The beneficial effect of green tea

The green tea extract is a popular supplement for weight loss, which has also demonstrated to regulate blood sugar. This is not the magical effect of an instant improvement in metabolic health, but the contribution to that health.

Scholars assume that the substance in green tea that has this beneficial effect is the epigallocatechin, which helps to raise metabolism and burn fat.

There are numerous studies published on both the 'European Journal of Clinical Nutrition is on' American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, reported that observations on important populations (eg, a Japanese study of 40,000 people), which show that supplementation of the extract green tea reduces the levels of glycated hemoglobin, which is an important marker of long-term normal metabolism of glucose.

Also identified is a better insulin homeostasis in relation to the increase of food production. Again: other studies seem to assume a protective cardiovascular and cerebral diseases.

The comparative studies confirm that people who took placebo showed symptoms and cardiovascular risk factors than those taking it regularly.

The conclusion is that the green tea extract is an excellent supplement that improves glucose metabolism, promotes fat burning and, finally, improve the general welfare.

War on the sugar, the better the glycemic index

To lose weight you need to choose foods based on their composition: attentive but not the calories glycemic index. Here's how to build the menu.

Millions of dollars invested, to find the pill of wonders, one capable of helping the millions of overweight people in the rich world to throw down the extra pounds. Pharmaceutical companies know this: who is the real Scrooge. But the pill is not there.

Indeed, last November, in a few weeks, three drugs have high hopes flop: the ribomanant Sanofi-Aventis, withdrew from the market the drug in late-stage trial of Pfizer, set aside, and the experimental taranabant, remote from Merck. And experts are scrambling again to tell us that the only way to lose weight is to exercise and eat little and well.

Yeah, but what? Possible that there is good news for those extra pounds? No, on closer inspection there is good news, and what now inspires many diet book proposals for the do-it-yourself gurus and nutritionists. The magic word is: Gi, which stands for glycemic index.

Vitamin C prevents hypertension

Make every day full of vitamin C is good for blood pressure of young women. It reports a study conducted by a team at the University of California at Berkeley, recently published in the journal Nutrition Journal. From research it appeared that the levels of plasma vitamin C are connected in inverse proportion to the pressure: in other words higher levels of valuable vitamin, best values of pressure.

With the aim of identifying possible protective factors against hypertension, American researchers have analyzed the relationship between the levels of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in the blood and blood pressure in 242 girls aged between 18 and 21 years , enrolled in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study, a ten-year study designed with the intent to verify the cause onset of obesity among girls during adolescence.

The measurements performed by researchers at the end of the study, or after 10 years, and ranges in previous years have shown that women who had higher levels of vitamin C in plasma is watched on average a reduction of 4.66 mmHg in systolic and 6.04 in diastolic pressure. In girls who had lower levels of vitamin C was instead shown the opposite phenomenon, namely an increase in blood pressure.

Sleeping well helps prevent colds

A good and healthy night's sleep is an effective way to avoid the ills of the cold season. You must spend in bed at least 7-8 hours of undisturbed sleep and because our defenses are strong and reactive aggression against viruses and bacteria.

It shows a study at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the United States, and published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. American researchers, led by Dr. Sheldon Cohen, asked 153 people, mean age 37 years, to disclose how many hours they slept each night and what remained in bed after waking.

All individuals sampled were subsequently isolated from each other and infected with Rhinovirus, the common cold virus: five days of infection have all been dealing with dripping noses and sneezing repeatedly, but not everyone reacted the same way to attack the pathogen.

Weight and flexibility

If you train seriously with weights will do almost exclusively multi-articular exercises with free weights (squats, deadlifts, etc. ..), the latter, using the full range of motion around the major joints, need a good degree of flexibility so that the same joints are safe from injury.

Another important fact that emerges from studies on the joint flexibility is that if you have a good stretching probably the performance will be better. Researchers associated with this improvement to the fact that less muscle stiffness increases the potential usefulness of the elastic components of muscle groups.

