RAQ Training

Last week, while going to the gym to workout, I was listening to the radio and came across a program that had Dr. Ian Smith, the celebrity doctor who has teamed up with State Farm for the 50 Million Pound Challenge. He was talking on the subject of childhood obesity and the epidemic that we are facing in this country and abroad. I went home and while writing yesterday post, I came across some disturbing news which I think whoever is reading this will find interesting and alarming. This entry is taken from the Los Angeles Times November 12, 2008. This article was originally posted on the TakePart.com blog http://www.takepart.com. Enjoy and take heed!!

Many overweight children and teenagers could have severe cardiovascular disease in their 20s and 30s, causing a healthcare crisis. Early identification of the problem is a key.

The arteries of many obese children and teenagers are as thick and stiff as those of 45-year-olds, a sign that such children could have severe cardiovascular disease at a much younger age than their parents unless their condition is reversed, researchers said Tuesday.

“It’s possible that they will have heart disease in their 20s and 30s,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who led the study presented at a New Orleans meeting of the American Heart Assn.
“There’s a saying that ‘you’re as old as your arteries,’ meaning that the state of your arteries is more important than your actual age in the evolution of heart disease and stroke,” she said. “We found that the state of the arteries of these children is more typical of a 45-year-old than of someone their own age.”

Experts did not find the results surprising, but they did view it as “alarming.”

“We’re facing an epidemic of childhood obesity,” said Dr. Michael Schloss, co-director of the lipid treatment program at the New York University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “We are raising a generation of children that are going to have a significant increase in vascular disease as they get older.”

A May study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 16.3% of U.S. children and teenagers are obese and an additional 15.6% are overweight.

Raghuveer runs a preventive cardiology clinic for children who have high cholesterol levels, obesity and a family history of cardiac deaths. She and her colleagues used ultrasound imaging to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries on 70 children considered at risk.

The carotid arteries supply blood to the brain, and the thickness of their inner walls is routinely used as a surrogate for the condition of the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart.

The children all had abnormalities in one or more types of cholesterol, and 40 of them had a body mass index, or BMI — a calculation of weight and height routinely used as a measure of obesity — in the 95th percentile.

Because the researchers did not have access to healthy children for comparison, they compared the measured values to readily available data for 45-year-olds, using an arbitrary cutoff value of the 25th percentile, Raghuveer said. They found that three-quarters of the children had artery thickness above this level.

The artery thickening was most advanced in patients who were the most obese and had the highest levels of a type of cholesterol known as triglycerides, so that combination “should be a red flag to the doctor that a child is at high risk of heart disease,” she said. Their long-term prospects “are not good” unless they can reverse the condition.

The findings suggest the potential for “a major public health problem” down the road, said Dr. Albert Bove of the Temple University School of Medicine, president-elect of the American College of Cardiology, who was not involved in the study.

“If we begin to see people disabled in their 30s and 40s because of heart disease, we could lose a significant fraction of the workforce,” Bove said.

But there is some hope.

“If we can identify the condition early and start modifying triglycerides, we can probably prevent progression and perhaps even promote regression,” said Dr. John P. Kennedy, director of prevention cardiology at Marina del Rey Hospital.

Maugh is a Times staff writer.

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

When Generation X was growing up, my generation, we were expected to play outside with friends and participate in sports. The only video game console that was out in the beginning was the Atari . And really who wanted to play with that with the horrible graphics that it had. That quickly died out with Generation Y. In this day and age, children are going outside less and playing video games and using their computers more, becoming less active than children their age several decades ago. Until now, video games have largely been a fairly passive activity, resulting in few calories burned. As a teenage kid, video games weren’t my cup of tea. I can remember times when I would play my Nintendo only when I was either on punishment or the weather was too unbearable to go out to play. I can remember getting my first Nintendo NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) for Christmas. I got two games. One was the popular Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. At the time, Mike Tyson had just came on the boxing scene and was terrorizing everyone he came in contact with. The other game was Contra. It was a military style game where you had to go through multiple levels to save the world. At that time, video games were still new and a lot of households didn’t have them. Fast forward twenty years later, now the opposite has taken place. Most kids have multiple game systems in the home such as the Sony’s Playstation I through III , or Microsofts’ Xbox or Xbox 360, or the one that is making a lot of adults and children alike get off their butts and exercise, Nintendo’s Wii. During the years, I have watched Nintendo come out with various versions of their game console, and through it all, I have been a big advocate of them because they always seem to create a way to make their games more interactive as oppose to sedentary.

I can remember with the NES game console, individuals had an option to purchase an additional piece of equipment called the Power Pad or the Power Glove that made the Nintendo NES games more interactive. The Power Pad was a piece of plastic that reminded me of the game Twister because it had these dots that were on it that required people to stand and play the game. The Nintendo Power Glove was a electronic glove that fit on your hand in which people could use when playing the NES. The problem with the Power Pad and Glove were that those two pieces of equipment were sold separately so many families would just buy the main game system and leave the Power Pad and/or Glove behind. So more and more game consoles followed, the Sega and Sega Genesis, Sony’s Playstations, Microsoft’s Xboxes. The graphics and story lines got better and better with each new company emerging. As a result burning off calories while playing traditional video games was next to impossible. Majority of the game consoles didn’t require that much interaction in the area of moving around. More and more kids started to invest more heavily in video game consoles and video games, which in turn with the combination of poor nutrition caused more kids to suffer from childhood obesity. According to the CDC, childhood obesity has been on the rise for two decades. It has currently topped out at approximately 18%, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. While some of this can be attributed to higher consumption of fatty foods and soft drinks, the bulk probably has more to do with inactivity.

