A warmer, drier climate is expected is increase the likelihood of larger-scale forest disturbances such as wildfires, insect outbreaks, disease and drought, according to a new study co-authored by a Portland State University professor.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have taken a huge step towards making smart devices that do not use batteries or require charging.

Bernard Yang Kim never wanted to be a bodybuilder. The 31-year-old currency trader simply wanted to look chiselled – like an underwear model, he jokes. Which is why he found it odd to be staring up at a 140kg barbell. He had never benched so much weight in his life; few men ever do.

But his usual trainer was out, and his gym had set him up with a substitute – one who, as it turns out, was not only overzealous but also a terrible spotter. “The bar crashed onto my chest, tearing my pectoral muscle,” says Kim, who ended up in hospital. “It was excruciating.”

Read more: These are the three best workout moves to injury-proof your body, according to a stuntman

While extreme, Kim’s experience is not uncommon. In 2014, there were roughly 15 000 personal trainers in South Africa, a number that has seen a steady growth over the years.

Indeed, personal training is one of the few professions to not only blossom during a recession but also grow afterwards as people turn to it for a second job and even a second career. And it’s easier than ever to get certified: You can go online, take a course and start training clients within a month.

“The problem is separating the accredited and qualified ones from the pretend ones,” says Scott Schreuder, chairman of Register of Exercise Professionals South Africa, a body that recognises certain qualifications and ensures exercise professionals meet the health and fitness industry standard.

“Using unqualified, unaccredited trainers is a no-win situation. At best, they will be ineffective and a complete waste of money. At worst, they can cause serious injury!”

Read more: 8 things you should know before hiring a personal trainer

“It’s a buyer-beware market,” says certified trainer Mike Boyle. “Getting hurt might be rare, but you can easily waste your time with someone who is ineffective at best and dangerous at worst.”

In short, knowing how to recognise bad advice is more critical than ever. Read on for six of the worst fitness tips we’ve ever heard, and six ways to get back on track.

Bad advice #1: “Go big or go home”

“There’s this idea that you have to train to failure to trigger growth,” says Boyle. “But ‘go big or go home’ is a slogan for a meathead’s T-shirt and a prescription for injury, not an effective training strategy. The truth is precisely the opposite – ‘slow and steady wins the race’. ” Not convinced? Talk to Bernard Yang Kim. The key to success in the weight room is to make consistent, incremental gains that ultimately add up to the body you want.

Read more: The kettlebell is the ultimate tool to torch fat – here’s how to use it and perfect your form

Better move: Train to technical failure. “You want to do as many reps as you can with perfect form,” says Boyle. “Once you can’t do a perfect rep, the set is over – no negative reps, no spotter assistance, no using momentum to crank out one more.” When you can complete your goal reps for every set – three sets of 10, for example – you’re ready to move up in weight. “Throw another 2.5kg on the bar or grab the next heaviest pair of dumbbells,” says Boyle. “It might not sound like much, but think about it this way: Even if you only go up 2kg every two weeks, you’ll still add 60kg to your lift after a year.”

Bad advice #2: “Push through the pain”

A little bit of soreness isn’t a bad thing. It just means you’ve pushed your body harder than usual, causing micro tears in muscles that ultimately lead to gains in size and strength. “But there’s a big difference between soreness and pain, and ignoring pain is a ticket to the disabled list,” says Boyle.

“I regularly ask my clients, ‘Does the exercise make any of your joints hurt?’ I don’t care if the pain diminishes after they warm up – if they answer yes, that’s the end of the exercise.”

Read more: Here are 8 fit-fluencers you should follow on IGTV

Better move: Find a pain-free alternative that works the same muscles. “Just because the barbell bench press causes you shoulder pain doesn’t mean you have to stop working your chest,” says Boyle.

“Try using dumbbells, do incline presses or switch to push-ups.” Changing your grip, angle or movement pattern alters the load and positioning of your joints, allowing you to build muscle without breaking your body.

