GetFit.com.au

Years of living with Cushing's syndrome, a hormonal disorder, had caused Kari Hyer's muscles and bones to weaken. After undergoing surgery to treat the condition, she needed to rebuild her strength but weight machines "felt horrible," says Hyer, who lives in Gwynedd Valley, Pa., outside of Philadelphia.

So she began doing yoga and Pilates, both of which helped. But she credits Gyrotonics — billed as a combination of gymnastics, ballet, swimming and yoga that simultaneously stretches and strengthens the body — with really turning things around.

"Even though I was weak, I could move," says Hyer, 46. "It felt graceful." Her spine, once rounded, is now almost straight again, and her muscles are stronger.

Like Hyer, a growing number of people are going "Gyro." In the last five years, the worldwide number of studios and gyms offering it has increased from 300 to more than 1,200, including almost 700 in the United States, according to Gyrotonic International Headquarters, a company in Dingmans Ferry, Pa., that certifies instructors and sells equipment. And a new industry survey by the IDEA Health and Fitness Association identified Gyrotonics as one of the hottest up and coming fitness trends.

Kathie Davis, executive director of IDEA, says Gyrotonics is now "similar to Pilates five years ago." With Pilates and yoga classes leveling off, she says, those who take these classes may be looking for something new and likely to try Gyro. "People are always interested in the newest, the latest," Davis says. "They just always want to keep it fresh."

Matt Aversa, vice president of Gyrotonic International, attributes the growing interest to the overall popularity of mind-body fitness, including yoga and Pilates, and the news that celebrities like Madonna, Liv Tyler and Julianne Moore and even some professional athletes such as golfer Mark Wilson and baseball player Steve Finley are fans.

'Moving meditation'
While Gyrotonics has been gaining momentum in recent years, it's actually been around since the 1980s, when it was developed by Romanian-born ballet dancer Juliu Horvath after he suffered a career-ending injury and began searching for new ways for dancers to improve their technique.

Gyro involves leg extensions, arm circles, spinal twists and other exercises that engage multiple body parts, explains instructor Barbara Schwarz, owner of Gyrotonic L.A. in Santa Monica, Calif. Many of the exercises use a unique tower with cables, pulleys and weight plates.

"It's similar to Pilates only in the respect that it teaches you to work the core," Schwarz says. Whereas Pilates is more linear, Gyrotonics is spherical, with the equipment allowing for a 360-degree range of motion.

Schwarz calls Gyrotonics a "moving meditation." It's not a typical cardio workout, but you can get your heart pumping if the moves are done quickly, and one after the other, she says.

In addition to the Gyrotonic tower, there are other pieces of equipment such as the ladder and the jumping-stretching board, and a form called Gyrokinesis, a mat class that requires no equipment. Prices for one-on-one sessions usually start at around $60 an hour and go up.

While Pilates and yoga fans account for many Gyrotonic clients, Schwarz trains people ranging from high-school cheerleaders wanting to improve their moves, to golfers and baseball players seeking to better their game, to an 86-year-old woman trying to keep her joints from stiffening up.

One client, Diana Osborne, 57, of Inglewood, Calif., recently started taking sessions to keep her bones strong as she ages. "I don't want to take hormone replacement therapy," she says.

Easy on the joints
Juergen Bamberger, a Gyrotonics instructor in New York City, says Gyro is starting to gain a following among physical therapists looking for new ways to rehabilitate injured knees and hips and bad backs. It helps by strengthening injured areas with less direct pressure than standard weight machines, he says.

People who take Gyrotonic sessions, especially those with injuries, should be sure the instructor is properly trained, he notes. (For a listing of certified instructors, go to gyrotonic.com.)

Anna Tallman, 37, of Chicago has been doing Gyrotonics once or twice a week for the last year and a half, working on both the tower and the ladder. A big benefit is that her back isn't so stiff anymore.
"Gyrotonics has helped me tremendously with my flexibility and back," she says, "and also with strength and balance."

