Today marks International Men’s Day, the annual, global event focused on promoting men’s health and contributions in the community.
Health on Female First
With over 65% of men in the UK regularly exercising, finding a workout regime that combines cardiovascular fitness, high physical impact and safety is key to achieving results.
We’ve been focusing on a regime that not only enables you to maintain a healthy weight and build muscle, but also serves multiple benefits such as controlling high cholesterol and reducing highblood pressure. Mr Simon Moyes, Consultant Orthopaedic Consultant(www.simonmoyes.com) at The Wellington Hospital (http://www.thewellingtonhospital.com/) comments on the impact of bodybuilding in the prevention of osteoporosis and arthritis for men:
“Strength training increases bone mass and can protect against the possibility of osteoporosis – it can even help build new bone. From about the age of 20 we lose approximately 1% of bone mass per year, thus the sooner one starts weight training the better, to help slow this deterioration - even though weight training at all ages can be beneficial.”
Mr Moyes continues, commenting on the need to increase weight without correcting technique to reduce the risk of injury: “Excessive weight training can lead to injury. It is important to start with low weights but slowly increase your workload, increasing it by not more than 10% per week. My personal opinion is that it is important to concentrate whilst training to ensure that you have the correct posture for all the various moves and lifts so as to reduce the risk of injury. Adding weight will not improve your technique, but it will increase the likelihood of an injury.
“If someone has had surgery then their return to weight lifting and body building activities will depend upon their age, their type of weight training and the type of surgery they have undertaken”, explains Mr Moyes. “I allow most of my patients to start again after six to twelve weeks; after an ankle ligament reconstruction I would be happy for them to start after six weeks. For a knee ligament reconstruction this would be more like twelve weeks, and for shoulder stabilisation and cuff repairs this can be anything from twelve to twenty-four weeks”. After any surgery, it is important to create a specialised training programme to ensure no injury in the area is sustained.
On how to maximize your gym sessions, Mr Moyes would advise that the use of a personal trainer ideally twice per week should form part of your training sessions. “A frequency of twice a week would significantly improve the benefit that you get from your training, and it would also be more clinically supervised”, explains Mr Moyes. “The advantages of personal training are that it is more closely monitored and therefore you are less likely to sustain injury, while you are more likely to achieve higher fitness levels and be pushed further and faster than you would otherwise manage on your own.” Mr Moyes is also an advocate of interval training along with weight training to improve fitness levels and strength.
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