Exercise Helps Arthritis

Reprinted with permission from the American Council on Exercise. Based on: Hoffman, DF Arthritis and Exercise Primary Care 20:895-9100, 1993.

From NPR’s Morning Edition

If you suffer the pain and stiffness of arthritis, you may not be enthusiastic about exercising. But arthritis specialists say that’s exactly what you need to do.

It’s advice that 65-year-old Sibyl Zaden has taken to heart. A former marathon runner and triathlete, Zaden now suffers from osteoarthritis in her shoulders and knees. “My problem is lifting my arm,” she says. “It’s very painful. I can lift it halfway and that’s it.”

Her knees hurt, too. But that doesn’t stopped Zaden from going to the gym and getting on a treadmill for 15 to 30 minutes. Her doctor, UCLA Medical Center rheumatologist Roy Altman, says more people with arthritis should follow her lead.

“The one thing that people don’t understand is that you have to do something,” Altman says. “When you don’t do anything with osteoarthritis of the knee, arthritis actually gets worse.”

Three years ago, federal health officials recommended that people with arthritis exercise moderately every day for about 20 minutes. But that’s not what’s happening.

A recent study at Northwestern University looked at activity among 1,000 adults, between 49 and 84 years old, who had osteoarthritis of the knee. Ninety percent of the people were not exercising, according to lead scientist Dorothy Dunlop.

“That means they did not participate in any moderate activity lasting at least 10 minutes at any point over the course of a week,” she says.

Even more alarming, 40 percent of men and nearly 60 percent of women were total couch potatoes, Dunlop says.

“Two-thirds of their day was being sedentary,” she says. “It was sitting — might have been sitting at the office, might have been sitting in front of television. We don’t know details of exactly what they were doing, but it was very clear that a large portion of that day was spent very close to zero” exercise.

So why is moving, and exercise, so important?

Arthritis slowly breaks down the body’s natural shock absorbers, the cartilage, that jelly-like substance between our bones and in our joints. When that happens, blood doesn’t circulate as freely and doesn’t deliver adequate nutrition to the cartilage. All the cartilage nutrition, says Altman, comes through the joint. Massaging the joint through exercise helps get the blood supply going which, in turn, helps cartilage take in nutrition.

Another big plus for exercising through arthritis pain: Muscles surround the joint, and when muscles are bigger and stronger, the joint is more protected.

By exercising, “you actually reduce the stressors on the joint itself,” Altman says. “The muscles take up the weight and take up the pressures, instead of the joint taking up the weight and the pressures.”

Exercise doesn’t reverse damage that’s already done. But it helps prevent arthritis from getting worse, and it has the added benefit of keeping excess pounds off. That can make a huge difference on the joints that support most of the body’s weight: the hips and knees.

“Six times your body weight goes through the inside of the knee,” Altman says. “If your muscles are weak, that adds direct pressure that’s not very good for the knee. If the muscles are stronger, you reduce that pressure that goes through the knee and improve the function.”

The heavier you are, the greater the pressures on both your knees and hips.

Altman says if you have arthritis and don’t exercise, it’s time to start. But begin slowly. You need exercises like walking to build endurance, and Pilates or yoga to build strength.

 

Hear The Full Story HERE

The Role Of Exercise In Arthritis Management on Johns Hopkins ArthritisCenter.org

For more information on Fitness Together’s customized fitness programs for individuals and groups, and to find a Fitness Together studio near you, go to FTGetsResults.com

 

Get Your Reluctant Spouse Fit without Endangering Your Health

by Martha Hicks Leta

My mother had a saying, “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.” After 20 years of marriage, I’ve come up with my own version of that: “Never try to get your spouse to exercise. It wastes your time and might land you in prison.”

Convincing a spouse to change his or her unhealthy habits can be daunting; you’d sooner convince Kim Kardashian to show up at a red carpet event wearing dirty overalls and Crocs. People become overweight and unhealthy from a lifetime of bad habits that, to them at least, feels “normal” and anyone who advises change is suspect, including doctors and family members. Most people find change is scary, uncomfortable, or at the very least, inconvenient, and will do all in their power to make anyone suggesting it go away. And really, who listens to family members anyway?

I know my husband doesn’t. Despite the fact that he’s one of those rare people blessed with the metabolism of a caffeinated hummingbird, there came a point when poor diet and lack of exercise was starting to wear on him. He was carrying a lot of stress from working too hard and eating poorly on the road and he couldn’t sleep. He went to bed grumpy. He got up grumpy. He made me grumpy. He made the dog grumpy. Soon I remembered something from my childhood: Grumpy is my least favorite dwarf.

