9 Secrets for Bigger, Stronger Muscles

By: Lou Schuler & Ian King
Your body has about 650 muscles. It doesn't matter that you only care about four or five of them. You need every one in order to perform the normal functions of everyday life—eating, breathing, walking, holding in your stomach at the beach.

Granted, you don't need to spend a lot of time thinking about most of your muscles. The 200 muscles involved in walking do the job whether you monitor them or not.

You could try to impress your friends at parties by telling them the gluteus maximus is the body's strongest muscle, or that the latissimus dorsi (in your middle back) is the largest, or that a middle-ear muscle called the stapedius is the smallest. But it probably won't work, unless you have some really unusual friends. And muscle trivia can't capture the wonder of muscles themselves—the brilliance of coordinated muscles in motion, the magnificence of well-developed muscles in isolation.

We hope, in the following story, to help you understand a little more about how your muscles work, and thus how to make them bigger, stronger, and more aesthetically pleasing (if you're into that sort of thing). You can accomplish all three, if you know what's going on beneath the surface.

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Muscle Fibers Do Different Things
Your skeletal muscles—the ones you check out in the mirror—have two main types of fibers.

Type I fibers, also called slow-twitch, are used mainly for endurance activities. Type II, or fast-twitch, begin to work when a task utilizes more than 25 percent of your maximum strength. A movement doesn't have to be "slow" for the slow-twitch fibers to take over; it just has to be an action that doesn't require much of your fast-twitch strength. And an effort doesn't have to be "fast" to call your fast-twitch fibers into play.

A personal-record bench press is going to use every possible fast-twitch fiber (plus all the slow-twitchers, as we'll explain below), even though the bar probably isn't moving very fast.

Most people are thought to have a more or less equal mix of slow- and fast-twitch fibers. (Elite athletes are obvious exceptions—a gifted marathoner was probably born with more slow- than fast-twitch fibers, just as an Olympic-champion sprinter or NFL running back probably started life with more fast-twitch fibers.) However, the fast-twitch fibers are twice as big as the slow ones, with the potential to get even bigger. Slow-twitch fibers can get bigger, too, although not to the same extent.

So one strategy comes immediately to mind . . .

To Grow Large, Lift Large
When you begin a task, no matter if it's as simple as getting out of bed or as complex as swinging a golf club, your muscles operate on two basic principles of physiology:

1. The all-or-nothing principle states that either a muscle fiber gets into the action or it doesn't. (As Yoda said, long ago in a galaxy far away, "There is no try.") If it's in, it's all the way in. So when you get up to walk to the bathroom, incredibly enough, a small percentage of your muscle fibers are working as hard as they can to get you there. And, more important, all the other fibers are inactive.

2. The size principle requires that the smallest muscle fibers get into a task first. If the task—a biceps curl, for example—requires less than 25 percent of your biceps' strength, then the slow-twitch fibers will handle it by themselves. When the weight exceeds 25 percent of their strength, the type II, fast-twitch fibers jump in. The closer you get to the limits of your strength, the more fast-twitch fibers get involved.

Here's why this is important: One of the most pervasive myths in the muscle world is that merely exhausting a muscle will bring all its fibers into play. So, in theory, if you did a lot of repetitions with a light weight, eventually your biggest type II fibers would help out because the smaller fibers would be too tired to lift the weight.

But the size principle tells you that the biggest fibers are the Mafia hit men of your body. They don't help the underlings collect money from deadbeats. They suit up only when the work calls for their special talents, and when no one else can be trusted to do the job right.

In other words, a guy who's trying to build as much muscle as possible must eventually work with weights that require something close to an all-out effort. Otherwise, the highest-threshold fibers would never spring into action. Moreover, the smaller fibers don't need any special high-repetition program of their own, since the size principle also says that if the big fibers are pushed to the max, the small ones are getting blasted, too.

Building Muscles Saves Your Bones
Many have tried to disparage the squat, framing it as an exercise that's brutal to back and knees. The charges never stick. Sure, the exercise can be tough on the knees, but no tougher than full-court basketball or other full-bore sports.

And for guys with healthy backs and knees, the squat is among the best exercises for strength, mass, sports performance, and even long-term health. The heavy loads build muscle size and strength, along with bone density, and thicker bones will serve you well when you finally break into that 401(k). So you won't be the guy who fractures his hip and ends up in a nursing home, although you'll probably pay some visits to your nonsquatting friends.

Setup: Set a bar in supports that are just below shoulder height and load the weight plates. (Be conservative with these weights if you've never squatted before. There's a learning curve.) Grab the bar with your hands just outside your shoulders, then step under the bar and rest it on your back. When you pull your shoulder blades together in back, the bar will have a nice shelf to rest on. Lift the bar off the supports and take a step back. Set your feet shoulder-width apart, bend your knees slightly, pull in your lower abs, squeeze your glutes, and set your head in line with your spine, keeping your eyes forward.

Descent: To begin the squat, bend your knees and hips simultaneously to lower your body. Squat as deeply as you can without allowing your trunk to move forward more than 45 degrees from vertical. Make sure your heels stay flat on the floor.

Ascent: Squeeze your glutes together and push them forward to start the ascent, which should mirror the descent. Keep your knees the same distance apart (don't let them move in or out). Your hips and shoulders need to move at the same angle--if your hips come up faster, you increase your trunk angle and risk straining your lower back. At the top, keep a slight bend in your knees.

You Can Improve Muscle Quality
On the day you were conceived, the gene gods had made three decisions that you might want to quibble with as an adult, if you could:

1. Your maximum number of muscle fibers

2. Your percentages of fast- and slow-twitch fibers

3. The shapes of your muscles when fully developed

On the downside, unless you were born to anchor the 4x100 relay at next summer's Olympics, you can forget about ever reaching that goal. The athletes at the extremes—the fastest and strongest, the ones with the best-looking muscles, and the ones capable of the greatest endurance—were already at the extremes from the moment sperm swam headlong into egg.

The upside is that there's a lot of wiggle room in between. Few of us ever approach our full genetic potential. You probably will never be a freak, but with the right kind and amount of work, you can always be a little freakier than you are now.

The best way to do that is to learn to use your muscles' very own juice machine.

More Muscle Comes from More T
Everyone has some testosterone—babies, little girls playing with tea sets, grandparents shuffling through the laxative aisle at CVS—but no one has hormonal increases from one year to the next like a maturing male. His level increases tenfold during puberty, starting sometime between ages 9 and 15, and he hits near-peak production in his late teens. From there, his testosterone level climbs slowly until about age 30, at which point he hits or passes a few other peaks.

His muscle mass will top out between the ages of 18 and 25, unless he intervenes with some barbell therapy. Sexual desire peaks in his early 30s. Sports performance, even among elite athletes, peaks in the late 20s and starts to decline in the early 30s.

None of this is inevitable, of course. Unless you're that elite athlete who's trained for his sport since before the short hairs sprouted, you probably have the potential to grow bigger and stronger than you've ever been. And that could also put a little of that teenage explosiveness back into your sex life.

The testosterone/muscle-mass link is pretty clear in general terms: The more you have of one, the more you get of the other. Strength training, while it doesn't necessarily make your testosterone level go up permanently, certainly makes it get a little jiggy in the short term. We know of four ways to create a temporary surge in your most important hormone.

