Here’s my exercise schedule:

Sunday: Cardio

Monday: Back, Triceps, Light Cardio

Tuesday: Tony Cress Fitness Camp

Wednesday: Chest, Legs

Thursday: Shoulders, Biceps,  Light Cardio

Friday: HIT Camp with MR

Saturday: Rest

Displaying the amount of time you’d need to jog in order to burn off the calories from a sugary drink, rather than showing a calorie count, may be more effective in dissuading you from consuming those beverages, new research suggests.

Researchers observed teenagers at stores in West Baltimore, where signs displayed either calorie counts, calorie counts as a percent of recommended daily calorie intake, or the time spent jogging that would be needed to burn off those calories. While all led teenagers to purchase fewer sugary beverages, the conversion to exercise minutes was the most effective.

“In general, people are very bad at estimating the amount of calories in food they consume,” said study researcher Sara Bleich, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “If we give them easy ways of examining it…I think we can be effective in reducing calories in purchases.”

After introducing the signs to neighborhood stores near schools, researchers observed teenagers and monitored how their beverage-purchasing habits changed compared with the period before the signs went up.

- visit MSNBC for full article

HYDROGEN PEROXIDE-SALT BATHS

First Bath
1. Fill the bath tub with warm water with temperature you prefer.

2. Add one quart of 3% hydrogen peroxide bottle to the bath tub.

3. Add one-half teaspoon of sea salt to the bath water (Baleine is a good brand). (note from Steve.. I prefer aquarium salt from the pet store)

4. Avoid direct contact of the bath tub water with eyes.

5. After five minutes, add a second one quart bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide to the bath water, if there is no tissue irritation is experienced (see caution note below).

6. After five minutes, add the third quart bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide to the bath water.

7. Stay in the bath from 20 to 25 minutes.

Second And Later Baths
1. Fill the bath tub with warm water with temperature you prefer.

2. Add three one-quart bottles of 3% hydrogen peroxide to the bath tub.

3. Avoid direct contact of the bath tub water with eyes.

4. Stay in the bath from 20 to 25 minutes.

Caution:
1. Use bath water temperature that is comfortable for you.

2. Some women with symptoms of vaginitis may experience temporary irritation and may need to use only one-half or one bottle of peroxide until tissue irritation clears up.

3. Some persons experience lightheaded if they stand up suddenly after a warm bath. It is a necessary safety step that this possibility be kept in mind and one should get up slowly, holding the safety bar or the side of the bath tub.

Note:
Brown colored 1 quart bottles of 3% hydrogen peroxide are generally available from drug stores and other stores, such as A&P. It pays to do comparative shopping.

The following text is taken from Dr. Ali’s Dysoxygenosis and Oxystatic therapies, the third volume of The Principles and Practice of Integrative Medicine. As is the case with all other information on this website, it is being offered as educational material, and is not a substitute for medical advice based on full clinical evaluation of the case.

Can’t resist the lure of KFC or the 4pm office chocolate run when you’re feeling peckish? Then it’s likely be your junk food addiction, not your stomach, talking.

According to intensive medical research in the US, fatty processed foods and high fructose sugar treats can be as addictive as cocaine and cigarettes.

The shocking findings come after American scientists looked into the results from 28 independent studies on food addiction. According to the most recent study by the University of Florida in Gainesville, the findings were so stark, it was hard to ignore the obvious links between junk foods and food addiction.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” says Nora Volkow from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlaps between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Can a stroll help ease depression? That question preoccupied Dr. Madhukar H. Trivedi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, after several of his patients, all suffering from serious depression, mentioned that they felt happier if they went for a walk. The patients in question were taking the widely prescribed antidepressants known as S.S.R.I.’s, for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, but not responding fully. They remained, by clinical standards, depressed. Dr. Trivedi and his colleagues began to wonder if adding a formal “dose” of exercise would increase their chances of getting better.

Certainly the possibility was worth investigating. Clinical depression, as anyone who has experienced or watched a loved one struggle with the condition knows, can be stubbornly intractable. Even if patients have been taking an antidepressant for months, recovery rates tend to hover below 50 percent.

In order to increase the odds of improvement, doctors frequently add a second treatment — often another drug, like lithium or an antipsychotic — to the S.S.R.I. regimen at some point, Dr. Trivedi said. Most patients ultimately require at least two concurrent treatments to achieve remission of their depression, he said. Studies have shown that these secondary drug treatments help an additional 20 to 30 percent of depressed patients to improve, but the medications can be expensive and have unpleasant side effects.

Which prompted Dr. Trivedi to look to exercise. His investigation joins a growing movement among some physiologists and doctors to consider and study exercise as a formal medicine, with patients given a prescription and their progress monitored, as it would be if they were prescribed a pill.

- read the full article at New York Times

I personally feel that by over-working my abs from January to June 2011, I ended up causing disk damage to my spine.  To the tune of over a $1000 in medical expenses for visits to Chiropractors, Physical Therapists, Doctors and for an MRI.  I understand why my disks were looking so bad!  Now I’m taking a break from crunches/core exercises and focusing on lengthening my spine, doing exercises to build my lower back, decompression and other great therapies.  Read the article below for more information:

 

For a study published this year, researchers at Indiana State University had a group of healthy, young adults squat, lunge, twist, crunch and hold a rigid plank position to measure the hardiness of their back, abdominal and side muscles, the area generally known as the core. The same volunteers then completed a battery of physical performance tests, including leaping off the ground while tossing a medicine ball backward over the head and sprinting through a short obstacle course.

The researchers had expected that the volunteers with the sturdiest cores would outshine the others on the tests of physical performance. But they did not. There was little correlation in this study between robust core muscles and athleticism. Despite the emphasis that many coaches, trainers and athletes themselves place on “core training for increased performance,” the authors write, “our results suggest otherwise”  — and in the process raise some intriguing questions about just how core strength affects fitness and whether a rippling abdomen, while attractive, is worth the effort.

The role of the core in physical performance has been a topic of considerable interest and controversy among sports scientists, as well as coaches and trainers, for years. Most of us think that a taut midsection, achieved usually by multiple crunches and perhaps some medicine-ball exercises and side planks, will make us not just less self-conscious in our swimsuits but also better athletes.

Read the rest of this article at the NY Times

Another article to read: http://journals.lww.com/nsca-scj/Abstract/2011/08000/To_Crunch_or_Not_to_Crunch__An_Evidence_Based.2.aspx

People who overtax their self-control may find they have less in reserve for later, suggests an intriguing new study that may have implications for people trying to lose weight or make other behavioral changes.

But lack of sleep does not appear to affect self-control, say the researchers, whose study of 58 subjects is in the March issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The subjects — half had stayed awake for 24 hours and half were well-rested — were shown scenes involving vomit and excrement from two movies, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) and Trainspotting (1996).

Some were allowed to express reactions; others were told to show no emotion. Later, they played an aggressive game in which they won or lost by chance. Winners were allowed to blast their opponent with a loud noise.

Those who had suppressed their emotions blasted their opponent at a noise level about 33% higher than those who were allowed to show emotion, regardless of how much sleep they’d had, researchers found.

Results suggest that “people have a diminishable supply of energy that the body and mind use to engage in self-control,” says study author Kathleen Vohs, a consumer psychology professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. “When people use this energy toward achieving one goal, they have less of it available to use toward achieving other goals.”

That can help predict when people are likely to fail at their diets, spend too much money or misbehave with family or in relationships, Vohs says.

Results suggest loss of self-control resources isn’t the same as being tired, she says. “The ability to engage in self-control is determined by prior use of self-control, not by how much sleep one had the night before.”

The study was part of ongoing research on sleep deprivation at the University of Texas-Austin.

Findings don’t suggest busy people will lash out for no reason: “Aggressive behavior involves some action by someone else that causes you to want to retaliate,” says researcher Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas.

Roy Baumeister, director of social psychology at Florida State University, has done extensive research on self-control. “Most people chronically don’t get enough sleep, so it’s reassuring to suggest from this one finding that it does not have any effect on self-control of aggression,” he says.

But Baumeister says the test used may not account for other factors besides self-control that could contribute to aggression, such as personality or the competitiveness of the task itself.

Sian Beilock, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, says it’s interesting that “being taxed in terms of doing one task can have these spillover effects on another.” People may think they can compartmentalize the different tasks they do during the day, but it turns out they are all connected, she says.

The study, paid for in part by the U.S. Army, could have important implications for the military as well. Though a lab is nothing like a war zone, “it does give preliminary reason for hope that just because a soldier has been forced to stay up for 24-36 hours, it doesn’t mean they will react aggressively because they were sleep-deprived,” Markman says.

For the rest of us, Vohs recommends being more mindful of priorities:

“When you want to engage in good self-control, the best thing that you can do for yourself is set up your day so you exert your self-control resources toward that specific task you want to succeed at.”

- article courtesy of USA Today

Neuro-Associative Conditioning or NAC is a science developed by Anthony Robbins, author of “Unlimited Power”, “Awaken the Giant Within” and the “Personal Power” tape series, from the foundations of Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP which was developed by Richard Bandler and Dr. John Grinder in their effort to model communication strategies of effective therapists.

This system was based upon Korzybski’s work of general semantics stating that a person’s experience is not reality but a representation of it (“The map is not the territory”).

NLP is also based upon the primary psychology and language strategies utilized by Dr. Milton Erickson to shift the internal representations and therefore, the experience and the behaviors of patients.

The science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning is a system that describes the process of change in human beings and is based upon the premise that there are two determining reasons for human behavior: 1) the need to avoid pain and/or 2) the desire to gain pleasure.

In order for the brain to efficiently evaluate how to rapidly accomplish these two tasks, you must create neuro-associations (associations within the nervous system) that are used to instantly determine the meaning (pain/pleasure) of situations, people, things, sounds, emotions, etc. These neuro-associations are the directing force of all human behavior.

How the Brain Works

All therapies can and do work but not all the time or with all patients. NAC addresses the question: What is it that all therapies have in common when they are successful in creating change for people? With NAC and its Six Master Steps for creating change and the Five Areas of Intervention, a therapist can rapidly create change in any human being so that a person’s neuro-associations consistently lead to pleasure and consistently avoid pain.

NAC is also a science of success conditioning, so that a person can be conditioned to feel and behave in ways that support their goals, create success and lead them away from behaviors that create limitations or pain. A human being’s destiny is based upon the neuro-associations of pain and pleasure that are linked in the nervous system to certain situations, people, ideas, emotions or contexts. By changing these neuro-associations, we change the way people evaluate, the way they feel and, therefore, the way people behave.

NAC is especially helpful for the athlete to become consistent in their mental game, as well as improving their actual physical ability to perform at their peak. Managing ones emotions in competitive sports can determine the success or failure of performance.

As martial artist Bruce Lee once put it ” Emotions are your enemy. When you get into emotion you lose your mind” When you lose your mind you lose your focus, when you lose your focus you lose you ability to perform at your peak. NAC teaches the athlete to mentally condition themselves so that they can manage their emotions to maintain focus and concentration to enter and stay in the zone.

NAC techniques include: guided imagery; trance induction; personal values and rules realignment; eliciting and changing submodalities to change internal negative neuro-associations; phobia cures with double disassociative technique; transformational vocabulary; visual, auditory and kinesthetic, anchoring; and pattern interrupts.

NAC is a powerful therapy. Here are just a few that can be overcome with NAC:

• phobias & fears
• addictions (drug, alcohol, food…)
• emotional trauma
• bad habits
• weight loss
• depression
• procrastination
• self sabotaging behaviors
• performance slumps
• learning disabilities

There are unlimited benefits to Neuro-Associative Conditioning.

THE N.A.C. 6 STEPS OF CHANGE:

1) Know What You Want.

2) Know What is Preventing You From Getting What You Want.

3) Interrupt that Pattern or Break the Old Behavior, Remove the Obstacles.

4) Choose and Install the New Behavior or Pattern You Want.

5) Condition Yourself for the New Behavior or Pattern.

6) Do an Ecology Test for the New Behavior to See If You Have Successfully Installed and
Conditioned It To Be Your New Automatic Response.

Pool Therapy Exercise Techniques
• Knee-to-chest exercise. This movement is performed while standing on one leg, which is slightly bent, and one leg outstretched in front while one hand holds onto the side of the pool. It strengthens and stretches the muscles in the leg, hip and lower back.
• Leg raise exercise. This movement is performed with one leg outstretched and the supporting leg slightly bent while one hand holds onto the side of the pool. It strengthens and stretches the muscles in the leg, hip and lower back.
• Wall-facing leg stretch exercise. In this stretching exercise individuals assume a “Superman” position with hands resting on side of pool and the body and legs outstretched into and supported by water. This extends all regions of the back and the joints in the back, as well as stretching shoulder muscles.
• Pool walking exercise. Walking both forward and backward in chest-high water works the leg muscles while exerting no impact of the knees or hips, which is particularly important for people who have arthritis in those joints. The walking exercise can be made more demanding with the addition of hand floats or light weights, so a stroll in the pool becomes an aquatic version of power walking.
• Quadruped activity and exercise. This exercise works legs and arms and is performed while floating on one’s back (sometimes achieved with a therapist supporting the trunk or using a flotation jacket). The individual makes paddling motions with his or her arms and legs.
Spa treatments complementing water therapy for back pain typically involve relaxing in warm, agitated water such as that found in whirlpool baths. This form of hydrotherapy relaxes muscles, improves muscle blood flow and increases general blood circulation, which make the body more flexible and can prepare it for water therapy or land-based exercise.
Combined Water Therapy for Back Exercise with Land-based Methods
Water therapy for back exercise can be a short-term exercise option if back pain or a back injury makes land-based exercise too difficult. Or it can be adopted as part of an ongoing exercise program if land-based methods worsen symptoms or if the person prefers water exercises. If their functional status or competitive goals require it, people may transition to exercise in a dry environment once they are successfully performing exercises in water.
Some people may find mixed use of wet and dry exercise therapy environments most beneficial.
There is a small but growing body of scientific studies demonstrating the benefits of aquatic exercise in the management of spine pain. Although more scientific evidence for the specific benefits of water therapy exercise in treating back pain will be helpful in creating specific programs for particular spine problems, the value of appropriate aquatic exercise programs is well established overall and has been beneficial in many thousands of individuals. The aquatic medium is ideal for patients for whom land-based options for back exercise are limited, and may provide a safe and effective method of managing spine pain while improving function.

- courtesy of Andrew J. Cole of  Spine-health.com