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.
Hard training and racing too much may stress the body in a way that disease symptoms suddenly reappear, part 1/2
Performing great and peaking at the right time – that does not only apply to sports – has a lot to do with finding and keeping your body in balance.
As an athlete you are constantly challenging your very own balance. At this point, I would like to mention that one’s balance is something individual, that parameters that define your balance cannot be simply passed on to someone else. The other may have a distinct pattern of parameters from you signifying wellbeing and balance. Balance is an active process, a condition that needs to be reestablished everyday, if you train and push your limits. This can eventually be a tricky thing to do.
Would you get enough magnesium? Studies suggest diabetes risk may fall as magnesium intake increases
Biestmilch proudly presents its first guest author Anna Sophie Bernstein.
Her publication gives an interesting approach to the intake and effects of magnesium. Obviously magnesium can dampen inflammatory processes, and thus lower the risk of developing diabetes type 2. As I see it, it is probably not magnesium alone, but a combination of factors that leads to the antiinflamatory impact of this ion. Nevertheless, Sophie makes a good point and magnesium has to be seen as a player in the endless game of preventing diseases.
Myocarditis is one of major threats to the heart of an endurance athlete
If we consider how long a heart is able to beat without taking a break, this muscle can be called robust without any doubt. But during a life time this muscle is exposed to many risk factors beside the fact that congenital defects of different extent may play a crucial role in initiating cardiac issues sooner or later in life. Basically, a good life style of which physical activity is one pillar, is strengthening and securing your heart's condition, but if the muscle is stressed too much and you overlook the early symptoms of overreaching, then the consequences may be serious or even lethal. The following chapter is meant to give an idea about the heart's robustness on the one hand, and its fragility on the other.
But how are they linked?
Everybody who has experienced sickness knows the feeling of being ill and not feeling well that may come along with indisposition, fatigue, lassitude, headache, drowsiness, shiver, muscle and limb pain, lack of motivation, loss of appetite as well as sleeping disorders. Also those among you who pushed their training too hard or have been on the edge to overtraining know these symptoms.
I think that especially the very early signs of overtraining – when overreaching turns into overtraining – are very easily overlooked. We tend to do more, if our performance level drops. We often prematurely draw the conclusion that we did not train enough. But if our "diagnosis" is wrong than more intensive training sessions can very quickly bring about heavy legs during exercise ...
... or a more closer look on the other side of the coin
Isn't it amazing how science and its view on the body changes over the years, decades and centuries. Just to give you some examples: Neurones and nerve tissue were considered to be without any potential for regeneration, the muscle cell was coined as a cell without abilities to multiply and adapt, and adipose tissue still has got this negative flavor of being a burden (aesthetic view) and health hazard (medicinal view) only. Fashion on the one hand and medicine on the other hand stand for these extreme positions.
To get an insight into the process of recovery it is necessary to go a little bit into the physiology of muscle adaptation by training. There have been days when we were not having microscopes giving us a view on the micro-texture of this marvelous tissue. Back then people thought the muscle is not able adapt or recover. We had a similar idea about the muscle as we had not very long ago about neurones, either proved to be wrong!