1. Do exercises that employ the most muscle mass, such as squats, deadlifts, pullups, and dips.

2. Use heavy weights, at least 85 percent of the maximum you can lift once on any given exercise.

3. Do a lot of work during your gym time—multiple exercises, multiple sets, multiple repetitions.

4. Keep rest periods fairly short—30 to 60 seconds. Of course, you can't do all these things in the same workout. For example, when you work a lot of muscle mass with heavy weights, you can't do a high volume of exercise, nor can you work effectively with short rest periods. This is among the many reasons you should periodize your workouts, which is a polysyllabic way of saying change your workouts every few weeks, rather than do the same thing from now till the gene gods recall the merchandise.

Muscles Need More than Protein
The mythology surrounding protein and muscle building could fill a book, even though the science is fairly straightforward. Your muscles are made of protein (except the four-fifths that's water), so you have to eat protein to make them grow. You also have to eat protein to keep them from shrinking, which is why men trying to lose fat without sacrificing muscle do best when they build their diets around high-quality, muscle-friendly protein from lean meat, fish, eggs, poultry, and low-fat dairy products.

But if you're young, lean, and trying to gain solid weight, a lot of extra protein may not help as much as you think. Protein has qualities that help weight loss and may curtail weight gain. First, protein is metabolically expensive for your body to process. Your body burns about 20 percent of each protein calorie just digesting it. (It burns about 8 percent of carbohydrate and 2 percent of fat during digestion.)

Second, protein creates a high level of satiety, both during meals and between them. In other words, it makes you feel fuller faster and keeps you feeling full longer between meals. (This effect does wear off as you grow accustomed to a higher-protein diet, so it may not have an impact on long-term weight gain or weight loss.)

Finally, if you eat more protein than your body needs, it will learn to use the protein for energy. You want your body to burn carbohydrates and fat for energy, obviously, so a body that's relying on protein for energy is like a car that's using pieces of its engine for fuel.

The best weight-gain strategy is to focus on calories first, protein second. You should make sure you're eating at least 2 grams (g) of protein per kilogram (kg) of muscle mass. A kilogram is 2.2 pounds, so a 160-pound guy weighs about 73 kg and should take in a minimum of 146 g protein a day. But that's just 584 calories of protein, the amount you'd find in 15 ounces of chicken, two salmon fillets, or a 28-ounce steak. A protein-powder shake can amp up your totals, as well. If you need to eat more than 3,000 calories a day to gain weight, you'd better have some sweet potatoes with those steaks.

Do Deadlifts
Ever watched a Strongman competition on TV? They start with large men picking something even larger up off the ground. That's a deadlift—the most basic and practical of all strength-building movements. Now, have you ever watched a Strongman competition with your wife or girlfriend? She'll notice something you probably wouldn't: Not a single one of those guys has a flat ass. So pull up a barbell: You'll be able to perform everyday feats of strength—lifting a sleeping child or a dying TV—and you'll look a lot better when she follows you upstairs to the bedroom.

Setup: Load a barbell and roll it up to your shins. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Position your shoulders over the bar as you grab it with an overhand grip, your hands just outside your knees. Keep your back in a straight line from head to pelvis. Finally, pull your shoulder blades together and down.

Just before the lift: Straighten your legs a bit to establish tension on the bar. Pull in your lower abs and squeeze your glutes.

First pull, from floor to knees: Straighten your legs while keeping your trunk and hips at or near the same angle. The bar should stay in contact with your skin at all times.

Second pull, from knees to midthighs: Stand up, driving your hips forward. Finish upright, with your shoulder blades back and down and your lower back flat.

Lowering: No need to perfectly reverse the motion; just slide the bar down your thighs and shins to the floor. Don't annoy your fellow lifters by dropping the bar.

Next repetition: Repeat the setup, letting go of the bar and regripping if necessary. You want perfect form on every repetition, and you won't get that if you bang out reps without stopping to set up properly before each lift. Remember, it's a deadlift. That means no momentum from one repetition to the next.

If you use perfect form, your lower back should give you no trouble. However, if you have preexisting back problems, your muscles may not fire properly for this exercise. Try the sumo deadlift instead. Set your feet wide apart, toes pointed slightly outward, and grip the bar overhand with your hands inside your knees. Your back will be more upright at the start, taking away some of the potential for strain.



Dip for Big Triceps
Beginners almost invariably hit their triceps with light weights, limited ranges of motion, and simple, easy exercises. Which is fine . . . for beginners. For sizeaholics, the key to triceps development is lifting really, really heavy loads.

If you have time for just one triceps exercise, make it a dip. It's the big, basic movement that works all three parts of the muscle (thus the name "triceps"). And, because the bigger, stronger chest muscles are the prime movers—the ones that get your body moving from a dead-hang position—your triceps get to work against a much heavier load than they would in a triceps-isolating exercise.

How to dip: Hoist yourself up on parallel bars with your torso perpendicular to the floor; you'll maintain this posture throughout the exercise. (Leaning forward will shift emphasis to your chest and shoulders.) Bend your knees and cross your ankles. Slowly lower your body until your shoulder joints are below your elbows. (Most guys stop short of this position.) Push back up until your elbows are nearly straight but not locked.

Making progress: For most men, doing sets of dips with their own body weight is challenging enough. But when you reach a point at which you can do multiple sets of 10 dips, you want to add weight. The best way is to attach a weight plate or dumbbell to a rope or chain that's attached to a weight belt. Many gyms have belts specially designed for weighted dips and chinups. Another solution, especially if you work out at home, is to wear a backpack with weight plates inside it.

But the more weight you add, the more careful you have to be. Always lower yourself slowly—you don't ever want to pop down and up quickly on a weighted dip, unless you think you'll relish the feeling of your pectoral muscles detaching from your breastbone.

Precautions: Aside from the pec-tearing thing, you want to protect your shoulders. If you have preexisting shoulder problems, or feel pain there the first few times you try dips, you should skip them.

A comparable but more shoulder-friendly exercise is the decline close-grip bench press, using a barbell or dumbbells held together.

Run Less to Grow Faster
Running doesn't build muscle mass. If it did, marathoners would have legs like defensive linemen, and workers in Boston would have to repave the streets each year following the city's signature race. But running shrinks muscle fibers to make them more metabolically efficient, thereby saving the pavement.

You'd think you could get around this by lifting weights in addition to running, but your body negates that work through a mysterious "interference effect." Your type II fibers—the biggest ones—will still grow if you run and lift. But your type I fibers won't, and even though they're smaller than the type IIs, they probably comprise 50 percent of the muscle fibers in your body that have any growth potential.

Cut back on your running program and you'll see growth in both your slow- and fast-twitch muscle fibers, and perhaps finally get your body to look the way you think it should.

Excerpted from The Book of Muscle (Rodale, 2003).

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The Lost Art of Movement Capacity

by Michael Ranfone, CSCS – 4/08/2011

Strength, power, and hypertrophy. This is what most people train for. But what about all-around athleticism? Wouldn't the ultimate goal be to look like a top natural bodybuilder and move like an elite athlete?

