Health and Fitness: Alcohol Eats Away At Muscle Mass

Health and Fitness: Alcohol Eats Away At Muscle Mass: If increasing muscle mass is one of your goals, think twice before you go out for a night of heavy drinking. Consuming alcohol in large quan...

Alcohol Eats Away At Muscle Mass

If increasing muscle mass is one of your goals, think twice before you go out for a night of heavy drinking. Consuming alcohol in large quantities has a direct effect on your metabolism, causing fat to be stored instead of being utilized as an energy source. Alcohol contains seven “empty” calories per gram, meaning that these calories don’t provide you with any of the essential nutrients you need to build that muscle mass you desire.

12 ounces of beer = ~150 calories
5 ounces of wine = ~100 calories
1.5-ounces of distilled spirits = ~100 calories

Alcohol is a known depressant that suppresses the brain’s ability to function. The after-effects of a night of excessive drinking can be detrimental to your fitness goals. Alcohol is a diuretic that may result in dehydration. This dehydration is known to decrease physical performance, so that previous night of drinking will continue to affect you the following day.

Alcohol’s affect on sleep patterns results in increased fatigue and physical stress to the body.

 A study examining how alcohol affects caloric intake found that subjects who drank wine with their lunch consumed an additional 200 calories and did not compensate for those calories by cutting back at dinner.

When alcohol is consumed in moderation (no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men), it has been shown to have some positive effects:

Increased HDL cholesterol

Reduced stress levels

Reduced Insulin Resistance

In conclusion, if you want to increase muscle mass, decrease fat or improve general health, make sure alcohol is only consumed in moderation.

Fitness For Older Adults

Even if you’ve never been active, it’s never too late to reap the many health benefits of regular exercise. Regular cardiovascular exercise, such as brisk walking, bicycling or swimming strengthens the heart and muscles, boosts energy and endurance. It also helps control blood sugar and cholesterol levels and works as a natural mood elevator.

Being sedentary raises the risk for developing such serious health conditions as diabetes and heart disease. Strength exercise, or resistance training, helps preserve muscle tissue and bone health. It’ll help you stay strong, so you can go about your normal daily activities.

Always consult with your health care provider before starting an exercise program. Ask about precautions specific to your condition and which exercises are beneficial and safe for you. Regular exercise helps manage health conditions and can speed up the recovery process of serious illnesses, including heart attack, stroke and joint-replacement surgery. Your doctor may recommend that you start exercising in a medically-supervised setting before you exercise on your own.

Water exercises (swimming, water walking) or non weight-bearing exercises (bicycling, rowing, elliptical machines) are easier on the joints and often recommended for people with joint issues. However, your health care provider may recommend some weight-bearing exercises (walking, jogging) to protect and strengthen your bones.

Start with 5 minutes or whatever you can manage, then gradually work up to 30 minutes a day of cardiovascular exercise most days of the week. You should notice a difference in how you feel within 6-8 weeks. Perform muscle-strengthening exercises twice weekly with at least 24 hours in between sessions.

Even if your weight is in a healthy range, regular exercise is key for maintaining good health and to reduce health risks. One study showed that physically fit overweight people had significantly lower health risks than thin, sedentary people. An inactive lifestyle raises your risk for developing serious health conditions, including metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and heart disease.

Strength-training is critical for older adults. Adults lose 4-6 lbs. of muscle tissue per decade, which means a significant loss of body strength and a lower resting metabolism.  Older adults who undergo a structured strength-training program have shown to regain lost muscle mass, increase their strength, metabolism, bone density and balance and improve their quality of life. 

One study linked muscular strength to reduced stiffness in the aorta, the major artery carrying blood from the heart to the rest of the body, which can reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular events, independent of current aerobic fitness levels.

However, if calorie intake isn’t also reduced, fat weight increases.

250 Calories, forfeit or jog?

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/12/16/if-250-calorie-label-doesnt-stop-50-minute-jog-label-might/

How to slim down abdominal fat

Pummeling your stomach with hundreds of repetitions of abdominal exercises doesn’t achieve what you think it should.  By doing hundreds 0f repetitions of an abdominal exercise, you gain muscles which are rock solid, but the fat is obscuring it. And all those abdominal moves won’t touch the fat. So, many people blast away at their abs thinking that the burn that they feel is zapping off fat. It’s not.  One classic study at the University of Massachusetts found that men who did 5,000 sit-ups a day did not decrease the size of the fat cells in the torso and they did not reduce waist size.

You should see more fat loss by rearranging your routine to do more cardio. A larger accumulated calorie burn will make the biggest dents in your fat stores.  You should aim for at least 30 minutes or more of any cardio exercise three times per week.  There is always a chance that you are simply genetically predisposed to store much of your excess body fat in your stomach, and you may be able to only whittle it down so much. It’s easy to gain weight with age in today’s environment. And in women, when estrogen levels start to lower, more abdominal fat comes on. Certain dietary habits like excess alcohol and eating foods high in saturated and trans- fats may also encourage abdominal fat.

