SportsGeezer

One Works Out, The Other Doesn't

What happens when one half of a couple is exercises like a fool and the other just likes to chill?  Lots of things, and most of them are stressful. The New York Times explores this delicate territory, where the santimoniously healthful and the blissfully slothful live together, often resentfully. Not exercising, for some single people, is a deal-breaker, the Times reports. But an even bigger turnoff is the vanity that is often attached to the super fit. What to do? Geezer is not a marriage counselor, but he is, yes, the world's greatest pre-marriage counselor. And Geezer says figure it out before you commit to a relationship in which one partner is destined to be resented for taking time to workout and the other is destined to  be resented for not doing the same. Go find someone else.  Read all about it in the New York Times.

Worship-Worthy Yogis

The L.A. Times gives us a worshipful look at a half-dozen Los Angeles-based yoga masters, whose auras, along with DVDs, books, and, in some cases, clothing lines, have won the bodies of thousands of "students".
Best quote: "Yoga is not about publicity, the clothes, where you live. It's about being content with yourself." No one who reads this piece will buy that one.
Nicest touch: A slide show of the LA's "rock stars of yoga."
Read it and breathe.

How To Keep Blood Pressure Down: Work Less

Perhaps it's not shocking news that people who work fewer hours have lower blood pressure, but now at least we have data to present to the boss. Here it is: compared with people who work 11 to 39 hours a week, those who work 40 hours are 14 per cent more likely to have high blood pressure. Those who work 41 to 50 hours a week are 17 per cent more likely to have high blood pressure and those who work 51 or more hours are 29 per cent more likely to have higher blood pressure.
Those numbers come from a 2001 California health interview survey covering some 24,000 people. The research, reported in Earthtimes and published in the October edition of the journal Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association, was conducted by scientists at the University of California, Irvine.

Two Ways to Improve Your Memory: Eat Berries and Turn Off the TV

Geezer recalls reading something, earlier today, about how he might improve his memory. Oh yes, now he remembers. One route to more accurate recall appears to be dietary. According to Foodconsumer.org, researchers at Tufts University divided 60 young male rats into three groups. One group was assigned an ordinary diet without any berries, the second an ordinary diet with strawberry extract and the third an ordinary diet with blueberry extract. After two months, half the rats were subject to radiation to speed up the aging process while the other half were not, then all the rats were subject to a Maze test and a chemical test for dopamine.  Foodconsumer reports that the rats who were radiated, but on a diet without any berry extract performed worse among the three groups in the maze test and they had lowest levels of dopamine. Rats who were radiated, but on a diet with berry extract performed as well as those who were not radiated.

Hate berries but still want to improve your memory? Try turning off the TV. The Scientific American tells us about an online survey of almost 30,000 people who were asked about a range of habits, such as alcohol consumption, television viewing and reading habits. Sciam reports that those who drank less than two alcoholic drinks a day performed better at all memory tasks, and people who did crosswords were better at remembering shopping lists and recalling names, while eating fish once a week improved the ability to remember shopping lists. It also found that television viewing had the main impact on results.
Take the test here.

                                                               

When Sex Is Not an Athletic Endeavor, Anymore

Geezer knows that sex is not an athletic endeavor.  Or, to put it more accurately, Geezer knows enough to not argue with one particularly close family member who reminds him, on occasion, that sex is not an athletic endeavor. Anymore. It is, at least, an endeavor. So Geezer found it somewhat reassuring when he read this story in the New York Times about a 53-year-old man who decided to turn up the heat of his sex life with the help of Viagra, and ended up turning up the heat of his wife's resentment of his sexual demands. His exhausted wife, the piece reports, finally lost her patience and told him that he had to stop the Viagra if he cared about their marriage. He did.

Run It, Map It, Share It

Kevin Callahan, founder of a new website called mapmyrun.com, tells the L.A. Times that he hope his baby will become the "MySpace of the running and fitness world." And it may. Using Google technology, mapmyrun lets runners plot their routes. It then delivers information on pace, speed, covered distance and calories burned. The Times reports that Mapmyrun can upload data from a runner's global positioning system   and use the information to plot the course the runner took. Or, conversely, tech-savvy runners can take a route from the website and import it into their GPS — which can display the route-in-progress on its screen, along with current location, heading and position.
Unfortunately for Callahan, several other entrepreneurial runners would also like to be the MySpace of the running and fitness world.  Among them, the Times reports, are WalkJogRun and gmap-pedometer.   For the moment, myspace is anybody's space.