Well, you can have it all. In fact, improving your "movement capacity" will make building muscle and getting stronger that much easier. Here's how to do it.

Express Your Strength and Power

Look at any athlete: The ones who typically do the best in most sporting events are those who possess the best movement capacity. That means they can adapt to a rapidly changing environment with fluid transitions throughout all planes of motion.

Now, I work with mostly performance athletes. Walk into our facility and you'll see them putting up some pretty respectable weights. But if all we've done is help them increase their squat numbers then we've failed them. A real athlete must be able to take his newfound strength and power and express it in competition.

When you get down to it, the athlete has to know how to move. In fact, anyone who dedicates hours in the gym to self-improvement needs to know how to move. It's just foundational. And we all have trainable qualities that should be considered in our programming.

Now don't get me wrong, programs rooted in strength principles are the most effective for broadening your potential. Nothing will replace variations of squats, deads, presses, and pulls. However, boosting your movement preparedness is the best way of actualizing that potential.

Enhance Your Motor Potential

Most exercises that focus on strength and power development follow very rigid paths of motion. They don't offer an appreciable amount of dynamic stabilization to which the athlete can adapt.

Even typical range of motion and mobility drills have limitations because the rate and velocity of movement is drastically different than what you'd find out in the real world. While familiar mobility is important (think dynamic range of motion, static range of motion, foam rolling, and activation drills), there are unique exercises that can significantly enhance your motor potential.

Building a strong combination of stability and mobility will produce optimal movement. Because of the "triphasic" nature of all dynamic muscle action, it's important to become proficient in handling the unique demands of each phase. Our solution is to sometimes isolate a certain phase to eventually become better at the process of blending.

Rx Single Leg Progression

This first drill requires the athlete to work on range of motion, proprioception, tonic and postural roles, along with basic muscle mechanics.

Since this drill is basically a series of unilateral isometric or quasi-isometric holds, it's best used to excite the nervous system, wake up dormant musculature, help correct posture, and get in some nice range of motion work as well.

An added benefit is that it helps with rate of force development so that you'll be able to reach peak levels of force faster in power exercises. Rehab clients recovering from lower-body injuries will find it useful as well.

Altitude Drops

Altitude drops are the most useful tool for developing stronger, more fluid, and more reactive athletes. They showcase your ability to rapidly stretch connective and elastic tissues, and they demand dynamic stability in a concerted manner.

Through eccentric muscle contraction and force absorption, we're laying the foundation for better-stored elastic energy and increased concentric strength potential. Force and power will increase during the overcoming portion of the action.

Tumbling

Tumbling was first introduced to me by my Olympic lifting coach over ten years ago. It offers tremendous benefits for athletes, weekend warriors, and even bodybuilders, including body control, ROM, agility, coordination, timing, leg power, and core activation.

And since tumbling is so versatile and easily paired with other movements and drills, the levels of difficulty are endless. The following combine tumbling with other drills:

How To Use These Drills

After your regular warm-up, try this progression for starters:

1. Rx Single Leg Progression, 15-30 seconds per position for 1-2 sets
2. Pick one altitude drop exercise and perform for 10-15 reps
3. Choose three tumbling drills and perform 3 sets of 5 reps of each

Remember to keep it simple, quality over quantity of reps, and make sure you feel amped and ready, not flat and fatigued. Performed correctly, these drills will enhance the subsequent work for that day.

Master All Phases of Movement

Most people only concern themselves with the concentric portion of the movement – the lift – which is understandable because we typically judge the success of that movement solely on that portion.

But by spending some time mastering the other two phases, you'll maximize your concentric ability. Without increasing your force stabilization and absorption, it'll become quite difficult to reach your force redirection and projection potential. As your concentric action improves, your training goals (strength, power, or hypertrophy) will soon be reached.

Big and Athletic

Whether you're interested in breaking up the monotony of training or becoming more athletic, you should give these drills a try. Exposing yourself to different challenges will provide a more enriched training environment and ultimately impact your level of productivity, both in the gym and out.

Wikio

CURE YOUR OWN AILMENTS

You can't actually earn your M.D. in a quarter of an hour, but this crash course can teach you how to think like a doctor. In some cases, that could be enough to save your life
"Gunners" was what we called them, with a mixture of respect and contempt that none of us really tried to sort out. They were the ones who just couldn't give up, even after being accepted into medical school, on what was clearly a lifelong campaign to be the Smartest Kid in the Room. All our grades were pass-fail and no class ranks were at stake, but still the gunners spent the first 2 years leaning forward in the front row, elbows cocked, ready to raise their hands at the first question the lecturer let fly.

In the midst of medical school's unassimilable flood of information, when no one knew which fact, if any, was going to be the one that saved somebody's life, it was difficult not to view such compulsive self-confidence without a little envy.

Until the third year. That's when the scene shifted from the lecture hall to the hospital wards. I still remember the day the rules changed. I was one of two students on the pulmonology service. The other student was a notorious gunner; already determined to become a neurosurgeon, he had an aura of polished chrome. He had just finished a dazzling presentation of a new patient, a 65-year-old man with bad kidneys and an atypical pneumonia who had apparently spent the night on the verge of respiratory failure.

"And what do you think we should do now?" the attending asked.

"Bronch him," the gunner shot back, suggesting a standard test beloved by pulmonologists, which involves inserting a rigid bronchoscope into the patient's lungs to bring up pictures, tissue samples, and usually a diagnosis.

"Really?" the attending replied mildly. "Aren't there less expensive ways to kill him?"

The gunner backpedaled, stammering, "CT him, then?"

"Cheaper," the attending agreed. "Until you factor in the dialysis."

Then he cracked a weary smile. "You know what's going to happen if you keep shooting from the hip, don't you, son?"

"What?" the gunner asked warily.

"One of these days you're liable to hurt somebody."

Doctors don't think like gunners. As the producers of House know, doctors actually think more like Sherlock Holmes. (This is not surprising, given that Holmes's creator, Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, modeled the fictional detective after one of his medical school professors.) "You know my methods, Watson," Holmes says. "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." This slow, painstaking method of unlocking diagnostic puzzles is dictated by the bizarre complexity of human physiology and illness.

So doctors learn to avoid leaping from fragmentary evidence to the most likely answer. They're trained instead to hold off answering at all for as long as possible. We "sift the differential"—that is, we construct a list of all possible explanations of the patient's symptoms, rank them in order of deadliest or most common (or both), and then collect the evidence necessary to rule out every item on that list until, as Holmes explains, whatever remains must be the truth.

All medical questions begin not with obscure facts about physiology or disease but with a set of symptoms. The medical workup is based on things you can feel, touch, see (and sometimes smell): a headache, a sore throat, a pain in your ankle. If you take that as your starting point, and bear in mind that the object of the game isn't to jump to a conclusion but to weed out all the wrong answers, diagnosis becomes (slightly) less mysterious.

