Cold Weather Exercise Cautions

It’s tough to exercise in the cold weather, and certainly one of the most frustrating things is that you can pull muscles. You can also put extra pressure on the chest. When you’re in the cold, the blood vessels that go to the heart actually can clamp down, and when they clamp down they can have decreased oxygen supply to the heart. With that decrease of oxygen can come chest tightness and situations resolving and leading into a heart attack. The other problem of course is if you don’t warm up properly, and you don’t stretch out, you can also pull hamstrings and other muscles and tendons.

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Preventing Muscle Mass Loss

You have probably noticed that as we get older we lose some of the muscle mass in our bodies. Over time, we can lose muscle mass in places like our arms, shoulders and legs. This is definitely true of many women and it’s a natural part of the aging process. But like most aspects of aging, you can do certain things to slow down the process. The most effective way to do this is with exercise and strength training. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have looked at this. They support the claims that strength training can have benefits for everyone.

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Flexibility and Strengthening Muscles

Flexibility can be a good and bad thing. Certainly, it helps. It helps in a woman when she’s going to have a baby. It helps with the joints, the ligaments and the tendons over time. It keeps you from being stressed. However, the problem with flexibility is it also can make you more likely to have a knee injury or a problem associated with it. Flexibility needs to be controlled, in a sense. In other words, you can stretch, which is good for you, but you have to strengthen the muscles. If you strengthen the muscles around particular joints that are very flexible, you increase their stability and strength and you decrease the chances of some sort of ligament tear.

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Causes of Muscle Strains

Muscles strains are very common. Muscle strains aren’t always from heavy lifting or putting yourself through unbelievable pressure.  A muscle strain can have many causes.  One of the most common causes of muscle strain is twisting or turning in sleep.  If you're in bed and you don't sleep in the right position, you can actually strain your muscles.  So, it isn't really the dramatic cause that's problematic.  Those of us, as we get older, often realize that the muscle strains can be very difficult to deal with. 

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Can Stress Cause Pain?

Can stress cause pain? Well, believe it or not, it can. If you’re a high stress individual, what can happen is the fact that you can tighten up and you can actually put stress on your joints because of the fact that you are so tight. That tightening up actually can cause spasm of the muscles and extra pressure. What doctors often tell people to do is take a deep breath, think of something that’s pleasurable, perhaps sitting on the beach or snowboarding, something you enjoy, and relax. Feel how that muscle relaxation hits your body.

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Relieving Low Back Pain

Low back pain is a severe problem because the support system to the body is affected.  You actually are in a situation where you feel pressure from the back all the way up or even down into the legs.  One of the best ways to strengthen the back, believe it or not, is to strengthen the core abdominal muscles.  If you actually can have stronger abdominal muscles, it will make a big difference for your back and give yourself an opportunity to do much better in the long-run. 

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Rotator Cuff Tears

The rotator cuff is something you've probably heard of.  People talk about rotator cuff tears and certainly it can be the end of an athlete’s career.  The rotator cuff is really a group of four muscles.  These four muscles are actually putting together extra stability for the shoulder.  When they go out, or one of them is torn or a couple of them, it can really affect the stability and the way the shoulder works and keeping it enclosed in an area.  Rotator cuff tears can be particularly frustrating and difficult to deal with and they can be a career ender for athletes.

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A New And Unusual Use For Botox

It seems they keep coming up with new uses for Botox. Now, you’re probably aware of the most common use. Botox can help wipe away wrinkles by temporarily paralyzing the facial muscles that cause them. It’s also been used to help people with everything from neck spasms to difficulty speaking. Well, the latest use? Writer’s cramp. According to a report from the Netherlands, in writer’s cramp, involuntary muscle contractions force a particular part of the body into an abnormal posture or movement. The abnormal contractions affect the hand and arm during writing. Now, during the study, after three months 70% of patients treated with botulinum toxin said their condition had improved, but the treatment does have downsides. It is not a permanent fix. The injections need to be repeated over time. But once again, it shows, with a little imagination, certain medications can be used for a wide variety of things.

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Understanding Botox

Botox is being used more and more often for the fact that Botox is one of these medications which actually can help to paralyze muscle. In the paralysis of this muscle, you actually are able to get a release of spasm. Here’s the problem with Botox…it is a poison. It’s not something that can be taken lightly and it’s something, obviously, that you need a physician, not just a therapist, to take a look at. You want to make sure it’s evaluated and the treatment is done properly.

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Exercise and Lactic Acid Build-up

It is called lactic acid buildup; when you haven’t exercised in a long time, and you start to exercise, you might feel some pain. Let’s say you haven’t been doing any running but you decide to jog around the block. Well, that pain you feel actually is lactic acid buildup because what you’re doing is, after a certain point, you no longer use oxygen that the metabolism can supply in the muscles. You use what we call anaerobic metabolism, a lack of oxygen, and the breakdown product, or build up of that, is lactic acid. When that gets in the body, it can cause pain.

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