Fulfilling Your New Year’s Resolution
To welcome in the New Year, most Americans dream up resolutions that in turn could be beneficial to them for the following 366 days (2012 is a leap year). The most popular resolution for people in our culture is to lose weight. Researchers think that this is true because people always want to be in the best shape; however, being in the best shape means different things for different people. Researcher
Courtesy of: Discovery Health
Dr. Tim Church of Louisiana State University says that “there is a huge return on a small investment when it comes to exercise and health.” Church and other researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana are studying what the majority of people want to do to fulfill their New Year’s wish.
Researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center state that muscular fitness is more important as an individual gets older because adults tend to naturally lose muscle mass starting in their 40s. According to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), working out muscles such as weight-lifting and weight training can help curb metabolic illnesses such as diabetes. The ACSM also states that cardiorespiratory fitness (more commonly known as cardiovascular fitness or “cardio”) is very important because it increases the increased blood flow during cardio activity helps strengthens muscles. Cardio also affects a person’s body mass index (BMI) which calculates how much of your body is fat, but the ACSM says that even if your BMI is high, people are still able to do walking and running programs to deter diseases such as heart disease and hypertension.
Church’s research team also says that stretching alone will not make a person fitter but it is not as important as cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness. The ACSM says that stretching for 10 to 30 seconds at the point of slight discomfort before and after you exercise is very important because it loosens the muscles and makes a person more limber. However, the ACSM also mentions that static stretching can also cause injury to muscles.