there is no finish line...enjoy the ride...

Exercise will increase the quality of your life – Just Do It!

 "We do not stop exercising because we grow old - we grow old because we stop exercising"  Dr. Kenneth Cooper

 
 

I just returned from 10 days of training down at my home in Mesa Arizona.  I'm training for a bike ride from Calgary, Alberta to Austin Texas in support of "cancer survivors" in the fall through an event called, "Cancervive".  For most of my life, daily exercise has been a priority, so it doesn't seem strange to ride 900km in the past 10 days.

I don't have to tell you that you should be exercising.  And it doesn't have to be 900 kms in 10 days either; you already know that.  What I don’t understand, is why so many people don’t get off their behinds and make excersie a part of their life, especially when they know how good it is for their health and vitality. 

Every time I go to my place in Arizona I'm reminded of this old quote about exercising and it goes like this, "I felt like exercising the other day, so I took a nap until the feeling went away".  Judging by the size and state of health in Arizona, I think lots of napping going on. 

If you’re looking for a few good reasons to get active, they’re listed below and every year researchers provide us with even more.

Benefits of Exercise

Exercise helps with weight loss and prevents developing obesity. It’s been proven to exacerbate oxidative stress throughout the body. The more we can stay near our optimal weight, the better our body will be at functioning optimally.  An easy way to determine your healthy “Body Mass Index” is to use this “BMI Calculator” to determine if you are normal, overweight, or obese. 

For years now, it’s been clinically proven that a regular exercise program contributes to a healthier circulatory system and the potential prevention of heart disease, the number one killer in North America. It's also been proven to lower "bad" or LDL cholesterol, and raise "good" or HDL cholesterol, as well as lower triglyceride levels.

For those with diabetes, exercise helps the body become more sensitive to its own insulin production, making it less likely that insulin replacement therapy will be necessary.

Exercise also helps the body fend off diseases like Osteoporosis by helping the bones with their regenerative processes.  Another benefit of exercise is increased strength and coordination. You'll stay stronger and feel younger longer, and have much less chance for dangerous falls as you age.

All that said I find that regular exercise works wonders for your “mind”. Many beginner athletes I coach who follow a regular exercise program for at least a month, begin to report an elevated sense of well-being. Because the body produces endorphins when exercising perhaps it’s probably the closest thing to a "feel good" drug that nature has to offer.

And finally, and I can’t resist, regular physical activity can leave you feeling energized and looking better, which may have a positive effect on your sex life.  But there's more to it than that. Regular physical activity can lead to enhanced arousal for women.  And men who exercise regularly are less likely to have problems with erectile dysfunction than men who don't exercise.

How to manage Extreme Exercise

Now let me turn my attention to the people that exercise for performance.  After all that I’ve said about exercise above, one would think that there are no downsides to working out, so the adage, “more has to be better”, must be true.  Not so fast.  To maintain optimal health, you have to eat right and take foods or natural supplements that have a high Oxidative Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC) value on a daily basis.  This is important to prevent the elevated free radical damage and oxidative stress brought on by intense exercise.  High performance athletes in sports like cycling, running and triathlon have to pay particular attention to what happens to the body, especially during the stress cycle of their training periodization.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to strenuous exercise when a lack of attention to nutrition and diet are not carefully considered.  It’s been clinically proven that excessive training significantly increases free radicals and oxidative stress damage. In fact, in the early 1980’s running guru, Dr. Kenneth Cooper linked decrease immunity to strenuous exercise.

If you exercise excessively in preparation for an Ironman Triathlon, the Boston Marathon, or some kind of strenuous athletic endeavour, it's important to ensure you have advanced sports nutrition as well as taking high quality antioxidants and vitamins to combat the free radicals you're releasing into your body.  I have personally experienced significant cycling performance improvements by taking a juice that’s high in antioxidants, anti-inflammatories and essential vitamins.  So it’s very important that any athlete that trains strenuously day after day should consider their diet for both health and athletic performance.