Ideally, you should be doing 60 minutes of cardio exercises per day, on most days. If 60 minutes a day sounds like a lot of exercise, it is. But you can spread it out: little 15-minute bouts of walking throughout your day count, too. If you are regularly active and take the stairs instead of the escalator or pick a farther spot in the parking lot, for example, you can easily accumulate an hour of more of low- to moderate-intensity activity. Of course, if most of your activity involves sitting on a couch or in front of your computer, unless you are making a concerted effort to get up and move every hour, it may be hard to fit in a full 60 minutes per day.

Theoretically, 3,500 calories equals 1 pound of fat. So if you walk around 60 minutes per day, you can lose 30 pounds in about seven months. You can speed up the weight loss by making small calorie reductions in your diet (for example, saying “no” to regular desserts or using skim instead of whole milk). If you are not yet fit enough to do a lot of exercise, take it one step at a time. Start with 10-minute sessions and add a few minutes per week.  These efforts should help whittle away body fat, and hopefully in the abdominal area.

Please ask me to design an exercise program just for you:etrainer1@gmail.com

Muscle Strengthening For Seniors

For most older adults, the primary goal is to maintain as much independence as possible. While you can’t control every factor that affects your independence, you can do some simple exercises that will make a big difference.

If you are doing no exercise right now, your first activity should be muscle strengthening. For those of you who are staying active by walking, biking or other activities, making your muscles stronger will not only keep you doing the activities you love, it will help you do them better! Many people, young and older, are reluctant to strength train. Some may fear the development of big muscles while others may be intimidated by all the different equipment available. The good news is that you don’t need expensive equipment or complex routines to reap the benefits of strength training.

No matter how old you are, your body can still increase its strength and muscle mass. And muscles are more important than you may realize. For diabetics, more muscle means better control of blood sugar. If osteoporosis is a concern, strength training will not only preserve bone density, it will increase it.
If your health problems are made more serious by excess weight, adding lean muscle to your body will increase the number of calories your body burns, even while you are resting, and will make it less convenient for you to store body fat. That’s just a sample of the reasons why strength training should be at the foundation of any exercise program.

There are many exercise programs available for seniors that specifically teach strength training.  Before you begin, there are a few basic rules you need to remember:

Always get your doctor’s permission to start any new exercise program and follow his/her recommendations. Listen to your body. If a movement causes you pain, stop and consult your physician. Breathe out on the hardest part of the movement - never hold your breath! Always move slowly and in control - not only to prevent injury, but to help you perform the exercises more efficiently and see the results.

Need An Incentive To Work Out?

According to a study found in the Annals of Behavior Medicine, the more you exercise, the better you feel about your body.  Increases in physical activity were associated with having a better body image.  The longer or more frequent you exercise, the more satisfied the participants became.

Energize Your Life With Strength Training

     Is a decrease in your physical strength and energy getting in the way of enjoying your favorite activities? Regular cardiovascular exercise is a well-known way to preserve stamina and to prevent chronic disease that can slow you down. But an increasing number of older adults practice strength training (using resistance bands, weight machines, body weight, or lifting weights) as an effective health-boosting strategy.

     Men and women of any age can benefit from strength training. Having a chronic medical condition doesn’t mean you can’t do strength exercises. If you’re living with heart disease, arthritis or diabetes, strength training may even help improve your condition.

     Experts point out that many of the changes associated with getting older are actually due to becoming less active with age. Unless you regularly engage in activities to strengthen your muscles, you’ll lose about a half a pound of muscle a year in your 30s and 40s, and that rate can double once you turn 50. As you lose muscle, you lose strength, and that compromises your ability to do even simple things, such as carrying your groceries, getting up from a seated position or gardening. Your metabolism also slows down as you lose muscle, so your body will need fewer calories to maintain your weight, and you’re likely to gain excess body fat, unless you eat less.  Excess fat contributes to a multitude of health problems: heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

     It doesn’t matter, if you’re 50 years old or 80, studies show that strength training can help to maintain your independence as you get older, improve your quality of life, allow you to do the things you enjoy with less effort, strengthen your bones, improve control of blood sugar, elevate your mood, and reduce your resting blood pressure.

     

Training Abdominal Muscles

I have heard many people ask me if training abdominal muscles everyday is necessary for a strong and flat stomach.  You should treat your abdominal muscles like any other muscle group, which means you shouldn't train them every day. Your abdominals, like all of your other muscle groups, need recovery time between workouts. Not only that, but your abdominals are used for just about any movement you do.

As with any resistance training exercise, you ideally want the last few repetitions to be difficult to complete.  Performed correctly, 10 to 25 repetitions for one to three sets of abdominal exercises provide a more than adequate training stimulus. If you can perform more than 25 repetitions of an abdominal exercise, you are most likely performing the repetitions too rapidly or with improper form.  After awhile, you may also need a more intense abdominal exercise to perform.

You can increase the challenge and intensity of abdominal exercises by using added resistance, moving more slowly, and performing the exercises on a slant board or exercise ball so that your head is at a lower elevation than your legs.  A tougher way would be performing a seated version of an abdominal exercise.  Please ask me for the correct and proper form in performing any abdominal exercise.