Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [65]
• Anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen are not suitable for chronic, nagging injuries or to prevent pain before it happens. They carry health risks and may interfere with the effects of training. However, they’re suitable for acute injuries.
• After an extreme event like a marathon, your body will return to normal within about a week, but neuromuscular fatigue can persist for several weeks.
• “Platelet-rich plasma” is a component of your own blood, injected to speed healing of tendon injuries. Recent clinical trials suggest it’s not a “miracle cure,” but it may speed healing in some patients.
• The best way to keep your bones strong enough to avoid stress fractures is to strengthen the muscles around them. Shortening your running stride may also help.
• For “above-the-neck” symptoms like a runny nose or a sore throat, exercising with a cold appears to have no ill effects, and may even speed recovery slightly.
• Having a few drinks won’t affect your next day’s workout, but more than four or five (depending on your weight) can slow muscle recovery and displace other needed nutrients.
Chapter 8
Exercise and Aging
ATTITUDES TOWARD EXERCISE AND AGING have changed dramatically in recent decades, as shown by 73-year-old Ed Whitlock’s record-setting sub-three-hour marathon in 2004. His time of 2:54:48 wasn’t just fast for an old guy—he placed 26th out of more than 1,400 finishers. The aging body is capable of much more than we once believed, but study after study has shown that we have to “use it or lose it.” As a result, researchers are busy figuring out what kinds of exercise are best for keeping our bodies and minds young.
For athletes like Whitlock, though, the biggest question is not what exercise can do for their aging bodies, but what aging will do to their 5K times. “Masters” sport (often defined as over-40) is the fastest-growing segment of sport in North America, and the experiences of these remarkable athletes offer valuable lessons about how to stay motivated and adjust workout routines as we age.
What’s the cumulative effect of all the exercise I’ve done over the years?
Unless you make a dramatic turnaround after a severely misspent youth, it’s inevitable that some of your body parts won’t work as well in your 50s as they did a few decades earlier. It may be tempting to blame that on the punishment you’ve inflicted on your body during years on playing fields, ice rinks, and jogging paths—but the opposite is more likely. In fact, researchers have a good idea of the average rates of decline you can expect for various systems. And for almost every sign of aging you can think of—muscle loss, weight gain, artery hardening, joint stiffening—there have been studies suggesting that exercise slows it down.
It’s not just the obvious physical ailments that exercise fights off. Better circulation of blood to the brain helps delay mental decline, and at a microscopic level exercise appears to slow the aging of your cells. Some benefits aren’t yet fully understood, like the 2009 finding by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs researcher Paul Williams that aerobic exercise dramatically reduces the risk of glaucoma, macular degeneration, and cataracts. This may have something to do with links between cardiovascular fitness and fluid pressure behind the eye—but in a sense, it doesn’t really matter how it works. The important thing is that, thanks to epidemiological studies, we know that exercise is the most powerful anti-aging tactic we’ve got.
Of course, many competitive sports do result in some wear and tear, and a series of studies have connected sports like soccer and hockey to elevated risk of knee osteoarthritis in later life. More recent studies, though, have differentiated between the risk of simply playing these sports and the risk that arises from acute knee injuries. According to a Swedish study in 2006, the increased risk of arthritis for soccer and hockey players was entirely attributable to those who had suffered serious knee injuries during