Top 10 Fitness Trends for 2013

Health has always been a great deal for most people. When it comes to fitness, they have tried different ways, techniques, equipment, and technology just to be fit and healthy. Here are the ten fitness trends that are likely to lead on the fitness society:

1. Fitness Professionals

People are becoming more concerned about their health and body figure. As the number of health-conscious individuals increase, the number of employed fitness workers tend to rise faster than other occupations according to the U.S. Labor Department. Experienced and certified fitness professionals ranked as the top fitness trend for 2013.

2. Strength Training

Most people, especially men, tend to incorporate physical exercise to improve muscle strength and lose weight as well. Strength training has always been a trend with gym goers and body builders. It helps maintain both body figure and resistance. It has taken the number two spot in the 2013 fitness trend.

3. Body-Weight Training

Next to strength training is body-weight training, which is probably the most natural way to be fit and healthy. Such training uses minimal training equipment and includes traditional workout like push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, squats, and planks. There are still people who believe that natural way of exercising is still the best choice to lose weight and be healthy.

4. Fitness Programs for Elders

Fitness clubs for older adults are popping up one by one giving appropriate exercises with consideration of the individual's age and capacity to workout. As older people become interested with health and fitness, more fitness clubs are capitalizing on older clients.

5. Back to Basics

Some fitness experts still believe that nothing can beat the basics. There may have been different high-tech equipment and gadgets to be healthy, but getting back to basic is still more effective than any other newly invented techniques. Daily rounds of walking and running in the neighborhood still beat those slimming pills and steroids. It may not be the quickest way, but it's the safest.

6. Functional Training

Functional training is an exercise that improves the body for daily activities. It involves the use of strength training to improve balance, body coordination, power and endurance.

7. Core Training

Researchers believe that exercising core muscles improves the body's stability for daily activities and sports performance. Core training involves the use of balance balls and wobble boards to stabilize midsection muscles. Such fitness trend is good to workout abs and core muscles.

8. Mind Workouts

Mind workouts also ranked as one of the fitness trends for 2013. Many have been incorporating in yoga sessions to fight stress and find serenity. It does not only benefit the mind but also the body. Yoga also improves health and lifestyle.

9. Group Training

Many budget-conscious individuals resort to group training for discount and social purposes. There are fitness professionals that provide workout services to groups of people. Such trend gives individuals a chance to receive support from other people. Group training does not only improve health but also develop social lives.

10. Buddy System

One of the newest trend in fitness is the man-beast buddy system that instead of having a personal trainer, people have been working out with their pets. Many boot camps that provide health and wellness both for pets and people are popping up around. The role of pets in helping humans get fit and healthy is indeed supported by a medical study.

Fitness is really starting to build a new culture. New fitness trends have indeed changed and influenced the understanding of people about health. Traditional or high-tech, slow or fast-paced, fitness has taken a position in the lives of many people.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7951652

Study: Black Women Lose Less Weight Than White Women on Same Diet

Black women will lose less weight than white women even if they follow the exact same exercise and diet regimen, researchers report.

The reason behind this finding is that black women's metabolisms run more slowly, which decreases their daily energy burn, said study author James DeLany, an associate professor in the division of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

"African-American women have a lower energy expenditure. They're going to have to eat fewer calories than they would if they were Caucasian, and/or increase their physical activity more," said DeLany. His report is published in the Dec. 20 issue of the International Journal of Obesity.

DeLany and his colleagues reached this conclusion during a weight-loss study involving severely obese white and black women.

Previous studies have shown that black women lose less weight, and the researchers set out to verify those findings, DeLany said.

The research included 66 white and 69 black women, who were placed on the same calorie-restricted diet of an average of 1,800 calories a day for six months. They also were assigned the same exercise schedule.

The black women lost about 8 pounds less, on average, than the white women, the researchers found.

The explanation can't be that black women didn't adhere to the diet and exercise plan, DeLany said. The researchers closely tracked the calories each woman ate and the calories they burned through exercise, and found that black and white women stuck to the program equally.

"We found the African-American women and the Caucasian women were both eating nearly identical amounts of calories," DeLany said. "They were as adherent in physical activity as well."

That leaves variations in biology and metabolism to explain the difference in weight-loss success, the study authors said.

"The African-American women are [equally] as adherent to the behavioral intervention," DeLany said. "It's just that the weight-loss prescription is wrong because it's based on the assumption that the requirements are the same."

The difference in weight-loss success between black and white women has been known for some time, said Dr. Mitch Roslin, chief of bariatric surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

"There are racial and genetic differences in obesity," Roslin said. "These things are real."

"However, this study advances our understanding by ruling out other explanations," Roslin said. "It's not just related to socioeconomic class or access to care or environmental situations."

One reason for the difference might be that European foods prevail in America, and form the basis of the modern diet, Roslin said. These foods might not burn as efficiently in the descendants of people from Africa, Asia and other parts of the world.