Bad advice #3: “Protect your spine with crunches and sit-ups”

There’s no denying that crunches and sit-ups can help you sculpt a six-pack, but they come with an inherent flaw: Repeated spinal flexion, which can increase your risk of developing a back problem and can also aggravate existing damage. Bottom line: By recommending crunches and sit-ups, some trainers facilitate the very injuries they’re trying to prevent, says Tony Gentilcore, qualified trainer at Cressey Performance.

Read more: Learn these 3 surprising facts about your core to get rock hard abs

Better move: Do stability exercises. “Stability, or resisting unwanted motion, is the true function of your core, and exercises that reinforce that function protect your spine,” says Gentilcore.

Try the stability ball rollout: Sit on your knees in front of a stability ball and place your forearms and fists on the ball. Slowly roll the ball forward, straightening your arms and extending your body as far as you can without allowing your lower back to “collapse”. Use your abdominal muscles to pull the ball back to the starting position.

Bad advice #4: “Let’s see how many dead lifts you can do in 60 seconds”

“We’re starting to see a lot of people getting thrown into an extreme group workout with little instruction, and then doing high reps of very technical lifts as fast as they can,” says Chris Bathke, owner of Elemental Fitness Lab. “Even athletes don’t do that.” When speed is your main focus, you lose sight of form and that can lead to injury – especially if you’re doing heavy Olympic lifts or powerlifting moves like cleans, snatches and dead lifts.

“I’ve asked people to show me an exercise that in a previous workout they repeated for time,” says Tyler Smith, a physical therapist and a member of the elite athletic development society known as GAIN. “They’ll demonstrate a horrible squat, and they did 30 of them.”

Read more: 10 deadlifts you can do with just a pair dumbbells

Better move: Focus on form, not speed, and start with body-weight versions of exercises until you master them. In big lifts like those we just mentioned, it’s critical that you brace your core and maintain a slightly arched or flat back. If you don’t, your spine can pay the price. And keep your body language to a minimum; jerky movements that boost momentum can do more harm than good.

Bad advice #5: “Don’t rest between sets”

This misguided mantra is the call to arms of many extreme-fitness programmes, and it can be disastrous in practice. The reason: Lifting heavy weights recruits fast-twitch muscle fibres, which generate more force but also fatigue faster. If muscles don’t have enough time to recover between sets, you won’t be able to train them fully, slowing your gains and increasing your risk of injury. “Making somebody tired is easy,” says Sal Marinello, president of Athletic Development Coaching in New Jersey. “But there’s a difference between tiring someone out and actually improving their physical condition.”

Read more: Why you should ditch weight training and build old school muscle

Better move: “Understand that a 45-second break is a 45-second break,” says Jonathan Goodman, founder of the Personal Trainer Development Centre, an online resource for personal trainers. As a general rule, the lower your reps and the heavier the weight, the longer you should rest a muscle group before working it again.

If you’re doing sets of one to three reps, rest three to five minutes. For sets of four to seven reps, rest two to three minutes. For eight to 12 reps, rest one to two minutes. Rest no more than a minute for any number of reps above 12. That doesn’t mean you can’t work opposing muscle groups, like quads and hamstrings, back-to-back. (Think supersets and circuits.)

Bad advice #6: “Add plyometrics to your routine”

High-impact plyometric exercises, such as box jumps (leaping on and off a box or bench) and depth jumps (stepping off a bench and then springing off the floor and landing on a platform) are favourites of many trainers trying to help clients build explosive speed and a killer jump shot. But these drills can also hammer your joints – especially if you’re heavier than you should be.

“I once had a client who was 18 to 22kg overweight come in complaining of knee pain,” says Mike Robertson, co-owner of Fitness and Sports Training. “The reason was that the previous trainer had this person doing jumps – something most fit people shouldn’t even do.”

