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Lead Stories: Saturday, September 6, 2008

Q & A: Is stretching helpful or harmful for exercisers?

Posted November 30th, 2007 at 2:12 PM by Andrew Goodman

Section: Health & Fitness, Injury & Rehab, Exercise

Stretching the leg muscles improves muscle flexibility and strength, running speed, and jumping distance, according to a study from Louisiana State University (Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, October 2007).

Stretching elongates muscles and tendons. Longer tendons allow muscles to exert a greater torque on the joint to exert more power to help you lift heavier, jump higher and run faster.

However, other studies show that you should not stretch before a competition involving speed and strength (Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, April 2006). The longer the athletes stretched, the weaker they became. Prolonged stretching fatigues muscle fibers so that they contract with reduced force.
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Muscle recovery techniques to get you back up, running and in the gym

Posted August 7th, 2007 at 6:11 PM by Shannon Clark

Section: Health & Fitness, Injury & Rehab, Exercise

One of the most critical aspects of your workout is your recovery. While you definitely do need to be putting in the effort at the gym to provide an overloading stimulus on the muscles to keep challenging them, if you aren’t giving your muscles enough time to recover and grow back stronger you will not see the progress you like.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to enhance your recovery ability so you spend less time out of the gym and more time enjoying your workouts (and reaping the desired results)…

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Prevent injury and improve performance by increasing the intensity of your warm-up

Posted March 6th, 2007 at 10:37 AM by Jeanie Rebb

Section: Running & Training, Injury & Rehab, Health & Fitness, Injury & Rehab, Exercise

Warming up before you exercise helps to prevent injuries and lets you jump higher, run faster, lift heavier or throw further.

Your warm-up should involve the same muscles and motions you plan to use in your sport. For example, before you start to run very fast, do a series of runs of gradually-increasing intensity to increase the circulation of blood to the muscles you will be using.

Muscles are made up of millions of individual fibers, just like a rope made from many threads. When you start to exercise at a very slow pace, you increase the blood flow to muscle fibers, increase their temperature, and bring in more oxygen, so the muscles are more pliable and resistant to injury.
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Studies: Older exercisers recover as fast as children

Posted February 5th, 2007 at 9:45 AM by Hariz Siddiqui

Section: Health & Fitness, Injury & Rehab, Exercise

As lifelong exercisers age, they find they can’t hit a tennis ball or golf ball as hard, run as fast, lift as heavy, or perform as well, whatever their sport. A study from Yokohama City University in Japan shows that this gradual decline is caused by loss of muscle strength.

However, the most significant finding of the study was that older men can recover from hard workouts as quickly as younger men (Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism, June 2006). Another encouraging study in the same journal, from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, shows that men over 60 who exercise regularly are far stronger than their non-exercising counterparts.
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Will lifting weights make
me musclebound?

Posted December 31st, 2006 at 12:00 PM by Jamal Walker

Section: Health & Fitness, Exercise

In 1937, Dr. Peter Karpovich of Springfield College in Massachusetts published a ground-breaking paper showing that lifting weights helped men improve their coordination. At the time, his paper was ridiculed by most athletes, particularly professional baseball players. They were afraid that lifting weights would cause them to develop such large muscles that they would lose the fine coordination necessary to hit and throw a baseball.

Today we know there is no such condition as “muscle bound”. Baseball players all lift weights and they are so much better as athletes that the best baseball players in the world before 1940 probably would not even make today’s professional teams.
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How to Warm Up

Posted October 22nd, 2006 at 5:56 PM by Martin Kennedy

Section: Running & Training, Injury & Rehab, Training Tips, Health & Fitness, Exercise

Warming up before you exercise helps to prevent injuries and lets you jump higher, run faster, lift heavier or throw further. Your warm-up should involve the same muscles and motions you plan to use in your sport.

For example, before you start to run very fast, do a series of runs of gradually-increasing intensity to increase the circulation of blood to the muscles you will be using.

Muscles are made up of millions of individual fibers, just like a rope made from many threads. When you start to exercise at a very slow pace, you increase the blood flow to muscle fibers, increase their temperature, and bring in more oxygen, so the muscles are more pliable and resistant to injury.

When you contract a muscle for the first time, you use less than one percent of your muscle fibers. The second time you bring in more fibers, and you keep on increasing the number of muscle fibers used in each contraction for several minutes of using that muscle.

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