Weight Lifting Class Getting My Form Perfect

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Thanks for the article from Robin Woodard

Weight lifting is a passion for me, so it was a natural progression to take a group exercise class at my local gym. Even though I did weight lifting before the class I learn a lot by taking it. One of the biggest things I learned in a group setting was the mistakes that I was making. Form is very important when you talk about weight lifting and learning to do it properly is very important. I learned this from taking the class, and I would always set my home security alarm from www.TotalAlarmSystems.com/ before going to group exercise class.

Another big advantage of the group exercise class was I could learn and interact with others. Many times you cannot find someone that has the same kind of passion that you have. In this class setting you can feel at ease talking about what you love to do. Learning from your classmates was another big plus I loved. They gave a lot of great advice to me as well. The instructor was a guy who knew his craft making the class go way to fast if you ask me. I gained a lot of knowledge from the weight lifting class and would recommend it to anyone.

Are Sex, Coffee And Exercise Bad For You?

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(Health.com) -- Having sex, drinking coffee, working out -- these and other everyday activities that cause blood pressure to spike may briefly raise the risk of a burst aneurysm in the brains of certain vulnerable people, a new study suggests.

Roughly 2% of the population is believed to have an aneurysm, a balloon-like swelling in a brain artery that results from a weak spot in the artery wall.

Aneurysms are usually too small to cause symptoms or problems, but if they grow large they can burst and cause a stroke, leading to permanent brain damage or death.

The overall risk of rupture is small. However, even brief activities that raise blood pressure can temporarily boost the risk, according to the study, which appears in the journal Stroke.
For instance, the risk appears to nearly double in the hour after drinking a cup of coffee, the researchers found.


"We investigated those factors that were known to cause a short-lasting sudden increase in blood pressure," says the lead author of the study, Monique Vlak, M.D., a neurologist at the University Medical Center, in Utrecht, the Netherlands. "Other researchers have already described that sexual activity or physical exercise are often reported by patients to precede rupture, but these potential risk factors were never quantified."

To do just that, Vlak and her colleagues asked 250 patients who had survived a rupture if they had been exposed to any of 30 potential triggers in the past year, how frequently, and whether any such exposures had occurred immediately before their rupture.

Coffee and vigorous exercise were the most commonly noted triggers, followed by nose blowing, sex, straining to defecate, drinking cola, being startled, and anger.

Coffee was linked to nearly 1% of the ruptures in the study participants and vigorous exercise to roughly 8%. The remaining risk factors each accounted for approximately 5% or less of the ruptures.


This doesn't mean that people with aneurysms need to quit drinking coffee, says Stanley Barnwell, M.D., a neurosurgeon and stroke specialist at Oregon Health and Science University, in Portland.

"I'm not worried about coffee or cola," says Barnwell, who was not involved in the research. "There's not enough evidence here to get people upset about drinking coffee. There was a relatively small number of patients involved to make a strong conclusion."

Aneurysms are most common after age 40. High blood pressure, genes, smoking, and drug abuse are among the many factors that are believed to contribute to their development. They can also be caused by head injuries and infections.


Most people who have small aneurysms don't know it because they don't have symptoms. These cases are usually discovered by accident -- when a brain scan is performed following a head injury, for example -- and regular check-ups to monitor the aneurysm's growth are generally all that's needed.

People with larger aneurysms tend to undergo surgery or another treatment within one to three weeks of their diagnosis, so there's no real need for them to give up coffee or make other lifestyle changes, says Neil Martin, M.D., the co-director of the UCLA Stroke Center, who was not involved in the study.

But some people aren't healthy enough for surgery and must live with the risk of rupture. These patients should quit smoking and lower their blood pressure, Martin says, and it might also be advisable for them to quit drinking coffee and take a stool softener if needed, as the study authors suggest.

"We don't tell patients to stop having sex or having bowel movements or exercising," he says.

Can Too Much Exercise Cause Anxiety?

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By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

There exists a large and soothing body of scientific literature suggesting that regular exercise can improve someone’s mood and fight anxiety. And then there is this experiment from Germany, in which researchers placed running wheels in the cages of a group of laboratory mice and let them exercise at will.

