Fitness Programme: OCR Obstacle Course Racing Programme, 8 Weeks

Workout.TrainingProgramme1Introduction

  • This is a an intense training programme that targets the whole body.
  • It spans over eight weeks.
  • Bodyweight exercises make up most of the programme.
  • The number of sets and reps are suitable at an intermediate level. Scale basis your current form.
  • The programme is perfect preparing for an obstacle course event.
  • You will be in the best shape of your life after completing the programme.
  • Good luck and have fun!

Download

Click to download the programme and start an intense period: Obstacle Course Racing Programme

MIND Diet Repeatedly Ranked Among Best

Food.Diet.ListA diet created, studied and reported on by researchers at Rush University Medical Center has been ranked the easiest diet to follow and the second best overall diet (tying in both categories) for 2016 by U.S. News & World Report. The MIND diet also tied for third for best diet for healthy eating and was ranked in the top five in five categories.

Now in its sixth year, the annual “Best Diets” list provides the facts about 35 chosen eating plans and ranks them on a range of levels, from their heart healthiness to their likelihood to help with weight loss. To create the annual rankings, U.S. News editors and reporters spend months winnowing potential additions to the diet roster and then mine medical journals, government reports and other resources to create in-depth profiles. Each profile explains how the diet works, whether or not its claims are substantiated, scrutinizes it for possible health risks and examines what it’s like to live on the diet, not just read about it.

Eating away at Alzheimer’s risk

The MIND diet is a research-based diet developed by Martha Clare Morris, ScD, a Rush nutritional epidemiologist, and her colleagues. In recent studies, the MIND diet showed that it helped lower the risk of Alzheimer’s by as much as 53 percent in participants who adhered to the diet rigorously, and by about 35 percent in those who followed it moderately well.

“One of the more exciting things about this is that people who adhered even moderately to the MIND diet had a reduction in their risk for Alzheimers,” Morris says. The researchers also have found that adhering to the diet may slow cognitive decline among aging adults, even when the person is not at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease

The name of the MIND diet is short for Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay. The diet is a hybrid of the Mediterranean and DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diets. Both diets have been found to reduce the risk of cardiovascular conditions, like hypertension, heart attack and stroke. Some researchers have found that the two older diets provide protection against dementia as well.

A wine and no cheese party

The MIND diet has 15 dietary components, including 10 “brain-healthy food groups” and five unhealthy groups – red meat, butter and stick margarine, cheese, pastries and sweets, and fried or fast food.

To adhere to and benefit from the MIND diet, a person would need to eat at least three servings of whole grains, a green leafy vegetable and one other vegetable every day — along with a glass of wine — snack most days on nuts, have beans every other day or so, eat poultry and berries at least twice a week and fish at least once a week. In addition, the study found that to have a real shot at avoiding the devastating effects of cognitive decline, he or she must limit intake of the designated unhealthy foods, especially butter (less than 1 tablespoon a day), sweets and pastries, whole fat cheese, and fried or fast food (less than a serving a week for any of the three).

Berries are the only fruit specifically to be included in the MIND diet. “Blueberries are one of the more potent foods in terms of protecting the brain,” Morris says, and strawberries also have performed well in past studies of the effect of food on cognitive function.

Read the full story.

Source: ScienceDaily January 5, 2016.

Anti-Aging Tip Sheet: Anti-Aging Essentials

Support.Anti.Aging.PyramidThe goal of anti-aging medicine is not to merely prolong the total years of an individual’s life, but to ensure that those years are enjoyed in a productive and vital fashion. The clinical specialty of anti-aging medicine utilizes diagnostic protocols that are supported by scientific evidence to arrive at an objective assessment upon which effective treatment is assigned. Physicians who dispense anti-aging medical care are concerned with the restoration of optimal functioning of the human body’s systems, organs, tissues, and cells.

Potentially 37 million premature deaths over 15 years may be prevented, simply if people modulated six specific modifiable risk factors. Various countries aim to reduce premature mortality from four main non-communicable diseases (NCDs), namely – cardiovascular diseases, chronic respiratory diseases, cancers, and diabetes. These nations have targeted to reduce these disease incidences by 25% from 2010 levels by 2025. Potentially 37 million premature deaths over 15 years may be prevented, simply if nations adopt the anti-aging medical model. Majid Ezzati from Imperial College London (United Kingdom), and colleagues report that this target may be achievable by the reduction of six specific modifiable risk factors.

