Whether you’re mountain biking, kicking a soccer ball with friends, or just sprinting down the street to catch a bus, your quadriceps are hard at work.

The quads are the large muscles that run down the fronts of your thighs. The stronger they are, the less strain each movement will exert on your knees. Lunges and squats will keep these muscles in tip-top shape.

The basic squat involves a motion similar to sitting down in a chair.

Stand straight, feet shoulder-width apart, toes forward. Keeping good posture, lower your hips until your thighs are parallel to the floor.

You might have to work up to this over time, going a little deeper each session.

Hold the position for two seconds before returning to the start position.

As you get stronger, try the sumo squat.

Start with your feet wider than your shoulders with your toes pointed out.

Push your hips back and bend your knees, but no more than 90 degrees – your back will lean forward for support.

After a few seconds, contract your glutes and slowly stand up.

For lunges, start with feet shoulder-width apart.

Step forward with your right foot, then lower your left knee almost to the floor as you make a right angle with your right thigh and calf.

Bring your left foot up to meet the right and then step forward into a lunge with your left leg.

For each exercise do three sets of up to 15 repetitions.

Be sure to warm up before strength training, stretch afterwards, and always give your muscles at least a day of rest in between workouts.

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Rats and ants top the pest control issues experienced by hospitals, freedom of information requests reveal.

Kerry Van Der Merwe has been fighting to be allowed surgery for a condition that baffles many GPs.

Needle exchange programmes in two large US cities prevented thousands of new HIV infections and saved hundreds of millions of dollars, researchers say.

Needle, or syringe, exchange programmes prevented nearly 10 600 new cases of HIV in Philadelphia and almost 1 900 new cases of HIV in Baltimore over 10 years, leading to significant savings for the cities, the new study found.

Sterile equipment

“Small investments in syringe exchange programmes yield large savings in treatment costs,” said principal investigator Monica Ruiz. She’s an associate professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, in Washington, D.C.

“Syringe exchange programmes represent a powerful way to stop the spread of HIV, especially in communities struggling to fight the opioid epidemic,” Ruiz added in a university news release.

The programmes provide sterile injection equipment to injection drug users in order to reduce the sharing of needles, which can spread HIV.

Most people who use injection drugs are covered by public health insurance. Philadelphia saved about $243 million (±R3 643 million) every year due to the drop in new HIV cases, while Baltimore saved about $62 million (±R929 million) a year, the researchers concluded.

Other health services

The study also looked at the lifetime cost of treating someone with HIV and the cost of a needle exchange programme. The investigators found that the one-year return on syringe exchange programme investment was nearly $183 million (±R2 744 million) in Philadelphia, and about $47 million (±R704 million) in Baltimore.

The findings may help policymakers understand the benefits of funding needle exchange programmes, according to the researchers.

“Giving injection drug users access to clean syringes can not only help them avoid HIV but often helps them obtain other health services, including access to drug treatment programmes,” Ruiz said. “Such programmes offer communities huge public health and societal benefits, including a reduction in new HIV cases and cost savings to publicly funded HIV care.”

The study will be published online in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

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Do you feel bad about feeling bad? Don’t.

Studies done at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that acknowledging a blue mood – and not berating yourself for it – can help you work through it more easily.

It turns out that accepting negative emotions is better for your long-term mental health than constantly passing judgment on yourself, which can cause your feelings of negativity to snowball.

Putting pressure on yourself to feel upbeat can make you feel even more downbeat, according to the research. It turns out that the people who let feelings like sadness, disappointment and even resentment run their course had fewer mood disorder symptoms than people who judged themselves for having them or who tried to bury them. Accepting negative emotions seems to help you better cope with your stressors.

There’s one important caveat, however. While it helps to acknowledge the normalness of negative emotions and not think you can – or need – to feel happy 24/7, it’s also important not to ignore a persistent and deep blue mood, and other signs that could signal depression.

Symptoms of depression include a loss of interest in things that you used to enjoy, and deep feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness that last for three or more months. Unlike a blue mood, depression needs treatment, such as counseling, medication or both.

Other Key Signs of Depression

• Deep sadness
• Lack of energy or overwhelming fatigue
• Difficulty concentrating
• Thoughts of suicide
• Not sleeping or sleeping too much
• Loss of or marked increase in appetite
• Irritability

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GPs urge hospitals not to strike people off the list straight away for missing appointments.

The painkiller is said to be up to 100 times stronger than morphine and is entering UK markets.

Hospitals say problems can waste hundreds of hours of staff time every day.

Increasing abundance of plastic waste has alarmed the society, the environmental fate of microplastics has been difficult to trace. A research group used carbon isotope labeling to follow the fate of polyethylene in the food chain. To the researchers’ surprise, plastic carbon was transformed into beneficial fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6, by the microbes originating from humic lakes.