Periods of rest are highly active phases for body build-up You probably urge yourself as often as your coach does to take a rest? You can hardly stand the breaks and tend to carry on training again much too early, and you have a bad conscience when you are not training? How are we supposed to judge our needs of the own period of recovery in a reliable way? Or put it another way: which criteria should you choose in order to make the decision to take a rest both rationally and with a good conscience? Even though science has tried to define parameters or body conditions such as heavy legs syndrome or heart rate the decision to get on is in the end primarily made by feel.

Since the racing season is in full swing I hear from many athletes that they suffered from exercise-associated muscle cramping (EAMC) during the race, be it on the bike or in the swim, but first of all on the run or beyond the finish line. It became an unquestioned state-of the-art approach to relate cramps to dehydration and a salt deficit. But if you measure the electrolyte levels of these individual you will rarely find a deterioration of electrolytes. If this were the case, cramping would be a generalized phenomenon that would affect muscles that are not necessarily under strain during the respective work-out.

Many thanks for the participation in our survey about pollen allergy. Your responses correlate with the prevalence mentioned in the respective literature. One third of all adults suffer from a pollen allergy with an upward trend. Among 288 persons who took part in this survey we counted 246 (85%) with an acute pollen allergy. More than one third of all allergic persons are unhappy with their treatment, this figure in fact applies to our survey as well. Only 60 people (24%) are happy with their treatment and experience an improvement of symptoms. 76% of those replying are searching for other treatment options.

Since several weeks the gastrointestinal infection with enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) is unsettling Germany and other European countries. I don't want to add more of the same to the pulp of words and breaking news on air every day. Opinions and propositions from experts of various kinds use this microorganism to follow their agendas, and irritate us, the so-called public. Currents of medical, epidemiological, microbiological, demographic, political etc. discourses coalesce and turned into a dirty flood overwhelming us.