Club Blog

by: Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D.

We aren’t alone. There are 78 million of us, and 10.5 million of us belong to health clubs and gyms all over the United States. Baby Boomers. Those born between 1946 and 1964. Already the fastest growing segment of America’s population, we are also the “boomingest” growth factor in gyms across the country, with a nearly 400% membership growth rate over the past decade.

We surely aren’t ready for a quiet at-home retirement. Maybe our grandparents were. Not, not us. We’re too busy looking for ways to defer and compress those age-related disabilities into as few years as possible, as late in our lives as possible, while doing what we can to increase our healthy life-years. Among the most often-cited solutions to this quest are being physically fit, exercising and staying active. The amount of data demonstrating the effect of exercise on slowing the aging process is staggering.

We enjoy kinder, gentler workouts, low-impact exercise, and want to insure that whatever we do diminishes the risk of injury. But gerokinesiologists tell us that we also ought to incorporate more moderate to vigorous posture, strength, endurance, flexibility, agility and balance training into our workouts in order to promote negligible senescence (preventing the normal biological changes caused by aging) – depending on our fitness level and ability to do so.

The American Council on Exercise, ACE, suggests that moderate-intensity endurance exercises at a minimum of 30 minutes five days each week such as low-impact aerobics, walking, cardio equipment, and swimming are primary exercise modes for most older adults. Weight training that initially incorporates low resistance and high reps is also essential at a minimum of at least twice each week to maintain or increase muscular strength and endurance. Balance training such as walking backwards and sideways, heel and toe walking, standing from a sitting or squatting position, are also valuable. Flexibility exercises at least twice each week are also recommended.

We lose 30% of their muscle strength between the ages of 50 and 70 years. Normally, adults who are sedentary beyond age 50 can expect muscle loss of up to 0.4 pounds a year. This reduction in muscle strength leads to impairment in carrying out daily activities, the ADLs, “activities of daily living.” Using free weights, exercise machines, or elastic bands to strengthen muscles sure help, but only doing so in a way that makes sense for our fitness levels and what experts know about the “stability/mobility?movement?load?performance” sequence that applies to posture, strength, endurance, flexibility, and balance training.

In addition to the fitness boom among boomers, anti-aging supplements are becoming big business. DHEA, HGH, melatonin, testosterone, estrogen, resveratrol, and the longevity cocktail (more stuff than I have room to include but B, C, D, E, K vitamins, magnesium, flax and fish oils, L-glutathione, coenzyme Q10, ALA are among the ingredients) are flying off the shelves of health and vitamin shops into the hands of the 55+ crowd.

Therapeutic levels of vitamin and mineral supplements, nootropic drugs for preserving and enhancing oxygen supply and neural functioning in the brain, clean living lifestyle (exercise, no smoking, moderate alcohol), avoiding toxins and radiation (good luck), healthy nutrition, intense physical activity, a sense of accomplishment, positive emotions, healthy relationships—these all go in the direction of adding life to our years and years to our lives.

The gym may well be the central address for increasing our healthy life-years before the doctor and the pharmacy.

(ARA) – Activities such as soccer practice, football games, student council meetings, volunteer events and parent-teacher conferences tend to fill family schedules in the fall, quickly replacing the lazy days of summer with extracurricular activities. While many find it refreshing for the family unit to get back into a routine, hectic schedules can often lead to miscommunication among family members and a relaxed attitude toward safety.

“Fall brings an abundance of schedule changes and families working to adapt to new routines,” says Rebecca Smith, vice president of marketing for Master Lock. “As each family member strives to balance various activities, it’s essential that families discuss security measures they should take to ensure they safely maintain their busy lifestyles.”

1. Secure your home. With people coming and going at different times, each family member should understand the importance of locking all points of entry when leaving, including dead-bolting doors, windows, sliding glass doors and garage/shed doors to bolster your home’s safety.

2. Keep your home active. For periods of time where most members of the family will be away, schedule a dog walker to come over or ask a neighbor to retrieve your mail. This helps to ensure that your home still appears to have people coming and going regularly – a natural theft deterrent.

3. Utilize key safes. Whether you’re storing a house key for children to access after school or for your mother-in-law who baby-sits, a Master Lock key safe will allow them access to your home without the risk of losing a key in transit, allowing parties to enter safely, even if no one is home.

4. Establish a “home alone” routine. If your child gets home from school while you are at work, or if your family is involved in activities on weekends, it’s important to have guidelines for your children to follow when home alone. These include locking the door immediately behind them after entering the house, not spending time outside and not answering the door for any visitors.

5. No notes. Many families leave notes on their front doors to communicate a change in schedule. Communication this important should happen directly via phone call, text message or voicemail – not out in the open for everyone to see.