Read more: Fitness tips and other lessons from our previous cover guy finalists

Better move: If you’re already fit, jump onto a 30 to 50cm box with both feet, and then step off one foot at a time. That gives you the explosive benefits of the exercise without destroying your knees. Better still – especially if you’re carrying extra weight – swap jumps for less jarring exercises that use similar movement patterns. “The kettlebell swing is a perfect substitute,” says Robertson. “It trains the same hip-hinge pattern without the high impact consequences.”

^{This article was originally published on www.mh.co.za}

^{Image credit: iStock} 

Megan Lee, 15, suffered irreversible brain damage from a takeaway containing peanut protein.

Israeli-based pharmaceutical company, Zion Medical, which recently broke the news of a successful first clinical trial for what they called a potential HIV cure, has issued a further statement on Twitter making it clear that more trials will be needed, and their official results will need to be published and peer-reviewed.

Since the company made the announcement on 31 October, there has been a wave of excitement on social media in particular, with people clamouring for more information on the “potential cure”.

According to the World Health Organisation, at the end of 2017 approximately 36.9 million people worldwide were living with HIV.

In a statement at the time, Zion Medical announced the results of the first clinical trial of its HIV-drug Gammora, which, the company said, eliminated up to 99% of the HI virus within four weeks of treatment.

Nine HIV-infected patients took part in “Part I and II” of the trial, at Dr. Ronald Bata Memorial Hospital in Entebbe, over 10 weeks.

But the company has moved to temper expectations, saying on Twitter: “We want to thank everyone for their interest in the promising results of our first clinical trial. Like you, we are hopeful that #Gammora may one day offer those affected by #HIV a viable path to ridding themselves of infection. Much work remains in this mission including additional trials, publication of results and the steps required to make #Gammora commercially available.

“We are not there yet, but we are a step closer, hopeful – and committed to keeping you informed of our progress.”

The company also acknowledged that the official results should be peer-reviewed in a scientific journal, which it hopes to have done in early 2019.

Lengthy process

Professor Adrian Puren, Head of the HIV Surveillance and Sero-Molecular Diagnostic Section at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), told Health24 that there is a lengthy process that needs to be followed, before being bold enough to call the drug a potential cure.

“You would need to go through several stages to prove something like this. Doing the research, gathering the evidence and building up all that’s required to find some potential is important.

“There are different phases that you would need to go through as well. You may need to do an animal trial, then a small human trial – the process is complex and you may need to start out really small and run several tests in order to determine that the drugs aren’t toxic and that there aren’t any harmful side effects.

“You would also need to test the efficacy of the medication at various stages, going through the different phases of trials. At some stage you would also need to run randomised tests so that you eliminate biases from the research and really make sure people aren’t being harmed.

“Going through something like this is not easy. It is highly complex, needs to be detailed and it’s quite expensive. If I were going to look into this drug, I would want to see the published literature and be able to trace everything back to the authors, knowing that everything has been reviewed.

“Once all of the research has been done, it’s been reviewed and it is run through all the regulatory authorities, various ethics boards, and sufficiently scrutinised, then a company will be able to make a statement like that. And when they do make announcements like this, they usually do it at big conferences,” said Puren.

The Health Department’s Deputy Director General for HIV/AIDS, TB and Maternal, Child and Women’s Health, Dr Yogan Pillay, added, “As far as we are aware, there is no published clinical trials on this.

“Unless this is published in peer reviewed journals and the World Health Organisation approved this drug, we cannot take this claim seriously.”

Quackery

On Tuesday, a prominent SA HIV scientist slammed the “cure”, which was widely being punted on social media, as smacking of “quackery”.

“The HIV world has seen quackery in different forms for decades – sadly this smacks of more of it,” Professor Francois Venter from the University of Witwatersrand’s Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, told Health-e News.

He said that saying the drug is a potential cure with no side-effects are “over-the-top biological claims that appear in public before the formal literature [is published] and should be viewed with deep scepticism”.

“I looked at the press report and the unsophisticated company website, and even if you believe their claims, they are many years away from testing them,” said Venter.

