Month: March 2018

260318 Lower your blood pressure

260318 Lower your blood pressure

High blood pressure is often referred to as the silent killer because its effects are rarely felt until the disease has progressed to a dangerous level.

Here is a list of four things that you can do to potentially lower your blood pressure.

If you weigh too much, lose weight.

Look at yourself in the mirror. Can you see the fat hanging off your stomach and sides? Can you pinch more of an inch on your sides? If so, you need to lose weight. Can you see your toes? If not, you need to lose weight. Is your body mass index in the obese range? If so, lose weight.

With a 10% reduction in your weight, you will notice reductions in your blood pressure numbers.

Start becoming more physically active.

If your prime source of entertainment is watching TV, working on the computer, or socializing at the local tavern then it is time to get off your butt and get moving. Being physically active goes hand-in-hand with losing weight and they each complement one another.

Reduce eating foods that are high in salt and sodium.

Began with an inventory of the foods in your house. Look at the labels. Are they high in sodium? Do you have stacks of potato chips in the cupboards? Is there bacon and sausage in your refrigerator?

You can reduce the salt you eat by cooking your own food and not adding salt when you eat at the table. Canned vegetables, according to their labels, contain an overly high amount of sodium. You can eliminate much of this by rinsing the vegetables before you cook them. This removes much of the salty juices that contribute to the high salt content of the food.

Cut back on the alcohol you drink.

Alcohol lowers your inhibitions and generally, when you are drinking, you are with friends socializing and eating crap food. More than likely the food you eat during these times contains a lot of fat and salt.

If you already have high blood pressure and are taking medications, do not stop these medications until you talk with your doctor.

190318 Low salt diets-good or bad for your health?

190318 Low salt diets-good or bad for your health?

Contrary to recent news articles suggesting that the low-salt diets are not helpful studies in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that one high salt meal of 1500 mg of sodium (this is at the upper end of the recommendations suggested by the US dietary guidelines for a full-day), reduces the ability of the blood vessels to dilate. Even though blood pressure is not affected, this reduction in dilation ability in healthy people was noted within thirty minutes of the meal.

High sodium loads in the body of people with impaired heart functioning can start a heart failure incident, which may lead to death. Not only is excessive salt hard on your blood vessels, it also affects your bones, kidneys, and your stomach.

The system within your body that regulates blood pressure and fluid balance is also involved in bone health. It appears as though a high sodium intake increases the elimination of calcium through the urine. This in turn causes calcium to be leached from the bone with the attending bone loss and increased risk bone fractures. It’s well known that reducing the salt intake has a positive effect on the bodies calcium balance. For this reason, a low-sodium diet may help slow the progression of age-related bone loss. Not only is the skeletal system adversely affected by high sodium, so are your kidneys.

In many people, additional salt contributes to hypertension which is a major cause of kidney dysfunction and even failure. Evidence collected from the studies of animals and humans lead directly to the contention that salt may, in some people, directly impair kidney function. Another side effect of increased calcium in the urine, see the previous paragraph, and high sodium intake is a potentially higher risk of kidney stones. The story doesn’t end there. Some studies have linked higher salt to cancers and ulcers of the stomach.

The stomach isn’t the only soft tissue organ that may be adversely affected by a high sodium diet, others are the colon and the rectum. According to the research, the evidence is not extremely clear but it is thought that the salty foods adversely affect the stomach lining and make it more likely that bacterium H.pylori can affect the tissues of lining. This bacterium is when the major cause of ulcers and stomach cancer something that most of us may want to avoid. Other findings theorize that the salty stomach environment could be altering the structure of the H.pylori and increases its ability to continue to live and do more damage to the stomach.

120318 Several shorter workouts per day may help control pre-hypertension

120318 Several shorter workouts per day may help control pre-hypertension

A small study reported in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found that several shorter exercise periods spaced four hours apart were more beneficial than doing one long session. The participants in the study walked briskly for ten minutes, three times a day with four hours separating each session.

The next day they walked a continuous thirty minutes. This alternating pattern continued throughout the length of the study as did constant around the clock blood pressures monitoring for each person. The results clearly showed that several shorter ten-minute sessions during the day created lower blood pressure readings and fewer high blood pressure spikes throughout the day.

Earlier research has shown that short accumulative sessions of exercise help to control weight, increase bone mineral density, and assist in lowering both blood pressure and blood sugar levels, along with decreasing the cholesterol levels. However, these are not the only beneficial aspects of exercising, there are others.

Exercise releases endorphins; the chemicals that make you feel good and counteract the negative effects of adrenalines brought on by stress. Endorphins work by relaxing the muscles and help to dilate the vessels in the circulatory system.

Further advantages of exercise result in the production of lower levels of stress hormones released into the body, lower increases in heart rate and blood pressure when under stress.

These non-intrusive, short time exercise periods help you to stay more consistent with your exercise compliance over lengthy periods. This means your health should continue to improve over time.

050318 Setting yourself up for success with your exercise plans

050318 Setting yourself up for success with your exercise plans

A beginning exercise program should be fun and easy to follow. It should not be a complicated affair filled with complex and hard to follow directions or intricate movements. Just keep it simple, follow it each day, and have fun. The more complicated you make it the harder it will be to stay up with it.

Set your goals as precisely as possible. For example, telling yourself you want to be stronger may sound good but it is too general. Do you want to be able to do one push up or one hundred? It makes a difference doesn’t it?

Be specific about each of your goals by knowing exactly where you want to go with your exercise dreams. Decide how you want to exercise, how much you want to exercise, how long you have to reach your goals (both immediate and long range), and how much time you will dedicate to each training session. Without knowing each of these and writing them down it is unlikely that you will actually get there.

Start out slowly and don’t overdo it the first time. It is easy to be over enthusiastic when beginning but this same enthusiasm can lead to being extremely sore the next day. This is something that catches unwary trainees by surprise. Good coaches nip this in the bud by not piling on exercises. Remember, if you are a coach, that it is easy to make someone sore.

You will have to decide whether you need a workout partner. Some people do well with one and others do well on their own. It all depends on your need to be with someone when you exercise.

If you find the right partner, each of you can exceed your expectations in the gym with the mutual support and encouragement you provide to one another. However, if you hook up with a lackard, one who does not show up on time, doesn’t push, or is too social then your training will suffer. You have to decide what is best for you.

Whatever you do, it has to be a fun experience otherwise, you won’t keep it up.

030318 Testing the new WordPress premium features

Here is a test video.

This is Charlie, our wonderfully sweet Bernese Mountain Dog trying to go across the new threshold between the kitchen and the living room.

After all it was new. And it was also new between the two rooms. Did I mention it was new?

He even refused to step over it to eat. Or go outside at the door in the living room.

I finally had to take his collar in hand and start walking quickly from the hallway into the kitchen and then on into the living room. When he realized what was happening, he stopped walking and started sliding on the wood flooring but by then we were over that majestic threshold.

The softer side of Explosivelyfit Strength Training.png

This just goes to show you we do have a heart…photo comes from my son.

It looks as though I can do everything here that I could no longer do on my website. Since Windows moved me to Windows 10, my website software (Dreamweaver) no longer allowed photos or videos to be put up on the site. It was a lose lose situation, thus the move to WordPress.