Posts Tagged ‘fitness’

Older People Must Work Out More to Keep Muscles

Posted: July 8, 2011 in Fitness, Training, Weight Training
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Older Man MusclesThe older you get, the more you may have to work to maintain your muscles, according to a new study.

Researchers report that men and women over the age of 60 have to lift weights more often than younger adults to maintain muscle mass and muscle size.

“Our data are the first to suggest that older adults require greater weekly maintenance dosing than younger individuals to maintain resistance-training-induced increases in muscle mass,” study co-researcher and physiologist Marcas Bamman, PhD, of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, says in a press release.

The study is published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
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How Running Makes You Smarter

Posted: June 30, 2011 in Fitness, Running
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Run and BrainCould running faster make you a better learner? Maybe—but one thing’s for sure: They both use the same brain waves, according to a new study in PloS ONE.

Researchers at UCLA monitored learning-related brain waves called gamma rhythms in mice, and found that the waves got stronger as the mice ran faster.

When we learn, certain brain chemicals are released that speed up the gamma rhythms, explains lead author Mayank Mehta, Ph.D., a neuroscience professor at UCLA. The same chemicals may be released when we run, though Mehta says more research is needed.

The researchers hope the spike they saw means that running can boost your brainpower, but they’ll need a little more time in the lab to make sure. Previous research does show that regular exercise improves your cognitive skills and lowers your risk for age-related mental decline. A 2007 study in Neurobiology of Memory and Learning found that participants learned vocabulary words 20 percent faster after high-intensity exercise.

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