Zion Medical is a relatively new company, established in 2014. According to the company website, it develops AIDS and Cancer curing products based on peptides derived from HIV and targeted lentivirus particles.

It lists its partners as The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York (USA), and the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, among others.

All of Health24’s attempts to contact Zion Medical directly for further comment have so far been unsuccessful – all forms of electronic mails have been undeliverable due to an invalid email address and all telephone calls go unanswered.

How tall you are might play a part in whether you are unlucky enough to develop varicose veins, a new study suggests.

Every additional four inches (10 cm) in height increases your risk of varicose veins by about 25%, said researcher Dr Erik Ingelsson, a professor of cardiovascular medicine with Stanford University School of Medicine.

“We have pretty robust evidence that height is actually causally related through genetics with increased risk of having varicose veins,” Dr Ingelsson said, though the study did not definitively prove causality.

Varicose veins are swollen, twisted, gnarled veins that can be seen just below the surface of the skin. They are often dark purple or blue in colour, and most frequently appear on the legs.

Benign condition 

Varicose veins do not increase a person’s risk for heart attack or stroke, explained cardiologist Dr Nieca Goldberg, medical director of NYU Langone’s Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health.

“They’re generally a benign condition,” said Goldberg, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association.

But these veins can become achy, itchy or painful, and can contribute to swelling of the legs due to fluid retention, she added.

Varicose veins affect up to 25% of women and 15% of men, according to the Vascular Disease Foundation.

How do varicose veins develop? Veins are designed to quickly shoot blood back up to the heart, with one-way valves that encourage blood flow, Goldberg said.

When these one-way valves start to fail, blood can start pooling the veins, causing them to swell and stretching the vein walls.

It’s been known that there are genetic factors involved in development of varicose veins, Ingelsson said. A family history of varicose veins makes it more likely you’ll develop them as well.

The study

To explore potential risk factors for varicose veins, researchers analysed the health of more than 413 000 people aged 40 to 69 across the United Kingdom. This included a screen of genetic markers for more than 337 000 of those participants, including nearly 9 600 with varicose veins.

Researchers confirmed a series of known risk factors, including age, gender, obesity, pregnancy and history of deep vein thrombosis. 

But when they sorted people by height, they found that those in the tallest quarter of folks were 74% more likely to develop varicose veins than the shortest quarter of people.

Further, the researchers linked genes that determine a person’s height to their risk for varicose veins.

The researchers also found a strong genetic correlation between deep vein thrombosis and varicose veins.

It’s possible that height puts additional strain on veins trying to return blood to the heart, Ingelsson said.

“If you’re taller, you have higher pressure downwards on your veins,” he said. “The veins are pushing the blood back up to the heart. If you’re tall, that creates more pressure.”

Reducing the risk 

Tall people can help reduce their risk of varicose veins by wearing compression socks, especially if they spend a lot of time on their feet, Goldberg said.

Varicose veins that have become very unsightly or uncomfortable can be safely removed through laser surgery, she added.

“In cases where these veins are irritated, itching, infected or contributing to swelling, you really should see a vascular specialist because you may be a candidate for a vein procedure to help eliminate the varicose veins,” Goldberg said.

The study was published in the journal Circulation.

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North Lanarkshire-based HES is seeking “upwards of £15m” in damages over terminated contracts.

Teachers are urged to spot the signs that a child might have epilepsy.

Sixty-nine pharmaceutical compounds have been detected in stream insects, some at concentrations that may threaten animals that feed on them, such as trout and platypus. When these insects emerge as flying adults, they can pass drugs to spiders, birds, bats, and other streamside foragers. These findings by an international team of researchers were published today in Nature Communications.

Moths are a mainstay food source for bats, which use echolocation (biological sonar) to hunt their prey. Scientists such as Thomas Neil, from the University of Bristol in the U.K., are studying how moths have evolved passive defenses over millions of years to resist their primary predators.