Should You Eat Before Or After Exercise?

December 23, 2019 / Thomas Cohn, MD

Should you fuel up before hitting the gym, or is it best to burn calories on an empty stomach? That’s the question researchers at the University of Bath in England sought to answer with their latest study.

For their research, the team decided to look at the fat burning capabilities of exercise based on when the participant last ate. They were wondering if when a person ate influenced how much muscle fat was burned during activity, because muscle fat can be a key contributor to the eventual onset of insulin resistance and diabetes. For their study, the team divided 30 overweight men into three groups.

A control group that lived their normal lives.
A group that consumed a vanilla-flavored shake two hours before cycling exercise.
A group that consumed a placebo shake two hours before cycling exercise.

Participants wore monitors and masks that tracked a number of different factors, including their heart rate and the amount of fat and sugar they burned. After exercise, the participants drank the shake they had not yet consumed (placebo for the vanilla shake group, and a vanilla shake for those who consumed a placebo before exercise).

The study lasted for six weeks, and researchers drew some interesting conclusions after looking at the data. As expected, the control group’s insulin sensitivity remained unchanged, while the men in both exercise groups improved their fitness and narrowed their waistlines, although few actually lost weight. Notably, participants who pedaled on an empty stomach burned about twice as much fat during each ride as the men who consumed their shake prior to exercise. All riders burned about the same number of calories while pedaling, but more of those calories came from fat when the men did not eat first. Riders that consumed the shake afterwards also had greater improvements in insulin sensitivity and had developed higher levels of certain proteins in their muscles that influence how well muscle cells respond to insulin and use blood sugar than the other groups.

“You can probably get more out of your workout without increasing its intensity or duration by exercising before breakfast,” said Javier Gonzalez, a professor of physiology and nutrition at the University of Bath, who oversaw the study.

So if you’re wondering when the best time to exercise is, it might be first thing in the morning after you wake up. That being said, any exercise is better than no exercise, so just get it in when it works for you!

How Regular Exercise Keeps Your Body Young

December 27, 2018 / Thomas Cohn, MD

New research published in the Journal of Applied Physiology revealed that regular exercise can have your muscles acting as if you are decades younger than your actual age.

According to researchers, older men and women who exercised regularly for decades had muscles that were indistinguishable in many ways from the muscles of healthy 25-year-olds. These older men and women also had much higher aerobic capacities than most individuals their age, making them biologically about 30 years younger than their chronological age, the study’s authors conclude.

Previous studies have found that older athletes have healthier muscles, brains and immune systems than individuals of the same age who are sedentary. However, those studies have concentrated on competitive athletes, not recreational exercisers. This study suggests that you don’t need to be a professional athlete to see many of the same benefits of regular exercise.

Exercise Study

For the study, researchers looked at the health of individuals who took up regular exercise during the fitness boom of the 1970’s. They were most interested in individuals who maintained that hobby through the next 40-50 years, with activities like running, cycling, jogging or swimming, even if they never competed in these activities.

28 men and women fit the bill, and they were compared to a second group of age-matched older individuals who had not exercised during adulthood, as well as compared to a third group of active young people in their 20s.

Each group was tested in a lab setting to measure their aerobic capacities, and tissue samples were also taken to look for the number of capillaries and levels of enzymes in muscles. The higher the numbers, the better the muscle health.

After looking at the findings, researchers were surprised to find that the muscles of the older exercisers resembled the muscles of the young group, and their aerobic capacities were about 40 percent higher than inactive individuals their age. They also concluded that the active older group had cardiovascular health similar to that of people about 30 years younger.

These findings are amazing, and they help us understand why regular exercise is so important. Exercise can literally roll back the clock and slow down the aging process, which can help prevent problems like pain or degeneration-related issues. So take care of your health while you’re young, and continue exercising as you get older. If you do this regularly, you can prove that age really is nothing more than a number, and we are in control of our health!