Some doctors grow nervous when they think a patient is diagnosing himself. Doing that can definitely cause trouble, and the Internet has made it easier than ever for you to get in over your head. But some doctors also believe that certain taciturn populations—I'm talking about men—might be more willing to seek help if they can find basic information online before they have to ask a human being for directions. And these days, when more and more nonmedical concerns interfere with medical decision making, and when you can find yourself looking at serious financial hurt for that unnecessary trip to the emergency room, you may understandably feel that you need some way of knowing when to seek help. Of course, medical professionals are your best resources for making that call. But there's no escaping the reality that we are all, ultimately, our own first responders. That decision to pick up the phone isn't going to come from your doctor: It has to come from you.

Take the humble bellyache. It's a simple thing to recognize—you know it intimately. But the differential diagnosis of abdominal pain is so big that you have to break it down by regions of the belly. And even within those subsets are dozens of possible diagnoses, from acute intermittent porphyria (an inherited metabolic disorder) to polyarteritis nodosa (an arterial inflammation) to mesenteric ischemia (blockage of one of the arteries supplying your gut with blood). Or it could be something as benign as gastroenteritis—a stomach bug.

This is where the art begins, by doing whatever you can to shorten the list. You set up a differential that—you hope—is manageable, and then you begin sifting.

Consider the following cases as a way to get a feel for the way your doctor thinks. All the scenarios are hypothetical, and you shouldn't mistake any of them for medical advice that could apply to any particular situation you might face. But try them on and see what it's like to work through the differential—it's how your doctor turns ordinary worrying into an art.
Sore Throat, Cough, Runny and/or Stuffy Nose
It's the common cold, right? Gunner. Even here there are other possibilities to consider.

If you don't have nasal congestion, if the cough is dry, if you have a fever above 101°F, if the illness came on suddenly and now you feel like a truck hit you, it could also be influenza—historically the world's deadliest virus, by body count. If that's the case and you're in ordinary good health, your doctor might send you on your way with the reassurance that you'll probably be okay.

But if you have heart or lung disease or diabetes, or any condition that impairs your immune system, you should let your doctor decide if you need a neuraminidase inhibitor—an antiviral medicine that can shorten a bout of influenza by a day or so. And no matter how healthy you are, if you have the flu and then find yourself becoming short of breath with minimal exertion, or if you start coughing up nasty junk, or if a few days into the illness the fever comes back and you experience shaking chills, seek help. You're developing pneumonia. A call to your doctor could keep you out of the hospital. Or save your life.


Headache
Headaches come in a bewildering variety, from the dull, all-over ache, to the blinding bass beat perched just above one ear, to that red-hot spike being driven past your eyeball. Some come with visual hallucinations, odd imaginary smells, vertigo, vomiting, or a profound aversion to bright light and conversation. And some aren't headaches at all.

Tension headaches and migraines can usually be distinguished by location: A migraine tends to hit one side of the head, while a tension headache is more diffuse. A migraine is usually marked by an exquisite sensitivity to sound and light, putting its victim out of action for several days. A tension headache isn't usually disabling, and it typically fades overnight. Both of these are distinctly different from the much rarer cluster headache: an excruciating attack that explodes behind one eye, reaches a crescendo after about an hour, and then vanishes—only to return in a day or so. These come in salvos for a few weeks, and then disappear.

What all three have in common, however, is that they're "benign." Touch base with your doctor, who will probably reassure you (once it's clear that nothing serious is afoot) that nobody ever died from a headache. No matter how seriously they wished for the end to come.

But not every aching head is a headache. There are times when that throbbing skull really is a sign of something seriously askew. Watch out for...

The thunderclap headache
If it hits you like a bolt out of nowhere, intensifying in a few minutes into the worst headache you've ever had, call 911. The list of causes for this kind of headache isn't long, but almost everything on it can be very quickly fatal.

The sex/exercise headache
A headache that comes on quickly and furiously with violent physical exertion, or at the moment of orgasm, needs to be worked up. Most are benign; some are subarachnoid hemorrhages.

The headache that spreads to your neck
Benign headaches stay in your head. Headaches that don't can be meningitis or a hemorrhage. So yes, call 911, especially if you have a fever, if you're just getting over a bacterial infection, if you have a rash, or if you can't think clearly.

The headache that won't end
A headache that comes and goes for days, with a low-grade fever, visual disturbances, and aching in one or both of your temples, often signals an inflammation of the arteries that can leave you blind if not treated. See your doctor today.

The contagious headache
Your family is all home on a cold, rainy Saturday. As the day goes on you develop a headache that grows steadily worse. If anyone else has the same headache, move everyone outdoors immediately: There's a malfunction in your heating system and it's spewing carbon monoxide. Once you're out of the house, call the fire department—they'll know what to do. Your headache should clear up in a few hours.

The headache that's been worsening for weeks, wakes you up, and is there in the a.m.
This is the classic pattern for a slowly expanding mass. It may not warrant a 911 call, but I wouldn't let the sun go down without an MRI.
Breathlessness
Let's say you're a healthy 38-year-old man with no significant medical history who wakes up in the middle of the night feeling short of breath. You haven't been exposed to any respiratory illnesses. You're not coughing or feverish. Since you returned home from a business trip 2 days ago, you've been too tired to do much more than sit at your desk at work and in front of the TV at home. But now you're feeling distinctly...short...of...breath. Sitting up makes it a little better. But as you lie back down and wait for the sensation to go away, it doesn't. You try to draw a deep breath, but that gives you nothing more than a sharp twinge low in your chest. Your mouth is dry; your pulse feels fast. You've never felt anything like this before, and it's terrifying.

It should be. Part of that terror comes from a deep reflex. A neural loop connects your lungs with the part of your brain that experiences fear—and when we can't breathe, we're wired to panic.

The other reason to worry lies in the differential, which is the usual collection of the ugly versus the unlikely. It includes a collapsed lung, heart attack, and panic attack. In this hypothetical example—and ideally in reality—you don't have emphysema, sickle-cell anemia, or cystic fibrosis, and you haven't sustained a recent serious trauma to your chest, so we can rule out a collapsed lung, broken ribs, acute chest syndrome, pulmonary contusion, and flail chest. Since you're a reader of this magazine, I'll assume you're not a smoker, so an exacerbation of chronic obstructive lung disease isn't likely. You're not coughing up blood (right?), so massive hemoptysis probably isn't your problem either. Unless you regularly neglect to read warning labels, you probably haven't been exposed to toxic inhalants, insecticides, or chemical fires, so acute respiratory distress syndrome and organophosphate toxicity are off the list. You're not wheezing, and you don't make any odd noises when you inhale, so asthma and upper airway obstruction are out, too.

Which is all admirable, in a med-school gunner sort of way, but you're still short of breath. What's left on the list? Only 14 different possibilities, from heart attack to panic attack.

Of these, about half could be fatal by sunrise. Some of the others, such as panic, could result in a battle over coverage when you file the ER bill with your insurance company. But if you think the ER is expensive, try the funeral home. It's the only place I know where breathing isn't required. Pick up the phone and dial 911.


Light-Headedness
If you've ever experienced it, you never forget it: that horrible sensation of nausea, clammy cold sweat, and then consciousness sliding from your grasp as you settle toward the floor. The ER shorthand for this is "DFO," for "I done fell out." Your grandmother called it fainting; the preferred medical term is "syncope."