Read the full story.

Source: WorldHealth.net

Swedish Diagnostic Method for Alzheimer’s Becomes International Standard

Body.Disease.Alzheimer1Researchers at Gothenburg University have developed a reference method for standardized measurements that diagnose Alzheimer’s disease decades before symptoms appear. The method has now formally been classified as the international reference method, which means that it will be used as the standard in Alzheimer’s diagnostics worldwide.

Everyone naturally builds the beta amyloid protein in his or her brain. The protein’s normal function is not completely mapped, but one theory is that it participates in the formation and removal of synapses, which is vital in enabling the brain to form new memories.

Remain in the brain

Beta amyloid built by healthy people is quickly transported out to the spinal fluid and blood. But with Alzheimer’s, the beta amyloids remain in the brain, where they clump together and begin to damage the synapses, which leads to brain, nerve cell death.

This process can begin in middle age and continue unnoticed for decades until the nerve cells are so damaged that symptoms take the form of a memory disorder and impaired cognitive abilities. At that point, the disease is felt to be too advanced to be treated, so intensive worldwide research is underway to find methods that diagnose Alzheimer’s sooner.

Exact measure

After decades of research, Henrik Zetterberg and Kaj Blennow at Sahlgrenska Academy, Gothenburg University, were able to develop a method that measures the exact amount of beta amyloid in spinal fluid and diagnose Alzheimer’s ten to thirty years before the disease becomes symptomatic.

“If the concentration of beta amyloid in the spinal fluid is abnormally low, it indicates that the protein is sticking in the brain, which is the earliest sign of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Henrik Zetterberg.

Global reference

The Gothenburg researchers’ pioneering studies have gained wide international recognition since the measurement method they developed was approved as the global reference method.

“This means that the method will be used as the norm for standardizing beta amyloid measurements around the world. With the help of the standard, people who are worried about Alzheimer’s disease can be tested, and get the same results regardless of whether it is done in San Francisco, Sao Paolo, London, Gothenburg or Cape town,” says Kaj Blennow.

“We put a lot of effort into this project and it has been initiated and conducted, and now completed by us at Gothenburg within the framework of a global cooperation project that we head,” says Henrik Zetterberg.

Read the full story.

Source: University of Gothenburg. “Swedish diagnostic method for Alzheimer’s becomes international standard.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 2 November 2015.

Does Exercise Slow the Aging Process?

Workout.Exercise.Dict2Almost any amount and type of physical activity may slow aging deep within our cells, a new study finds. And middle age may be a critical time to get the process rolling, at least by one common measure of cell aging.

Dating a cell’s age is tricky, because its biological and chronological ages rarely match. A cell could be relatively young in terms of how long it has existed but function slowly or erratically, as if elderly.

Today, many scientists have begun determining a cell’s biological age – meaning how well it functions and not how old it literally is – by measuring the length of its telomeres.

For those of us who don’t know every portion of our cells’ interiors, telomeres are tiny caps found on the end of DNA strands, like plastic aglets on shoelaces. They are believed to protect the DNA from damage during cell division and replication. As a cell ages, its telomeres naturally shorten and fray. But the process can be accelerated by obesity, smoking, insomnia, diabetes and other aspects of health and lifestyle.

A new study, which was published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers from the University of Mississippi and University of California, San Francisco, decided to look broadly at the interactions of exercise and telomeres.

Their results show that risk declined more substantially if someone exercised more. People who reported two types of exercise per week were 24 percent less likely to have short telomeres; three types of exercise were 29 percent less likely; and those who had participated in all four types of activities were 59 percent less likely to have very short telomeres.

Interestingly, these associations were strongest among people between the ages of 40 and 65, the researchers found, suggesting that middle age may be a key time to begin or maintain an exercise program if you wish to keep telomeres from shrinking, says Paul Loprinzi, an assistant professor of health and exercise science at the University of Mississippi.

The message seems clear, Dr. Loprinzi says. “Exercise is good” for your cells, and “more exercise in greater variety” is likely to be even better.

Check the full story.

Source: the New York Times.

Active Body, Active Mind: The Secret to a Younger Brain May Lie in Exercising Your Body

Body.Brain.Puzzle1It is widely recognized that our physical fitness is reflected in our mental fitness, especially as we get older. How does being physically fit affect our aging brains? Neuroimaging studies, in which the activity of different parts of the brain can be visualised, have provided some clues. Until now, however, no study has directly linked brain activation with both mental and physical performance.

