Short and sweet, here’s some news you can use from the editors at Men’s Health:
-Reserachers from the University of Pennsylvania found that folks who took 1800 mg of red yeast rice supplements twice a day for 6 mos. saw their LDL cholsterol drop 21 %!! That’s about the same effectiveness of statins –without the muscle soreness those drugs caused my mom and a lot of other folks.
-More research on the subject of sleep…the more you sleep, the more you increase your speed, reflexes, and power. Studies were done on tennis players, runners, swimmers, basketball, soccer and football players. Moral: treat sleep as part of your training.
-Caffeine has now been shown to be as effective as an inhaler at reducing symptoms of exercise induced asthma. Go figure. So grab yourself a cappuccino, will ya? (nonfat, extra foam!) Before you get too excited tho, the test subjects actually took in 5-6 cups o’ joe, but supposedly you can get the effects with half as much. Still seems like a lot, tho…
-Expressing anger can increase your muscle force by 25%…so go ahead, get fired up! Slap your workout partner around. Tell him he’s a wuss, or her. Venting is good. Keep it in and you get left behind. Literally.
-If you have high blood pressure, you might think twice about exercising at dawn since arteries are less able to widen for increased blood flow early in the morning.
-Eating refined carbs hinders blood flow for about two hours after consumption according to a recent study. Not good.
-Green tea continues its ascent into sainthood….now it appears it may help slow prostate-cancer progression. Black tea doesn’t provide the same benefits. (Dr. Oz loves green tea…it’s one of his top 25 health for life recommendations.)
Happy Wednesday. Stay STRONG!!