I tried everything. I’d buy him gym passes and watch them expire with one or two uses. (That’s, like, $250 per session!) I bought him a punch card and finally ended up using it myself. Then there was the week he promised to come to the gym after I got the kids off to school, but I had to get him out of bed. On the fourth day he threw holy water at me and grumbled something like “Be gone, Succubus” and so I figured that for the sake of our marriage, I should try another tactic. And so I Googled.

The US Department of Health and Human Services has lots of useful hints for encouraging spouses to exercise. They have a list of “Suggested activities you can do together” like taking a nice walk after dinner or doing sit-ups together while watching CSPAN. They say that squealing encouragement and praise is a good idea, like “You did awesome today, honey! Who is my big man? Who’s my BIG MAN?!?” (Yeah, not going to happen.) I thought about leaving him on a deserted stretch of road with no cell phone or credit cards–you know, for the exercise–but since I wasn’t up for sleeping with a loaded Glock under my pillow, I pretty much gave up.

And then a miracle happened. My husband makes TV commercials for a living and a personal training business called and wanted to do a series of ads. The campaign featured testimonials from clients who, like my husband, had not previously been successful at exercising regularly. They found that Fitness Together worked for them, largely because of the accountability factor. You schedule an appointment with a trainer and you actually have to show up for it. The trainers customize your program for your level of fitness and they keep changing it as your fitness level improves. My husband signed up for his first appointment four years ago and he’s been going ever since. At his last physical the doctor looked at his blood work and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” (High praise, indeed, but Doc, you should really be looking at my bloodwork, which is largely absent of the triglycerides and pharmaceuticals that would otherwise be packed in there chunky-style had we not exorcised Mr. Grumpy four years ago.)

Whether you use Fitness Together or another personal trainer, (See my article for the Hingham Patch “Your Workout Isn’t Working? It’s Time to Get Personal“) this is the way to go if you’re serious about helping your spouse get fit. Fitness Together has recently added a new program called, PACK Training, which sounds really intimidating, but it’s actually just personal training in small groups of two to four people. It’s about half the cost of 1-to-1 training, but with the same level of personal attention and best of all there’s the social aspect, so Guess Who has a new group of friends? My husband! Now guess who gets to be married to a cheerful guy with a flat stomach and rippling biceps. I’ll give you a hint: It’s not Kim Kardashian.

For the holidays, Fitness Together is running some great specials on PACK training, 1-to-1 and those great gift cards for your Spouse, or your other special someones. So be sure to give them a call for more details. In Cohasset call 781-383-8004. In Norwell call 781-659-0034. In Hingham call 781-749-2511.

For links and contact information to all our Northern New England FT Studios go to FTGetsResults.com

How Golfing Led To Amputation: Dr. Donald Pelto, DPM

DR DONALD PELTO, DPM, is a member of the New England Amputee Association and specializes specializes in the medical and surgical treatment of all conditions of the foot. Dr. Pelto completed the three-year reconstructive foot and ankle surgical residency program at St. Vincent Hospital. He is trained in the latest surgical advances with a special interest in all aspects of diabetic foot care. It’s important for diabetics to seek help for chronic foot conditions in order to avoid any long-term complications, especially those that may lead to amputation. Early detection and prompt treatment can keep a small problem from developing into a serious one.

Central Massachusetts Podiatry

At Fitness Together, we know exercise is a cornerstone of diabetes management, along with dietary and pharmacological interventions. Today, both the ADA and NASM (National Association of Sports Medicine) recommend that patients with type 2 diabetes perform at least 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise and should perform resistance exercise 3 times per week. “Diabetes is a major health issue affecting more than 24 million Americans, and our franchisees have told us they are happy to have a chance to make a difference,” says Jeff Jervik, president and CEO of Fitness Together Holdings, Inc.

To find out more about FT’s individualized programs for diabetics, please contact your local Fitness Together Studios at FTGetsResults.com

Join us on facebook at facebook.com/FTGetsResults

Diabetes & Dementia?

By CARRIE GANN (@carrie_gann) clipped from the ABC News Medical Unit

To View The ABC Broadcast click on the video

People with diabetes may be at an increased risk of developing dementia, a new study finds.

Scientists have suspected the link between the two diseases for several years, but several experts say this latest study highlights how treating preventable diseases like diabetes and obesity may be useful in preventing the onset of dementia.

“Our findings emphasize the need to consider diabetes as a potential risk factor for dementia,” said study author Dr. Yutaka Kiyohara, of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. “Diabetes is a common disorder, and the number of people with it has been growing in recent years all over the world. Controlling diabetes is now more important than ever.”

Researchers began studying residents of the town of Hisayama, Japan, in 1961, monitoring the numbers of people who got cardiovascular diseases. In 1985, they began measuring the numbers of people who developed dementia. The researchers followed more than 1,000 people for an average of 11 years.