Syncope sends a lot of people to the emergency room. Most episodes are benign, caused by either simple dehydration ("orthostatic" syncope) or something called a "vasovagal reflex." In the latter case, some noxious trigger, usually in an internal organ, stimulates your vagus nerve, which signals your heart to slow down, your skin to break out in a clammy sweat, and your blood pressure to plummet. So if you're developing gastroenteritis from some bad sushi, your writhing gut can generate a reflex reaction that makes you faint. Vasovagal faints also happen to susceptible people when they go to the bathroom, when they stand too long, or when they've been startled.

Some other causes of syncope are less innocuous. For starters, cardiac arrhythmias can cause you to lose consciousness. Because arrhythmias are both potentially deadly and preventable, any DFO, unless it's part of a well-established pattern already diagnosed by your doctor, needs to undergo diagnostic study in the emergency room.

Finally, a relatively common genetic condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) can cause athletic young men to faint during exercise, and sometimes to drop dead. If you feel light-headed when you stand up, and if you easily become short of breath either when you lie down or suddenly in the middle of the night, make the trip to your doctor. You should do this especially if any of your close relatives died suddenly and inexplicably at an early age. HCM runs in families, and the majority of people carrying these genes don't know it.

The frustrating thing about fainting spells is that the most common result of the hospital workup is...nothing. Often it's impossible, after the fact, to pinpoint a cause. This is also the good news, because the causes that leave clear traces are things you don't want to have.
Spots
Rashes are common. Most are benign. Sometimes they're the first sign of disaster.

Rashes are also notoriously mysterious. Almost anything can cause them. I have seen rashes caused by exercise, riding a motorcycle, and eating red meat. Some people break out in hives whenever they become excited or embarrassed, a response guaranteed to destroy social lives.

But by far the most common rash is the blotchy red of contact dermatitis: It's itchy, unsightly, and rarely serious, usually caused by switching to a new laundry detergent, wearing a new item of jewelry, or trying on that shirt made of recycled mystery fibers that your sister gave you for Earth Day.

Some other rashes—including the annoying ones, like poison ivy, ringworm, yeast—can be hard to tell apart once you've tried to treat them with the wrong over-the-counter creams. The steroid that's good for poison ivy, for instance, won't cure yeast; it will, however, change it into a diffuse, red flush indistinguishable from contact dermatitis. And a rash that starts out as athlete's foot will sometimes become a diffuse red flush, except this one is hot and painful. Your locker-room leprosy has graduated from the merely annoying to cellulitis, a bacterial infection that gained a foothold through the cracked skin between your toes. That's a same-day doctor visit, unless you have diabetes, in which case you should go straight to an emergency room.

A painful, hot, sunburn-like rash that comes and goes, especially in somebody with a fever who recently had surgery (or any kind of wound, or even an ordinary IV catheter inserted), can be the warning sign of toxic shock syndrome, a scenario in which common skin bacteria like staph and strep enter your bloodstream, producing toxins that lead within hours to shock and organ failure. A rash accompanied by fever, headache, and joint pain can also be the first sign of meningitis or Rocky Mountain spotted fever, both readily fatal. Any rash that doesn't fade when you press on it needs immediate attention: You could be about to bleed to death due to any number of causes, from an autoimmune attack on your blood platelets to a hidden cancer.

There are hundreds more types of rashes lurking out there. This list offers just a sampling of some of the more common and dangerous ones. Your doctor may not recognize them all, but will know a dermatologist who can.


Lumps
Usually these are enlarged lymph nodes, swollen because cells in your immune system are busy getting their game on. Swollen nodes in your neck, armpits, or groin generally suggest infection nearby, or allergies. Big, tender nodes, typically in your neck and accompanied by a wicked sore throat, are mononucleosis until proven otherwise. There's not much you can do with mono (except spread it around), but someone with an active case is at risk of a ruptured spleen, so take your nodes to your doctor for a quick confirmatory test, lay off the contact sports, and wash your hands.

One of the worst things I ever saw in a clinic was when this big, awkward college student, a really nice guy, came in because his girlfriend had had mono and now he had these big swollen nodes and a low-grade fever. His girlfriend was afraid that if he played rugby that weekend he could rupture his spleen. The problem was that he didn't have a sore throat. What he did have was lymphoma.

Other items in the differential for lumps with fever include HIV, tuberculosis, and lupus. In case you have any doubts, lumps in your testicles are never normal. Lumps overlying your pectoral muscles also need to be checked, because guess what? Guys develop breast cancer too. And an isolated swollen lymph node that doesn't go down in a week or two, especially if it feels firm and immobile, must be biopsied for cancer.
Vision Changes
I once had a patient who'd been admitted to the ER for a brief dizzy spell. They'd given him fluid and he felt fine. When I checked him, he said, "Just one thing, doc: Why am I seeing two of you?" This was the first sign of the stroke that over the next 12 hours slowly paralyzed him.

New-onset double vision can signal a stroke, a blowout fracture of your eye socket, multiple sclerosis, or myasthenia gravis (an autoimmune condition in which your muscles become so weak you can wind up unable to breathe). Any time your vision suddenly changes in any way, whether it's parts of your visual field going dark (stroke), showers of floaters (detached retina), or generalized blurriness (imminent diabetic coma), you could be having serious problems not only in your eyes but elsewhere, ranging from autoimmune diseases of the circulatory system to HIV. I've also seen sudden changes in vision diagnosed by head CT (ordered usually after the patient has a seizure in the ER): The scan shows the telltale spots of pork tapeworm larvae in the brain.

Your eyes are attached directly to your brain. If you ever think they're trying to tell you something, listen.


Concussion
"Concussion" is the technical term for what happens when you're hit on the head hard enough to rattle the contents. We used to think that loss of consciousness defined concussion. We know now that even if you're not hit hard enough to be knocked out cold, a blow to the head can still shred the wiring in your brain. After the initial disorientation clears, you can develop headache, vertigo, nausea, and vomiting. Then come mood swings, insomnia, and/or memory loss. It's hard to talk. Bright lights and loud noises can be intolerable. You drop things, including your train of thought. This is the most mild form of brain injury.

Not all concussions are mild. Some are fatal, or inflict permanent brain damage. In the first minutes after the injury, symptoms of a serious concussion can be impossible to tell from those of a mild one; by the time severe symptoms appear, permanent brain injury may have already occurred. If you're hit on the head hard enough to make you even momentarily groggy, seek treatment immediately. And no matter what your coach or teammates (or that stupid little voice we all have in our heads) says, don't ever go back into the game. There's too much evidence that a second mild concussion too soon after the first one can add up to a lifetime of disability.

Once you've made it to the hospital emergency room, there's the controversial question of when you can turn around and go home. Even doctors disagree on this, but a few consensus guidelines are clear. The American College of Emergency Physicians recommends that a patient be sent home without additional testing only if he or she...

is alert, oriented, and able to follow simple commands;

has no suggestion of skull fracture (which can include some subtle signs, such as bruising around the eyes or behind the ears, blood behind the eardrums, or clear fluid leaking from the nose or ears);


isn't taking aspirin or other anticoagulants;
hasn't had a seizure;
can remember events up to 30 minutes before the injury;
has no sensory changes or weakness;
is younger than 65.

