The human body has an adaptive mechanism where its overall characteristic is influenced by its environment and the way it is being used. The muscle expands when it is under heavy use. The bones get stronger with stress. Even the human brain increases in size when used regularly.
The opposite will happen when all of these faculties are just coasting along. Why?
It has to do with blood circulation. Blood circulates throughout the body supplying critical nutrients and oxygen to the cells, keeping them healthy at all times. This process gives the cells enough time to mature and replicate to constitute new tissues later on, which the body under mechanical or neural stress precisely needs. This is what is happening to weight trainers and geniuses alike.
Weight trainers know that to be effective in what they do, they must start slowly and allow the body to adapt to gradual yet progressive weight stresses. Overdoing it can have negative and disastrous effects, as overstressing destroys more cells than the body can produce in any given time.
What the body requires, it produces by itself. What we demand from our body, we must pay for by providing it with the right environment conducive for delivery of such. Otherwise, the action borders in abuse and lack of respect that it deserves.
You don’t need to follow strictly rigorous weight training exercise to keep your health at optimum. In fact, a mere 30 minutes are all you need, and you can choose whether to run or walk. The most important thing is that you have to sweat it out somehow and make the effort regularly. No need to check-in to some fancy gyms either; just climbing the stairs would do the job quite nicely.
If one does it regularly, the same won’t get knock down by a flu or measles easily. The blood needs to be there with the actual infections before it can effectively deal with them. Push them hard to all extremities of your body and you’ll defeat most of the viruses.
Regular exercise is something you can start right now!
Lack of Exercise Is a Bigger Risk Factor Than Obesity in Premature Death
February 06, 2015
By Dr. Mercola
Would you take a brisk 20-minute walk each day if you knew it could reduce your risk of premature death by up to 30 percent? Well… lace up your walking shoes, because that’s what scientists from the University of Cambridge revealed.1
Everyone in the study benefited from the modest increase in physical activity, regardless of whether they were normal weight, overweight, or obese. In fact, the researchers believe that increasing exercise is even more important than reducing obesity in terms of public health.
Their data suggests that at least twice as many deaths occur due to a lack of exercise than due to obesity. This is really astounding, considering one in five US deaths are associated with obesity. Study author Ulf Ekelund from the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge told TIME:2
“This is a simple message: just a small amount of physical activity each day could have substantial health benefits for people who are physically inactive.”
If You Want to Live Longer… Exercise!
If you are currently living a sedentary lifestyle, the mere act of incorporating some moderate activity most days of the week can significantly reduce your mortality rate.
Past research showed that just meeting the minimum requirement of 30 minutes of moderate physical activity a day, five days a week, can reduce your risk of death from any cause by 19 percent.3
Those who engaged in moderate intensity activity even more — a full seven days a week — further reduced their risk of death, from 19 to 24 percent. A separate study also found that, compared to those who exercised daily and often vigorously, sedentary people had a six times greater risk of dying from heart disease over the course of 15 years.4
The greatest gains are often seen among people who go from being sedentary to physically activity, although benefits also increase with exercise frequency and intensity (to a point, of course, as overdoing it will backfire).
As Samantha Heller, an exercise physiologist at New York University Medical Center, told CBS News:5
“If you look at the human body, you will notice the odd, irregular shapes of the bones and muscles. Just the musculoskeletal architecture of the human body shows that it is designed to move. The adaptations the body makes to regular exercise are nothing short of ‘astounding,” she said.
Aerobic exercise ignites the body’s immune system, improves mental function, boosts energy, strengthens muscles and bones, and reduces the risk for chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, she said.
‘If we do not move, we will not be able to move,’ Heller said. ‘Gee, I am so sorry I exercised today’ is something no one has ever said.”
Exercise Improves the Quality of Your Life, Not Just the Quantity
Part of what makes exercise so useful is that it not only extends your life but also adds quality of life to those extra years. All of those movements that you might now take for granted – walking up and down stairs, carrying in groceries, climbing a ladder to change a light bulb – can start to become more difficult by the time you’re in your 70s. This is when sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss) tends to accelerate. You might start to feel weaker and find you can’t do things, physically, that you used to do. But exercise can change that by helping you to maintain your muscle mass and strength (and even increase your muscle size). At the same time, exercise lowers your risk of chronic diseases so much that researchers described it as “the best preventive drug” for many common ailments, from psychiatric disorders to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.6
Your Entire Body Benefits from Exercise
Numerous beneficial biochemical changes occur during exercise, including alterations in more than 20 different metabolites involved in fat burning and metabolism, among other things, like optimizing insulin/leptin receptor sensitivity. As stated by Dr. Timothy Church, director of preventive medicine research at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, exercise indeed affects your entire body—from head to toe—in beneficial ways.7 This includes changes in your:
- Muscles, which use glucose and ATP for contraction and movement. Tiny tears in your muscles make them grow bigger and stronger as they heal. Gaining more muscle through resistance exercises has many benefits, from losing excess fat to maintaining healthy bone mass and preventing age-related muscle loss as you age.The intensity of your resistance training can achieve a number of beneficial changes on the molecular, enzymatic, hormonal, and chemical level in your body.
- Lungs. As your muscles call for more oxygen, your breathing rate increases. The higher your VO2 max—your maximum capacity of oxygen use—the fitter you are.
- Heart. Your heart rate increases with physical activity to supply more oxygenated blood to your muscles. The fitter you are, the more efficiently your heart can do this, allowing you to work out longer and harder. Your blood pressure will also decrease as a result of new blood vessels forming.
