Your health: Workout can cause muscle soreness

Workout can cause muscle soreness

Many popular workouts that aim to strengthen your arms, legs, and abs give short shrift to many of the muscles that form your body's core (the group of muscles that form the sturdy central link connecting your upper and lower body).

Strong core muscles are essential to improving performance in almost any sport — and are the secret to sidestepping debilitating back pain.

If you haven't been working your core muscles regularly — or if you challenge yourself with a new set of exercises — expect to feel a little soreness as you get used to your new routine, warns Harvard Medical School.

Extremely sore muscles a day or two after a core workout means you probably overdid it and might need to dial down your workout a bit.

Next time, try to finish just one full set of each exercise in the workout. You might also do fewer repetitions (reps) of the exercises you find especially hard.

Once you can do reps without much soreness, build strength by adding one more rep of the harder exercises in each session until you're doing the full number of reps comfortably. Then try adding a second set.

If your muscles feel really sore within 24 to 48 hours of adding a burst of core work, cut back on the number of reps.

For example, say you are doing planks, the modern alternative to pushups. Instead of trying to do four front planks a day, start with one. Stick with that for a few days, then add a second plank. When you're comfortable at that level — that is, not feeling a lot of muscle soreness — add a third plank. And so on.

If even one plank knocks you out, cut back on how long you hold it: instead of 30 seconds, try 10 seconds for several days, then try 15 or 20 seconds, and so on.

Delayed-onset muscle soreness is a normal response to working your muscles. Usually, it peaks 24 to 48 hours after a workout before gradually easing, then disappearing entirely in another day or so. But if you experience sudden, sharp, or long-lasting pain, check with your doctor.

Could diet shield you from dementia?

Scientists say they've developed an anti-Alzheimer's diet, WebMD reports..

While it couldn't prove cause-and-effect, the new study found that adults who rigorously followed the so-called MIND diet faced a 53 percent lower risk for Alzheimer's, the most common type of dementia. Those sticking to the diet just “moderately well” saw their Alzheimer's risk drop by roughly 35 percent.

“Often, people who eat healthier also participate in other healthy lifestyle behavior, but the MIND diet afforded protection (against Alzheimer's) whether or not other healthy behaviors or health conditions were present,” said study author Martha Clare Morris, a nutritional epidemiologist at the Rush University Medical Center and the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago.

The eating plan emphasizes healthy grains, vegetables, beans, poultry and fish while also allowing for a limited amount of less healthy red meat, butter and sweets.

The MIND diet combines aspects of the better-known Mediterranean diet with certain features of the so-called DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, both of which call for high consumption of fruits, vegetables, and fish.

But while the MIND diet stresses the importance of plant-based foods, green leafy vegetables and blueberries, it does not push much consumption of fruit, fish, dairy or potatoes.

One expert said he was intrigued by the findings.

“The protective impact they found is significant and substantial enough to make you do a little bit of a double-take,” said Dr. Anton Porsteinsson, director of the Alzheimer's care, research and education program at the University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York.

“With a diet like this, it seems that it's never too late to start,” Porsteinsson said. “And that's a very important message.”