They found that 27 percent of the people with diabetes developed dementia, compared with 21 percent of people without diabetes.

The study was published in the latest issue of the journal, Neurology.

Dr. Richard Caselli, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, said the connection isn’t particularly new, but its implications for the importance of treating diabetes are.

“Nobody doubts that diabetes is associated with a higher incidence of dementia,” Caselli said. “But this is one more reason for people to be aware of the potential ravages of diabetes and to treat it aggressively and adequately and try to prevent consequences.”

According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), 25.8 million adults and children have diabetes in the United States, creating $174 billion in health care costs. And 79 million more Americans are prediabetic. Add those numbers to the $183 billion it costs to care for the 5.4 million Americans who have Alzheimer’s disease, and it’s not hard to see how doctors are interested in any connection between the two conditions.

“Given how common diabetes is, we would expect that the economic implications would be tremendous, if it was linked to dementia,” said Dr. Zoe Arvanitakis, a neurologist at Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago.

Diabetes has been known to put people at risk for strokes, which can lead to a type of dementia called vascular dementia, in which damage to the brain’s blood vessels deprive it of the oxygen it needs to function. But there is also increasing evidence that all types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, may be linked to how the brain responds to insulin, the hormone connected with diabetes.

“There is some evidence that the brain is very sensitive to fuels like sugar and hormones like insulin,” said Dr. Joel Zonszein, a professor of clinical medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “How exactly it happens is really speculation, we really don’t know.”

A recent study showed that an insulin-based nasal spray was effective against the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Although the specifics of the connection between diabetes and dementia are still a little fuzzy, scientists say their current emphasis is on the importance of prevention.

However, Dr. Michael Perskin, chief of geriatrics at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, said preventing more cases of diabetes doesn’t necessarily mean that the numbers of people with dementia will dwindle.

“If people aren’t dying of strokes and heart attacks, they’re living longer and are more likely to get dementia,” Perskin said. “If you do a good job of treating cardiovascular symptoms, of course you’re going to see more dementia.”

Fitness Together & Diabetes

Fitness Together has finished a study with individuals who were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. This observational study was conducted by area Fitness Together studios to examine the impact of a 26-week individualized fitness training program. Exercise, it has been found, is as important as regular blood glucose tests in measuring safe success. “Diabetes is a major health issue affecting more than 24 million Americans, and our franchisees have told us they are happy to have a chance to make a difference,” says Jeff Jervik, president and CEO of Fitness Together Holdings, Inc.

To find out more about FT’s individualized programs for diabetics, please contact your local Fitness Together Studios at FTGetsResults.com

 

ACT NOW: Free Week Of Sessions For Diabetes Awareness Month

As the ADA notes on their website: With nearly 26 million children and adults in American living with diabetes, and another 79 million at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes, the disease is taking a devastating physical, emotional and financial toll on our country.  Yet, most Americans don’t consider diabetes a serious matter. They feel it is someone else’s responsibility; someone else’s problem.

Recent numbers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paint a desperate situation of where we are at, and where we are headed:

• Every 17 seconds, someone is diagnosed with diabetes.
• Diabetes kills more people each year than breast cancer and AIDS combined.
• Recent estimates project that as many as 1 in 3 American adults will have diabetes in 2050 unless we take steps to Stop Diabetes.

Now is the time to act.

Become Involved in American Diabetes Month® 2011

Fitness Together Dedham, Cohasset, Norwell & Westborough want you to ACT NOW. If you suffer from diabetes you can get a FREE week of small group training in the month of November for you and a friend at any one of our four studios.

FT Dedham

FT Cohasset

FT Norwell

FT Westborough

More On PACK Training from FT Middleton

(FT Middleton created this great video to explain how PACK Training works, but they are not part of our Become Involved Free Sessions. They may be running other specials, so please contact them directly at FT Middleton.)

To find an FT Studio near you and find out more about their individualized and small group Fitness programs please go to FTGetsResults.com

Ken Ballou: Too Fit To Fail

Ken Ballou: On His Way

By Martha Hicks Leta and Greg Briggle

Trainers hear excuses all the time and if pushed will eventually pose the question to evasive clients, “What fits your schedule better, exercising one hour a day or being dead 24 hours a day?”

Ask a guy who’s stared into the gaping maw of his own mortality, and he’ll tell you for sure, exercising. Definitely exercising.

Ken Ballou is the kind of guy you could miss in a crowd. Unassuming, average height, average build, he’s not the sort to come up and start telling you his life story. But if you ask him why he works out at Fitness Together in Westford, you’d better pull up a chair.

For most of his adult years, Ken was not the sort to embrace physical fitness in any form.  “As far as I was concerned ‘exercise’ was just two four-letter words made into one big, bad eight-letter word,” he says.

