It’s tragic - a terrible story of a young life cut off too early, and by something that seems so harmless and yet it almost qualifies as a “freak accident” because of the sheer aspect of unusual that goes in to the story and the circumstances. High school track star Arielle Newman was 17 years old. She had sore muscles and wanted to be able to perform at her peak without the soreness, and so she did what many athletes do, she rubbed sports creme into her affected muscles, which seems harmless on the surface.

The problem is, the use was so excessive that Arielle ended up dying from an excessive absorption of a chemical that is found in all sports cremes, which absorbs through the skin transdermally and can become toxic if too much of it is absorbed through the skin and into the blood stream. The name of the chemical that the coroner concluded killed Arielle, and that is found in sports cremes like Ben gay and other sports cremes sold commercially over the counter is called methyl salicylate. It is the cooling agent that may smell minty many times in the sports cremes, presumably to help topically “cool” sore muscles and it may even help absorption.

The products were used in combination by Arielle, and examiners thought that it was really that the chemical was absorbed over time that made her succumb to it, not from a one time over-use of the product. Supposedly a creme, adhesive strips and another undisclosed product were used by Arielle and combined together over time to create toxic levels of methyl salicylate in her blood stream which ended up killing the young woman.

Some doctors and experts are now calling for sports cremes to contain a more outlined warning on their packaging, as well as to diclose specifically that many of them contain aspiring derived medications, since aspirin can be detrimental to people with certain physical conditions. They wanted to note that these sport cremes can be especially dangerous if they are applied over 40% of the body since the rate of absorption may be excessive.

This also reinforces the fact that many of us have gotten lazy about reading the fine print on lables especially on over the counter products like this, since we just assume that they are safe and we don’t really have to read the indications, we’ll be fine with dosing ourselves. Even myself, I’ve noticed, do not read the labels on pain relievers and other medications like cold medicine and antihistamines sold over the counter because I believe that I already know the dosage requirements, when in fact I don’t!

Every parent wants their child to do well and thrive socially, academically and to be fit and athletically inclined. Sometimes in the parental zeal to have our children accomplish all of these things, we forget to allow them the time and space to be children. It’s great to set goals and standards, but we need to leave down time and play time and let our children be just kids.

The creative art of being kids and playing tag, jump rope or red rover seems to be on it’s way to extinction. Children occupied in unstructured play time is very important to developing socialization skills, decision making and imagination. Children in these settings don’t know they’re learning, they’re just busy having fun. Children role play through playing with dolls, dressing up and coming up with their own games. They are learning valuable life skills.

Competitive sports are also wonderful for the children as are organized extracurricular activities. Competitive sports like soccer, T-ball and softball all teach valuable lessons about fair play and social skills. However, if children are doing only these type of activities, they will begin to feel pressured.
If you want your children to be happy and well adjusted, let them just go outside and play. Leave some nights without organized activities. Make sure you don’t overbook your child with back to back sports and activities after school every night.

Make sure there’s enough time for well balanced meals, plenty of rest and sleep and just old fashioned joyful playing outside like a kid and you’ll all be better off as a family. Children are increasingly complaining of headaches and migraines and other stress related ailments when they’re only in grade school. Parents, keep your kids motivated but don’t stress them to overachieve.

There’s something we all do automatically every minute we are alive that vastly effects our health and we don’t ever think of how we do it. It is essential for life itself, the simple involuntary act of breathing. The manner in which we breathe can effect our levels of tension, the amount of oxygen we take in and the amount of carbon dioxide we expel with each breath.

The way that we inhale and exhale effects the amount of stress we experience. A person with an anxiety disorder often breathes rapidly and shallowly leading to further anxiety and can even bring on a panic attack. For stress reduction, breathing exercises help you relax by consciously inhaling slowly and then exhaling slowly.

While doing yoga, the emphasis is on how you breathe to help you relax while doing the yoga postures. Oxygen is vital to life itself, our cells, our hearts , lungs and our brains. Yet, few of us think of how we do this essential life function.

One of the reasons we tend to breathe shallowly and rapidly is because we are a fast paced society and we feel the need to hurry at all times. Shallow, fast breathing is a response to stress, a sedentary lifestyle and our own overly emotional states.

Yoga, with it’s concentration on slow, deep breathing through the nose, not the mouth, breaks this habit of rapid ineffective respiration. The deep breathing done during yoga transfers to an awareness of your breathing patterns throughout the day. When deep breathing is done properly, increased oxygenation will occur and elimination of toxins from the body will be aided.

