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Nine and a half weeks works for some things, but not training for a half-marathon. For that, Outside magazine warns, you need a full 12 weeks. In fact, the magazine has recruited Terence Mahon, who trained American half-marathon record holder Ryan Hall, to prescribe the perfect training regimen for a half-marathon. If you're half ready, click here.
Three health-related reasons to celebrate spring: Seasonal Affective Disorder becomes orderly; there are fewer heart attacks in spring; and the number of flu cases almost always declines. On the other hand, many of us begin to feel weird. We are restless, have even more trouble than we usually do paying attention, and find romance in strange places. The L.A. Times offers some reasons for the seasonal weirdness that we call spring fever. Let's start with chemicals. In winter, the paper reports, the body secretes high levels of melatonin, a hormone that governs sleep-wake cycles. Come spring, the increasing amount of daylight is registered by light-sensitive tissue in the eye, which signals the brain to stop secreting so much melatonin. As the hormone's levels drop off, greater wakefulness results. Wait, there's more on the chemical front: In spring, levels of another chemical, serotonin, rise. This mood-elevating neurotransmitter may be at the root of the giddiness, energy boost and enthusiasm that characterize spring fever. Read more about spring fever in the L.A. Times.
From Best Life Magazine, Rodale's sharp new reach for mean who stopped worrying about the resiliency of their abs a few years ago, comes these three tips for beating high blood pressure.
Look into Coenzyme Q10.
Australian
researchers recently found that men who supplemented their diets with
this antioxidant experienced a 17-point drop in blood pressure. Best Life quotes Mark Moyad, MD, Phil F. Jenkins director
of preventive and alternative medicine in the department of urology at
the University of Michigan Medical Center, saying
“Coenzyme Q10 cleans up free radicals in the blood-vessel walls,
allowing them to dilate. Even those with only a
family history of high blood pressure should take 75 to 100 milligrams
a day.”
Stay Calm
Meditating
for 20 minutes a day can lower systolic blood pressure by five points
and diastolic pressure by 2.8 points, according to a recent study in
Current Hypertension Reports. To reap the same benefits, sit
comfortably, close your eyes, and slowly repeat a peaceful mantra, such
as the classic ohm or simply calm.
Realign your neck.
Doctors
at the University of Chicago found that chiropractic adjustment of the
Atlas (C1) vertebrae relaxes the arteries at the base of the skull,
improving blood flow and resulting in a 17-point drop in systolic blood
pressure and an eight-point drop in diastolic blood pressure. To find
a certified chiropractor, visit amerchiro.org.
Read more about how to beat high blood pressure in Best Life.
Readers who have not had time to pick up the latest issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex will be delighted to learn that the relatively inexpensive feeling of euphoria known as runners' high is now officially real. New York Times' health guru Gina Kolata writes about the research, reported in Cerebral Cortex and conducted at the University of Bonn. Researchers at the German school gave PET scans to the brains of athletes before and after a two-hour run, hoping to spot evidence that endorphins produced during the run were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood. And the answer is...YES. Dr. Henning Boecker, who led the study, told the Times that endorphins could be detected in the
limbic and prefrontal areas of the brain. Those are the areas, Boecker said, that are activated when people are involved in romantic
love affairs or, “when you hear music that gives you a chill
of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.” When researchers also asked the runners to describe any post-run euphoria, they found that the greater the
euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.
Read more in the New York Times.
While compassion is not one of the required traits for most competitive sports, Geezer has observed that it can render some other venues more rewarding: the dining room, for example, and yes, the bedroom. Now, from researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison comes good news for the compassion deficient: compassion can be learned, maybe. The Scientific American reports that researchers working at the university's Waisman Center for Brain Imaging took fMRI scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators and 16 others who had started with no meditation experience but received cursory training before they carried out a series of tests. During these tests, the researchers measured the flow of blood in the brains of both the veterans (some of them Tibetan monks) and the American novices as the subjects did or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while being subjected to various sounds with positive and negative connotations. Sciam reports that when engaged in compassionate meditation, the brain region known as the insula burst into action when the expert meditators heard the sound of a woman in distress. (The insula—a part of the limbic system—has been associated with the visceral feeling of emotion, a key part of empathizing with another's emotional state.) When these experts heard the female screams or the sound of a baby laughing, their brains showed more activity than the novices in areas like the right temporal-parietal juncture, which plays a role in understanding another's emotion. Read more about learning compassion in the Scientific American.