But the psychological benefits are a key reason she keeps doing it.

"In a one-hour session I work every aspect of my body and come out of it with a really great sense of well-being," Tallman says. "It's addictive cause you feel so good afterward

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

Posted by Dean at 12:05 PM | Permalink

LONDON - The standard measure of obesity known as body mass index, or BMI, is badly flawed and a more accurate gauge should be developed, according to doctors in the United States.

Writing in Friday’s Lancet medical journal, the researchers from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minn., found that patients with a low BMI had a higher risk of death from heart disease than those with normal BMI.

At the same time overweight patients had better survival rates and fewer heart problems than those with a normal BMI

This apparently perverse result, drawn from data from 40 studies covering 250,000 people with heart disease, did not suggest that obesity was not a health threat but rather that the 100-year-old BMI test was too blunt an instrument to be trusted.

“Rather than proving that obesity is harmless, our data suggests that alternative methods might be needed to better characterize individuals who truly have excess body fat compared with those in whom BMI is raised because of preserved muscle mass,” said lead researcher Francisco Lopez-Jiminez.

300,000 die of obesity each year in U.S.
About 30,000 people in Britain die due to obesity every year and 300,000 in the United States where the condition is now thought to have overtaken smoking as the main cause of preventable death.

Body Mass Index, invented by Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet between 1830 and 1850, is a measure of body fat calculated from height and weight.

A figure of less than 18.5 is considered underweight, while from 18.5 to 24.9 is normal, 25 to 29.9 is overweight and anything over 30 is categorized as obese.

Intended as a broad indicator of general health, it has become a standard diagnostic tool of heart disease risk.

Waist-to-hip measure better predictor
Maria Grazia Franzosi from the Instituto Mario Negri in Milan, writing in the same issue of the Lancet, noted that a 52-country study comparing four different tests — BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, waist measure and hip measure — found that waist-to-hip was the best predictor of heart attack risk.

“BMI can definitely be left aside as a clinical and epidemiological measure of cardiovascular risk,” she said.

“Uncertainty about the best index of obesity should not translate into uncertainty about the need for prevention policy against excess bodyweight,” she cautioned

REUTERS

Posted by Dean at 12:02 PM | Permalink

Many conservative methods used to treat work-related complaints of the upper body have only limited effectiveness, according to an updated systematic review by Arianne Verhagen, Ph.D., and her colleagues in the Netherlands. Exercise, however, emerged as "a very good thing to do," she said.

Yet, "conservative interventions such as physiotherapy and ergonomic adjustments play a major role in the treatment of most work-related complaints of the arm, neck or shoulder," said Verhagen, a physical therapist and epidemiologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam.

As for expensive ergonomic equipment like special keyboards and office furniture, little scientific evidence currently exists to support their use.

The review appears in the current issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates research in all aspects of health care. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing trials on a topic.

Verhagen updated a review published in 2003, which had included 15 trials. She added six new trials for a total of 2,110 adult participants. Most were industrial workers or hospital staff who suffered with chronic complaints varying between three and 12 months. Workers with inflammatory or neurological diseases were not included.

The randomized and nonrandomized controlled trials evaluated more than 25 conservative interventions including exercises, relaxation, ultrasound, biofeedback, myofeedback and workplace adjustments.

Verhagen said she is not surprised that exercise appeared most helpful to people suffering from chronic complaints of the arm, neck or shoulder.

"I am an evidence-based person, and exercise seems to be the best intervention from this review," said Verhagen. "That is what I do. When I treat patients, I know that they almost always get better."

Orthopedic surgeon Nicholas A. DiNubile, M.D., a clinical assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that there is limited scientific proof that conservative interventions are effective for these injuries.

"It is not that they are not effective though," he said. "There is an important difference." An orthopedic consultant for the Philadelphia 76ers and the Pennsylvania Ballet, DiNubile said that he is a great believer in physiotherapy interventions such as exercise and stretching as well as ergonomic workplace adjustments and taking breaks.