The sorry state of his health showed it. At 255 lbs, he had type 2 diabetes, hypertension and couldn’t get through the afternoon without falling asleep at his desk. He’d go home and sleep 12-14 hours and still feel tired.

But that wasn’t enough to get him to make the necessary changes. “The idea of working out on my own was laughable,” says Ken.

Finally, Ken’s doctor said he was running out of options. If he didn’t do something drastic he was looking at a future of declining health and insulin injections, which Ken dearly wanted to avoid. And then a co-worker convinced him to try the one-on-one personal training program at Fitness Together.

Trainer Greg Briggle wasn’t expecting much when he first met Ken, but it didn’t take long for him to be impressed by his new client’s tenacity. “Ken’s one of the toughtest people I’ve ever been around,” says Greg.

Ken was equally impressed by the program at Fitness Together. He says he never once questioned the expense. “The value of 45 minutes a day of a training program designed just for me by experts of this caliber? You can’t put a price on it. These are people who really know their stuff, and I know the trainers put time into preparing my program for each and every appointment.”

Since committing to his four-days-a-week FT program, Ken has lost 57 lbs., lowered his glucose levels into a healthy zone and has been able to cut back on or eliminate some of the medications he once relied on to keep him alive. But that was just the beginning of his journey.

Last Christmas Ken was behind the wheel when he collided with the business end of a large deer, totaling his car. He was left with a severely broken wrist that required surgery, something that would have been much riskier had Ken not taken care of his diabetes.

Despite his injuries, he kept up with his fitness program and his trainer was, once again, very impressed. “Ken was unable to put any load on that wrist, meaning no weight-bearing workouts,” says Briggle. “Ken could have easily stopped his training, but he wouldn’t hear of it.  He never complained, he never quit, he never canceled and he trained hard every single day doing whatever his trainers asked of him.”

As it turned out, Ken’s decision to keep up with his program may have been the difference between surviving or succumbing to the next major event that awaited him.

As Ken describes it, he was in the middle of a fairly typical workout when he realized something was very wrong. He became short of breath, had pains in his lungs and became very light-headed.  Fortunately, his trainer realized it too and called 911. When Ken awoke in the hospital he was told he’d survived a major episode, one that had nothing to do with diabetes but rather a blood clot that had traveled to his lungs: a pulmonary embolism. The same thing had killed his mother at the age of 32, and, as it turned out, Ken carried a genetic permutation that made him susceptible.

When Briggle showed up at the hospital to check on his friend, he was greeted unexpectedly by Ken’s nurse: “So you’re the guy who saved Ken’s life.”

Greg was baffled. “The nurse left and I asked Ken what she meant. He began to tell me how the doctor said there was no doubt that his workouts saved his life.”

Briggle’s not likely to take credit—he says it’s all Ken. “Ken gives us every ounce of energy he has every time he walks through the door. Were some days hard? Of course they were. Did he want to cancel sometimes? No doubt. But he showed up anyway. And it paid off. It saved his life.”

Ken says the experience changed his perspective. “Now I look at training differently. Now it’s not just the diabetes. I don’t know if I could have another episode like that and I need a strong heart to get through it. Now I say, ‘Train as though your life depends on it.’”

While Ballou credits his Fitness Together trainers with saving him, the benefit has obviously been mutual.

Says Briggle, “The odds of this happening to anyone are probably pretty slim but I know I’m training just a little bit harder and when it gets too tough, I think about Ken and I push on.”

To learn more about one-on-one and small group training at Fitness Together in your area go to FTGetsResults.com.

For FT Westford, contact Greg Briggle at 978-392-5800.

______________
Greg Briggle
Owner Fitness Together Westford

Greg Briggle is the proud owner of FT Westford as well as a Certified Fitness Coach. He has been a certified personal trainer since 2002 through the ISSA (International Sports Sciences Association). The ISSA is recognized world wide as a leader in sports and fitness certifications. Other certifications include Specialist in Performance Nutrition and Endurance Fitness Trainer. In the past he trained at Golds Gyms specializing in training competitive bodybuilders teaching about diet, weight training and posing. He is also a former competitive natural bodybuilder winning several titles. Outside of the gym he enjoys spending time with his wife Dreana who he has been married to for the past 14 yrs and their dog Coco. They spend some of their free time together traveling to the Caribbean and scuba diving. (The dog, though, stays home, Greg says.). They also enjoy watching and participating in any sport and generally staying active. “Our Westford trainers,” he told us, “and I have a passion for fitness and helping people achieve their goals. We genuinely share their joy when they tell us we have helped them change their lives. Our mission is to help you change yours. I look forward to meeting our next client, perhaps that’s you?”