The deep breathing exercises will bring about a more relaxed state of mind and improve focus and attention span as more oxygen is supplied to the brain. The complete breath of yoga involves the entire respiratory system.

To inhale, take air in through the nose, first push your stomach forward, the ribs sideways and lift the chest and collar bone upward. To exhale, allow the chest and collar bone to relax first, then push in the stomach to expel any air left in the lungs.

The principles of these breathing techniques can be transferred to any workout activity to ensure your body is utilizing oxygen to it’s best advantage.

We all know that a workout and exercise is beneficial to our health. There are many apparatus and types of equipment we can use to maximixe the benefits our bodies receive from our workout.

An interesting and inexpensive workout intensifier is the use of resistance bands for our exercise routine. Some of the rationale behind using resistance bands would be, first of all, they are very little money. The price for resistance bands ranges from $6.00 to $20.00.

Another reason resistance bands are appealling is that they can be taken anywhere easily. This way you can workout readily when traveling. Also, resistance bands can be suited for any degree of fitness whether you are a novice at exercise or more advanced. The amount of difficulty depends on how the resistance bands are used. You can get more tension from the workout band by adjusting your hand or body position. If it still feels too easy, like there’s no effort to move, switch to a heavier band. Conversely, if the tension is too intense, switch to a lighter band.

For the upper body, some of the workout maneuvers done with resistance bands include alternating chest presses, the one arm chest fly and the tricep extensions. Working out the lower body, the legs and hips, may be done with resistance band exercises such as squats, lunges and side steps.
With the use of resistance bands, you can get a total body workout. You can vary the intensity of the workout by how many reps you do of each exercise motion and which type of resistance band you use.

Yep, that’s right, an 81 year old man is biking a very long distance for a charity. Pretty impressive huh? Even more impressive is the amount of miles the 81 year old has pledged to bike. 2,000 miles! He is biking around Arizona and has already set off recently to raise money for the charity. The ambitious and big hearted guy, named Bill Anderson, is making the trip to benefit a shelter that feeds, clothes and cares for the homeless based out of Yuma.

Anderson is no stranger to travelling long distances on his bike for charities, he’s done it a few times before, so hopefully that means he’s in peak shape for his latest endeavor and won’t encounter any problems. We can all take a few lessons from this big hearted and athletic man. That you only live once, and attitude is everything when it comes to age.

I haven’t seen a picture of Bill Anderson, but by some of his quotes, you can tell he’s someone that has a lot of zest for life and has kept active for his whole life, which is apparent in the way he views life, as an enjoyable ride, but only as enjoyable as you make it and as enjoyable as you allow it to be throught he health and maintenance of a strong, lean body through exercise and moving around. As they say, immobility begins the death cycle. Cryptic, but true!

It seems as if everybody is watching their carbohydrate intake these days. Even people who don’t look like they need to lose weight, do the low carbohydrate diet temporarily when they want to shed 5 or 10 pounds they’ve recently put on. There’s a reason for the popularity of this diet. It really works.

In a study done recently in Boston, it was found that both fasting and a high fat- low carbohyfrate diet increase the levels of a hormone called FGF21. The study was done on laboratory mice. The theory postulated is that the hormone, FGF21, is helping the body switch it’s source of fuel from sugar to fat.

The logical correlation is when you fast, your body uses stored body fat and also when your intake is a high fat, low carbohydrate diet, your body, again, uses stored body fat. It will take more studies and research to switch these principles from laboratory animals to people. The interplay of the hormone, FGF21, and it’s increase with a high fat, low carbohydrate diet, shows a lot of promise in the treatment of obesity.

A new angle of scientific research is opened with the premise of these studies. This hormone and it’s subsequent increase could be the reason that people on low-carb diets don’t have elevated fats in their bloodstream. This hormone, FGF21, could open the gateway for a host of new and effective weight loss drugs of the future. It will be interesting to see further studies, research and results on this subject.

Can you really burn fat faster simply by taking a supplement? Well, that remains up for debate, but there are certain natural chemicals that are thought to produce additional energy, suppress appetite, and yes, even purportedly help to burn more calories, or burn them faster, at least while the natural chemical’s effect is still circulating in the body. Which means that you have to pop the supplements consistently if you are to get the purported benefit of faster calorie consumption.

One such natural chemical is green tea, which has received a lot of touting by natural product manufacturers as a good fat burner, which is also supposed to have numerous other health benefits in addition to potentially reducing the appetite and kicking calorie burning ability into higher gear.

