Fitness Guide

Cold and Heat Therapy

When we sustain an injury, the body begins to repair itself immediately. The damaged part begins to receive increased blood flow, which can lead to inflammation. While inflammation is a natural by-product of the healing process, it can sometimes result in swelling and pain - and that is where heat and cold therapies come into play. Most doctors recommend R.I.C.E. (rest, ice, compression and elevation) therapy. When applied immediately to an injury, cold can reduce both pain and inflammation. After a few days of applying cold to the injury (when swelling has decreased), it’s a good time to apply heat therapy. Heat increases blood flow and helps to speed up the healing process as well as promote flexibility. If you are injured, call your doctor for advice. The information provided in this post is not meant to diagnose or cure any medical problems.

Cold therapy can help to relieve chronic discomfort associated with the following:

• Arthritis
• Back Pain
• Burns
• Headache Pain
• Neck Pain
• Sinus Inflammation
• Toothaches

Cold/Heat therapy can help to alleviate temporary pain from:

• Muscular Sprains/Strains
• Post-Surgical Pain
• Some injuries

Heat therapy may relieve pain and restore flexibility for specific ailments such as:

• Arthritis
• Cramps
• Muscle Aches
• Menstrual Cramping

Pay Now or Pay Later

The average American will gain seven pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. There are only 27 days until Thanksgiving with the Christmas and New year holidays close behind, why not take some time to get your body ready for the holidays.

Here’s the thing: you can take some time, develop some good habits, and drop some pounds before the holidays arrive. If you don’t, you’ll enter the holiday season with the statistics stacked against you. You may be strong enough to resist all the food as you celebrate the holidays, or you may end up starting 2009 with the extra weight you’re carrying now plus another seven or more pounds.

You can pay now or pay later. The choice is yours.

It’s Time To Detox

The last day of Summer is over and it’s time to get ready for Fall and Winter by dropping a few pounds you may have put on by eating all those summertimes barbecue goodies: hot dogs, hamburgers, potato chips, beers, ice cream, sodas pops…It’s time to detox you body and get ready for the busy season that is fast coming with a lighter, more energetic body.

Detoxification is about giving your body a chance to rest, cleaning and nourishing it, from the inside out. By removing and eliminating toxins, then feeding your body with healthy nutrients. Beside losing a few pound, detoxifying can help strengthen your immune system, protecting you from disease and renew your ability to maintain optimum health. Get your body ready to fight off the cold, the flu and all those nasty bugs that usually come around in the winter.

So whip out your favorite detox recipe.  Cleanse and nourish your body, from inside out.

Happiness-The Best Medicine

A cheerful outlook has positive health impacts: research links optimism with reduce stress, blood pressure and cardiovascular problems. In a long-term study of heart disease patients, the death rate was twice as high among those feeling pessimistic about their recovery compared to optimists. Another report links positive emotions with increased resistance to colds and flu.

A Happiness How-To

the secret to happiness rests in part within you. To boost happiness, reflect on the good in your life and keep mistakes and challenges in perspective. Choose friends whose values and standard of living match yours. Then stop comparing yourself to people with more money and possessions; research shows that they actually are not happier and that striving to be like them will increase your dissatisfaction. Instead, focus on appreciating what you have and what you realistically can achieve. Over time, you will realize you’ll own power to affect positive change in your life.

More Ways To Boost Your Outlook

• Expressed gratitude. Each week, write down five things for which you are grateful. Read you a list daily.
• Strike a balance. Maintain balance between work and home life.
• Be social. So round yourself with family and friends. Join a new club or sign up for a sports league.
• Help others. Volunteer or donate to a cause that inspires you. Perform random acts of kindness.
• Find purpose. Spending your time on compelling and enjoyable work - paid or not - gives you a stronger sense of satisfaction.

(Credit given to HillHealth Magazine)

Why Muscles Pain

As people age, they begin to complain more of pains in their muscles and joints. They seem to stiffen up with age, and such commonplace activities as bending over for the morning paper can make them wince.

Such pain can grip so fiercely that they are sure it begins deep in their bones. But the real cause of stiffness and soreness lies not in the joints or bones, according to research at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, but in the muscles and connective tissues that move the joints.

The frictional resistance generated by the two rubbing surfaces of bones in the joints is negligible, even in joints damaged by arthritis.

Flexibility is the medical term used to describe the range of a joint’s motion from full movement in one direction to full movement in the other. The greater the range of movement, the more flexible the joint.

If you bend forward at the hips and touch your toes with your fingertips, you have good flexibility, or range of motion of the hip joints. But can you bend over easily with a minimal expenditure of energy and force? The exertion required to flex a joint is just as important as its range of possible motion.

Different factors limit the flexibility and ease of movement in different joints and muscles. In the elbow and knee, the bony structure itself sets a definite limit. In other joints, such as the ankle, hip, and back, the soft tissue—muscle and connective tissue—limit the motion range.

The problem of inflexible joints and muscles is similar to the difficulty of opening and closing a gate because of a rarely used and rusty hinge that has become balky.

Hence, if people do not regularly move their muscles and joints through their full ranges of motion, they lose some of their potential. That is why when these people will try to move a joint after a long period of inactivity, they feel pain, and that discourages further use

What happens next is that the muscles become shortened with prolonged disuse and produces spasms and cramps that can be irritating and extremely painful. The immobilization of muscles, as researchers have demonstrated with laboratory animals, brings about biochemical changes in the tissue.

However, other factors trigger sore muscles. Here are some of them:

1. Too much exercise

Have you always believed on the saying, “No pain, no gain?” If you do, then, it is not so surprising if you have already experienced sore muscles.

The problem with most people is that they exercise too much thinking that it is the fastest and the surest way to lose weight. Until they ache, they tend to ignore their muscles and connective tissue, even though they are what quite literally holds the body together.