Mice generally love to run, and these rodents spent almost every waking hour on their wheels, skittering through more miles than most animals are allowed to complete during exercise studies, averaging about seven miles per mouse per day. The scientists, from the Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, then placed these avid runners in unfamiliar situations. What they found was surprising, in part because it contradicted earlier experiments by other researchers. The mice froze or quickly fled to dark corners, behaviors considered by some researchers to signify anxiety. It was as if the marathon runners in this experiment had become more anxious and neurotic than the nonrunners, presumably because of the volume of their running.

The apparent implication of that finding — that too much running makes an animal a nervous wreck — might seem disconcerting. But as this study, published in the journal Hippocampus, and additional new research makes clear, a great deal still needs to be understood about just how exercise affects mood.

To date, most research into the interplay of exercise and anxiety has focused on the actions of various neurotransmitters or chemical messengers within the brain, like serotonin and dopamine. But the German researchers weren’t looking at neurotransmitters. Their interest was in a different brain mechanism. They were trying to determine whether the formation of new brain cells, a process called neurogenesis, was making their lab animals nervous.

Exercise spurs neurogenesis, a finding confirmed by seminal research completed a few years ago. This neurogenesis would seem to be completely laudable, since it occurs mostly in the hippocampus, a portion of the brain associated with memory and thinking. Rodents that have exercised and that have brains fizzing with new neurons tend to score well on tests of memory and cognition.

But the effects of neurogenesis on mood are murkier. A number of neurological case studies have reported that people and animals with lesions in the hippocampus — meaning fewer brain cells in that region — are less prone to anxiety than other people.

So could high volumes of running and the commensurately large amounts of neurogenesis in the hippocampus produce anxiety? The German work seemed to say yes, particularly a follow-up experiment by the same scientists published in September in the online journal PLoS One. In that study, the researchers radiated the brains of mice to prevent neurogenesis, and then let them run. The treated mice eagerly took to their wheels, but grew almost no new neurons.

Afterward, placed in stressful situations, they remained calm, reacting much like sedentary mice.
It seemed that neurogenesis had been the culprit behind the earlier runners’ excessive anxiety.
But the scientists are quick to point out that these findings do not mean that human marathon and ultramarathon runners are necessarily at risk of developing mood problems. The “exercise schedule of mice is not comparable to human fitness training,” wrote Dr. Johannes Fuss and Dr. Peter Gass, the primary authors of the two studies, in a shared e-mail response to questions. With very rare exceptions, humans will not spend their entire waking hours running.

More important, it’s not clear whether the behavior of the nervous mice was necessarily anxiety as we might experience it. The exercised mice did frequently freeze and hide, but they are prey animals, a situation that does not reward insouciance. To be less anxious, if you are a mouse, Dr. Fuss and Dr. Gass wrote, “might not always be the best survival strategy.”

The German scientists, in focusing narrowly on neurogenesis, may also have underestimated the intricate and broad ways in which exercise affects the brain’s mood centers. A fascinating series of experiments conducted at Princeton University and presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in November showed that neurons born from running actually behave differently from other neurons. They are not as physiologically excitable, even in stressful situations.

The Princeton scientists showed that after a rodent stress test, the hippocampi of running mice contained fewer proteins associated with neuron activity than the brains of sedentary mice, even though the runners had more neurons over all. The runners’ brain cells had remained, it seemed, more calm in the face of stress. Similarly, the scientists found, areas of the brain that would normally shoot stimulating messages to the hippocampus during and after stress were quieter in exercised mice.

“Thus,” the Princeton researchers concluded, “running may reduce anxiety-like behavior” despite increasing the number of new brain cells. Exercise had recalibrated the animals’ brains so that they were more serene.

What this emerging science means for those of us who regularly exercise is, admittedly, still being teased out by researchers. But other recent studies are encouraging. A review article published last year in The Archives of Internal Medicine, for instance, concluded that compared with sloth, “exercise training significantly reduced anxiety symptoms” in a group of people at risk for mood problems. And in a beguiling experiment also presented at the 2010 Society for
Neuroscience meeting, scientists from Oklahoma State University found that female rats allowed to run at a moderate pace for 10 to 60 minutes several times a week — my exercise regimen, in fact — behaved with robust mental health in stress tests. So whether you run on two legs or four, the message may be: relax.

Corrections: An earlier version of this post misidentified the affiliation of Dr. Fuss and Dr. Gass; they are with the Central institute of Mental Health Mannheim and the University of Heidelberg. The earlier version also misidentified the affiliation of the scientists whose experiment was presented at the 2010 Society for Neuroscience meeting; it is Oklahoma State University.