Exercise

Holiday Exercise Tips

For many, the holidays equal shopping, quality time with family and gorging on cookies, cakes and holiday feasts. While the hustle and bustle of the season may tempt you to take a hiatus from healthy eating and exercise, you can stay fit through the holidays by incorporating exercise into your favorite seasonal activities.

How to sneak exercise into holiday plans

The holidays create extra duties and extra calories, but U.S. experts suggest exercise be added to everyone's holiday to-do list.

Karen Basen-Engquist, a professor in The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, suggests in addition to the usual recommendations to incorporate daily exercise such as using the lunch break to take brisk walk, scheduling workouts in advance and enlisting a friend or partner to walk with you during the holidays, break up 30 minutes of daily exercise into three 10-minute or two 15-minute chunks.

Walking: The Easiest Exercise

Every magazine I read features models and celebrities running, kickboxing, climbing or stretching. You’d think that people are doing nothing but this stuff all day long, and that we're on our way to becoming a society in which everyone is as fit as Cindy Crawford and George Clooney.

Exercise Fights Breast Cancer

Study Shows Vigorous Exercise Reduces Risk of Breast Cancer in African-American Women

Oct. 4, 2010 -- Postmenopausal African-American women who exercise vigorously for more than two hours a week can reduce their risk of developing breast cancer by 64% compared to women of the same race who are sedentary, according to new research.

Exercise could cut endometrial cancer risk

Women who regularly work up a sweat exercising have a 30 percent lower risk of developing endometrial cancer, a new study says.

Researchers at the United States' National Cancer Institute analyzed 14 previous studies and found physical activity cuts the risk of endometrial cancer by 20 to 40 percent when compared to sedentary women. The study was published online Wednesday in the British Journal of Cancer. It was paid for by the National Cancer Institute.

Phys Ed: Does Music Make You Exercise Harder?

For a study published last year, British researchers asked 12 healthy male college students to ride stationary bicycles while listening to music that, as the researchers primly wrote, “reflected current popular taste among the undergraduate population.” Each of the six songs chosen differed somewhat in tempo from the others.

Yoga for Workaholics

Even if you love your job, spending 40-plus hours at a desk every week can sometimes lead to more than just a headache; it can also be a pain in the neck, shoulders, back, feet, and eyes. Being chained to your desk starves your extremities of blood, oxygen, and other fluids, resulting in tight muscles and stiff joints. But before reaching for the industrial-size bottle of ibuprofen, try these poses from Karin Wiedemann, yoga instructor and director of Urban Yoga in Washington, D.C. She suggests spending 3 minutes every 2 hours doing the following moves to relieve some tension.

Yoga for Cancer Patients Provides Benefits of Sleep, Vitality

Touch toes. Downward dog. Breathe. It’s a yoga routine that cancer doctors have prescribed for years without evidence it would do much good. Now the biggest ever scientific study of yoga finds their instincts were right.

While yoga doesn’t cure the disease, its stretching and breathing exercises did improve sleep, reduce dependence on sedatives and help cancer patients resume the routine activities of everyday life, according to a 410-participant study being highlighted at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago next month.

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