Fascinating Fitness Facts

I've compiled a list of fitness and nutrition related facts that I thought would be fun:

• Getting in your fruits and veggies can help the body produce its own form of Aspirin. After a study done by the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, participants who ate fruit and vegetables containing benzoic acid, could produce their own salicyclic acid. This is the main ingredient in aspirin that makes aspirin an anti-inflammatory pain reliever. 
•  Watching yourself in a mirror while running on a treadmill, will make your workout go faster. 
• Garlic can help cure athlete’s foot.
• Using a diary for weight-loss purposes can double a person’s weight loss efforts. (I told you!!!)
• Walking either in water, against the wind, or wearing a backpack burns approximately 50 more calories an hour. 
• Regular exercise can lower a women’s cancer risk, but only if she is getting an efficient amount of sleep. 
• After a study done at Cornell University, researchers found that people who enter their homes through an entry way that is close to the kitchen tend to eat 15% more than those who enter farther away from the kitchen.
• There is no difference between stronger, larger, and firmer muscles. Those three go hand in hand. It is simply untrue that one kind of exercise will build a different kind of muscle than another. The only three variables you can influence with any type of exercise are: muscle mass, muscle shape, and the amount of body fat.
• Each pound of muscle (1 pound = 0.45 kilograms) burns 75-100 calories every day simply by being.
• A pound of body fat stores 3500 calories.
• Your muscles do not grow during exercise. Exercise is only the stimulus. The body strengthens the muscles while you are resting.
• The amount of rest needed in order for muscles to grow depends on their current size. The larger it is, the more it needs to rest. Gym beginners should rest at least two days between exercise. After a year in the gym you should probably rest three days. And so on. By exercising every day you are hurting your body and retarding muscle growth!
• A dehydration of 2% of your water volume can result in a decrease of muscular performance of 20-30%
• When fasting for a long period (several days in a row, without eating anything), 30% of the weight loss is muscle loss
•  Full body training maximizes hormonal response and therefore muscle development
• A caffeine intake of 13 mg per kg of body mass can increase your peak force by about 50% (a cup of coffee contains 100/200 mg)
• Fast music during effort makes you burn more calories.
• There is only one type of exercise that requires you hold your breath in order to accomplish the exercise. What is it? It's swimming underwater.
• If you had every single muscle in your body work together at the same time, you could lift about 50,000 pounds.
• If you are not a regular exerciser, by the time you are 65 you may experience as much as an 80% decrease in your muscle strength.
• The best way to judge whether or not you are exercising at too high of an intensity is to see whether or not you can carry on a conversation. If you can't, you may want to back off of the intensity just a little until you can.
• Bodies are creatures of habit. The more you exercise, the more your body learns to burn fat rather than storing it.
• Regular exercise is linked to better sex, because it can improve body image, energy, self-esteem and overall fitness (just so you know!)
• If you're always in a bad mood, then getting fit just may help. Regular exercise can enhance mood and overall well-being.
• The top three factors that determine whether or not you will stick to your exercise routine include having support, finding a workout that you like and knowing what you're doing. Your recipe for fitness success just may be working out with a buddy doing something you love after having received formal education on how to do it.
• If you have an inactive spouse, chances are that you will be inactive, too.
• In spite of what you may have read, there is no "best time to exercise." It turns out that the best time to exercise is when it works for you.
• Regular exercise can reduce the signs and symptoms of PMS.
• Visualization can help to improve your workout. By visualizing yourself completing the exercise before you actually perform it, then you will be able to perform the exercise with more intensity and effectiveness.
• Visualization of specific exercise actually causes the muscle synapses to fire as if you were performing the exercise. Does this mean that you can get all of your exercise in your mind? Not necessarily, but visualization can be a valuable part of your workout.
• People who cross-train with a variety of exercise are more fit and less injury-prone than those who exercise using only one or two exercise modalities
• For every 25 pounds of excess weight, your body needs to pump blood through an extra 5,000 miles of blood vessels.
• It takes 70 muscles to speak a single word.
• Your body has more than 650 muscles.
• Blood circulates through your body very quickly. The average time it takes for your blood to make the entire circuit is 23 seconds.

Have fun, be fit!
Cassandra Wyzik
www.FitToYouBrevard.com