I know, I know, you’re not mice. But hear me out. There are three types of injuries I see very regularly that take a lot longer to heal than others: Rib strains, injuries to nerves, and ligament strains.
And now two recent studies have shown that smokers are at risk of having even slower ligament healing. “Exposure to cigarette smoke delays the chondrogenic phase of fracture repair as well as ligament healing in mice”, according to two reports in the December 2006 issue of the Journal of Orthopaedic Research
In the first …

Now, this wasn’t the best designed study ever, for starters they only had 20 subjects, so it is hard for us to read too much into it. But the results do show a trend that is worth acknowledging. And the idea that we can minimise the risk of knee injury when running is worth investigating.
In this study they did a variety of tests, such as weights, height, strength, flexibility, and joint angle measurements, as well as questionnaires on running habits on runners to see which, if any, of these was …

Now, if you know me, you would know that I would have jumped at the chance to review an article like this, particularly when the findings were so positive. I must sound like a broken record at work giving out advice to do some warming up prior to exercising, and this kind of validation is so sweet.
A warm-up program was developed and taught to 1055 teenage soccer playing girls. The warm-up consisted of 8 minutes of slow jogging, stretching, and some strength and balance exercises, then 2 minutes of faster …

Or even just a little clumsy? Heck, we’ve all been a little “inelegant” when we’ve had one too many before, right? I wanted to summarise the information in an article I read recently (a systematic review of 44 previous trials with a total of 9603 people—that’s a lot!) where they looked at:
1. whether exercise programs were able to prevent falls in older people; and
2. what sort of exercise is best for helping prevent falls.
The overwhelming result from these studies was that exercise can help prevent falls.
Some studies found better results …