Weight training-related injuries up If you use free weights don’t drop them, especially on yourself. A just-released study conducted by the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital finds that injuries from weight training increased nearly 50 percent between 1990 and 2007, largely the result of males dropping weights on themselves. The study, to be published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, found that of the 970,000 weight training-related injuries recorded during that 18-year span, 82 percent were suffered by males, 47 percent by lifters age 13 to 24. Ninety percent of the injuries involved free weights, 65 percent involved the lifter dropping said free weight on their person. Read more in this Science Daily post. (Similarly, injuries from rock climbing and the use of ladders and hot tubs were also up.read more
Tuesday morning I was at a Brains & Bodies workshop conducted by Advocates for Health in Action, a consortium of local public and private sector groups “shaping a community where healthful eating and physical activity are the way of life.” Brains & Bodies is a program of the Wake County PTA designed to encourage healthy habits in our schools. Healthy habits such as PTA fundraisers that eschew cookie dough sales in favor of fun runs. That kind of thing.read more
A review of 40 studies of the effects of exercise on people with chronic illnesses concludes that working out eases anxiety over what ails you. Scientists from the University of Georgia, in a report in the Feb. 22 Archives of Internal Medicine, found that exercise alleviates anxiety in sufferers of heart and circulatory issues, fibromyalgia, arthritis, various other pain conditions, cancer, mental health problems and the breathing disorder chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. The only illness exercise didn’t seem to help: multiple sclerosis.read more
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.read more
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.read more