"One must be very careful, however, when interpreting interventions done in a workers' compensation environment and trying to apply those findings to non-workers' comp issues," DiNubile said. He added that it is important for researchers to ask themselves whether they are really measuring that intervention - or if social or psychosocial issues might be involved.

"What applies in work-related injuries may not always be applicable to the average person who gets an injury," DiNubile said.

Participants in the Cochrane review come primarily from the United States and Europe, where workers typically receive compensation when out of work because of work-related injuries. Verhagen said that she does not believe that workers with chronic pain would report that a particular intervention was not effective if, in fact, it worked. These factors were not considered in her study.

"I think normally, people would like to go back to work," she said.

The quality of these studies were poor, Verhagen said, making it difficult to draw more conclusions about the effectiveness of many of these interventions. One limitation centered on varied and vague definitions of "work-relatedness." In the Netherlands, "work-related" means that people have complaints that get worse when they are working, yet decrease or diminish on the weekend or when they are on holiday.

Verhagen said that with a rapidly increasing incidence in work-related disorders, the need arises "to determine whether these interventions have a significant impact on short-term and long-term outcomes."

In particular, research is needed to look at the effectiveness of ergonomic adjustments in the workplace, with studies concerning how a chair or a monitor is placed, how a mouse is used and whether an ergonomic keyboard is effective, said Verhagen. She knows of no such current studies.

"We have ongoing workplace adjustments in the Netherlands, for example, that are very expensive," she says. "Most of these have not been evaluated regarding their effect."

"The costs associated with these disorders are high - more than $2 billion of direct and indirect costs estimated annually in the United States alone," Verhagen said.

www.emaxhealth.com

Posted by Dean at 11:18 AM | Permalink

Girls whose families criticize their weight or eating habits may develop lasting problems with body image and self-esteem, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that of 455 college women with poor body image, more than 80 percent said their parents or siblings had made negative comments about their bodies during childhood.

Many believed the comments reflected a general lack of love and support or were even part of a pattern of emotional abuse - with some saying family members also called them "ugly," "stupid" or "lazy."

But in more cases than not, the women said their parents or siblings had only occasionally made comments about their weight and body shape.

"The data suggest that even a few comments may have a negative impact," the study authors report in the journal Pediatrics.

"In fact, in otherwise or generally supportive families, a few negative comments may have a particularly detrimental impact, because they stand out against patterns of little or no criticism," write the researchers, led by Dr C. Barr Taylor of Stanford Medical Center in California.

Parents, they say, need to be aware that their words can have lasting effects on how their daughters feel about themselves.

All of the women in the study were part of a larger project looking at eating disorder prevention; they were considered to be at high risk based on their excessive worries about their weight, shape and eating habits. At the start of the study, they all completed a battery of surveys, including ones that asked about hurtful comments during childhood and current levels of self-esteem.

Most of the women said that family members had made some negative remarks about their bodies. Based on their reports, more than half of mothers had made such comments, as had roughly 40 percent of fathers and 40 percent of brothers and sisters.

Women whose parents had said these things showed relatively lower self-esteem and felt a lack of support from their families.

According to Taylor and colleagues, parents who are worried about their daughter's weight and health need to find ways to give "constructive advice" about healthy eating and exercise without being critical.

It's also important for parents to lead by example, following a balanced diet, getting regular exercise and refraining from criticizing their own bodies, according to the researchers. Stanford University has a pamphlet with advice for parents that can be downloaded from http://bml.stanford.edu/mcknight.

- Reuters

SOURCE: Pediatrics, August 2006

Posted by Dean at 12:25 PM | Permalink

Stress could help trigger the onset of eating disorders, a new study shows.

Many factors contributed to eating disorders, Dr Luis Rojo of the University of Valencia in Spain and colleagues report in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

Multiple factors, including psychological ones, can influence the onset and development of an eating disorder.

