Exercise & Fitness Archive

Here's a host of ideas that support healthy eating and exercise habits.

This holiday season, how about giving the gift of good health? From kitchen tools to a session with a personal trainer, there are many thoughtful presents that can have a lasting impact on a person's cardiovascular health. Here are suggestions from several Harvard experts.

Kitchen tools and gadgets

"Many of my patients want to eat healthier, and one good strategy is to prepare more meals at home. Because this takes time, kitchen tools and gadgets really can be helpful," says registered dietitian Kathy McManus, director of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital. One great time-saving tool is an Instant Pot, which works as a pressure cooker, slow cooker, yogurt maker, rice cooker, and steamer, she says.

Research we're watching

Counting steps with a fitness tracker doesn't always inspire people to be more active. But a little friendly competition may help, a new study suggests.

The study, published online Sept. 9 by JAMA Internal Medicine, included about 600 overweight or obese adults, all of whom received wearable step trackers and set goals to increase their daily steps. Researchers randomly divided them into four groups. The control group had only their goals and the step trackers; the three other groups also had different elements of games (support, collaboration, or competition) tied to their goals, an approach known as "gamification."

These three exercises can help make functional fitness part of your regular routine.

As part of everyday living, you spend a lot of time bending, reaching, lifting, twisting, turning, and squatting, without even thinking about it. These movements show up in everything from carrying groceries, to playing with your grandkids, to just checking if the coast is clear when you back out of the driveway.

The ability to do these ordinary activities and movements is called functional fitness, and it can determine how active, healthy, and independent you are as you get older.

In the journals

Downing a protein drink after a workout is often seen as the best way to reduce muscle soreness and speed up recovery. However, this may not be the case, suggests a study published online Aug. 21, 2019, by Human Kinetics.

Researchers found that high-protein drinks did not increase the rate of muscle recovery following resistance training when compared with a carbohydrate-only drink. They recruited 30 men who had at least one year of resistance training experience. The men performed a prescribed workout and afterward had either a whey protein hydrolysate-based drink, a milk-based drink — both of which contained 32 grams of protein — or a carbohydrate-only drink. (All the beverages had the same amount of calories.)

In the journals

Adopt a dog and get a healthier heart. That's the conclusion of a study published in the September 2019 issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Researchers looked at 1,769 people ages 25 to 64 with no history of heart disease. Participants' overall cardiovascular health was assessed based on several health markers, such as body mass index, diet, physical activity, smoking, blood pressure, blood sugar, and total cholesterol levels.

Incorporating brief spurts of high-intensity physical activity throughout your day can help you move to the next fitness level.

If you're not very active but looking to move more, a new strategy might help you get going. Called high-intensity incidental physical activity, or HIIPA for short, it's a new take on high-intensity interval training (HIIT) — only you might find yourself vigorously pushing a vacuum instead of going for a run.

HIIPA (not to be confused with the HIPAA health care privacy rule) is a term coined in an editorial published online Sept. 3 by the British Journal of Sports Medicine. It borrows from the idea behind HIIT, which is a workout that alternates between high-intensity and low-intensity activity. But instead of performing these high-intensity intervals during exercise, HIIPA encourages otherwise sedentary people to add a few moderately strenuous physical activities during the course of their regular day. Anything that raises your heart rate counts — walking up a flight of stairs instead of taking the elevator, carrying in a load of groceries, or doing some heavy cleaning around the house. The editorial's authors, a team of international experts, say the goal is to perform an activity that gets you a little out of breath.

One in three people ages 65 or older will suffer a fall. It's time to assess your balance and improve it.

Image: Jacob Ammentorp Lund/iStock

Many older adults focus on exercise and diet to stay healthy. But one of the worst offenders to health—poor balance—is often an afterthought. "I see a lot of older adults who are nonchalant about balance," says Liz Moritz, a physical therapist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Unfortunately, imbalance is a common cause of falls, which send millions of people in the United States to emergency departments each year with broken hips and head injuries. But there are many things you can do to improve your balance. The strategies below are some of the most effective.

Stroke survivors are typically discharged with a program of exercises meant to help them regain independence. But researchers found that an aerobic training in a stroke rehabilitation program similar to that offered to some heart attack patients helped stroke patients improve their aerobic capacity.

Your core muscles are your body’s foundation, and the plank pose is a great exercise to do to help build core strength—it’s challenging but not complicated. Here’s everything you need to know to plank correctly.

Ask the doctor

Q. Your article about interval training in the September issue suggests a target heart rate of at least 80% of your maximum heart rate during the high-intensity intervals. But what about people like me who take drugs such as metoprolol, which lowers the heart rate? Should I adjust my target heart rate for exercise?

A. Metoprolol (Lopressor, Toprol) belongs to a class of drugs known as beta blockers. As you mentioned, these drugs reduce your heart rate; they also lower blood pressure. They work by blocking the effects of the hormone epinephrine (also known as adrenaline), causing your heart to beat more slowly and with less force. These drugs are often prescribed for people who have had a heart attack, as well as those with heart failure, atrial fibrillation, or angina.