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

Majority of you reading this probably are wondering what is the Creature from Jekyll Island about. Well, yesterday while preparing for my speed camp, I was reading an article entitled The Creature from Jekyll Island, and I thought that since I had posted yesterday about the benefits of sports participation for females, why not talk about some of the injuries that most females sustain from playing sports. Jekyll Island is a real island located off of New York. It was a private island, it was a resort club, it was where the families of the very, very, very wealthy went to escape the cold winter months of New York. There you will find documents where a very small group of billionaires from New York met to establish what we now call the Federal Reserve Bank. But enough about the real Jekyll Island, I thought it would be cool to name this entry The Creature from Jekyll Island. Jekyll and Hyde is a portrayal of a split personality, split in the sense that within the same person there is both an apparently good and an evil personality each being quite distinct from each other; in mainstream culture the very phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” has come to mean a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next. So I thought since yesterday I posted about the “Hyde” or benefits of participation of females in sports, it would be rightfully deserving to post about the “Jekyll” or injuries that most females are susceptible to while participating in sports.

Female high school sports has increased 900% which equates to female participation doubling every 10 years. As stated in yesterday’s blog post the benefits for female participation are numerous. Some of those benefits are:

female athletes are less likely to:

• Be in abusive relationships
• Teen pregnancy
• Chemical use
• Obesity
• Cardiovascular risks
• Develop breast cancer

however, females who participate in sport are more likely to:

• Finish high school
• Enroll in college
• Have an increase in self confidence
• Have better bone density
• More positive body image
• Learn and implement goal setting skills
• and develop team work capabilities

As discussed in a previous blog post, female athletes are more likely to injure their knees than male athletes. They are 2 to 8 times more likely to sustain an ACL injury. They are 2.5 times more likely to go down with a MCL/ LCL injury. And they are twice as likely to sustain a menisci injury. The mechanisms that causes these types of knee injuries are usually non-contact in nature. They usually come from females trying to change direction or cut on a surface, decelerate, or land from a jump.

Training programs should be designed to include prehabilitation components within it.
Within the program exercises should include:
• Stretching
• Plyometric type of exercises (type of exercise training designed to produce fast, powerful movements, and improve the functions of the nervous system, generally for the purpose of improving performance in a specific sport),
• Proprioceptive balancing exercises (the term proprioception refers to a sense of joint position. Proprioceptive training is highly common in rehabilitation of injured athletes, but it can just as easily be used to prevent injury),
• Strengthening
• Flexibility
• Incorporate some hamstring activation type of exercises
• Landing drills with the emphasis on landing on the ball of the toes
• and Deceleration training

Concussions and cervical neck strains are injuries that females sustain while playing sports with soccer having the most incidents reported. Majority of the concussions appear to be from head to head collusion with other female soccer players. At the same rate, more females are suffering worst from post concussion syndrome. Post concussion syndrome or PCS, is a set of symptoms that a person may experience for weeks.
Symptoms include:
• Dizziness
• Lethargy
• Decrease concentration
• Poor sleep
• Decrease appetite
• and Memory deficits

Some girls who play sports or exercise intensely are at risk for a problem called female athlete triad (FAT). Female athlete triad is a combination of three conditions: disordered eating, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis. Amenorrrhea is the absence of menstrual period for more than 3 months. A female athlete can have one, two, or all three parts of the triad. In 2007 the American College of Sports Medicine redefined FAT as recognizing the relationships among energy availability, menstrual function and bone mineral density, which may manifest into eating disorders, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis in at-risk female athletes. Triad disorders are thought to be most common among female athletes in sports or activities which emphasize a lean physique or low body weight, such as gymnastics, swimming, or track and field.

Our last group of injuries are shoulder and foot related. Generally females have more joint laxity than males which predispose them to injuries of the shoulder joint. At the same rate, females are 9 times more likely to develop foot disorders from playing sports. The main culprit for foot injuries and disorders are improper fitting of the shoes.

Some of these disorders are:
• Metatarsalgia-general term used to refer to any painful foot condition affecting the metatarsal region of the foot. This is a common problem that can affect the joints and bones of the metatarsals.
• Bunions
Hammertoe-twisting of the toes that are caused by high heels, narrow shoes and wearing improper shoes
• Neuromas-refers to any swelling of a nerve

In conclusion the rate of female participation is outpacing males. Injuries sustained by female athletes are unique in that they are intrinsic and extrinsic in nature. The ultimate goal is to empower female athletes, promote musculoskeletal health, and facilitate a lifelong participation way after their high school and collegiate careers are over.

Reference:
www.naot.org