The Benefits Of Brain Exercise

November 19, 2018 / Thomas Cohn, MD

A new study reported from the University of California – Irvine in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that even a brief amount of exercise improves the brain. It is well known that prolonged exercise has benefits from the heart to the brain. Exercise improves circulation and helps to reduce the effects of aging. Animal studies have shown that exercise increases the formation of new cells in the hippocampal region of the brain. This region is essential for memory creation and storage. Unfortunately, what works in animals is not necessarily true in humans.

Your Brain on Exercise

The twist in this study was whether a memory type of activity could be improved by participating in a low grade exercise. The subjects chosen were the usual paid college student (eager victims with minimal chance of other medical issues), and they were first asked to perform a computerized memory test. They were then sat on an exercise bike for ten minutes and either asked to do nothing (the control group) or slowly pedal in order to increase the heart rate by 30% for ten minutes.

After either the rest or exercise, the memory test was repeated. Interestingly, the light exercise group showed a clear improvement in memory tasks. The reason for the immediate boost in memory ability is not clear. The main theory is that the light exercise improved blood flow to the brain and hormone levels may have been involved.

The main message is that light exercise is beneficial to the brain and memory. Light exercise can be walking or many other types of activities. The exercise does not need to be intense, and it does not need to be prolonged. Daily exercise for ten minutes at a time appears to be beneficial to the brain. As we get older, we need to keep the brain healthy. It is important to exercise and even the simple things from walking to things like yoga or tai chi move the body and improve the brain.

Son if you find yourself with 10-15 minutes of free time throughout the day, try to do something active and stimulate your brain!

The Overall Health Benefits Of Exercise

April 6, 2018 / Thomas Cohn, MD

Exercise isn’t just a way to stay in shape or calm inflammation, it also has enormous benefits for our overall health. In fact, new research shows that it doesn’t really matter whether your walk or run, so long as you are getting regular exercise.

According to new research, if you want to improve your overall health and reduce your risk of all-cause mortality, make sure you get some type of exercise on a regular basis. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s bi-weekly kickboxing classes or a 30-minute walk around the neighborhood with your dog, so long as you’re moving and working muscle groups.

The findings come on the heels of a study of more than 4,800 adults by the Journal of the American Heart Association. For their study, researchers sorted activity into two different categories – total minutes of activity per day and total minutes of intense or concentrated activity.

The Benefits Of Activity

You may assume that individuals who participated in more concentrated exercise would fare better than individuals who just walked or moved around, but that wasn’t really the case. The study found that neither type of activity had a significant edge over the other. According to researchers, individuals who clocked roughly 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day were significantly less likely to die from any cause than people who got none. Participants who exercised an hour or more each day fared even better.

“The key message based on the results presented is that total physical activity (i.e., of any bout duration) provides important health benefits,” the study authors wrote.

Cardio workouts not only help with your overall health, but they can provide some other benefits as well, like increased blood flow, enhanced memory and improved mood. The overall message from the study is that the more you move, the healthier you are likely to be.

Being Accountable For Your Health

September 21, 2015 / Thomas Cohn, MD

Taking control of your health requires daily management, and it’s not always easy to do on your own. Sometimes help comes in the form of a gym buddy, but recently we’ve seen a rise in the number of people who wear a fitness tracker to help them track their activity, which is a great start towards a healthy lifestyle. That’s because people who wear some sort of fitness tracker tend to exercise more regularly and they are more accurate in reporting the time and amount of exercise. In the end, it all comes down to holding ourselves responsible for our health, but if these devices can help you stick to a schedule, it seems well worth the investment.

The boom in activity trackers hopefully will lead to higher rates of compliance with fitness. For my patients with pain, those who have included the use of a fitness tracker to monitor activity have been more consistent in exercise. They have also tended to be more motivated in performing an exercise routine, use less medication and have better control of symptoms.

One of the most important actions necessary to control pain is exercise. One needs to perform muscle strengthening and aerobic conditioning on a regular basis to control symptoms. Working with a physical therapist to learn how to perform the correct exercise is a good start, and after learning how to exercise appropriately, consistently being active is critical. The use of an activity tracker can significantly help a person stay the course of appropriate exercise.

The cost of a good fitness tracker runs about $100. As medicine goes, this is a relatively cheap investment into your own health. If pain is a factor in your health, get a fitness tracker, use it and get active.