Stress is thought to be an important precursor of eating disorders. Rojo and his team studied the connection between stress and eating disorders as well as the influence of psychological problems in 32 teenagers with eating disorders.

They interviewed the teenagers about life events and difficulties.

Close to half (46.9 per cent) of the teenagers with eating disorders had some other type of psychiatric disorder, compared to just 9.4 per cent of controls.

Individuals with eating disorders also reported more difficulties.

During the year before eating disorder onset, the researchers found, the adolescents with eating disorders reported more acute stressful events, as well as more accumulation of acute stress.

Stress also appeared to peak in the weeks before the eating disorder's onset.

The relationship between stress and eating disorder onset was stronger among individuals who also had other psychiatric disorders, the researchers found, suggesting that mental illness might make people more vulnerable to the effects of stress.

Individuals who were exposed to at least one stressful agent were 10 times more likely to have developed an eating disorder.

"Our results specifically highlight the importance of severe chronic stress (major difficulties) in the development of," the researchers conclude.

REUTERS

Posted by Dean at 12:22 PM | Permalink

WEDNESDAY, July 26 (HealthDay News) -- If you've been way too sedentary lately, you're not alone. More than half of Americans aren't active enough to meet the U.S. government recommendation for exercise -- at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity most days of the week.

Excuses run the gamut, but getting bored is a biggie.

And now, that excuse is becoming pretty passé.

Anyone with a computer or a handheld device like an iPod can take advantage of all the new avenues to fitness, including virtual personal trainers, podcasts and video streaming.

Exercise is now coming to you.

Consider the possibilities: PumpPod is a portable, digital training program that is purchased and downloaded from an Internet site and designed for use in iPods, Treos and color Blackberries. You can pick from 43 programs, including yoga, aerobic conditioning and strength training.

Virtual personal trainers, another coaching option from cyberspace, have been around a while, but are growing in number. Some sites -- a quick Google search will turn up a bunch -- offer streaming videos that offer "hardcore training" designed to produce "deeper cuts and grooves." Other sites provide personalized programs and encourage you to track your progress online.

Even traditional exercise experts say there is a time and place for this wired approach to workouts. "Certainly there is something [good] that can be said for using these forms of media," said Fabio Comana, an exercise physiologist and spokesman for the San Diego-based American Council on Exercise.

The new delivery systems for exercise instruction are best for experienced exercisers, including those who have fallen into a rut or become bored with their typical routines, he said.

For less-experienced exercisers, Comana recommends starting with some "face-to-face time" with a personal trainer before switching to the online or other high-tech programs.

"The trainer needs to understand your needs and your goals," he said. A trainer can also help you to focus your goals, so that instead of nebulous ones such as "I want to get into shape," the trainer can help you be more specific, such as "I want to be in shape to run a 5K in three months."

After a few sessions with a trainer, the e-sites can be helpful, Comana said.

"This type of technology is certainly very cost effective," he said. Virtual trainers, for instance, charge a fraction of what real-life ones do, according to the American Council on Exercise. Personal trainers who offer face-to-face sessions charge between $35 and $100 an hour, depending on location, according to council spokeswoman Kristie Spalding. Virtual trainers can run a fraction of that cost, sometimes as little as $10 a month.

But online exercise instruction, just as in-person approaches, requires a savvy consumer. Here are tips from the American Council on Exercise to help you find good virtual exercise advice and programs:

Find out who is operating the site. Look for background information about the staff and be sure the personal trainers have a college degree in an exercise-related field or are certified by the American Council on Exercise or similar organizations, such as the American College of Sports Medicine or the National Strength and Conditioning Association.

SOURCES: Fabio Comana, exercise physiologist and spokesman for the American Council on Exercise, San Diego; Kristie Spalding, spokeswoman, American Council on Exercise, San Diego; U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta

Posted by Dean at 02:22 PM | Permalink