6. Share schedules. Be sure that your family is aware of each other’s schedules, including work, school and extracurricular activities. Keeping a calendar updated with everyone’s commitments in a common room such as the kitchen will prevent miscommunication about who will be home and when.

7. Create an emergency plan. Every family should have a plan that details what to do in case of an emergency. This should include a list of numbers to call and steps to follow should anything happen to the home while a member of the family is there alone.

8. Communicate with neighbors. Communicate your schedules with a friendly, watchful neighbor you trust and empower him or her as an extra set of eyes and ears, keeping watch on your home when you can’t be there.

9. Set social media rules. In today’s digital age, location-based services are growing in popularity with both kids and adults. Set a family social media policy to limit check-ins and location information being made too readily available online to ensure your family’s schedule does not become too predictable.

10. Secure items on-the-go. Whether you’re headed out for a walk or to a soccer game, odds are you are carrying several valuables including keys, a wallet and cell phone. Secure these items in a small, portable safe secured to a fixed item such as a fence, allowing you to relax and enjoy any activity.

For more security tips and solutions for families on the go, visit www.masterlock.com.

By: Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D.

If you’ve been a member of The Sporting Club for more than 10 minutes, you know one of the truly special amenities of our club is the upstairs café. Under Fro’s watchful eye, it’s more than a lounge where members can hang out, relax overlooking the pool, catch up on email on the computer available for your use, or watch the big-screen TV. It’s truly a recovery center for post-exercise and training replenishment.

This is not an advertisement for the café—the healthy options and sports nutrition offerings speak for themselves at any time of the day. This is a column on how to be sure your body gains all of the benefits it can from the exercising you do.

Exercise science tells us one simple fact: if you aren’t consuming a healthy snack within 30 minutes following a moderate to intense workout, you aren’t gaining all you can from the effort you put in on the gym floor. Specifically, the American Dietetic Association advises that we consume .03 -.06 grams of carbohydrates per pound of body weight and 10-20 grams of lean protein—to properly replenish and repair.

When you combine protein with carbohydrates within 30 minutes of moderate to intense exercise, it nearly doubles the insulin response, which results in more stored glycogen, lost during your workout. A 4:1 ration of four grams of carbos for every gram of protein is ideal. Keep in mind that too much protein will slow rehydration and glycogen replenishment. Be sure to keep fat to a minimum.

The American Council on Exercise, ACE, suggests the following 7 great post-workout snacks, that, along with 8-12 ounces of water, will best refuel your body.
1. Non-fat Greek yogurt with fruit
2. Banana with almond or nut butter
3. Low-fat chocolate milk
4. Tuna on whole wheat
5. Frozen grain waffles with Greek yogurt and almond butter
6. Whole wheat English muffin with sliced turkey breast and hummus
7. Protein shake with banana

Guess what? The café offers each of these! Remember that diet is king and exercise is queen—a healthy kingdom requires both. A blueberry or strawberry “Fatburner” which includes protein whey, banana and flax seed is an ideal post-workout protein drink. The café’s “Healthy Tuna” wrap, “Mediterranean Turkey Roll” and “No Meat Please” wrap are also ideal to add for a post-workout snack. These are my favorites!

An intense 90-minute sweat-filled workout requires different replenishment than a light cardio no-sweat session. The powerhouse exercise routine is best renewed with the protein/carb post-workout snack while the milder workout may just require water hydration.

Keep in mind Edison’s famous comment, “The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of human frame, and in the cause and prevention of disease.”?Post-exercise recovery and replenishment is a great place to start. Leave the club without it and you may be leaving behind all you worked out for.

(ARA) – The crunch of pads followed by a tweet of a whistle, the thump of a basketball with a staccato of footfalls to accompany it, and even the thwack of a hockey puck against Plexiglass means one thing: school sports are in season.

Coaches, parents and players are all getting ready for the game and practices are hard and grueling. But many sports involve contact and potential injuries, so coaches and parents need to educate themselves about serious injuries like concussions.

At the professional level, more and more attention is being paid to the hard hits players are taking. The NFL is changing rules on helmet-to-helmet contact in hopes of reducing the number and severity of concussions suffered by players. But, head injuries also happen at much lower levels of play, and can be very serious.

“Coaches and parents need to understand the extreme care that is needed when returning younger athletes to a game or practice who may have experienced a sports concussion,” says Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher, chair of the American Academy of Neurology’s Sports Neurology Section and also director of the University of Michigan’s Neurosport program.

Signs of a concussion that can be observed during a game or practice are:
* Behavior or personality change
* False or imagined memories
* Loss of consciousness
* Empty stare
* Disorientation

Athletes may also report the following when suffering a concussion:
* Blurry vision
* Confusion
* Dizziness
* Feeling hazy, foggy or groggy
* Headache

The American Academy of Neurology’s website at www.aan.com/concussion offers two online safety courses created by the University of Michigan Neurosport program and endorsed by the Academy to help high school and youth coaches recognize the signs of concussion and what to do if a player gets a head injury during a game. Each 20-minute safety course is free and a printable certificate is available after passing the online quiz.