Studies also confirm that joint mobility to perform the stretching exercises at the end of the workout speeds recovery processes, because, after training a muscle is slightly shorter than the anatomical length and, considering that to regenerate and therefore compensate for the muscle must necessarily return to its natural length, stretching done after the workout back muscle length to its optimum, thus accelerating the recovery processes are so important. Surely you've realized the importance to include in your workout routines for stretching major muscle groups.

There are different types of stretching: the static, dynamic, ballistic, passive, active and PNF. Among these, the best choice is to perform static stretching exercises, to understand, is that it runs slowly putting in place stretching and maintain it for a certain period of time (on average it holds the position for 15-30 seconds and repeats the same for 3-4 times).

This choice is dictated by the relative ease and practicality of this method, unlike others, does not need a training partner prepared to perform the exercises safely. Finally, here is some directive that will draw the greatest benefit from this practice.

The basic rules are those run stretching only when there has been heated enough, to run so slow and controlled, without bounce and so does not cause pain. You can enter the routine of stretching and at the end of weight training (in order to help speed recovery) and during rest days: in this case, you always warm up before you perform various stretches.

The importance of basic exercises

In bodybuilding, there are two types of exercises: those composites (multi-articular) and those of isolation. The first cover more than one joint, while others involve only one. If you are a beginner or an intermediate, you should focus purely on financial multi-articular.In fact, these involve a lot more muscle with the same number of exercises versus isolation.

The basic exercises such as: squats, deadlifts from the floor (in both versions that bent legs straight), leg press, bench press, dips, variations of shrugs his shoulders, pulling and stretching the bar overhead, are those that make up the substance of the body. The isolation exercises instead of working on the details and should not be used before a good muscle development.

The overtraining

Overtraining is the number one enemy of all athletes in any sport. Even those who are training with weights to achieve the desired physical is not immune to the contrary, it is often the cause of stagnation in the results. This syndrome not only will make progress, but in some severe cases will cause your regress.


The overtraining arises when the body is exposed to greater stress than it can bear. This happens when the limits are not respected its resilience. Let us now because in order to achieve the desired results and to prevent "sick" the body is important to stay as far away from the overtraining syndrome (also known as overtraining syndrome). When you exercise, there is a temporary disturbance of homeostasis (condition internal balance necessary to life) of the body, due to the decrease in metabolic capacity, bioenergy and circulatory.

The organism is then to find in a state of imbalance that is not congenial. This altered state triggers the phenomenon of overcompensation, which exists precisely to provide an adequate response to stress (in this case exercise) and to prevent negative consequences organic. Supercompensation then returns the body in its internal equilibrium.

The fascinating thing, though, is that in addition to restoring the capacity of organic pre-workout, the overcompensation leads them to a level higher than the previous, thus, with continuous and progressive training, development of physical skills and increasingly important, in the case of bodybuilding, the development of muscle mass longed. Supercompensation, main reason why we train, can only happen when we give the body the right amount of rest that allows you to regenerate and be more "performance" than before.

Needless to say, when you are not overtraining supercompensation but in fact: the organic capability will increasingly declining at making you run out of psycho-physical. Understand the role of compensatory rest in the process, and especially the contribution it has not to go into overtraining, we see what are the main symptoms that should put you on alert and you decide to loosen the rope and rest more:

• Stagnation of training loads
• Reduction of the enthusiasm that you have for training
• Fatigue irregular days of detraining
• Sleeping problems even if you feel very tired
• Decreased appetite
• Increased irritability in life report
• Increased resting heart rate
• Increased diastolic blood pressure (minimum)

Besides the lack of rest days, including an excessive number of series and exercises, or the frequent use of techniques to increase the intensity as the forced or negative, can undermine the resilience of the body by sending in overtraining. It 'important to highlight how thin the line between training hard to achieve results and work out a little too hard: you know how to adjust.

If you have one or more symptoms of overtraining, do not hesitate to take 3 or 4 days of rest (or a week, if necessary), trying to rest and sleep a bit 'more power to heal and to encourage a speedy recovery . Rearrange so the training program, so that in one session and the other there are at least 2-3 days of rest, and that, once back in the gym, work loads are reduced by about 15% and recovered range of about a month.