As reported in the latest volume of the journal NeuroImage, an exciting new study led by Dr Hideaki Soya from the University of Tsukuba in Japan and his colleagues show, for the first time, the direct relationship between brain activity, brain function and physical fitness in a group of older Japanese men. They found that the fitter men performed better mentally than the less fit men, by using parts of their brains in the same way as in their youth.

Check the full story.

Source: University of Tsukuba. “Active body, active mind: The secret to a younger brain may lie in exercising your body.” ScienceDaily.

Workout (M): Weekend Challenge – Card Shuffle

Workout.ExerciseDictIntroduction

  • This is a full body routine that uses a deck of cards (52 cards) to determine the exercises. This brings a lot of variety to the workout. ‘Which will be the next exercise?’, you will wonder.
  • It is basically a strength routine, but if you keep the rest time between exercises to a minimum, the cardio effect will also be great.
  • Bodyweight exercises only.
  • Workout Structure: Card Shuffle.
  • Have fun and good luck!

Click here for complete details (Member).

Want to become a member of Club One Fifty? Click here to initiate your membership.

Brain Workout (M, 126): Find Your Way

Body.Brain.ThinkIntroduction

  • Your mission is to trace a single path from the top left corner to the bottom right corner of the grid.
  • Travel through all of the cells in either a horizontal, vertical or diagonal direction.
  • Every cell must be entered only once.
  • Your path should take you through the numbers in the sequence 1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-3-4-5-6, and so on.
  • Click below to find the correct path.
  • Have fun and good luck!

Exercise

Click to view the correct answer (Member).

 

Cocoa for Cardiovascular Health

Food.Chocolate.DarkEuropean Union Consortium researchers report two studies that suggest that consuming cocoa flavanols – plant-derived bioactives from the cacao bean – may help to improve cardiovascular function and lessen the burden on the heart that comes with the aging and stiffening of arteries.

In the first study, Christian Heiss, from the University Duesseldorf  (Germany), and colleagues enrolled two groups of 22 young (under 35 years) and 20 older (50-80 years) healthy men, to consume either a flavanol-containing drink, or a flavanol-free control drink, twice a day for two weeks. The researchers then measured the effect of flavanols on hallmarks of cardiovascular aging, such as arterial stiffness (as measured by pulse wave velocity), blood pressure and flow-mediated vasodilation (the extent to which blood vessels dilate in response to nitric oxide).  The team observed that vasodilation was significantly improved in both age groups that consumed flavanols over the course of the study (by 33% in the younger age group and 32% in the older age group over the control intervention). As well, among the older age group, a statistically and clinically significant decrease in systolic blood pressure of 4 mmHg over control was also seen.

In the second study, Roberto Sansone, from the University Duesseldorf (Germany), and colleagues , enrolled 100 healthy middle-aged men and women (ages 35 to 60 years) with low risk of cardiovascular disease.  The participants were randomly and blindly assigned into groups that consumed either a flavanol-containing drink or a flavanol-free control drink, twice a day for four weeks. The researchers also measured cholesterol levels in the study groups, in addition to vasodilation, arterial stiffness and blood pressure. The team observed that cocoa flavanols increased flow-mediated vasodilation by 21%.; as well as decreased blood pressure (systolic by 4.4 mmHg, diastolic by 3.9 mmHg), and decreased  total cholesterol (by 0.2 mmol/L), LDL cholesterol (by 0.17 mmol/L), and raised HDL cholesterol (by 0.1 mmol/L).

Taken collectively, the Consortium submits that flavanols are effective at mitigating age-related changes in blood vessels, and could thereby reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in healthy individuals.

Read the full story.

Source: WorldHealth.net

A 2-Minute Anti-Aging Activity

Support.Walking.FootprintAmassing published studies show that sitting for extended periods of time each day leads to increased risk for early death, as well as heart disease, diabetes and other health conditions. Emerging data suggests that it is not sufficient to simply replace sitting with standing. Srinivasan Beddhu, from the University of Utah (Utah, USA), and colleagues analyzed data collected in 3,626 men and women enrolled in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2003-2004.  The team found that by replacing sitting for 2 minutes each hour with walking for 2 minutes hourly, lowered the risk of dying by 33%.  The study authors submit that: “Interventions that replace sedentary duration with an increase in light activity duration might confer a survival benefit.”

Check the full story.

Source: WorldHealth.net