2. Aging and inactivity

Connective tissue binds muscle to bone by tendons, binds bone to bone by ligaments, and covers and unites muscles with sheaths called fasciae. With age, the tendons, ligaments, and fasciae become less extensible. The tendons, with their densely packed fibers, are the most difficult to stretch. The easiest are the fasciae. But if they are not stretched to improve joint mobility, the fasciae shorten, placing undue pressure on the nerve pathways in the muscle fasciae. Many aches and pains are the result of nerve impulses traveling along these pressured pathways.

3. Immobility

Sore muscles or muscle pain can be excruciating, owing to the body’s reaction to a cramp or ache. In this reaction, called the splinting reflex, the body automatically immobilizes a sore muscle by making it contract. Thus, a sore muscle can set off a vicious cycle pain.

First, an unused muscle becomes sore from exercise or being held in an unusual position. The body then responds with the splinting reflex, shortening the connective tissue around the muscle. This cause more pain, and eventually the whole area is aching. One of the most common sites for this problem is the lower back.

4. Spasm theory

In the physiology laboratory at the University of Southern California, some people have set out to learn more about this cycle of pain.

Using some device, they measured electrical activity in the muscles. The researchers knew that normal, well-relaxed muscles produce no electrical activity, whereas, muscles that are not fully relaxed show considerable activity.

In one experiment, the researchers measured these electrical signals in the muscles of persons with athletic injuries, first with the muscle immobilized, and then, after the muscle had been stretched.

In almost every case, exercises that stretched or lengthened the muscle diminished electrical activity and relieved pain, either totally or partially.

These experiments led to the “spasm theory,” an explanation of the development and persistence of muscle pain in the absence of any obvious cause, such as traumatic injury.

According to this theory, a muscle that is overworked or used in a strange position becomes fatigued and as a result, sore muscles.

Hence, it is extremely important to know the limitations and capacity of the muscles in order to avoid sore muscles. This goes to show that there is no truth in the saying, “No pain, no gain.” What matters most is on how people stay fit by exercising regularly at a normal range than once rarely but on a rigid routine.

The Root Of All Sickness

Why do people get sick? There are a lot of things to blame. But here are a few reasons accounted for most sickness that most of us neglect their significant.

To Refill
We live in a hectic, fast pace life. When things go crazy, we forget to eat. The body expends energy even when we are doing nothing, let alone coping with work and taking care of the family and all that running around. Many are so busy that they skip breakfast, not a good idea for keeping a healthy body. And even when we eat, most likely we eat stuff we like or accustomed to, or even worst, fast food. We may feel full to the stomach, but not really giving the body what it needs. Just like a car, it needs more than just gas to run on. It needs water, engine oil, break fluids… in order to be safe to drive. We often need to check what it’s low on and refill or even refresh the ingredients it needs if we don’t want it to break down sooner then it is supposed to. When the engine oil is low, you won’t refill it with water, do you? It works the same way with the body, a much more complex machine, for optimal function, it needs 14 different types of nutrients to work properly. These nutrients are found in many different kinds of foods and fruit and vegetable. If we only feed it with what we like to eat, then it is like keep filling water when the car is low on engine oil. We are not properly refilling our body of what it needs. Over time, it will start to break down, just like a car.

To Repair

The human body was designed to spend 1/3 the time sleeping for a reason - to repair the body by replacing damaged cells with new ones. This self healing process is done during deep sleep, and it needs nutrients to produce the cells that are going to replace the death cells.  When we don’t have enough sleep (at the right time), we are robbing the body the chance to do its job.  When we don’t give it the right nutrients (whatever that may be) to produce the cells,  we are cheating our body to do  a good job, and the result,  a weaker body that are prone to many kind of ailments.

To beware of the living environment

We are living in a toxic fill environment.  Water and air are being polluted by the modern world. Pesticide, herbicide and hormone in the food we eat.  Household cleaning products,  medications in the cabinet are all contributing to the toxic build up in the body.  When the liver, the main toxic treatment center, is overloaded for a prolong period, its function starts to weaken and portion of the toxic never get leased out of the body.  The result?  Need I say more?

To manage stress

Another biggy, your emotion, which account for 50% of your overall health. Did you know that when you are angry, being startled or under lots of pressure, body cells are dying off in a faster rate than normal?  Sitting in traffic going to work, an issue with the coworker at the office,  you are late picking the children up from the baby sitter, having an argument  with your spouse….all these stress  building up.  Imagine a wooden table, you stack a few bricks on it every day, by the time you have about 50 bricks, you may notice that the table start to cave a little, a sign to stop loading it or even need to unload it.  What happens if you keep piling it up, until it has no more resistant? It will collasp!

Medicine Is Not Magic

One of the most positive benefits of the often stunning advances in computer technology over the last twenty years has been the assistance that it has given to the development of medical technology.
Computers have enabled medical research to be successfully undertaken and completed many, many times faster than was ever possible previously. More and more diseases and illnesses have been isolated and investigated in a fraction of the time that it once took.

Medical practitioners are becoming ever more skillful, with increasingly sophisticated tools and instruments to help them in their tasks.

And yet disease, sickness and illness has not been comprehensively defeated or outwitted, nor is it ever likely that they will be. For example, it is now widely accepted that, no matter how quickly computer aided technology and research might enable a virus to be identified and isolated, the virus itself can mutate into a more virulent form much faster!
Medical science is far more advanced than it ever was, but it is still fighting a never ending battle against the power and strength of the ‘bad side’ of nature! So, man will probably never conquer disease entirely. People will always become ill with all sorts of conditions and ailments, and, in the worst cases, they will die from them.

Being healthy is, therefore always a question of degree to a certain extent. You can only do what you can to be as healthy as you can possibly be.