"People of Western European or Eastern European descent have evolved greater mechanisms to withstand the pressures of the modern diet," Roslin said. He said studies have found that Asians subjected to a Western diet are more likely to develop metabolic syndrome and diabetes at a much lower body-mass index (BMI) than whites. BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight.

Weight-loss doctors will need to keep these biological differences in mind when prescribing diet and exercise regimens for black women, DeLany said.

"They can't just base caloric restriction on body weight," he said. "They have to take into consideration [people's] lower energy requirements."

DeLany said it's not clear whether these findings apply to black men, since much less data is available for them. But in a diabetes intervention trial, he said, black men lost about as much weight as white men following the same diet and exercise plan.

More information

For more information on weight control, visit the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Article Source:   http://www.philly.com/philly/health/fitness/HealthDay683243_20131219_Study__Black_Women_Lose_Less_Weight_Than_White_Women_on_Same_Diet.html

Marine Female Pull-Up Deadline Extended

Recently, 55 percent of female Marine recruits in boot-camp training this past year could not pass a minimum three pullup requirement. This forced a delay in the planned Jan. 1 implementation of a new physical-fitness test mandated a year ago by Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps commandant.

The test made female Marines perform pullups rather than giving them the “flexed arm hang” option that allowed a woman to qualify by holding her chin above the bar for at least 15 seconds. Hanging in the balance, so to speak, is the question of whether women in any service are strong enough to be in combat.

But that is not our concern here. We want to know: Why did so many female Marines struggle with pullups?

Several reasons, fitness experts believe. A big factor is superior male upper-body strength, but genetic differences, training approaches, social biases and even concepts of physical beauty play in.

Women generally are not adept at pullups, trainers agree, but it’s a myth that women can’t accomplish many pullups. Even if they despise doing them.

“When I add them to my all-female classes, everyone hates them with a passion,” says Jay Morgan, 29, a Washington, D.C., fitness trainer.

But, he says, “I have clients who couldn’t do one and can now pump out six, seven, eight.”

Eight pullups, by the way, is the top score in the temporarily scrubbed female Marine fitness category; for men it’s 20 pullups.

“You can train anyone to do a pullup,” says Lisa Reed, 41, an Arlington, Va., personal trainer who notes on her website she won a childhood pullup contest (she did about 15 or 20). “You need time. You have to practice it.”

“It will be harder for us to do the pullup than the male,” she says. “Women are always stronger in lower body.”

Men have an unfair advantage in the pullup quest: Testosterone. It provides more lean muscle mass. Women tend to carry more body fat.

When it comes to pullups, strong back muscles and abs are important. But other upper-body muscles help: the “beach muscles” — biceps, triceps and pectorals — says Morgan. Men who exercise tend to work those muscles the most. Because of the beach thing.

With women, it’s the opposite. They generally eschew strenuous chest, arm and back exercises to avoid, in technical terms, looking like a dude.

“Women are more inclined to work on their lower bodies because that is where their body fat tends to pool at,” Morgan says.

To a certain extent, then, this female quest for physical beauty — designed to attract mates, according to several thousand years of research — has disadvantaged women who want to become the pullup equals of men.

It should be noted, however, that society has long treated women differently when it comes to pullups. High-school gym teachers, for example, gave girls the flexed-arm-hang option, reinforcing the notion that females can’t do pullups.

“In my personal opinion, one of the worst things we ever developed in physical-fitness classes (was) the ‘girl pullup’ or flexed-arm hang,” writes Stew Smith, a former Navy SEAL and fitness expert, on Military.com. “At an early age, we have been telling young girls that they cannot do regular pullups because they will never be as strong as boys.

“Well, part of that statement is true,” he adds. “The strongest woman will never be stronger than the strongest man, but I have seen 40-50-year-old mothers of three do 10 pullups.”

For at least the next year, female Marines will have an option of doing the flexed-arm hang or pullups on the physical-training test. But it’s unclear whether a pullup-only test will finally be implemented in 2015.

The Marines delayed the 2013 test because they did not want to risk losing recruits and officer candidates because of pullup failures: “The commandant (Amos) has no intent to introduce a standard that would negatively affect the current status of female Marines or their ability to continue serving in the Marine Corps,” Capt. Maureen Krebs, a Marine Corps spokeswoman, said in an email.

Article Source:   http://seattletimes.com/html/healthyliving/2022625370_healthpullupxml.html

Video Source:  http://www.youtube.com/user/marines?feature=watch

Women’s Flexibility Is a Liability (in Yoga)

by William J. Broad

FROM my own practice and research, I know that yoga is generally a good thing. The bending, stretching and deep breathing can renew, calm, heal, strengthen, lift moods, lower the risk of heart disease, increase flexibility and balance, counter aging and improve sex. In short, the benefits are many and commonplace while the serious dangers tend to be few and comparatively rare.

Eleanor Davis

Even so, last year, after my book on yoga came out, letters from injured guys prompted me to see if the practice, despite its benefits, was hurting one sex more than another. To my surprise, reports from hospital emergency rooms showed that, proportionally, men got injured more often than women and suffered damage that was far worse, including fractures, dislocations and shattered backs.