Coaches Cards are also downloadable from the Academy’s website providing easy-to-access information on how to spot a concussion and what to do if a player experiences one. Coaches and players are encouraged to keep these cards with their athletic gear for easy access.

Some states have passed laws on managing concussions. If you are a coach or parent of a younger athlete, make sure you educate yourself on the laws and concussion signs to keep the athlete safe.

“If for any reason you suspect an athlete has a concussion, remove the athlete from play and be sure the athlete is carefully evaluated by a person trained in concussion management, such as a neurologist,” Kutcher says. “Rushing this part of the process may lead to a serious setback, or worsen the injury.”

High school and youth sporting events are meant to get athletes playing the games they love. But, a head injury needs to be addressed very carefully in order to ensure the athlete returns to the field safely for many more games to be played, both now and well into the future.

by: Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D.

Unlike your money, where your fat is deposited is more important than how much you have. If it’s belly fat, that fat is actually deposited deep in your abdominal cavity.  It’s not just under your skin and it’s more than muffin top filler.  Instead, it fills in the spaces between your internal organs and has been associated with heightened risk for diabetes, cardiac disease, and cancer.

With two-thirds of the US population diagnosed with obesity, belly fat, also called visceral or liver fat, is a serious national health problem.  Researchers at Duke University Medical Center may well have come up with an answer for those wanting to lose their dreaded fat.

Exercise physiologists at Duke compared three types of exercise common to gym goers—aerobic exercise, resistance training, and a combination of the two.

They discovered that aerobic training did the best job of ridding unhealthy visceral and liver fat, improving fasting insulin resistance, reducing liver enzymes and fasting triglyceride levels—all key factors in cardiac disease and diabetes.

Remember, “aerobic” or “cardio” exercise means “with air,” while resistance training or “anaerobic” means “without air.”

Resistance training without aerobic exercise demonstrated no significant reduction in these factors.  Weight lifting may be great for improving your strength and lean body mass, but when it comes to reducing belly fat, it’s aerobic exercise that will do it according to this latest research.  In fact, the combination of resistance training and aerobic exercise showed no significant difference from aerobic training alone.

How effective is aerobic training compared to resistance training?  In this Duke University study, aerobic training burned 67% more calories than resistance training did.  The researchers used 12 miles of jogging per week at 80% maximum heart level as the standard, and used three sets of 8-12 reps three times per week as the standard for resistance training.  How much exercise you do, the miles you put in, appears to determine how many calories you will burn.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and Georgia State University offer the following to help determine heart rate training ranges:

How to Determine Your Heart Rate Training Range:
1. Heart Rate Reserve: The Karvonen Formula
•    Find your Resting Heart Rate (RHR)
•    Find your Predicted Maximal Heart Rate (HR max)
•    HR max = 220 – age
•    Find your Heart Rate Reserve (HRR)
•    HRR = HR max – RHR

Find the lower limit of your Heart Rate Training Range:
•    Multiply your HRR by 50% and add your RHR
•    HRR x .50 + RHR = Low Target Heart Rate

Find the upper limit of your Heart Rate Training Range:
•    Multiply your HRR by 85% and add your RHR
•    HRR x .85 + RHR = High Target Heart Rate

2. Percent of Heart Rate Max:
•    Find your Predicted Maximum Heart Rate (HR max)
•    HR max = 220 – age

Find the lower limit of your Heart Rate Training Range
•    Low Target Heart Rate = HR max X .50

Find the upper limit of your Heart Rate Training Range
High Target Heart Rate = HR max X .90

So, how can you create an effective aerobic exercise routine to help you in your fight against dreaded belly fat?  Assuming your are healthy enough to do cardio training, keep in mind you want to use large muscle groups repetitively for a sustained period of time, 30-60 minutes three to five times per week, preferably high intensity interval training style.

A word about high intensity interval workouts (“H.I.I.T.”).  These up and down, slow and fast, reps increase your resting metabolic rate in the 24 hours following high intensity exercise, which will burn even more calories than lower intensity exercise.  Lower intensity exercise will burn more calories during the exercise but fewer afterwards.

Walking, cycling, treadmills, stair climbers, swimming, ski machines, ellipticals, steppers, rowing machines, jogging, aerobic dance are all examples of terrific aerobic exercise methods.  Prefer outdoor cardio workouts?  Try cross-country skiing, cycling, inline skating, or running. Kickboxing your thing?  Jumping rope?  Circuit training? All great aerobic exercise and all aimed at reducing that unhealthy deposit of belly fat.