Maintaining Flexibility Through the Years

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 If you're active, have a cardiovascular balance, strengths, and a workout style, you might think you've got it covered. But no, that's not the case, not at all. There's still another area that most people, a lot of men, overlook: flexibility. For those of you who can't remember the last time you did yoga or did a toe curl without bending your knees, flexibility is much more vital than you think, and improving it could even add years to your life. Here's what you need to know: Being flexible isn't just about extending your legs or performing difficult body contortions like you would at the gym, but also about maintaining movement. Flexibility is the ability to move through the range of motion of a joint, according to Alex Rothstein, an American exercise physiologist and professor of exercise science at New York Tech. Elasticity is the passive ability to move through a range of motion, and mobility is the active ability to move, he adds. Here are five re...

The Truth About BMI and Health

 You've seen it in a doctor's office, at the gym, and in calculators, apps, or online websites the body mass index (BMI) has been around since its creation in the 1970s. But this definition of healthy weight has been calculated fairly for a decade, and for good reason. The relationship between physical well being and BMI is complex and, according to experts, is not a direct indicator of normal health. BMI is a simple measurement that consists of dividing a person's weight (or its mass by their height in kilograms for the metric system).

Patients have been receiving fat as an answer for years from doctors when assessing our weight using the body mass index (BMI) underweight, normal, overweight, or obese. The magic number is 25 discard this number and move it to the overweight or obese bin. Some population, spatial, or demographic studies have linked having a higher BMI with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes or other endocrine disorders. But it may not be just weight that contributes to these detrimental health effects research.

What is BMI?

Is less likely to conclude that the shameful behavior and the speed bumps faced by people with a high BMI also contribute to health issues. Other studies have not found that BMI is directly related to health. Thin people may be very unwell, and those with a BMI over 25 may be showing signs of good health, adds Fatima Stanford, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a physician specializing in obesity at Massachusetts General Hospital (USA). So, as far as the individual is concerned this metric doesn't exactly tell you anything about your health, argues Janet Tomiyama, a UCLA psychology professor.

The concept of a common weight metric was conceived in the 19th century by Belgian statistician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, the idea being to quantify the ideal weight metric for the already normal. In the late 1950s, life insurance companies first began calculating people's body fat (and their likelihood of dying) by comparing it with that of other people of the same height, or sex, large. And finally, in the early 1970s, physiologist Ancel Keys conducted one of his famous studies with 7,000 healthy white men, mostly middle aged, creating what we now consider the BMI formula.

Is it a good indicator of health?

After the BSA, BMI has been revised to accommodate more different scales for children and adolescents, and percentiles have been adjusted for more recent population data, but the fundamental calculation remains the same: it's a single calculation for men and women, and the BMI ranges for underweight, normal, and obese have remained unchanged for decades. One of the reasons BMI is still widely used is that it's a fairly simple measurement. But, she says, this makes the metric easily accessible to primary care physicians, without specialists, says Eleanna De Filippis, a physician and endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in the United States.

According to Stanford, a BMI of too little or too much importance is a possible indicator of later health problems; however, a BMI of 25 or 30 is easily misinterpreted without parametric studies. BMI cannot indicate a person's weight percentage that comes from fat, muscle, or bone. That's why muscular athletes often have a high BMI despite having a low percentage of body fat, says De Filippis. It's also possible to have poor orthometric health, high blood pressure, and cholesterol, and still have a normal body mass index (BMI), says Stanford.

Downsides of BMI

In a 2016 study of more than 40,000 people in the United States, researchers assessed participants' BMI by tracking other health measures such as insulin resistance, inflammatory markers, and blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, and glucose. Nearly half of those classified as overweight and a quarter of those classified as obese had normal health measures. “34 million people considered overweight by BMI are in perfect health. That's not all. Although body composition can vary depending on a person's race, ethnicity, age, and sex, doctors use the same formula to calculate BMI for all adults, even though it's developed from exercise maintenance data, especially in white men.

This has led to an overdiagnosis of people from marginalized groups, especially Black women. So doctors are abandoning BMI as a measure of health. Stanford indicates that when examining The negative effects of cortisol can also be found in virtually all body systems, including the heart and organs. Furthermore, many patients diagnosed with overweight or obesity drop out because their symptoms are dismissed by their doctors, he adds. To what extent negative stigma and stress contribute to the association between obesity and poor health, the researchers say they are unaware of any studies that have examined this issue.

Conclusion

Good question. But the truth is, there's no one answer, says Tomiyama. Stanford suggests that if you're concerned about your weight, your waist circumference or hip-to-waist ratio could be a very good indicator of health. Excess central adiposity (fat stored in the center of the body), whether you have some or a lot of it, is a type of fat that carries a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Therefore, a better guideline would be the Body Roundness Index (BRI), which is the waist circumference, and methods for calculating height and weight from BMI to predict total and visceral body fat percentages.

The BRI has been proven to be better than other tests for determining who is at higher risk for diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and cancer. A recent study showed that both the group with the lowest BRI and the group with the highest BRI presented over a 20-month period. years, a higher risk of death, and although authoritative studies demonstrate the convenience of using the LBBB as a noninvasive screening tool to predict mortality risk.

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