It made sense. Women are well known to be more flexible than men. Macho guys, yoga teachers told me, too often used their muscles to force themselves into challenging poses and got hurt. The overall numbers were relatively small but large enough to argue that men who did yoga should exercise caution.

Earlier this year, the picture of female superiority began to blur when a prominent yoga teacher in Hawaii wrote me about a poorly known threat to women.

The teacher, Michaelle Edwards, said that women’s elasticity became a liability when extreme bends resulted in serious wear and tear on their hips. Over time, she said, the chronic stress could develop into agonizing pain and, in some cases, the need for urgent hip repairs. Ms. Edwards sent me her book, “YogAlign.” It described her own hip pain long ago and how she solved it by developing a gentle style of yoga.

Her warning contradicted many books, articles and videos that hailed yoga’s bending and stretching as a smart way to fight arthritic degeneration.

I put her cautions aside. Finally, in late summer, I got around to making some calls.

To my astonishment, some of the nation’s top surgeons declared the trouble to be real — so real that hundreds of women who did yoga were showing up in their offices with unbearable pain and undergoing costly operations to mend or even replace their hips.

“It’s a relatively high incidence of injury,” Jon Hyman, an orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta, told me. “People don’t come in often saying I was doing Zumba or tai chi” when they experienced serious hip pain, he said. “But yoga is common.”

Dr. Hyman said his typical yoga patient was a middle-aged woman, adding that he saw up to 10 a month — or roughly 100 a year. “People need to be aware,” he said. “If they’re doing things like yoga and have pain in the hips, they shouldn’t blow it off.”

Bryan T. Kelly, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, echoed the warning, saying yoga postures were well known for throwing hips into extremes. “If that’s done without an understanding of the mechanical limitations of the joint, it can mean trouble,” he said in an interview.

The same kind of damage, Dr. Kelly added, can strike dancers who overdo leg motions. Each year, he said, roughly 50 to 75 of his patients who danced or did yoga underwent operations. Most, he noted, were women.

Curious about the back story, I found that medical detectives in Switzerland had pinpointed the origin of the hip trouble more than a decade ago. Arthritis is usually associated with old age, but they discovered it can also strike the young and active.

Women’s hips showed particular vulnerability. By nature, their pelvic regions support an unusually wide range of joint play that can increase not only their proficiency in yoga but, it turned out, their health risks. The investigators found that extreme leg motions could cause the hip bones to repeatedly strike each other, leading over time to damaged cartilage, inflammation, pain and crippling arthritis. They called it Femoroacetabular Impingement — or F.A.I., in medical shorthand. The name spoke to a recurrence in which the neck of the thigh bone (the femur) swung so close to the hip socket (the acetabulum) that it repeatedly struck the socket’s protruding rim.

The main investigator was Reinhold Ganz, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Berne, in Switzerland. Between 2001 and 2008, his team published many studies, the 2008 one noting that women between 30 and 40 years of age whose activities made “high demands on motion” tended to show the hip damage more often. The paper specifically cited yoga.

The discovery resonated. I found that hundreds of orthopedic surgeons in the Mediterranean region heard a conference presentation in 2010 that linked F.A.I. to middle-aged women who do yoga.

Michael J. Taunton, an orthopedic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, told me that he first learned of the danger a half decade ago and now annually performs 10 to 15 hip replacements on people who do yoga. About 90 percent, he added, are women.

Stuart B. Kahn, a rehabilitation doctor at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, called F.A.I. “an emerging topic as we learn more about what causes hip pain and osteoarthritis.” He said much remains unknown.

Hip damage, for instance, can have complex causes. In addition to yoga, contributing factors can include bone misalignments, excess body weight and subtle joint deformities that differ from person to person. Hip scientists are exploring such factors, but the variations make it hard to predict who is most likely at risk.

Another complication is that yoga probably does help millions of people cope with arthritis, which can strike not just the hips but fingers, knees and shoulders. Scientists have long reported that yoga’s movements can help fight joint inflammation.

Gentle yoga probably helps the hips, too. But, as Dr. Taunton put it, the bending can become “too much of a good thing.”

Ms. Edwards, the yoga teacher in Hawaii, said she warns practitioners to be cautious if doing seated forward bends (like Paschimottanasana), standing forward bends (like Uttanasana) and forward lunges (like Anjaneyasana) — moves that can force the neck of the femur into the socket’s rim.

Recently, she aired her warnings in Elephant Journal, an online yoga magazine. If a woman feels hip tenderness when walking, or sharp pain when doing poses like the revolved triangle, Ms. Edwards said, “you may want to back off.”

Surgeons agree that women who moderate their practice can probably avoid hip trouble.

Unfortunately, yoga teachers too often encourage students to “push through the pain.” That’s not smart. Pain is nature’s warning system. It’s telling you that something has gone awry.

Better to do yoga in moderation and listen carefully to your body. That temple, after all, is your best teacher.

 Article Source:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/sunday-review/womens-flexibility-is-a-liability-in-yoga.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter