon the sequence of amino acids in the chain.

There will be two separate protein molecules if the sequence of the amino acids is different, no matter if the combination of amino acids is same in two proteins.

Branched chain amino acids are non-linear amino acids containing aliphatic side chain. There are three amino acids in this category – valine, leucine and isoleucine. These three amino acids are very essential to build the skeletal and muscular structure in our body. They also produce different proteins in different combinations. At present, there is much discussion about branched chain amino acids in lowering mental fatigue as it is seen that they can reduce the serotonin level in the brain. They are also used to treat burn patients in their convalescence stage.

An essential amino acid is such that it can not be synthesized de novo, i.e. our body can not synthesize this amino acid from other resources.

Therefore, this group of amino acid has to be supplied by food. There are nine essential amino acids – lysine, leucine, isoleucine, histidine, valine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine and tryptophan.

The non-essential amino acids can be synthesized in our body. They are – alanine, cysteine, cystine, glutamic acid, glutathione, glycine, serine, taurine, threonine, asparagine and proline.

Are you continuing your morning session of running even you are suffering from excruciating pain in the left heel? Have you ever felt a binding for treadmill running even when you are having a low grade fever? Continue to skip even when your friends have given up long before?

If anyone of these is true, you may be having some kind of exercise addiction my friend. Whereas regular exercise is necessary to keep your health hale and hearty, doing excessive exercise will cause no good, instead it can ruin your life.

How do you know that you are addicted to exercise? Let us find out –

• You feel extremely anxious if you miss any time of your daily exercise schedule.
• You continue to exercise each day, even when you are so sick that it is better to remain in the bed.
• You are missing classes, reaching late in the workplace or skipping social gathering to do some more exercise.
• If you miss any schedule, you do twice or thrice on the very next day.

If your answer is yes in any case, it is time to have a look into the deeper aspect of life as to who is driving your mind for doing exercise or how. Experts say that maintaining an exercise dairy will enable you to track the progress.

If you are progressing, there is no need to continue over exercising. It may land you in personal injury in a short time or you may become a patient of osteoarthritis at an early age.

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What happens when you exercise too much? 

Doing adequate exercise is healthy, but when a person gets obsessed with exercise, it becomes a disease. It is has multiple names – exercise addiction, exercise dependence, compulsive athleticism and exercise abuse.

This addiction will affect your career, family and other social engagements. Addiction to exercise is both physically and psychosocially damaging.

Those who are obsessed to exercising may have their own motivations. They feel a ‘high’ from doing exercise. It makes them feel they can adequately control their body weight and keep it in shape. They will do exercise even if they are injured or sick. They usually exercise alone to avoid any silly comments from others. They miss important arrangements, workplace, school, college and other social gatherings.

Recent studies have shown that, exercise addiction is also associated with other psychological disorders like bulimia nervosa. They become a serious patient of chronic fatigue syndrome. Long standing patients of exercise addiction suffer from stress fracture of long bones.

They are also a strong contender of nutritional disorders like protein deficiency, avitaminosis and others.

As they continue doing exercise even when injured, it calls for an immediate medical attention. They don’t feel like going to the doctors as they fear they will be banned doing exercise.

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You are making six pack abs, a curved muscular body and working hard with weights. After a couple of months you have shaped your body up quite a lot. Now you have noticed that you are losing your hair and becoming bald day by day. What could be the reason? Does bodybuilding really make your hair fall out? 

The hair follicles produce an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase. Hair is not the only organ where this enzyme is formed. The main organ that produces 5-alpha reductase is the liver. This enzyme reacts with the hormone testosterone (male sex hormone) and produces Dihydrotestosterone. Now this Dihydrotestosterone (DHT – the acronym) is lethal to the bulb of the hair and can damage it badly. Ultimately the hair dies and falls out.

DHT can lead to ‘Male pattern baldness’ or the temporal regression. It affects the fairer gender also. In men, the process starts with a retreating hairline, general thinning, horseshoe pattern baldness or frank baldness. In women, the scene is not so grave. They notice only the retreating hairline or general thinning.

The testosterone is what enables men to build muscle, levels of testosterone are at a maximum just after the weight training time and last for at least one hour. After that, the level decreases gradually.

Just a quick note, DHT will affect the hair growth even when you are not a bodybuilder as this enzyme is naturally produced in our body, body building does increase your bodies testoerone production and so can increase hairloss.

According to biochemistry, an amino acid refers to a molecule which contains both the amine and the carboxyl group. This is most pertinent for the α-amino acids having the general chemical formula H₂NCHR-COOH. Here R denotes any organic molecule. The α-carbon is the common carbon molecule, where all the carboxylate groups and the amine component are attached. The amino acids differ from one another by the attachment of side chain (the R group).

The size of amino acids varies quite a lot. The simplest amino acid is glycine, where the R group is replaced by a single hydrogen atom one of the most complex amino acids tryptophan, where the R-group is denoted by a larger heterocyclic group.

Amino acids play a major role in building the protein and act as the mediator in different bodily metabolisms. The exact amino acid content with the progression of the base molecule is the determinant of a protein. The chemical properties of the structural amino acids are the responsible factor of biological nature of the protein. Even a single change of the amino acid sequence can change the protein structure as a whole and the resultant protein will act differently.

Amino acids coalesce together to form the peptides and the peptides combine to form the polypeptides or the proteins.

Apart from forming protein, different amino acid act as a precursor of different organic molecules in our body.

Going down the Gym and training hard is probably the easy part of trying to build muscle and strength, in order to successfully see results you need the correct Nutrion.

What Nutrition do you need?

You need to increase your protein intake this can be done be increasing the amount of protein rich food you eat, egg whites for example are an excellent source of protein. Egg Yolks however contain quite a bit of fat and egg whites on their own tast Yuk, a protein supplement can help deliver the muscle building material your body needs without the belly building lard.

You may want to look at more sports specific nutrition such as supplements for wrestling.

Creatine is another good muscle builder a natural ingredient found in foods mainly from animal origin. Red meat like beef, veal and mutton are rich sources of creatine. Creatine has been much discussed in recent years. The bodybuilders and weightlifting champions are using this element with a good result so I believe are many football clubs including the England National side at one point.

Before buying for this product, you should consult your doctor who will be able to tell you about all the health benefits you will derive from creatine.

But here are some of the benefits of creatine for your ready reference –

• In our body, a substance called ATP (Adenosine TriPhosphate) helps to transfer energy from food to our muscles. Creatine is required in the process to produce ATP.
• Glycogen stored in our muscles releases energy during vigorous exercises. Creatine helps in breaking down process of glycogen.
• As creatine is available only in the foods of animal origin, the vegetarian people lack this element. By taking creatine supplements, they can replenish the need of their body.
• Cardiovascular activities are closely related to creatine. It helps in the blood supply in the vital organs. During any vigorous exercise program, the vital organs like heart, brain, liver and kidney need extra amount of blood to work properly. Creatine helps them to overcome the workload.
• It also helps in the fat burning process. Our stored body fat is essential to provide extra energy. Creatine helps in the fat braking pathway.

Protein and nutrition supplements will definitely help you to gain optimum benefit from exercise. For more information on which nutritional supplements you need see this nutritional supplements 101.