Exercise & Fitness Archive

You can get a good workout anyway.

The winter months present numerous challenges to maintaining your fitness in a typical year. This year, with the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be harder than ever to get to the gym or your usual exercise class.

What can you do to keep your body in motion and not lose ground as the weather turns colder? The answer, luckily, is plenty, says Dr. Beth Frates, an assistant professor physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. There are many effective workouts that don't require a large space, a gym, expensive equipment, or even a live instructor.

Interrupt your sitting time with a break every hour.

For many people, the effects of the pandemic include less physical activity. But long periods of sitting are bad for health. They're associated with increased risks for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of health conditions that include abdominal obesity, unhealthy cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar). Too much sitting is even linked to an early death. The good news: staying active throughout the day helps reverse the effects of too much sitting.

Doctor's orders

"Take a two-, five-, or 10-minute break at least once per hour," advises Dr. Beth Frates, director of wellness programming for the Stroke Research and Recovery Institute at Harvard-affiliated Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

Rates continue to rise, but there are ways to protect yourself and even reverse the effects of this dangerous disorder.

Your liver is your largest internal organ and your body's workhorse. Among its many jobs are converting food into fuel, processing fat from your blood, clearing harmful toxins, and making proteins that help your blood clot. Yet this hard-working, supersized organ is susceptible to a dangerous and often hard-to-diagnose condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD.

NAFLD is defined as the presence of fat in more than 5% of liver cells. It is the most common liver disease and affects up to 25% of American adults, 60% of whom are men.

If lack of energy has drained your sex life, there are ways to reignite the passion.

 Image: © nautiluz56/Thinkstock

Your sexual drive can stay high late in life, but often your energy for sex can diminish. Low energy not only affects your sex life, but can carry over to other parts of your life, too. You can become apathetic, no longer find pleasure in favorite activities, and become more sedentary.

However, many of these issues related to lost sexual energy can be addressed. "Never think lack of energy means an end to your sex life, and there is nothing you can do about it," says Dr. Sharon Bober, director of the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Sexual Health Program. "There are many strategies you can adopt to get back in the game."

When a minor injury leads to soreness or discomfort, what’s the best first treatment choice? The American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Family Physicians recently developed new recommendations based on reviews of more than 200 studies involving nearly 33,000 subjects.

Research we're watching

Doing easy leg stretches may improve blood flow throughout the body by making the arteries more flexible and able to dilate, according to a small study in the July 1, 2020, Journal of Physiology.

The study included 39 young adults, 27 of whom did passive leg stretches five times a week for 12 weeks, while the other 12 did no stretching. (Passive stretching involves holding a stretch for a set period of time aided by an outside force, such as one's body weight or gravity). Volunteers held the thigh and calf stretches for 45 seconds, followed a 15-second rest. They repeated each set a total of five times.

This ancient practice, which consists of sequences of fluid movements, can improve your balance and help you prevent falls.

Tai chi is a form of gentle exercise that experts say can help improve your mood, reduce your stress level, and help keep your heart healthy. It can also benefit your bones.

"There's very strong evidence that tai chi is one of the best weight-bearing exercises to reduce the risk for falls," says Peter Wayne, faculty editor of the Harvard Special Health Report An Introduction to Tai Chi and director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

Put the focus on food quality and healthy lifestyle practices to attain a healthy weight.

Most people have been taught that losing weight is a matter of simple math. Cut calories — specifically 3,500 calories, and you'll lose a pound. But as it turns out, experts are learning that this decades-old strategy is actually pretty misguided.

"This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Switch the type of walking in your routine to stay motivated and active.

Putting one foot in front of the other is a simple way to trigger a cascade of health benefits. Regular brisk walks help lower LDL (bad) cholesterol; control blood sugar; and reduce the risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Brisk walks also strengthen muscles, burn calories, and lift mood.

Just one problem: some people find walking boring. Boredom may diminish your motivation and interest in exercising. Before that happens, mix up your regimen with different types of walking that maximize physical, mental, and emotional health benefits.