Until now, with the introduction to Nintendo’s Wii. Now for the first time you can combine video games with a high degree of activity, resulting in more calories burned and healthier kids. Wii is the new interactive video game system from Nintendo. Rather than sitting down with a remote control, the user must stand and mimic the actions that he/she wishes to complete on the screen. New studies are showing that Wii games such as boxing, aerobics, bowling and tennis, are helping users to get much needed exercise while still enjoying video games. God bless scientists. I even have a couple of adult clients who love to not only play the Nintendo Wii with their kids or family members, but they themselves find a lot of enjoyment and pleasure with playing the Wii alone. Some have gotten the Wii Fit to supplement the days when they are away from me and my training sessions.

Motion sensor-controlled consoles can make an impact on a child’s energy expenditure and calories burned, however parents should encourage outdoor pursuits such as riding a bike, or playing a quick pick up game of football, baseball, or basketball. If kids aren’t able to go outside or can’t find the time to go outdoors, the Nintendo Wii is the best substitute in the video game market in comparison to the other companies.

Liverpool John Moores University, scientists there have been hard at work measuring gamers’ activity levels, and found that playing Wii for 15 minutes boosts children’s energy expenditure by 156%, compared to 60% using normal joypads on other consoles. They study continued to say that this calculated for the average child who spent 12.2 hours a week playing games, to potentially burn off 1,830 calories.

In conclusion, traditionally, video gaming systems are expensive, as are the games that must be purchased separately. In today’s economy, setting up a video game systems can be a burden on a family’s pocketbook. If you are debating to purchase a game console for your children and family this Christmas, the Nintendo Wii actively encourages gamers to get up and play rather than sinking further into a sedentary lifestyle. However, playing new generation active computer games uses significantly more energy than playing sedentary computer games but not as much energy as playing the sport itself. Therefore, parents and children should use the game console as an auxiliary to whatever current physical active that they have in place for their family and themselves.

Until next time keep moving. I have next on Madden Football on the Wii. Let’s Go Panthers!!!

Reference: Physorg.com and Selfgrowth.com

Yesterday I was working with one of local high schools in the town and I made an observation. The team is predominantly female with the head coach being a female and her assistance being a male. I usually talk with both coaches after practice just to see how things are going with the team and it’s funny to hear them talk about their perception on what they think the girls need to improve upon for the team to get better. Now, both coaches are really experienced in the field of coaching basketball but their approach and methodology are different. The male coach has coached basketball for 30 plus years, with majority of the population that he has coached being males. The head coach, which is a female, is a former basketball center, who coaches female athletes majority of the time. This made me start to wonder about their language and delivery towards the girls and how the female coach gets more positive feedback from the girls and the assistant sometimes runs up against resistance when he instructs them to do different things.

Is there a possibly that there should be a different approach when coaching females? Or should females athletes be coached the same as male athletes? I asked two females for their perspective on the matter. One was an current athlete and another was a former athlete.

My findings showed that female athletes compete for different reasons than boys and require different kinds of stimuli to achieve. WITH THE POPULARITY of women’s basketball at an all-time high, hundreds of young female athletes are beginning to dream of playing professional basketball. I can remember when my little sister started put pick up the sport and how excited she was with wanting to become the best possible athlete she could be. Many times females are being coached by individuals who do not understand the many factors involved in motivating and coaching female athletes, and this can lead to much frustration and misunderstanding.

The three basic areas that must be addressed in motivating female athletes are:

camaraderie among the players and between coaches and athletes,
a positive self-perception,
and the realization that female athletes compete for different reasons than males and require different kinds of stimuli to achieve.

The girls’ coach must also understand that males look for an action oriented environment for competition, while females prefer a more meditative ambiance which explains why the two coaches approaches were totally different and one gets through to the female athletes and another is received with resistance. They want to be addressed in a friendly and respectful manner and are turned off by yelling, screaming, and the throwing of objects.

Overbearing displays of emotion create a hostile environment that could cause sensitive athletes to drop out.

Coaches who believe in yelling should do it only sparingly and should direct it at the group rather than the individual.
It’s possible that winning for winning’s sake is less important for the average female and that she is more goal-oriented than the average male. Likewise, girls are also different from boys in their need for nurturing a family-like camaraderie with teammates and coaches which explains the head coach talking about how the girls get excited about buying each other gifts for special occasions. It is important for them to feel comfortable with their teammates and coaches, and they have to be motivated to achieve.

Where male teams predicate enjoyment largely on playing time and winning, the most enjoyable kind of team for a female coach is a group of girls who get along well both on and off the court. The teams who have the best camaraderie are almost always the ones who are the most successful in terms of team unity and seasonal improvement.

Team Chemistry

The role of team chemistry has different shadings in female and male sports. Whereas it is an essential prerequisite for optimal performance in female sports, it is more a by-product of optimal performance among male teams.

Self Perception

Many female athletes tend to have lower levels of confidence than men. Their confidence depends on three things:
1. nature of the task
2. need for clear and positive feedback
3. social acceptance.

To enhance a girl’s sell-perception, coaches must make certain she is comfortable with the nature of her task. The sport she is competing in must be gender-role appropriate. She must feel comfortable in it, just as a boy would be comfortable playing football, but feel at ease playing on team.

Feedback

Females also need clear and positive feedback. Ambiguous, negative criticism will likely impair their self-perception. They are much more likely than boys to be disturbed by negative comments. They respond very well to positive feedback as well as praise and encouragement. John Wooden believes that coaches should seek out private opportunities to praise athletes who need it. Too many coaches are too willing to criticize and too reluctant to dole out much-needed compliments (quick to criticize and slow to commend). Many coaches contend that such verbal reinforcement is the key to success in coaching women.

All in all females athletes want to have fun just like their male counterparts. However, team chemistry, self perception, and feedback are areas that need to be addressed and developed in order for females to be motivated and have success in their sport.