TIPS AFTER EXERCISE

Top Tips To Treat Pain After Exercise

Autor: raymondlee12

We all get stiffer after unusual exertion, and as we grow older we get stiffer more easily. Often the stiffness will be maximum on the second to fifth day after exercise. This creates a paradox. In order to stay in good physical shape we need regular exercise, which results in substantial amounts of pain and stiffness from time to time. To relieve this discomfort, we have to increase our exercise, which inevitably triggers at least a few episodes of increased pain.

This pain is not a message to eliminate the exercise program. Rather, it is a suggestion from your body to proceed more carefully with a gentle exercise progression. So don’t be discouraged by pain after exercise. Listen to the pain message and work with it.

On the other hand, people with osteoarthritis have pain during exercise that usually is relieved by rest. If you have significant arthritis, the pain after exercise may be localized to the joints and not the muscles. If the pain lasts more than two hours after you have stopped exercising, you may need to rethink your exercise program.

You don’t need the doctor unless signs of severe injury or nerve damage are present or unless the problem continues to bother you quite a bit for quite a while. This problem is a signal to review your home exercise program.

Almost always, pain after exercise indicates that you have disregarded one of the principles of a sound exercise program. Let’s review them. Exercise should not make you hurt very much. Don’t try to exercise through pain. If you hurt after exercise, that exercise is a bit too much for you right now. Exercise programs should be daily.

The weekend gardener is not going to become fit or able, may have reinjury, and will experience increased pain and stiffness on the days after gardening. Exercise programs should be gently graded. No day’s activities should be more than a 10% increase over the typical day’s activity. Slow and steady progression is essential to success.

Exercise programs should emphasize smooth actions, as with swimming, walking, or bicycling, until good conditioning is achieved. Jerky exercises with incompletely trained muscles are likely to result in reinjury.

Exercise programs should emphasize suppleness and muscle tone, not absolute strength. The stress of lifting heavy objects, squeezing balls, and so forth is likely to damage an already injured joint. Swimming easily is an excellent exercise.

Exercise should be preceded by a warm-up period in which the joints, ligaments, and muscles are stretched gently. The parts to be used should be physically warm, on a cold day, wear warm clothing. Exercise programs are in addition, not instead of, prescribed medications. Exercise programs always have setbacks in which there are periods of increased pain. This does not mean that the idea is wrong.

Back off just a little bit and begin again more gently. Older people are likely to think that serious exercise programs are for the young. This is absolutely not so. The principles of conditioning apply to all ages. You won’t get as well as you might unless you persevere in your exercise program.

Source: Free Articles

VIDEO GAME HELPS YOUNG CANCER

Video game helps young cancer patients take medication

NEW YORK (Aug 6, 2008) : Playing a specially designed video game can help adolescents and young adult cancer patients adhere more closely to their prescribed treatment, according to a report in the journal Pediatrics.

"Targeted video games can help improve the lives of young people with cancer, most importantly improve their adherence to their treatment," Dr. Pamela M. Kato of the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health.

Adherence is a major problem in this age group, Kato and her colleagues point out in their report. While dramatic improvements in survival have been seen in pediatric cancer patients, they add, death rates among teens and young adult patients have not followed this trend. "They're kind of a tough group that gets a little bit lost in the system," Kato said.

To investigate whether playing a video game might help, the researchers randomly assigned 375 male and female patients 13 to 29 years old being treated at centers in the US, Canada and Australia to play "Re-Mission" or "Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb," a standard video game not focused on cancer care.

In Re-Mission (http://www2.re-mission.net), developed by HopeLab, a Redwood City, California-based non-profit company, players control a tiny robot called Roxxi who moves around in a 3-D environment representing the inside of the body of a young cancer patient. Players can use Roxxi to blast cancer cells and control side effects, and winning the game requires taking chemotherapy drugs and antibiotics, using relaxation techniques, eating food, and keeping up with other types of self-care.

Patients in both groups were asked to play their assigned game for at least an hour a week, and 22 percent of those in the comparison group and 33 percent of those in the Re-Mission group actually did so over the course of the 3-month study.

Electronic pill monitoring showed a 16 percent rise in antibiotic adherence in the Re-Mission group, who took 62.3 percent of their total prescribed antibiotic medications, compared to 52.5 percent for the Indiana Jones group. Adherence to a standard chemotherapy drug was also higher in the Re-Mission group.

Playing Re-Mission was tied to improvements in cancer-related knowledge as well, the authors note.

According to Kato, the game worked because it gave the patients a new way of looking at their illness; for example, thinking of chemo as a way to combat cancer, rather than as an annoyance that makes their hair fall out. "To me it was kind of changing their reward system for taking chemo and giving them a different insight," she explained.

The game can be downloaded free from the Web site by patients and medical professionals. - Reuters