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A growing body of research shows that working out with weights has health benefits beyond simply bulking up one's muscles and strengthening bones. Studies are finding that more lean muscle mass may allow kidney dialysis patients to live longer, give older people better cognitive function, reduce depression, boost good cholesterol, lessen the swelling and discomfort of lymphedema after breast cancer and help lower the risk of diabetes. "Muscle is our largest metabolically active organ, and that's the backdrop that people usually forget," said Kent Adams, director of the exercise physiology lab at Cal State Monterey Bay. Strengthening the muscles "has a ripple effect throughout the body on things like metabolic syndrome and obesity."

Strength training often takes a back seat to cardiovascular training, but it can benefit the heart in ways that its more popular cousin can't. During cardio exercise, the heart loads up with blood and pumps it out to the rest of the body: As a result, Potteiger said, "the heart gets better and more efficient at pumping." But during resistance training, muscles generate more force than they do during endurance exercises, and the heart is no exception, Potteiger said. During a strength workout, the heart's muscle tissue contracts forcefully to push the blood out. Like all muscles, stress causes small tears in the muscle fibers. When the body repairs those tears, muscles grow. The result is a stronger heart, not just one that's more efficient at pumping. Another big advantage of working out with weights is improving glucose metabolism, which can reduce the risk of diabetes. Strength training boosts the number of proteins that take glucose out of the blood and transport it into the skeletal muscle, giving the muscles more energy and lowering overall blood-glucose levels. "If you have uncontrolled glucose levels," Potteiger said, "that can lead to kidney damage, damage to the circulatory system and loss of eyesight."

The brain may get a boost from the body's extra muscle as well. A 2010 study in Archives of Internal Medicine found that women ages 65 to 75 who did resistance training sessions once or twice a week over the course of a year improved their cognitive performance, while those who focused on balance and tone training declined slightly. One reason for the improvement, researchers believe, may be that strength training triggers the production of a protein beneficial for brain growth.

Exercises that look like pilates or yoga routines are in. And the traditional bane of the new private, the long run, has been downgraded. This is the Army’s new physical-training program, which has been rolled out this year at its five basic training posts that handle 145,000 recruits a year. Nearly a decade in the making, its official goal is to reduce injuries and better prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat in rough terrain like Afghanistan.

“What we were finding was that the soldiers we’re getting in today’s Army are not in as good shape as they used to be,” said Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who oversees basic training for the Army. “This is not just an Army issue. This is a national issue.”

“Between 1995 and 2008, the proportion of potential recruits who failed their physicals each year because they were overweight rose nearly 70 percent,”

Studies are finding that more lean muscle mass may allow kidney dialysis patients to live longer, give older people better cognitive function, reduce depression, boost good cholesterol, lessen the swelling and discomfort of lymphedema after breast cancer and help lower the risk of diabetes.

During a strength workout, the heart's muscle tissue contracts forcefully to push the blood out. Like all muscles, stress causes small tears in the muscle fibers. When the body repairs those tears, muscles grow. The result is a stronger heart, not just one that's more efficient at pumping. Another big advantage of working out with weights is improving glucose metabolism, which can reduce the risk of diabetes. Strength training boosts the number of proteins that take glucose out of the blood and transport it into the skeletal muscle, giving the muscles more energy and lowering overall blood-glucose levels.

A 2010 study in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology suggested that people on dialysis can benefit from building muscle. Researchers found that kidney dialysis patients who had the most lean muscle mass — a measurement derived from the circumference of the mid-arm muscle — were 37% less likely to die than the patients who had the least.

"Renewed interest in personal training" is the number-one fitness trend for 2011 by the American Council on Exercise (ACE) and this is driven by baby boomers' interest in health and an anticipated economic upswing, he said.

How personal training will change:   1. Client  expectations. Many clients will want to improve function to stay independent as long as possible, but a subgroup will seek new activities or assistance in training for sports-specific competitions. Trainers will need to guide both types of clients.

2. Demand for knowledgeable trainers. Personal trainers will need to become more knowledgeable in two key areas: the motivations and aspirations of older adults, and the health conditions that can affect a client’s ability to work out, Milner said. They also need to learn how to collaborate with other healthcare providers.   3. More comprehensive continuing education courses. Trainers will need to know learn not just about chronic health conditions and rehabilitation, but also learn about social and psychological perspectives, emotional issues, and lifestyle choices that affect their older-adult clients. They will need to be coaches as well as flexible program designers who can work with their clients in multiple settings besides the gym.   

