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Whole Grains

Medical News Today recommends that you always choose whole-grain foods over white, refined foods in order to maintain healthy blood sugar levels. Specifically, it suggests you eliminate white rice and white pasta from your diet, and replace them with brown rice and whole-grain pasta

Fresh And Raw Fruits And Vegetables

With all the different supplements that are available for use, many people have a tendency to get confused on which they should take. In some cases there will be one or two supplements in particular that will stand out to you and draw your attention.

One supplement to take, that often tops the list of many people, is creatine. Let's have a quick look at the top five reasons why you should consider taking creatine.

Why Should You Consider Taking Creatine?

Taking the right foods will help you in attaining your target fitness and physique.

Coffee: Take a cup of coffee before you start to workout.

caffeine present in coffee blocks the pain-processing adenosine

Muscular strength is defined as the maximum force that can be exerted by a muscle or muscle group.

Muscular endurance is the capacity of a muscle to repeatedly exert force or to maintain a fixed contraction for a period of time.

An extra hour or two of sleep seems so ... optional. Yet, lack of sleep is implicated in obesity, poor heart health and mental illness.

Lack of sleep can trigger certain epileptic seizures. Strokes and heart attacks occur more often in the last third of the night.

Stay awake just 17 hours and your brain behaves as though you have a blood alcohol level of 0.05, the legal limit for drunkenness in most European countries.

Glucose, which is transported by your bloodstream to organs and tissues after eating carbohydrates, provides an essential source of energy for both your muscles and brain when working out. As energy and glucose needs to increase with exercise, it's important to eat enough carbohydrates in order to fuel your workouts. Having low blood glucose levels during exercise harms performance and can lead to physical and mental fatigue, sometimes resulting in weakness, dizziness and hypoglycemia. Glucose also prevents the body from using protein for energy.

When glucose isn't needed for immediate energy, the body stores it as glycogen in the liver and skeletal muscle. Glycogen stores are especially important when working out, as the body's energy demands may exceed the amount supplied by glucose in the bloodstream after prolonged exercise or when exercising with insufficient carbohydrate intake. According to Iowa State University, during low-intensity workouts, glycogen stores can be used to increase glucose levels in the bloodstream for as long as 90 minutes -- whereas during high-intensity exercise, glycogen stores provide energy for only about 20 minutes. Active people therefore need to replenish glucose regularly by eating plenty of carbohydrates. However, in less-active people with adequate glycogen stores, additional glucose is stored as fat.

A carbohydrate-loading diet, also called a carb-loading diet, is a strategy to increase the amount of fuel stored in your muscles to improve athletic performance. Carbohydrate loading generally involves greatly increasing the amount of carbohydrates you eat several days before a high-intensity endurance athletic event.

Your muscles normally store only small amounts of glycogen — enough to support you during recreational exercise activities. If you exercise intensely for more than 90 minutes, your muscles may run out of glycogen. At that point, you may start to become fatigued, and your performance may suffer.

But with carbohydrate loading, you may be able to store up enough energy in your muscles to give you the stamina to make it through longer endurance events without overwhelming fatigue

2. Switch It Up Doing the same exercise, on the same day, at the same time will bore your muscles just as much as it is probably boring you. Jolt your body’s expectations by completely changing your lifting schedule. If you do chest work on a specific day choose another day to do that exercise. You may want to switch it up every week. After doing this for about four weeks, slowly increase your weight. You should see an improvement. in addition, watch your form. Compromised form can also impede increasing your weightlifting weight.

1. Stop Over-training You may think you are doing your body good by lifting five to six days per week, but when specific muscle groups are being over worked, you will have a difficult time increasing your lifting weight. If you have "hit the wall" and cannot go any further, this would be the time to check your routine. By cutting back on exercises that may be working certain muscles too hard, you may be able to increase your weight, and best of all, your strength. Try these tips each time you cannot advance to more weight. Choose a muscle group that you workout two or more times per week. Cut back to one time, for two weeks. Increase your weight.

Teenagers and diet

should sustain growth and promote good health.

number of physiological changes occur that affect nutritional needs

While bicycling, jogging and other aerobic workouts are ideal for improving your heart function and lowering your risk for stroke, you'll need to dedicate time each week to resistance exercise --- also called strength training --- in order to build stronger muscles and overall body strength.

Machine weights or free weights like barbells represent the primary tools for resistance workouts, although your strength also increases when you stretch resistance bands or carve out time for pushups and pullups.

Your timeline for improved strength depends on the intensity of your resistance workout, as well as how often you visit the gym, according to Dr. Ed Laskowski, a Mayo Clinic fitness specialist. Lifting weights for 20 minutes on three days each week is sufficient to gain larger muscles and better strength.

The time frame in which you can expect to notice muscle gain depends on several factors: your current fitness level, the intensity and consistency of your workouts and your body fat percentage.

According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine--an organization that educates personal trainers--those who are new to exercise can expect to notice muscle gain within four weeks of beginning a strength-training program.

Everyone from sedentary adults to seasoned body builders possesses skeletal muscles, the muscles that support the movement of the skeletal system. Body fat acts like a blanket covering these muscles.

FOLLOW A HIGH-PROTEIN, LOWER-CARB DIET. Your diet is essential in building a lean physique. It is important to consume 4- to-6 small meals per day; this helps to speed up your metabolism at an incredibly rapid rate. Although there are many different theories on meal frequencies, eating smaller meals more often will help the average person avoid overeating and will curb hunger.

FOLLOW A CONSISTENT WEIGHT-TRAINING AND CARDIO REGIMEN. This will allow you to burn fat through the day. Weight training helps you to burn calories after the workout and throughout the day while cardio burns calories during the workout. A combination of cardio and weight training will give you the optimal fat burning rate you need to stay lean.

DRINK A LOT OF WATER. If you're completely hydrated, your fat-burning rate will be optimum. To speed up your metabolism, drink at least 6-to-8 glasses of water per day.

But while a little exercise is a good thing, taking exercise to the extreme can cause serious health issues, even death.

When few adults exercise regularly, and many struggle to find just 20 minutes to dedicate to a workout, it may be hard to believe that some people place exercise at the center of their lives

Compulsive exercise is more than a desire to get in the ultimate shape or manage one's weight.

One in five young teens has high blood pressure. Elevated cholesterol levels increasing at alarming rate.

A seven-year ongoing study examining more than 20,000 Canadian grade 9 students shows most already have at least one major risk factor for heart disease and stroke, Dr. Brian McCrindle told the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2009, co-hosted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Cardiovascular Society

This study is further evidence of an accelerating decline in the heart health of Canada’s teens

Packing an hour worth of fitness into 20-30 minutes can be done

Choose a cardio activity that you enjoy such as running, or biking

Do a short warm-up session to get the blood pumping and muscles warmed up

The events that provoke stress are called stressors, and they cover a whole range of situations

The hypothalamus signals the adrenal glands to produce more of the hormones adrenaline

These hormones speed up heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, and metabolism