FitRep for Nov. 7 - Military Off Duty, Army Health, military fitness, army physical fitness - Army Times

FitRep for Nov. 7

Here are some fitness tips to help you get to the top of your game.

Psych yourself into better performance

Deceiving the brain may lead to an improvement of up to 5 percent in athletic performance. In a British research project, trained cyclists raced against a computer avatar that cyclists believed was moving at the rate of the their personal best — but the avatar was actually going 1 percent faster. Despite this, the cyclists were able to match their opponent, going faster than they ever had before. Researchers believe this is because there is a reserve of energy production that can be tapped into, even in well-trained athletes.

Don’t skip the tunes

You already knew the right music can help you blast through your workout. Now there’s a study to back you up: The Journal of Strength and Conditioning found that college students who did the same strength training routine twice — once with no music, and once with their favorite music — did better the second time on certain components of their workout, such as the takeoff velocity of squat jumps. Other parts of their performance, including the bench press, were unchanged.

Exercise before pregnancy

Exercise has recently been proved to be beneficial for women in the first trimester of pregnancy, but new research suggests starting earlier helps lower the risk of preeclampsia, a condition that raises blood pressure to dangerously high levels. New research from the University of Oregon suggests exercise before conception and in the early stages of pregnancy may protect a mother-to-be by stimulating the expression of two proteins thought to play a role in blood vessel health.

Report: Simplify nutrition labels

U.S. agencies should revamp the labels on food and beverage packages to make it as simple as possible for consumers to figure out how nutritious a product really is, a new Institute of Medicine report concluded. The report suggests creating a rating system that uses symbols to convey calorie counts by serving size, and a point system that tells consumers whether the levels of saturated fats, trans fats, sodium and sugar in the products are more or less healthy than recommended.

Workouts work as well as migraine drugs

Although exercise is often prescribed as a treatment for migraines, there has not previously been sufficient scientific evidence that it really works. However, new Swedish research shows that exercise works just as well as drugs to prevent migraines. The study involved 91 migraine patients, one-third of whom were asked to exercise for 40 minutes three times a week under the supervision of a physiotherapist, with another third doing relaxation exercises, and the final third given the drug topiramate. After several months, there was no difference in the preventative effect between the three treatments, researchers said.