Even when you pass these tests, if the injury was from a car wreck, if you fell from higher than 3 feet off the ground, if you were drunk, or if you vomited more than once after the injury, then you've at least bought yourself a head CT. If the CT is normal and there's somebody at home to keep an eye on you (which means waking you up every 2 hours for a brief round of "what's your name?" and "who's the president?"), your doctor may let you go home as long as you're alert and oriented, and not bleeding or having a seizure.

Life is short. Art is long. When Hippocrates said this about the art of medicine, what he left out is that medical school is longer than any artistic performance I've ever sat through, but still much too short to cover everything you need to know. As with rashes, what you've read here just scratches the surface.

But even the art of medicine isn't concerned only with facts. There's also style—that Holmesian process of reasoning backward from all the possible causes to that one remaining truth. To form a reliable diagnosis, you still have to go to school. But style is something you don't need school to learn. To make the good decisions that will prompt you to go to your doctor so he or she can make the call, you don't need an M.D. But it might help to think like one.

The identifying characteristics of patients described in this essay have been altered to protect patient privacy. Any resemblance between such descriptions and any specific individual, living or dead, is a coincidence.



Wikio

Le sirop d'érable, un superaliment?

Le sirop d’érable du Québec renfermerait le potentiel d’un superaliment, grâce à certaines molécules ayant des propriétés anti-inflammatoires et anticancer.

C’est ce qu’ont affirmé des chercheurs de l’Université du Rhode Island, dans le cadre du congrès annuel de l'American Chemical Society (ACS)^1-2 tenu récemment à Anaheim, en Californie.

Ainsi, à partir d’un échantillon de 20 litres de sirop d’érable du Québec, les chercheurs ont identifié une vingtaine de nouveaux composés actifs, issus majoritairement de la famille des polyphénols.

L’une de ces nouvelles molécules a même été baptisée du nom de « Quebecol », en l'honneur de la provenance du sirop duquel elle est issue².

Ces nouvelles molécules découvertes dans le sirop d’érable seraient plus « actives » que celles qu’on retrouve dans le bleuet, selon les chercheurs. Par contre, leur concentration serait jusqu’à 100 fois moindre.

Ainsi, la seule consommation du sirop d’érable ne permettrait pas de tirer un bienfait quelconque de ces nouveaux composés sur la santé. Le sirop d’érable ne constitue donc pas un superaliment en soi, mais ses extraits pourraient le devenir.

On estime que cette découverte permettrait de créer des aliments fonctionnels, ou même des médicaments destinés aux personnes diabétiques ou aux personnes atteintes d’un cancer colorectal.

Un sucre mieux toléré des diabétiques?

Yves Desjardins

Selon Yves Desjardins, professeur de phytologie à l’Université Laval, l’index glycémique du sirop d’érable serait semblable à celui d’autres sirops (maïs, agave, Okinawa). « Mais chez des personnes diabétiques, on peut penser que le sirop d’érable est mieux toléré en raison de l’acide abscissique qu’il contient en grande quantité », suggère celui qui est aussi chercheur à l’Institut des nutraceutiques et aliments fonctionnels (INAF) de la même université.

C’est Yves Desjardins qui a découvert la présence de cet acide dans le sirop d’érable. Issu de la même famille que les caroténoïdes, on le retrouve aussi dans plusieurs fruits et différentes graines (lin, moutarde) et légumineuses (soya).

« L’acide abscissique contribuerait à libérer l’insuline dans le pancréas, à permettre l’entrée du glucose dans les muscles et à ainsi abaisser taux de sucre sanguin », poursuit-il.

Selon lui, la concentration de l’acide abcsissique dans le sirop d’érable est telle que l’équivalent de 3 c. à thé (60 ml) pourrait suffire pour permettre aux personnes résistantes à l’insuline de mieux tolérer le sirop d’érable, qui est pourtant constitué à 95 % de sucrose.

« C’est ce qui expliquerait pourquoi la glycémie d’une personne est plus stable quand elle consomme le sirop d’érable plutôt qu’un autre sucre », explique M. Desjardins.

Martin LaSalle – PasseportSanté.net

1. Le congrès annuel de l’ACS a eu lieu du 27 au 31 mars 2011. Pour en savoir plus : http://portal.acs.org [consulté le 6 avril 2011].
2. Li L, Seeram NP, Quebecol, a novel phenolic compound isolated from Canadian maple syrup, Journal of Functional Foods, juin 2011. doi:10.1016/j.jff.2011.02.004. Cette étude a été financée par le Conseil pour le développement de l’agriculture du Québec, Agriculture et Agroalimentaire Canada, ainsi que par la Fédération des producteurs acéricoles du Québec.

Lean Belly Countdown: Men's Health.com

Countdown to a Lean BellyBy: Travis Stork, M.D.

How did they do it? That's the first question anyone asks when they see a friend or colleague who's lost a lot of weight, or remade their body into a healthier, leaner version. How did they do it?

Well, it's no mystery. In fact, one of the most important and intriguing studies ever conducted was put together by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) back in 2006. This is our tax dollars at work, and I'd say we got our money's worth.

The pages of the study—its catchy title is "Dietary and Physical Activity Behaviors Among Adults Successful at Weight Loss Maintenance"—take all the world's weight-loss theories and compare them to what works for real people in the real world. It looked at people who won the fat war by losing at least 30 pounds and then keeping the weight off using strategies that will work for you, too.

Keep in mind: It wasn't a 100 percent success story. The CDC studied 2,124 people, and only 587 of them actually lost the weight and kept it off. But those who succeeded used many of the same strategies, the strategies outlined here.

And for even more ways to revolutionize your diet and get lean for good, check out The Lean Belly Prescription by Dr. Travis Stork. It's filled with simple strategies that will help you lose weight the same way you gained it: By making easy lifestyle choices that will transform your life—for the better.

Lean-Belly Strategy #1

Pay Attention to What You Eat

Mindless eating is excessive eating. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts discovered that people who watched TV while they ate consumed nearly 300 more calories than those who dined without an eye on the tube. You need to pay attention to the messages your stomach is sending to your brain; if the TV is blaring, you won't see the "slow" and "stop" signs.

Lean-Belly Strategy #2

Slow Down

Fast eaters become fat people. If you consciously stop to take a breath between bites, you can cut your food (and calorie) intake by 10 percent, according to researchers at the University of Rhode Island. Special bonus: You can do this in social situations—Thanksgiving dinner at Aunt Marge's—and nobody will even notice. That is, until you show up next year minus 20 pounds of flab.

Lean-Belly Strategy #3

I Said Slow Down!

It takes 20 minutes for the news that you've had enough to eat to travel from your gut to your brain. The reason: Hormones that trigger the "I'm full—stop!" sensation are at the end of your digestive tract, and it takes a while for digested food to reach there. If your mouth is filled with conversation, it won't be so full of food. Talk more between bites, and weigh less when the conversation/meal is over.

Lean-Belly Strategy #4

Beware the "Healthy" Menu

If you order the stuff that's supposed to be good for you, you're likely to underestimate a meal's calorie total by more than a third, according to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research. The restaurants know that; now you do, too. So be especially aware when ordering "healthy," and make sure you have a "to go" box handy to carry leftovers home.