Want to run a 3:30 marathon? Then train to run a bunch of 800s in 3:30 each. Between the 800s, jog for the same number of minutes it took you to run your repeats. Training doesn't get any simpler than this, not on this planet or anywhere else in the solar system. Bart begins running his Yasso 800s a couple of months before his goal marathon. The first week he does four. On each subsequent week, he adds one more until he reaches 10. The last workout of Yasso 800s should be completed at least 10 days before your marathon, and 14 to 17 days would probably be better. The rest of the time, just do your normal marathon training, paying special attention to weekend long runs. Give yourself plenty of easy runs and maybe a day or two off during the week.

If I can get my 800s down to 2 minutes 50 seconds, I'm in 2:50 marathon shape. If I can get down to 2:40 (minuses), I can run a 2:40 marathon. I'm shooting for a 2:37 marathon right now, so I'm running my 800s in 2:37."

Seeing is believing. To be the best runner you can be, it's crucial to begin with a positive vision. While thinking about running won't get you in shape, creative visualizations will motivate you to stick with a training plan, achieve your running goals and persevere in challenging race conditions.

"Even if you're aerobically fit, it helps to be limber, too, so your body can easily adapt to physical stressors,"

Although countless studies have shown how beneficial exercise is for your body and mind (it may do everything from reducing the risk of some cancers to helping improve memory), less attention has been paid to flexibility.

"Flexibility is the third pillar of fitness, next to cardiovascular conditioning and strength training

proprioceptors are the sensors in your muscles that help to govern your balance. All of your muscles and tendons have these sensors. When you’re injured, the proprioceptors become damaged and don’t function properly. This can lead to becoming more easily injured, such as when you are running on uneven terrain. In those circumstances, when you’re about to roll your ankle, it’s your proprioceptors that inform your tendons and muscles to fire to stop that process.

Children of depressed parents are two to three times as likely to have major depression. Maternal depression in particular has been shown to have serious effects on development, primarily through an absence of responsiveness — the parent’s conscious and consistent mirroring and reciprocity of an infant’s gaze, babble and actions. “Depressed mothers often respond to their babies from the beginning in ways that dampen their enthusiasm and joy,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. This is problematic, as 10 to 20 percent of mothers go through depression at some point, and 1 in 11 infants experiences his mother’s depression in the first year.

Many researchers, particularly those with medical training, are eager to identify some kind of a “biologic marker” to make diagnosis scientifically conclusive. Recent studies have looked at the activity of cortisol, a hormone the body produces in response to stress. In preschoolers who have had a diagnosis of depression, as in depressed adults, cortisol levels escalate under stressful circumstances and then fail to recover with the same buoyancy as in typical children.

But in adults, cortisol reactivity can be an indication of anxiety. Other research has found that in young children, anxiety and depression are likewise intertwined. At Duke, Egger found that children who were depressed as preschoolers were more than four times as likely to have an anxiety disorder at school age. “Are these two distinct but strongly related syndromes?” asks Daniel Pine of the N.I.M.H. “Are they just slightly different-appearing clinical manifestations of the same underlying problem? Do the relationships vary at different ages? There are no definitive answers.”

A memory center in the brain called the hippocampus shrinks a little bit each year with age, but older adults who walked routinely for a year actually gained hippocampus volume, researchers report in a study to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, 60 adults aged 55 to 80 scaled up gradually until they walked for 40 minutes three times a week, enough to get their heart rates up. Sixty other participants did toning workouts that included weight training, yoga sessions and stretching for the same amount of time. After a year of toning, a part of these subjects’ brains called the anterior hippocampus lost a little over 1 percent of its volume. In contrast, a year of aerobic exercise led to about a 2 percent increase in anterior hippocampus volume. Study participants who got their heart rates up performed slightly better on a memory test and had higher levels of a brain-aiding molecule called BDNF, the researchers found.