Exercise advice

It seems that every coach or sport physiologist has a different approach regarding exercise. The key is to follow Nike’s advice and “Just do it”, and do it regularly. If you’re just starting an exercise program, walking is potentially the best form of exercise that just about anyone can integrate into their lifestyle. A good 30-60 minute brisk walk five to seven times a week is a great start for optimal health.  Most importantly, I aways suggest that you find a sport or activity you look forward to doing everyday.  If you’re going to spend time exercising, why not do something you look forward to every single day.  I love cycling.  I love it so much, I hate missing a day.  Try to find something that becomes your “fitness passion”.

To improve your athletic performance you have to improve your body’s ability to recover.  So in addition to your training program, it's equally important to maintain a proper nutritional diet that’s high in antioxidants and anti-inflammatories to help your body regenerate and recover. You should understand the role of the essential vitamins and minerals to help maintain health and prevent diseases. Be careful to choose only natural and high quality supplements to ensure you get the most out of your easy, moderate and intense workouts.

And remember: if you’re new to any form of exercise, consult your doctor before you start.

Enjoy the ride.....Rob 

Osteoporosis…What's the best way to reduce the risk and prevent bone loss

"The Osteoporosis treatment market generated pharmaceutical revenues of over $12B worldwide in 2009. The incidence and prevalence of bone metabolism disorders are on the rise worldwide, in line with an ageing population. The increasing number of older people offers significant commercial opportunities for the pharmaceutical vendors. The number of osteoporosis and other bone metabolism patients may exceed 400 million by 2020".

The above comment is a direct quote from a firm that provides health care professionals, including people that sell into the market vertical insight into where the greatest pharmaceutical opportunities lie. As you can see, this organization looks at degenerative diseases as business opportunities and the people that will contract this and other degenerative diseases as future revenue generation, not an illness issue to prevent.  Last year along, Big Pharma within the United Sates set a record in R&D spending at $68B to find new diseases to justify their drug development.  Just think of the positive health outcomes if this money were directed towards illness prevention, instead of illness treatment.

If you are to believe the commercials presented by the pharmaceuticals on TV, or the articles you read, you would think that all women, especially menopause and post-menopausal women will eventually suffer the affects of Osteoporosis.  What’s worse is our medical community seems to agree with this inevitable fate as they push pills onto women that hit that certain age. But ladies, there are things you can do right now to prevent and repair some of the damage caused by this disease, regardless of your age. Some will have significant impact.  In order to understand what we should do, it's important to first understand what Osteoporosis is and what causes this degenerative disease.

So what is Osteoporosis?

Throughout our lives, our bones act as a repository for important minerals, like calcium and magnesium. Depending on our lifestyles and diets, our bones go through a destructive and reconstructive process in order to harness these minerals for our body's use. One example of this process is the body's need to maintain its blood pH at a slightly alkaline level.  Osteoporosis occurs when there's more destruction, than reconstruction occurring over a long period of time, (as in decades). 

The problem with most degenerative diseases, including Osteoporosis, is they take a long time to manifest into a critical state and by the time they become serious, it’s almost too late to do anything about it.  That’s why I say the cure is in prevention.  If you do the right things throughout your life, good chance you won’t have to deal with this and other degenerative diseases in later life.

Most North American diets are highly acidic as a result of the intake of fast foods, processed dinners, pizza, red meat, soda pop, alcohol, etc.  Our bodies extract alkaline minerals like calcium and magnesium from our bones to offset the unhealthy levels of acid we ingest. 

In addition to the acidic diets mentioned above, free radical damage, oxidative stress and limited access to healthy nutrients in our diets forces these destructive processes to happen sooner and more frequently than they have in the past. And because of doctors’ bias against natural supplements we're left to believe that all we can do is pop pills and wait for the inevitable.

So who's at Risk and Why?

Women as young as 40 are starting to experience early signs of this disease, but generally women over 50 years are at risk of developing osteoporosis, because that’s how long it takes for bad eating practises and lack of exercise to manifest into this and other diseases. However, the destruction of the disease begins well before that age. It's extremely important for young adolescents, especially young girls to get the nutrients they need - right now - to help prevent osteoporosis in future years.

Up until a certain age, until just after puberty, our bones are constructing more than they're destructing. Due to the amount of processed food North American’s consume, the degraded and reduced nutritional value of our food supply, the minerals and vitamins we used to get from eating healthy foods no longer exist, resulting in the need to augment our diets with natural supplements.  If you haven’t watched the movie “FOOD INC.”, check it out.  You will have a better understanding of what I’m speaking about. Or read my page, “Bad Food”.

In addition, our diets are rich in foods that actually inhibit the absorption of very important vitamins and minerals. Thus, children are often (and surprisingly) malnourished in this day and age - malnourished in terms of healthy, nutritional ingredients they very much need.

Scientific studies have shown that when girls build solid bones rich in calcium and magnesium, reduce the oxidative stress and free radical damage along with the acidity in the foods they eat; they have significantly less chance of developing osteoporosis later in life. Once puberty has passed, the ability to build new bone mass is greatly reduced - so there's a window of opportunity for complete prevention. 

However, if you have symptoms of osteoporosis or are concerned about developing it later in life, there are things you can do right now to slow the process and keep your bones healthy. 

So What Can I Do Right Now?

To begin with, EXERCISE! Clinical studies have shown that exercise will help build and maintain bone density at any age.  So ladies, it’s never too late to begin working out.  In fact, studies have seen bone density increase by doing regular resistance exercises, such as lifting weights, as little as two or three times a week. This type of weight bearing exercise appears to stimulate bone formation, and the retention of calcium, in the bones that are bearing the load. The force of muscles pulling against bones stimulates this bone building process. So any exercise that places force on a bone will strengthen that bone.

Weight-bearing exercises are the most effective to build bones. These include activities such as walking, stair climbing, running, hiking, and weight lifting. Sorry, swimming and bicycling are not considered weight-bearing exercises, so if you’re a regular cyclist or swimmer, add a weight training program to your exercise routine.

A survey of 350 middle-aged women (Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise, October 2005) found that those who were most active in their daily lives had significantly greater bone density in their spines, femurs and forearms than less active women. Another study found that running strengthens the leg bones of both older and younger women. Exercise also increases muscle strength, coordination, and balance and decreases the likelihood of falls in the elderly.

Exercise by itself isn’t enough, you should also consider giving your cells optimal cellular nutrition. The basis on which the health of your body depends is how efficiently you clear out the bad stuff - free radicals and internal acidity - and introduce the good stuff – antioxidants and alkaline based foods.  The quickest and easiest ways to accomplish this is by starting a daily regimen of eating foods high in antioxidants such as fruits and vegetables and introducing high quality natural and nutritional supplements.

NOTE: If you’re new to any form of exercise program, cconsult your doctor before starting. You may need a bone density test and a fitness assessment first.  In the meantime, start think about what kind of activities you enjoy most. If you choose an exercise you enjoy, you're more likely to stick with it over time.

In addition, make sure you're getting plenty of calcium, and be sure to take vitamin D with it, as vitamin D helps in the absorption of calcium. Finally, find a supplementation program that includes magnesium, manganese, folic acid, the B vitamins, and vitamin K.

There are two potent sources of antioxidants. These are, Elegiac Acid, found in certain small berries like raspberries and Fucoidans, a cornerstone of the Asian diet and found in certain brown sea vegetables.  You should be supplementing your diet with both of these natural and nutritionally sound components to aid your body in expelling free radicals before they can do more damage to your bones and your entire body.

  

So remember, the key to the cure of Osteoporosis is to prevent it from ever happening in through positive lifestyle and healthy dietary choices throughout your life. 

Enjoy the Ride ..... Rob