Enjoy this tease of warm weather; After Tuesday we’re back to highs in the 40s, lows in the 20s. According to Gary Sforzo, a professor of exercise and sports sciences at Ithaca College in New York, the return of cold weather shouldn’t deter you from exercising.
Category Archives: Health
Let’s Move the toddlers
Wondering what you can do as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program to stop the super-sizing of our kids? If you have preschoolers, you can do three things according to a study to be published in the March Pediatrics.
- Eat dinner as a family (at the table, not on TV trays assembled in front of the “Family Guy”).
- Make sure your preschooler gets at least 10.5 hours of sleep a night.
- Don’t let them have more than two hours of screen time a day.
According to a survey of parents of 8,550 4-year-olds, kids who adhered to the above three practices were 40 percent less likely to be obese than their slacker counterparts who sucked down their mac & cheese in front of a dusk-to-dawn Dora marathon.
Let’s Move
Yesterday, First Lady Michelle Obama revealed her — and the nation’s — plan for combating childhood obesity. It’s called, appropriately, Let’s Move. That the first lady has made this her top priority underscores how serious the matter of our kids’ ever-expanding waistlines has become: About one in three kids in this country are now overweight or obese (that number has tripled over the past three decades), health-care costs related to obesity run about $147 billion a year, this is the first generation in recorded history that stands to be less healthy than its parents. The stats go on.
Do this, not that
So maybe you don’t have time to go to Zumba class before work, or walk at lunch, or hit the gym for a cardio workout after 6. That doesn’t mean you can’t get a good workout in in between. Current thinking from the health and fitness world is that bursts of exercise as brief as 10 minutes can boost your cardio fitness. So if you’re wondering if these little things really can make a difference, yes, they can.
Running barefoot: Dipping your toe
There’s nothing like good news from the scientific community to spur interest in a given exercise: We’re all open to the latest magic bullet when it comes to getting in shape or improving performance. We’re even more susceptible when that magic bullet includes the promise of health minus hurt. Which is why a study appearing last week in the journal Nature suggesting that running barefoot may help prevent injury has caused the sports medicine community to respond with an optimistic cringe.