 

A Better Way to Warm-Up: Infared Light

Good news for those who find warm-ups tedious or tiring or just plain dumb. There's a faster, and much less dramatic, way to get muscles ready to action. It involves something called "deep thermal therapy," and one good way to get it is from a device used to deliver polarized near-infrared light. The Scientific American reports on a study of 24 young adults, in which one group of participants rode a stationary bike for 10 minutes to warm up their whole body and another group had their shoulder and back muscles irradiated with the near-infrared light-therapy device. A third group received "placebo" irradiation, in which the light pulses were set at a very low intensity. Sciam reports that the researchers found that both exercise and the light therapy improved participants' range of motion in the shoulder, but the latter worked slightly better. They believe the therapy may improve blood flow to the deeper layers of muscle that act on the shoulder joint. Read more about using infared to warm up in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine.

Why You Should Chill at Least One Day a Week

Why should you take at least one day of rest from exercise a week?  Let the L.A. Times count the ways.  Because, the paper reminds us, exercise causes micro-trauma to muscles, which get stronger when they repair themselves during rest. And without proper recovery time, areas of wear and tear become weak links and are more prone to injury and, importantly, less likely to show strength gains.  So while you might burn a few extra calories by not taking a day off, your body will be less efficient in capitalizing on the work you do.
Next question: What, exactly, is a day of rest? For someone who jogs regularly, the Times suggests, rest could mean a light swim. For a devoted weight lifter, it could be a casual bike ride or noncompetitive tennis game. The story's experts, Dr. William Roberts, an associate professor in the Division of Sports Medicine at the University of Minnesota, and Conrad Earnest, chief exercise physiologist at the Cooper Institute in Dallas, agree that a rest day is not needed for low-intensity exercisers, such as people who walk a couple miles a day simply to clear their head and get a little blood flowing.  But, they advise, for those who train hard, go for "periodization" — variation in the amount and intensity of exercise — and some volume of rest, regardless of your training cycles. For those devoted to what is called the "macro-cycle" of year-round sports training, Roberts recommends taking a month of rest per year. For people in a "meso-cycle" of three to six months of training, he recommends one week off. Read the whole story in the L.A. Times.

OK, Maybe Thinner Is Healthier

Gosh, this is confusing. Just a few days ago Lancet reported on a study suggesting that people with a low body mass index had a higher risk of death from heart disease than those with normal BMI, and that overweight people had better survival rates and fewer heart problems than those with a normal BMI. Now comes this piece in the Washington Post, and this one in the New York Times, reporting on two studies indicating, as the Post puts it, that just a few extra pounds can take years off of your life. The Post reports that one 10-year study of more than 500,000 U.S. adults found that those who were just moderately overweight in their fifties were 20 percent to 40 percent more likely to die in the next decade, and another study involving more than 1 million Korean adults produced similar results. Both are being published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.
So what was all that talk in Lancet about the uselessness of BMI? Geezer is a bit lost, here. The Times reports that, as with most such studies, the fatness and thinness of the participants in the two new studies was specified by their body mass index.

Unprocessed Cocoa Improves Blood Flow

The New York Times reports on promising new research that indicates that unprocessed cocoa significantly improves readings on several tests of blood flow that often deteriorate with age. Wait, there's more: the effect was much more prominent in the over-50 group than in the younger subjects.
According to the Times, the researchers studied 34 healthy subjects, 19 of them over 50. None were taking any medications, and all were free of cardiovascular, endocrine and kidney disease. Each consumed a quart of flavanol-rich sweetened cocoa every day for four to six days. The study, published in the Journal of Hypertension, found that all of the subjects had significantly improved readings on several tests of blood flow, but the effect was much greater in the over-50 group than in the younger subjects. The scientists found that the cocoa flavanols work to widen arteries by the same mechanism as the heart drug nitroglycerin.
The bad news: you can't buy the kind of unprocessed cocoa used in the study. Yet.