Muscle care and Fatigue

MUSCLE CARE

The voluntary muscles are the only ones that require your everyday care. Muscles remain in good condition only when they are used. If they fall The Muscles / 195 into complete disuse, they atrophy or waste away. Short of this, if they are used relatively little, they lose strength and vigor and their tone diminishes. Healthy vigorous muscles are important for many reasons: for good posture, graceful movement, and a sense of well-being. The spring in the step of a healthy vigorous man isn't simply a matter of well-developed muscles, but of the contribution that good muscular health makes to overall body health and even to mental outlook. Also, strong muscles protect the bones, joints, and internal organs more effectively against injury. In our increasingly sedentary way of life, unless we resort to special measures, our muscles are victimized by disuse.

Actually, when muscles are not used, they have relatively little need for blood and nourishment; and as a result most of the capillaries, the tiniest blood vessels which supply them, collapse and remain collapsed, out of business most of the time. The greater the activity of muscles, the more the capillaries opens up and, in fact, the more capillaries may be developed by the body to supply the need. With sedentary living, there is little demand. One famed experiment by Dr. Hardin Jones of the University of California has shown that the average sedentary American man is, in terms of muscle circulation, middle-aged by the time he is 26.

Using Geiger counter tests to follow blood flow through muscles in teen-agers and in 500 industrial workers, Dr. Jones established that between the ages of 18 and 25, the flow drops 40 percent; by the age of 35, it is down 60 percent, at which point, in the sense of physical vigor, the average sedentary man is less than half the man he used to be. Because of our sedentary living, deliberate exercise is essential-and this applies to all of us, women and children as well as men. The objective of the exercise should not be the development of big muscles, for muscle size is not a true measure of fitness. A well-founded exercise program should aim at strengthening muscles and also the circulatory system in the interest of endurance-the ability to sustain activity and keep going without quick fatigue. 

Major Muscles and muslce power

Since muscle fibers exert pull when they contract, they use energy. The energy comes from food supplied to them through the blood. A muscle works by converting chemical energy into mechanical energy. Actually, only about one fourth of the chemical energy is converted properly into mechanical energy; the remaining three fourths is lost as heat, raising the temperature of anyone doing strenuous work. This efficiency of 25 percent is similar to that of an automobile engine, which also loses much of its energy as heat. There have been calculations which suggest that the maximum energy output for man is about 6 horsepower and that as much as 0.5 horse- power output can be sustained almost indefinitely.

SOME MAJOR MUSCLES Skeletal muscles are of many shapes and sizes suited to their particular jobs-and they have many jobs. The sternomastoid muscles, which are on either side of the head, serve two purposes. When you nod your head, it is because both of the sternomastoid muscles contract simultaneously. You turn your head to one side or the other depending upon which of the two you contract. Among muscles at the shoulder are the trapezius, which shrugs the shoulder when it contracts, and the pectoralis major, which spreads over the chest and attaches to the humerus and helps sweep the arm across the chest. On the forearm are muscles that divide into tendons extending down to the fingertips; they help move the fingers.

 Among the big muscles of the lower extremity are the gluteal muscles on the buttocks, which, with their contraction, move you from sitting to standing position and are involved in walking; the sartorius, in the thigh, the longest muscle in the body, which pulls the thigh into cross-legged position; the quadriceps in the thigh used [or balance during standing and for kicking; and the gastrocnemius and solt'us in the calf which enable you to stand on tiptoe and provide from the ground for walking, running, dancing. Along each side of the spinal column maintain an erect posture, to bend the body, and to help turn it to one side or the other. Inside the body is the major muscle for breathing, the diaphragm, which is attached through tendons to the spinal column, ribs, and lower tip of the breastbone. The contraction of the diaphragm helps fill the lungs with air. And the diaphragm, incidentally, is also used in laughing, sneezing, and coughing. Its spasmodic contractions occasionally produce hiccupping. 

HELP FOR THE ALCOHOLIC - who is alcoholic? symptoms and cure

Dr. Harry J. Johnson, President of the Foundation, goes on to urge, very soundly, that every heavy drinker should give himself a test to determine whether or not he is becoming an alcoholic. It's a simple test. It merely requires that the heavy drinker declare a semiannual alcoholic abstention period of not less than one week. 

If he can get through the week without unpleasant withdrawal symptoms, without a feeling of martyrdom, and with no obsessive desire to return to drinking when the rest period is over, alcoholism is not yet present. If, when time for the test period arrives, the drinker rationalizes and justifies a postponement for any reason whatever, he is entering the twilight zone of alcoholism and the point of no return may be near. Alcoholism is preventable. 

Even the heavy drinker, alert to the danger that he is traveling the road to alcoholism, often time to prevent development of the full-blown addiction and disease by limiting alcohol intake.

