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A Pitcher of Health: Injury Prevention in Little League
Spring heralds the start of the baseball season—or is it the other way around? Either way, the diamonds are filling up with millions of little leaguers as the new season starts after a long winter. These first few weeks are of particular import because of the new strains on young athletes after the off-season. Little League injuries can be as stressful for parents as they are for their children, so we’d like to offer some background as well as a few tips on how to prevent injury in one of the most injury-prone positions on any baseball team: The pitcher.
So Cool: Skiing, Snowboarding and Safety
Feel that chill? For some, fall is just a precursor to the joys of winding down the slopes on the opening weekend of their favorite ski resort. That’s why getting the most out of a quick trip to the mountains means getting prepared now through exercise and the proper equipment. Read more…
Fall’s Well that Ends Well: Prepping for Winter’s Workouts
The muggy heat of summer is not over yet, but if you’ve taken full advantage of the outdoors this year you might be feeling a season’s worth of activity starting to take its toll. You may not know this, but normal wear and tear is what helps build muscle and strengthen our tendons and ligaments. After a long summer of pick-up games and outdoor pursuits, now may be the time to take a moment to relax, both physically and mentally. Read more…
Outlasting the Aging Process: Strategies for Long-Term Knee Health
Advances in orthopedic medicine, sports sciences, and physical therapy have allowed for sustained, active lifestyles that only keep us healthier and heartier as we swim, bike, volley and swing our way into retirement. In particular, there has never been a better time for knees.
Keeping your knees healthy begins with maintaining motion and strength through regular exercise. The catch-22, however, is that the more we exercise, the more wear and tear builds up, leading to arthritis. Read more…
Shouldering the Burden: The Other Tennis Elbow
Tennis season is undeniably underway for those of us who dust off our rackets when the weather hits 75 degrees. We’ve all heard of tennis elbow, but the muscles and tendons of the shoulder are just as susceptible to inflammation and pain as the elbow. Even if it’s just a light rally with a friend, your swings make repeated demands on the tissue in your shoulder and can cause injury through overuse; the result: tendinitis.
The two most common shoulder injuries for tennis players are tendinitis and bursitis. Bursitis affects the tiny fluid-filled bursa that provides a cushion between the bones and tendons around a joint. Tendinitis is a result of inflammation and damage to the tendons. Read more…
The Life-Extending Benefits of Exercise
During the past half-century, tremendous research has focused on understanding the causes of age-related declines and the reversing effects of exercise. Researchers suggest that about a third of the negative effects of aging is due to genetics; the remaining 60 to 70 percent is dictated by behavior. An important example is the fact that up to 75 percent of heart attacks and strokes are caused by a sedentary lifestyle: in other words, exercise can lower that risk by 75 per cent!!
The physiological factors most responsible for our bodies deterioration are: decreased blood supply to cells (example: high blood pressure), higher blood sugar levels (example: diabetes), and cumulative free radical damage (example: cell damage due to smoking). The amazing fact is that exercise affects all of these factors in a positive way. Read more…
Hamstring Injuries
If you have ever pulled one, you need to read this; even if you haven’t, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Lower extremity muscle strains are a very common injury in an active population.
Acute trauma that causes a muscle to tear can occur during activities like sprinting. That is not always the inciting agent. For those of you who like to do repetitive activities like running, overuse strains of the hamstrings also occur. Repetitive loading to a muscle can over time cause tissue to fail and cause the feeling of muscle tightness, pain and disability even with activities like sitting in the chair. Some people even think that it might feel like so called sciatic pain because it can radiate down the leg. Read more…
It’s All in the Swing: Preventing Tennis & Golfer’s Elbow
In our last newsletter, we talked about the range of outdoor activities that spring’s warm weather affords. A bad case of tennis or golfer’s elbow, however, can seriously dampen the enjoyment in a round on the course or a friendly rally on the court.
Tennis elbow is the result of micro-tears to the tendon that originates from the bony prominence on the outside of the elbow, known as the lateral epicondyle. Tennis elbow, or lateral epicondylitis, affects 1% to 3% of the population as a whole, but gets its name from the fact that it affects almost half of all tennis players at some point in time.
Golfer’s elbow is similar, but its discomfort is due to microtears affecting the tendon located at the inside of the elbow. Golfer’s elbow, also known as medial epicondylitis, affects mostly golfers, but weight lifting, gardening, or other activities that strain this part of the elbow can cause this condition in non-golfers alike.
3 Simple Rules to Get Fit and Avoid Injury This Spring
The warmth of spring is upon us, and once again it’s time to start gearing up for a refreshing change to the winter routines that have kept us cooped up with muscles creaking. But even if you managed to remain active through trips to the gym, the prospect of getting outside and in the sun offers a range of new exercises that require preparation and training. You may ask, “if I have maintained my exercises, why would I need any extra preparation?” The answer is that it’s specifically at the start of these new exercises that your body is most prone to injury.
Fats, Good Fats & Nothing but Good Fats
How to Reduce Recovery Time and Promote Healing Through Food
-By Lauren Antonucci, MS, RD, CSSD, CDE, CDN
Registered Dietitian, Board Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics
Marathoner, Ironman triathlete and Founding Director of Nutrition Energy, NYCYou may already know that the American Heart Association recommends eating fish, particularly fatty fish, at least two times per week (3.5oz per serving) due to their high content of omega-3 fatty acids, which are known to help reduce triglyceride levels and heart disease.
But did you also know that those same omega-3 fatty acids help to reduce inflammation in our bodies, and are therefore also extremely beneficial to athletes recovering from strenuous workouts and individuals recovering from injury or surgery? Increased blood concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids are associated with decreased levels of IL-6 (interleukin-6), a marker of inflammation in the body as well as TNF-alpha (tumor necrosis factor alpha). Those same individuals were also found to have higher levels of anti-inflammatory markers soluble IL-6r and IL-10 (tumor growth factor beta), which is a good thing for not only heart disease prevention, but also for muscle recovery! Research has also shown that omega-3 fatty acids have the power to increase blood flow by up to 36% during exercise, and decrease complaints such as muscle soreness, joint pain and swollen joints. Read more…
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