Lean-Belly Strategy #5

Beware the Community Chest

Always serve snacks in a bowl or dish, and put away the packages. Never eat from the bag or container. That way you won't ever eat an entire bag of something in a single sitting.

Lean-Belly Strategy #6

Beat Hunger with Your Mind

Have a craving even though you ate just an hour ago? Before you indulge your mystery hunger, here's how to test whether your appetite is real or not: Imagine sitting down to a large, sizzling steak. If you're truly hungry, the steak will sound good, and you should eat. If the steak isn't appetizing, it means your body isn't actually hungry. You might be bored, or thirsty, or just tempted by something you don't need. Try a change of scenery: Researchers at Flanders University in Australia found that visual distractions can help curb cravings.

Lean-Belly Strategy #7

Redecorate, Repack, Remember

If you don't have a countertop fruit bowl, buy one so you can grab a peach, banana, pear, or other piece of fruit on your way out the door in the morning, to munch on during your commute. (Plus, it's fun to throw the core out the window.) Plan a 10 a.m. apple-a-day break. Toss an orange in your briefcase to help you past the mid-afternoon lull (otherwise known as Temptation Time). Make fruit part of your entourage, and it will beat up lesser foods.

Lean-Belly Strategy #8

If You Can't Bear to Eat Vegetables, Drink Them Instead

That's right, you could have had a V8—as long as it was the low-sodium variety. It has pureed tomatoes, beets, carrots, celery, spinach, lettuce, parsley, and watercress, and 8 ounces supplies two of your five recommended daily servings of vegetables. It also heats up nicely as a base for soups.

Lean-Belly Strategy #9

If You Can't Bear to Eat Vegetables, Hide Them in Your Pasta Sauce

And no, neither you nor the kids will notice. Using a fine grater on your food processor, grate 2 cups total of onions, garlic, carrots, beets, and zucchini (or any combo thereof), then sauté the microscopic vegetable bits in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add 4 cups of basic marinara sauce and simmer to an anonymous tomato flavor.

Lean-Belly Strategy #10

If You're Not Yet Drinking Smoothies, Why Not?

Have you read the label of your fruit juice? Lots of sugar (however "natural" it is) and not much fiber, which means it's a carb bomb when it hits your bloodstream. Not so with a blended smoothie, because ingredient number one is whole fruit, making the sugar content drop and the fiber climb.

Two tips: Use frozen fruit; buy it by the bag in your store's freezer section. And buy a wand mixer and a small pitcher so you can mix your smoothie in the same container you drink it from; it's much easier than washing out a blender. Almost any fruit-and-berry combo will do, but you can start with this recipe: 1/2 cup frozen blueberries, 1/2 banana (peeled ones freeze well), 2 tablespoons peanut butter, 2 tablespoons whey powder (it's in the supplements aisle in the grocery store), 1 cup 2% milk, and 1 cup water.

Lean-Belly Strategy #11

Buy Smaller Dishes

According to the food scientists at Cornell University, people tend to eat as much food as will fit on their plates. That's where "duh!" overlaps with dangerous. Over the past 100 years, our plates have grown, decade by decade. And we also know that the nation's obesity rates have grown exponentially in that time as well. No, it's not a coincidence. If you dine off of smaller plates, you'll grow smaller, too. Shoot for 9 inches in diameter, and you'll be on your way.

Lean-Belly Strategy #12

Drink out of Skinny Glasses

As have gone dinner plates, so have gone drinking glasses. And if you fill the newly cavernous ones with any kind of sweetened beverage, you'll overindulge in calories. But here's a smart tip: We tend to gauge our drink sizes by how tall, not how stout, our drinking glasses are. So if you buy tall, skinny ones, you'll think you're drinking more even though you're drinking less.

Lean-Belly Strategy #13

Never Eat from the Box, Carton, or Bag

Those same clever food scientists at Cornell did an experiment in which they gave one set of moviegoers giant boxes of stale popcorn and another set smaller boxes of stale popcorn. The big-box people ate more than the small-box people. The theory: You gauge the amount that's "reasonable" to eat by the size of the container it's in. Put two cookies on a plate, put a scoop of ice cream in a bowl, or lay out a small handful of potato chips on your plate, then put the container away; you'll eat far less of the treat.

Lean-Belly Strategy #14

Limit the Fried Stuff

Fun fact: Fast-food burgers and chicken from KFC and McDonald's are the most frequently requested meals on death row. It kinda makes sense. The inmates won't be around to suffer the aftermath. Fried foods are packed with calories and salt, and that crunchy, oily coating beats down any nutritional qualities that whatever is entombed inside might have.

That said, eating one piece of fried chicken won't be, um, a death sentence, if it's surrounded on the plate by generous helpings of vegetables and you follow with fruit—not more fat—for dessert. What's more, the fat in the chicken will help you absorb the fat-soluble vitamins in the veggies.

Lean-Belly Strategy #15

Eat the Good Stuff

Make sure your diet is filled with healthy fats in the forms of fatty fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel, sardines), fatty fruits (avocados), extra-virgin olive oil, eggs (among the healthiest foods known to humankind), and healthy-fat snacks (nuts are nutritional powerhouses and keep you feeling full). I even give bacon in moderation a green light; at only 70 calories per strip, it carries big flavor and belly-filling capabilities.

Lean-Belly Strategy #16

Wear Your Milk Mustache with Pride

Milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, and cheeses all contain slow-to-digest protein and healthy fat, so they can be excellent belly fillers. And studies have suggested that the calcium in dairy products may aid weight loss. Make them part of your diet and you'll find the cow elbowing aside lesser members of the food kingdom.

Lean-Belly Strategy #17

Eliminate Sweetened Beverages

If you're going to follow only one piece of advice in this article, make it this one. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: Drinks with added sugar account for nearly 450 calories per day in the average American's diet. That's more than twice as much as we were drinking 30 years ago. If you're looking for a way to cut unnecessary daily calories to help you lose a pound a week, wean yourself from the overload of sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages.

No, artificially sweetened sodas are not okay. Even if they have few calories or no calories, they maintain or increase your taste for highly sweetened foods, so you seek out the calorie payload elsewhere. Worse yet, they crowd out the healthy beverages. My prescription: Out with the bad, in with the great—in taste and nutrition.

Lean-Belly Strategy #19

Reduce Your Intake of Food Prepared Away From Home

When you let somebody else prepare your food—especially if it's a teenager in a paper hat—you lose control over what you eat. And the fast-food companies, being what they are, encourage all of your worst eating habits by stuffing their products with crave-inducing ingredients like unhealthy fats, sugar, and salt. If you can stay out of the drive-thru, you can shrink your calorie intake every day.

Lean-Belly Strategy #20

Keep a Food Diary

Clearly, this weight-loss technique isn't for everybody. It's a hassle to write down every little thing you eat, day after day. But it's strikingly effective for those who do it. My advice: Try it for a week so you can get a handle on how many sodas you drink and under what circumstances, when you're most likely to veg out with a bowl of chips in front of the TV, and when your dessert cravings strike. That will help you identify your dietary danger zones and lead you to strategies that save pounds.