- Brain. The increased blood flow also benefits your brain, allowing it to almost immediately function better. Exercising regularly also promotes the growth of new brain cells, boosting your capacity for memory and learning. A number of neurotransmitters are also triggered, such as endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, and GABA. Some of these are well-known for their role in mood control. Exercise, in fact, is one of the most effective prevention and treatment strategies for depression.
- Joints and Bones. Exercise can place as much as five or six times more than your body weight on them. Weight-bearing exercise is one of the most effective remedies against osteoporosis, as your bones are very porous and soft, and as you get older your bones can easily become less dense and hence, more brittle — especially if you are inactive.
Are You Sedentary? Try This to Get More Movement
More than half of American men, and 60 percent of American women, never engage in any vigorous physical activity lasting more than 10 minutes per week.8 I believe high-intensity exercises are an important part of a healthy lifestyle, however perhaps equally important is simply moving more while sitting less.
I recommend using a pedometer, or better yet, one of the newer fitness trackers like the Jawbone UP, to keep track of your daily movement. At first, you may be surprised to realize just how little you move each day. Sitting really is the new smoking, as sitting more than 8 hours a day will actually increase your risk of lung cancer by over 50%, far worse than exposure to second-hand smoke.
Setting a goal of say 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day (which is just over three to five miles, or 6-9 kilometers) can go a long way toward getting more movement into your life. If you fit in your 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day, you’ll enjoy a significant health boost. One study found that walking for two miles a day or more can cut your chances of hospitalization from a severe episode of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) by about half.9
Another study found that daily walking reduced the risk of stroke in men over the age of 60. Walking for at least an hour or two could cut a man’s stroke risk by as much as one-third, and it didn’t matter how brisk the pace was. Taking a three-hour long walk each day slashed the risk by two-thirds.10 As you become accustomed to this regular movement, you can then add in high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which will allow you to reap all the rewards that exercise has to offer. Personally I seek to walk between 13,000 and 16,000 steps, or 7 to 9 miles a day. I use this uninterrupted quiet time to read about one new book a week.
Optimize Your Exercise Benefits with High-Intensity Movements
Walking 7,000-10,000 steps is, ideally, in addition to, not in place of, your normal exercise program. This might sound like a lot, but when you incorporate HIIT into your workouts, you get the benefits in a fraction of the time. HIIT such as Peak Fitness mimics the movements of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, which included short bursts of high-intensity activities, but not long-distance running. This, researchers say, is what your body is hard-wired for. Basically, by exercising in short bursts, followed by periods of recovery, you recreate exactly what your body needs for optimum health. Twice-weekly sessions, which require no more than 20 minutes from start to finish, can help you:
- Lower your body fat
- Improve your muscle tone
- Boost your energy and libido
- Improve athletic speed and performance
- Naturally increase your body’s production of human growth hormone (HGH)—a synergistic, foundational biochemical underpinning that promotes health and longevity
Can you find 20 minutes twice a week to lower your risk of chronic disease, feel better, and live longer? I thought so. You can find the details on how to perform Peak Fitness HIIT here. Or, if you prefer, learn how to perform one of my favorite exercises: high-intensity super-slow weight training (which requires just 12 to 15 minutes once a week).
source »
How Exercise Makes Your Brain Grow
by David DiSalvo
Research into “neurogenesis”—the ability of certain brain areas to grow new brain cells—has recently taken an exciting turn. Not only has research discovered that we can foster new brain cell growth through exercise, but it may eventually be possible to “bottle” that benefit in prescription medication.
The hippocampus, a brain area closely linked to learning and memory, is especially receptive to new neuron growth in response to endurance exercise. Exactly how and why this happens wasn’t well understood until recently. Research has discovered that exercise stimulates the production of a protein called FNDC5 that is released into the bloodstream while we’re breaking a sweat. Over time, FNDC5 stimulates the production of another protein in the brain called Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), which in turns stimulates the growth of new nerves and synapses – the connection points between nerves – and also preserves the survival of existing brain cells.
What this boils down to in practice is that regular endurance exercise, like jogging, strengthens and grows your brain. In particular, your memory and ability to learn get a boost from hitting the pavement. Along with the other well-established benefits of endurance exercise, such as improved heart health, this is a pretty good reason to get moving. If jogging isn’t your thing, there’s a multitude of other ways to trigger the endurance effect – even brisk walking on a regular basis yields brain benefits.
Now researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School (HMS) have also discovered that it may be possible to capture these benefits in a pill. The same protein that stimulates brain growth via exercise could potentially be bottled and given to patients experiencing cognitive decline, including those in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
“What is exciting is that a natural substance can be given in the bloodstream that can mimic some of the effects of endurance exercise on the brain,” said Bruce Spiegelman, PhD, of Dana-Farber and HMS and co-senior author of the research report with Michael E. Greenberg, PhD, chair of neurobiology at HMS.
In the new study, the research team artificially increased BDNF in the brains of mice by using a harmless virus to piggyback FNDC5 molecules through the bloodstream of the mice. After seven days, researchers found a significant increase in BDNF in the hippocampus area of the mice brains – the brain area crucial for memory and learning.
“Perhaps the most exciting result overall is that peripheral delivery of FNDC5 with adenoviral vectors (i.e. a virus) is sufficient to induce central expression of BDNF and other genes with potential neuroprotective functions or those involved in learning and memory,” the authors said.
The research team cautions that since this is an animal study, it’s far too early to conclude that the same effect will work in humans, but the significant results of this study show promise for future research into delivering cognitive benefits to the human brain via a similar mechanism. Cognitive boost for suffers of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other debilitating diseases in the form of a brain-growth pill may not be too far off.
More immediately, neurogenesis research has provided yet another great reason to get up, get out and get moving.
The research report was published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
You can find David DiSalvo on Twitter @neuronarrative.
Posted on November 14, 2013 .