HELP FOR THE ALCOHOLIC

Once alcoholism has developed, the problem is difficult but not hopeless. It can be solved-and must be solved if permanent damage and possibly death to the alcoholic and incalculable damage to spouse and family as well, are to be prevented. If it is to be solved, it must be approached in no simplistic fashion. It must not be regarded as simply a form of neurosis. 

Every aspect of the problem, which means virtually every aspect of the alcoholic's life, must receive attention. An important part of the physician's job is to help the patient recognize, accept, and understand his illness. He must be made to feel not an outcast, a pariah, but a worthwhile person who has a definite sickness. 

Treatment-more properly, rehabilitation-must be multifaceted: physical, psychological, social, and spiritual.

On the physical side, for ex- ample, because an alcoholic often drinks instead of eating and may be seriously malnourished, lacking in essential vitamins, minerals and other basic nutrients, his diet must be carefully supervised. Many forms of treatment for alcoholism have been tried. There are medications which in some cases have stopped the abuse of alcohol and have prevented the complications of alcoholism. 

For example, for some well-motivated alcoholics, Antabuse, a drug that leads to uncomfortable reactions upon drinking, has proved useful. It may eliminate preoccupation with drinking, freeing the mind for other things, and giving the patient a lift through the feeling that he can live without alcohol. 

Although hypnosis has been found of limited usefulness in producing aversion to alcohol, it sometimes may help in teaching the nervous, anxious patient to relax and develop greater self-esteem. 

Swimming a great relaxation source

A swim should leave you relaxed and comfortable; if it does not, you have stayed in the water too long. Take a shorter swim next time.  Long swim, have someone row along beside you or go with and long good swimmer. And be sure both of you know life-saving technique. 

The most expert swimmer can get a cramp-and if he does, he would drag you down unless you know how to avoid desperate clutches and how to tow him to shore. No matter how well you swim, stay close to shore if you are swimming to an isolated spot. Any races you may have won in high school or college will not protect you against cramps.

Don't try to swim a long distance the first few times out. Your swimming muscles may have lost strength through inaction; give them time to get strong again before you tackle rapid currents, heavy seas, or long distances. Before diving in a new place, test the water for depth and hidden logs or rocks. Lakes and rivers change in depth depending upon rainfall; md in salt water, high and low tides have to be considered. 

Find out for yourself whether your dive should be a shallow one-rather than risk a broken neck. If you have trouble with sinuses or ears, give up diving and under-water swimming. Excessive water in the nose may wash away secretions that help protect against infection.

In addition, infections may wash into the sinuses through the nose or may even reach the middle ear through the Eustachian passage from the throat. 

Excercises and Muscle activity - Benefits and precautions.

In addition, the well-exercised body requires a smaller amount of muscle activity for a given physical performance than the untrained body. Many studies indicate not only a lower incidence of heart attacks among the physically active than among the sedentary but also a greater likelihood, when a heart attack does occur, for the physically active per- son to recover. One possible reason is that exercise appears to promote the development of supplementary blood vessels which can take over the burden of nourishing the heart muscle when a coronary artery is blocked in a heart attack. 

In a recent study to try to explain why physical exercise may ward off heart attacks, investigators at the University of Oregon Medical School and radioactively tagged cholesterol to animals. Because of the tagging, they could follow what happened to the cholesterol. (It is a high level of blood cholesterol that is thought to foster development of atherosclerosis, the pile-up of fatty deposits on blood vessel walls that may shut down blood flow to the heart muscle, producing a heart attack.)

The Oregon workers found that the more the animals exercised, the more cholesterol was broken down; the less exercise, the higher the levels of cholesterol in the blood. In Israel recently, a special program of activity has been set up for men who have had actual heart attacks. 

In the program, exercise is gradually intensified until it becomes quite vigorous, including jogs along the Mediterranean Sea. The program is carried out under close medical super- vision. Dr. Daniel Brunner, its director and Associate Professor of Physiological Hygiene at Tel Aviv University, reports that many of the patients now are more fit than before their heart attacks-and more fit than non-trained people of their age who have not had coronary artery disease.

ACTIVITY AT ANY AGE That even elderly people, men in their 70's, can regain much of the vigor and physical function of their 40's through carefully planned physical activity has been demonstrated by a University of Southern California investigator. In the program, in which exercise is prescribed with the same care as a physician prescribes medications, 69 men aged 50 to t\7 have been working out one hour three times a week. 

Their closely supervised regimen includes calisthenics, stretching, swimming, and jog- at the end of one year, these were the results expressed in terms of: blood pressure improved by 6 percent; body fat 4.8 percent; oxygen consumption increased by 9.2 percent;  

 arm strength increased by 7.2 percent; and nervous tension reduced by 14 percent. It would be an invitation to disaster for older people and, for that matter, for younger people to rush pell-mell into vigorous activity after long years of sedentary living without having a thorough physical checkup first and without undertaking activity on a gradual, progressive basis under medical supervision. But there is growing support now for the concept that proper physical activity can help the aged and can even delay the aging process, prolonging the active years, retarding and possibly helping to avoid some degenerative diseases.