When is it time to call in a wellness coach? When you're willing to pay $50 to $150 an hour to talk on the phone with someone who will help you stick with the program. As this piece in the New York Times makes clear, almost all of the programs have something to do with weight loss. Another thing this story makes clear is that wellness coaches are doing well--hence the name--most make between $50,00 and $150,000 year, and they are sprouting like mushrooms after a summer rain. The paper reports that in 2000, Wellcoaches, an alliance whose training program is endorsed by
the American College of Sports Medicine, trained 100 coaches. Last
year, it trained 1,000. The bad news, the Times reports, is that because the wellness coach business is completely unregulated, there is no telling how many people are doing well simply by calling themselves wellness coaches, but lack meaningful credentials. In fact, a correction that has been added to the Times piece suggests just how hard it is to keep all the credentials straight: the paper misstated the credentials of one of the story's main sources.
Read more in the New York Times.
Who works out more: Eli Manning or Peyton Manning? In this video from the Washington Post, Superbowl- winning New York Giants quarterback Eli talks his way around that question and a few others. His best advice? "Stay away from the cheese fries."
Watch the video.
How many times a night does your spouse wake you up?
Twice? Four times? The London Times reports that research by the Sleep Council has found that half of us are regularly woken
about six times a night by our partners, particularly if they snore or
fidget. The same mysterious Sleep Council reports that one in four of us
regularly retreats to a spare room or sofa for a refreshing night's sleep,
and the National Association of Home Builders predicts that by 2015 more
than 60 per cent of custom-built houses will have dual master bedrooms. When that happens, research suggests, women will benefit more than men, if only because they now suffer more than men. The Times reports that when Professor Jim
Horne, the director of the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre,
attached movement monitors to men and women sleepers, he found that men
moved much more than women and were far more likely to disturb women than
the other way round. The paper reports that Horne's observation was confirmed recently in a study, reported in the
journal Sleep and Biological Rhythms, that found that women benefited for more from sleeping alone than men.
Read more in the Times of London.
If you have high blood pressure, you can now blame your spouse, although blaming your spouse will only send your blood pressure higher. That, at least, is the implication of a recent study involving 204 married people and 99 single adults. As the Washington Post reports, study volunteers wore devices that recorded their blood pressure at
random times over 24 hours. Married participants also filled out
questionnaires about their marriage. The research conducted at Brigham Young University, found that the more marital satisfaction and adjustment
spouses reported, the lower their average blood pressure was over the
24 hours and during the daytime. Spouses who scored low in marital satisfaction had higher
average blood pressure than single people did.
Read more in the Washington Post.
From Karen Voight via the L.A. Times comes this simple balancing exercise. Done once a day, every day, it helps find our center of gravity and improves concentration. Voight says:
1. Stand with your feet together, arms hanging down
alongside your body. On an inhale, shift your weight to your right leg,
then lift your left thigh, bending your knee so that your toes point
toward the ground. Exhale. With both hands, grasp your bent leg just
below your knee. Lift your chest and lengthen your spine. Draw your
ribs in and pull your shoulders back. Pause for a few breaths.
2. Grasp your left outer knee with
your right hand. Keep your left hip at the same level as your right
one. Slowly twist your trunk to the left, reaching your left arm behind
you. Hold this pose for 20 to 30 seconds or longer as you get stronger
and feel more stable. Reverse for the other side.
This and other exercises from Karen Voight can be found in the L.A Times.
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