Issue 30, November 4, 2006

Timing is Everything - When to Exercise to Maximize Your Results     
by Paul Chek, HHP, NMT & Founder, C.H.E.K Institute

 All of us want to get the most we can from our workouts. While figuring out how to do this can sometimes be tricky, there's one variable that you can easily control that can make a great deal of difference to how efficient you are in the gym. It's as simple as when you work out.

That's right, the time of day is pretty important. Why? Your level of cortisol, a vital human hormone, varies depending upon the time of day.

Not only is cortisol our primary stress hormone, it is a primary hormone in general. In other words, you would die without it. Beyond supporting us in times of stress, cortisol serves as:

My experience with training athletes, as well as with my own training, has been that people naturally train better when their cortisol levels are high. Since cortisol levels rise with the sun, reaching peak blood levels around 9–11 a.m. and then progressively set with the sun, most of you will find that you get your best performances in this timeframe (Click Here to see Figure 1).

If your schedule doesn't permit you to train at this time, at least you can set your schedule so that your hardest workouts are on weekends or your days off from work, allowing you to train with your natural cortisol tides.

For those of you who currently wake up in the morning feeling tired -- even after sleeping eight hours -- training in the evening after work may well be disrupting your sleep and recovery cycles.

This is because performing any exercise that is more intense than you could perform on a full stomach triggers the release of cortisol, telling your body that it is some time between sunrise and about noon.

There's a good reason why we're built this way. For thousands of years, if not millions, we did our hunting and gathering from sunrise until just before noon. When you elevate your cortisol levels at night by hitting the gym after work, you literally wind yourself up! Since cortisol lasts for hours in the body before it is used up or neutralized by the liver, it will stop you from getting a deep, restorative sleep.

Some of you are probably saying, "That's not me. I workout after work and sleep like a rock." If this is the case, chances are very good your adrenals, the little glands atop your kidneys that produce cortisol, are fatigued or even exhausted.

When your adrenals are burned out (as we say in the clinic) and you work out after work or in the evening and you seem to sleep better, it is often because you are actually stimulating enough cortisol production with exercise to bring you to baseline levels.

Because every hormone in your body has an influence on all the other hormones -- and cortisol is a primary or master hormone -- when you bring it to baseline levels through this pathological means, it actually gives the impression that you are doing better.

If this approach is, in fact, helping you to sleep better, then there may be some therapeutic value to training late in the day. But, you must be careful because, in essence, such a tactic is like taking a sleeping pill because you can't sleep. You're never addressing the real problem!

When I identify such a finding in one of my patients or athletes, I typically start by addressing their lifestyle factors and looking for causes there (these are addressed in my book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy). If I can't find the problem there, I'll run a variety of tests to see what is stressing their body.

I'll also run a 24-hour cortisol rhythm test to see where their adrenals are performing well and where they are not. This also helps me assess the rhythms of their life and guides me to potentially unrecognized stressors that may be stopping their adrenal glands from recovering properly.

In the end, it all comes down to hormones. Choosing when you exercise is, at its heart, a choice about whether or not to live a lifestyle that is in harmony with the ebb and flow of your hormones. This decision can also have some far reaching consequences about how well you perform in the gym as well as how well you sleep and recover from the day's wear and tear.

So work out earlier and you'll find yourself getting better results from your exercise and waking in the morning more refreshed than ever!

To learn more about how to manage your lifestyle and exercise more effectively to lead a healthy, happy life, I recommend the following CHEK Products:

More about the Author: Paul Chek, Holistic Health Practitioner and certified Neuromuscular Therapist, is the founder of the C.H.E.K Institute in Vista, Calif. He is also sought-after consultant to sports organizations, his services have benefited numerous professional sports teams, athletes and individuals seeking optimal health worldwide.

Original Article published by Paul Chek

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College Students Gain Weight Beyond 1st Year   
by Marilynn Marchione

The "Freshman 15" is more like 5 to 7, but it is followed by the "Sophomore 2 or 3," say researchers who led two of the largest and longest studies ever done of weight gain among college students.

The research also showed that males piled on significantly more pounds than females.

Doctors say it is good news that the number of pounds gained is less than the widely believed 15 but bad news that "Generation XL" students seem to be learning patterns of gradual weight gain that could spell trouble after graduation.

"It may be 10 or 8, but it continues. That, to me, is a bigger problem," said Rena Wing, a psychologist and director of the weight control center at Brown University Medical School in Providence, R.I. She and others at Brown reported the studies Sunday at a meeting of the Obesity Society in Boston.

The first study, funded by the federal government, involved 382 students - 40 percent of them male - at an unidentified private school in the Northeast. Weight was measured four times - at the beginning of the school year in September, at the end of the first semester in December, after the holiday break in January, and at the end of the freshman year in May.

"Over the year, we found that males gained 5.6 pounds and females gained 3.6 pounds, with the large majority of that weight gained in the first semester," said Elizabeth Lloyd-Richardson, the Brown researcher who led both studies.

More than 16 percent gained 10 or more pounds during freshman year, and 6 percent gained the "Freshman 15" or more.

Men tended to gain weight sharply in the first semester and then more gradually after that, while women gained a lot at first and then tended to plateau, Lloyd-Richardson said.

At the end of the freshman year, more than 17 percent were overweight or obese, compared with 14 percent at the start.

The second study involved 907 students, 55 percent of them male, at an unidentified public university in the Midwest and was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Students were weighed four times as in the previous study but also at the end of their sophomore year.

Similar to the first study, students gained an average of 7.8 pounds during the freshman year. More than 33 percent gained 10 pounds or more, and 20 percent piled on 15 or more.

Things got worse the next year. Males were on average 9.5 pounds heavier, and females, 9.2 pounds heavier, than when they started college.

Original Article published by www.Buffalonews.com

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