But it wasn't just dietary changes that helped all those folks lose all that weight. Becoming active was another enormous factor in leading the successful losers into the promised land of the lean (but not hungry): exercising for 30 or more minutes per day, and adding physical activity to daily routines. Clearly, these are Lean Belly Prescription kind of people. And that provides a great segue to talking about the activities that these "successful losers" used to shed fat and keep it off .

Here's why it's so important to keep both healthy eating and exercise going as your one-two punch against belly fat. A study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology reported that when people chose healthier foods and combined that benefi t with exercise, they torched 98 percent of their weight directly from their fat stores. People who changed their diets alone were much more likely to break down muscle for fuel, and that's a big problem. Muscle is one of your prime metabolism boosters, so it will help you burn fat for up to 24 hours after a workout. So let's tackle the activity list, and give you strategies to make the most of it.

Lean-Belly Strategy #21

Walk for Exercise

I consider that great news. Is there a simpler exercise than walking? Is there a better way to incorporate talking with friends and loved ones into your fitness plan? Is there anything else that gets you out among your neighbors at a pace that lets you say hello? And is there anything that makes your dog happier than your saying the magic word walk?

A study from the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada (a lovely place for a walk, mind you) found that largely sedentary people who wore a pedometer for 12 weeks increased their total steps by 3,451 a day, to about 10,500. By walking more, they also lowered their resting heart rates, BMIs, and waist measurements. Once you start paying attention to footsteps, you'll find ways to bank the extra strides. Thirty here, 300 there, 1,000 after dinner, and suddenly you're walking away from your old weight. Why not start right now? The closer you pay attention, the more you'll walk. And the more you walk, the greater the temptation will be to mix in an even bigger calorie burner: running.

Lean-Belly Strategy #22

Lift Weights

I suspect that for 81 percent of you, the picture that just flashed in your mind was of a no-neck Bulgarian weight lifter straining as he hoisted a steel beam over his head in the last Olympics. I know that isn't you.

But you should still be taking advantage of the weight lifter's advantage: Muscle is the all-night convenience store of fat burning—it never shuts down. Not only do you burn a ton of calories while you're actually exercising, but there's also a big afterburn effect that kicks in. Your body has to expend energy to cool you down and repair the small tears in muscle fibers that happen when you lift. (Don't freak out. If you lift reasonable-size weights, you won't tear muscles, you'll just push the muscle fibers hard enough to make them grow.)

Lean-Belly Strategy #23

Exercise Regularly

Believe it or not, "none of the above" is a legitimate option when it comes to physical activity, because there's nothing magical about running or weight lifting or even walking. They're just the most common activities people choose in order to add more activity to their days. The only one that's important to you is one that a) you enjoy, b) fits into your life well enough that you can do it most days, and c) allows you to up your energy expenditure.

You can do that by adding three 15-minute walks to your day or by scheduling 2-hour bike rides on weekends. Or simply by walking more, standing more, lifting more, and sitting less.

Just look at your whole day as an opportunity to make the smart choices that will help you lose weight and feel better. Achieve that, and where might you be next month? Or next year? Some place far better than where you are today!

http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/lean-belly-countdown/?cm_mmc=BONL-_-04062011-_-HTML-_-dek

Wikio

THE BEST EXERCISE FOR YOUR TRAPS!

Given the popularity of shrugs, lateral raises, and upright rows, guys seem to spend plenty of time working their upper traps. But what about their lower traps? Turns out, this part of the trapezius—responsible for pulling your shoulder blades down—is often ignored, leaving the muscle weak. This can leave you with poor posture and make you more likely to fall victim to injuries such as shoulder impingement. The fix? An exercise called the bent-over Y. The no-weight version works great as a warmup before any workout, and you can perform it with dumbbells for serious strength gains. Fair warning: You may be surprised that even holding a light weight will make it highly challenging.

Wikio

Perfect Your Single-leg Squat

by CHAD WATERBURY on APRIL 5, 2011

Single-limb exercises, especially for the lower body, are essential for everyone, regardless if they’re a pro athlete or weekend warrior. The benefits of single-leg exercises are numerous, but a few key points to mention are that they recruit additional hip muscles that often get minimal stimulation with double-leg exercises, and they make the core play a larger role in each movement.

The single-leg squat has gained a lot of popularity over the past few years. But there’s a problem: most people do it with terrible form, as evident by extreme spinal flexion. It’s not your fault, as the saying goes. You just haven’t been given the right information to make it work for you. To perform a full single-leg squat requires a lot of strength, mobility, and stability. So you must improve those qualities to get it right.

I could honestly write an entire book on perfecting this exercise. I mention this because I’m about to outline the common problems that are probably holding you back, but there could be other factors working against you.

Now, before I get to the good stuff I must differentiate between a single-leg squat and a pistol. A pistol is the exercise that requires you to squat on one leg with the opposite leg held straight out in front and off the ground. It was popularized by my friend, Pavel Tsatsouline. It’s a good exercise, but it’s extremely advanced. To get it right you must have crazy hamstring flexibility and plenty of strength. Most people are severely lacking the hamstring mobility needed to keep your spine from bending like a fresh twig.

Perfecting the pistol requires another set of guidelines. This post is about the single-leg squat for people who have average mobility. Here’s how to get it right.

Step #1: Start with a few minutes of rope jumping or similar exercises to increase your body temperature. Do some foam rolling at this time if you wish.

Step #2: Stretch your hip flexors: the rectus femoris and psoas. I’m not a big fan of static stretching before a workout, but when it comes to the hip flexors it’s usually a good idea. Stiff hip flexors can diminish your ability to build maximum tension in your glutes and lockout your hips. That’s why stiff hip flexors are often referred to as a “parking brake” that’s partially engaged, thus limiting your hip power. Another reason to stretch your hip flexors is that it allows you to remain more upright in the single-leg squat.

Step #3: Groove the right motor pattern with a single-leg squat facing a wall. When most people do a single-leg squat they shift their torso forward. This can be caused by subpar thoracic extension and a lack of dorsiflexion in the ankle joint. This exercise restores both. It’s a fantastic technique-builder that I learned from spinal expert, Dr. Craig Liebenson. Perform 10 reps with each leg.

Step #4: Activate your hip abductors. Another problem people tend to have is that their leg buckles in as they squat. This is caused by weakness in the gluteus medius/minimus muscles that must fire strongly to hold your leg in proper position. The hip external rotation exercise strengthens and activates those muscles. This can be used as a stand-alone exercise when weakness is evident, or as an activation drill.

Step #5: Perform the single-leg squat on a high bench. The first way to build this exercise is to start by standing barefoot (or with Vibram shoes) on a relatively high bench. The key point is that you must be able to maintain an arch in your low back. If you step down and you feel your low back round (your spine will flex), the bench is too high. Start at a height that allows you to maintain lordosis (low back arch) and increase the height – or the distance you drop down – to build your single-leg squat. The goal is to be able to perform a range of motion that allows your hips to drop below knee level while maintaining an arch in your low back. This can take time so be patient.

Perform these exercises a few times per week and focus on increasing your range of motion with the single-leg squat while standing on a bench. Your hips, legs, and core will get stronger and more powerful than ever!

Stay focused,
CW

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