According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping 75 percent of people in the United States feel stressed out. Almost half of us eat unhealthy because of it; 47 percent of us can't sleep because of it; it makes one in three of us depressed; and for 42 percent of us, it has gotten worse in the last year. There is so much making us anxious these days -- from big-picture problems like uncontrollable oil spills and a still-soft economy to garden-variety job, relationship, money, you-name-it woes -- that it's easy to think of chronic stress as the new normal.

the latest research reveals that revving up your body with exercise may be the most effective antidote. In lab studies, when scientists at Princeton put animals on a six-week aerobic conditioning program, then compared their brain cells with those of a group that remained sedentary, they found that the "brains on exercise" morphed over time into a biochemically calm state that remained steady even when the subjects were under stress. The nonexercising group's brain cells continued to react strongly to anxiety-inducing situations. This breakthrough discovery has scientists now saying that cardio workouts may actually remodel the brain to make it more resistant to stress hormones.

That's the idea behind this year's "Be Healthy Delaware: Get Up & Move!" fitness challenge, presented by the Delaware Center for Health Promotion and The News Journal. The goal is for participants to log 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week for 10 weeks. Collectively, the goal is 5 million minutes in motion.All types of activities will be considered -- and encouraged -- including walking, running, biking, swimming, dancing, basketball, tennis, hiking, indoor rock climbing, even mowing the lawn. The key is to find activities that will get you moving."We're trying to get away from that word 'exercise' because it connotes some negative thoughts -- that you have to be athletic, super fit, young," said Marianne Carter, a registered dietitian and director of the Delaware Center for Health Promotion at Delaware State University in Dover. "People do have set ways of thinking when they hear the word 'exercise,' so using the term 'movement' tends to be friendlier."

The normal resting heart rate for an adult ranges from 60 to 100 beats per minute. But some researchers believe it may be time to re-examine what’s considered normal.Researchers have found that a resting pulse at the upper end of “normal” may indicate a higher risk of stroke and heart disease. Some have linked it to a greater risk of diabetes and obesity. Instead of drawing the line at 100 beats per minute, some say, anything above 90 — and perhaps even 80 — may be considered cause for concern.

In one study published in The Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, scientists followed 50,000 healthy men and women over two decades, looking at whether a resting heart rate at the upper end of normal increased the risk of dying of a heart attack. Just more than 4,000 of the subjects died of heart disease, and the authors found that resting heart rate was a good predictor: For each rising increment of 10 heart beats per minute, the risk of dying of a heart attack increased 18 percent among women and about 10 percent in men.Another study, published in The American Journal of Hypertension, found that a large group of adults who started out with resting heart rates above 80 beats a minute were more likely to become obese and develop diabetes after two decades.To lower the heart rate, try stepping up your cardio exercise, particularly with interval training, which is known to increase the amount of blood the heart pumps with each beat.

Proprioceptive cues are images and other sensory cues that enable you to modify your running stride for the better as you think about them while running.

Using proprioceptive cues effectively requires concentration and discipline. Our natural tendency is to let our thoughts wander aimlessly while running. If you're serious about improving your stride, you must fight this tendency by forcing yourself to concentrate on and execute a particular proprioceptive cue for hundreds of consecutive strides.

You'll get the best results from proprioceptive cues if you use one at a time throughout the entire length of a run and you use them generally at least three times a week every week. Because proprioceptive cues require you to use your muscles differently than they are accustomed to being used, certain muscles may fatigue more quickly, so it's best to begin using each specific proprioceptive cue only during short recovery runs.

“Slowing down in the heat could be a subconscious regulation to protect us from damage, such as heat stroke,”

In other words, you don’t slow down because your body has reached some critical temperature. Instead, your brain slows you down to prevent you from ever reaching that critical temperature. It’s a subtle difference – but as the cyclists in the study discovered, it means that our physical “limits” are more negotiable than previously thought.

“To obtain a substantial heat adaptation, core temperature must be elevated and high sweat rates need to occur,” Dr. Jay explains. “The best way to do this is to combine exercise with heat exposure.”The study volunteers had averaged just 18 minutes a day of “moderate” or “intense” physical activity outdoors. In contrast, researchers have found that proper acclimatization takes 45 to 60 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise in the heat, either for seven to 10 consecutive days, or four to five times a week for two to three weeks.