The benefits found in green tea that are supposed to be good for your health other than their calorie burning acceleration, are the fact that green tea is rich in a phytochemical called polyphenols, which are powerful antioxidants, and are also thought to be potent cancer fighters in addition to other benefits, including skin benefits and other “beauty” benefits. Polyphenols are also found richly in olive oil, and other omega 3 rich foods often.

In addition, green tea has been shown to help improve cholesterol levels, making the good cholesterol outweight the bad cholesterol levels in the blood more easily. All in all, even if green tea proves to not help improve the caloric burning, it’s probably an overall good idea when it comes to general health and well being, for anyone to consider adding it to their diet.

Spas are really popular these days. Combining health, fitness and body care into one spa or salon is all the rage these days, and many men and women are really starting some great businesses geared at pampering their clients as well as ensuring their continued health and beauty in return for their patronage.

So what are the things that spa owners have to consider, other than making sure they treat their clients like gold and listen to the needs and desires of their clients? Well, a good spa software program is a necessity. Those that don’t have this put themselves at a distinct disadvantage both against their competitors as well as in their own best business interest in operating a profitable, organized business.

Salon software from Milano Systems offers modern technical support as well as software bundles that is ten times easier than its competitors and earns high marks for ease of use and exemplary organization from its business users. It’s also affordable and customizable, because not one size always fits all in the business and software world as we all know, and offers a leg up when it comes to time efficiency.

The company also offers products that will give a competitive edge over other spas and salons in that it offers gift certificates with different designs (people love giving the gift of health, fitness and beauty, believe me, they love receiving it too!) So if you’re in the spa business or are thinking about getting into the business, it might be one of the best investments you’ve ever made!

PMS, if you’re a woman, you equate these words with the following headaches around period time : anxiety, crabbiness, bloating, cramps and headaches (literally this time). But what about working out around your period, or the time before that which varies for every woman, that period before your period when you feel like you’re temporarily going insane and want to body slam everyone that looks at you the wrong way?

I’ve found, personally (and yes, if you haven’t guessed it yet, I’m a woman), that working out around the time I know I’m getting PMS, which for me is around two weeks to one week before my period, depending on the month I guess, immensely helps me with the pre-period jitters, anxiety and ensuing grouchiness that comes along with this lovely time of the month we’re all blessed with.

Not only that, I tend to retain a lot more water, which accounts for anywhere from a one to three pound water weight gain around my period, and working out, sweating and getting my blood pumping really seems to ease the water weight gain, as well as help work any cramping out that may occur along with my period.

Water weight gain basically happens because of the shift in the hormones during this time, and if you like to eat a lot of salty foods, you may want to be extra cautious about eating too many salty foods around PMS time, because you will just be all that much more prone to putting on a few extra ounces or pounds at least of pure, unadulterated water weight. This is usually enough to make that favorite pair of jeans of yours not fit and just make you more upset when all you really need is pleasing, fitting clothes.

Working out not only may help prevent all that water weight gain, but it also may help to elevate your mood since exercise helps our bodies to release endorphins, and this reverses and even quells the feelings of anxiety and crankiness we inevitably get around this time.

When I think of doing a workout, my thoughts are always of either popping in a tape or DVD and working out in my living room. The other setting I think of is either going to the local YMCA or gym. When it’s a beautiful day outside, I hurry through my routine so I can spend more time outdoors.
There’s no reason, when it’s gorgeous weather outside, to keep my fitness routine so rigid and mundane.

Shifting your physical workout to the outdoors makes a lot of sense when the weather’s great. The results of working out in the wonderful outdoors will energize you more.

Shifting your exercise to the outdoors will benefit you by the sunshine to elevate your mood and fresh air for your lungs. Exercises that can be done just as easily outdoors as indoors would be the simple calisthenic style that does not involve equipment or complex apparatus. Such exercises could be squats, chin ups, step ups, uphill sprints, duck walks and push ups.

Push ups are a highly effective means of toning and building muscle mass for the upper body without the use of weights or exercise equipment. Squats are great for the thigh muscles. Step ups can be done with the simplest form of equipment, even a picnic bench, and they are good for cardio and for leg muscles.

Chin ups can be done on playground equipment and are a good upper arm toner and strength builder. A fast run uphill is excellent for both the leg muscles and building lung capacity. Duck walking is simply squatting with your thighs parallel to the ground and walking. Duck walks are more of a workout than you’d expect and are good for thigh toning.

Break up the boredom and rut of only working out indoors. Next time it’s nice out, go outdoors and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air and get fit all at the same time.