health and fitness

  • Study: More than 9 hours of sleep could send you to an early grave

    According to new research, people who are generally inactive and spend most of their days sleeping and sitting are four times as likely to die young.

  • The truth behind the waist training fad

    If getting in shape is your goal, there are several routes you can take. Eating right, a consistent workout regime and detoxing are few of the most common ways to stay fit. There is however, something you can do on top of all 3 that may speed up

  • 10 Rules Fit People Live By

    Personal trainer Joel Harper has spent two decades helping his clients (from Olympic medalists to Dr. Oz) reach their fitness goals, and over the course of his career he’s discovered the reason why some people thrive and others fail: It’s all about attitude, he argues in his new book, Mind Your Body: 4 Weeks to a Leaner, Healthier Life. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. “Do you want to lower your blood pressure?

  • These Totally Badass Photos Prove Anyone Can Be A Fitness Model

    Photoshop isn't always the way to go -- and photographer Benjamin Von Wong just proved that with his mesmerizing black-and-white fitness photo series. When photo website SmugMug decided its company gym would be a lot cooler if it were filled with photos, President and co-founder Chris MacAskill asked Von Wong to do the job. Although MacAskill said he wanted simple black-and-white shots, Von Wong had other ideas.

  • Hi.Q: Improving health through knowledge, motivation, and fun

    It's that time of year again, when we'll start hearing about new ways of tracking our health and losing weight. While that seems to be an annual holiday trend, making true health gains involves making a long term commitment to eating right, exercising more, getting more sleep, and so on. How do you learn about healthy habits? Hi.Q (free) is a new iPhone app that tests your knowledge through a series of fun and informational quizzes, then provides a community for mentoring others in a specific area or asking questions about those things you're clueless about. Frankly, I didn't think I'd like this app. That's before I spent the weekend taking quizzes, learning a ton more about health-related matters than I had anticipated, and finding that my knowledge in some areas was so good that it was considered "elite" (had a score better than 80 percent of people in that topic). After launching Hi.Q, you're asked to log in via email or through Facebook. The latter method allows you to brag about your results on Facebook, although I chose not to annoy friends with that capability. The app "knows" that you're of a certain gender and age, so it tailors many of the suggested quizzes to your interests. The quizzes are all vetted by an expert team of nutritionists, doctors, fitness experts, trainers, dietitians, organic farmers, you name it. There's a preliminary quiz to test your overall knowledge. Some of those questions were incredibly difficult, asking about such things as Yoga poses and chromosomal birth defects in girls, two areas I'm completely clueless about... but I learned something by getting them wrong. Each question needs to be answered within 60 seconds; you also have an "I don't know" button to push, as well as way to "Ask a friend" about the topic. As you answer questions quickly and gain points, you work towards being a Health Enthusiast (10,000 points), Health Guru (20,000 points) or Health Pioneer (30,000 points). Considering that I'm currently at almost 42,000 points, I'm hoping that they have other levels to aspire to. Gamification of instruction can lose its effectiveness if there are no more goals to reach. The app has more than 10,000 questions in over 300 topics, so you can keep yourself busy learning for quite a while. The questions were all calibrated with an audience of 250,000 people to determine those topics that are most important to long-term health. That same audience was polled and the developers found that a scant 21 percent of Americans have enough knowledge to take control of their health. Provided you don't get into a weekend quiz binge like I did, you can continue to check out quizzes on a daily basis - today's daily topic, for example, is "Early Cancer Warning Signs You May Be Missing." The app is surprisingly solid for a 1.0 release. I found a typo on a splash screen, and later found that the app would tell me that I "scored better than 0% of people on this quiz" before showing me a "Share on Facebook" screen that showed that I actually scored better than 91% of people." Those bugs notwithstanding, Hi.Q is very stable. How did Hi.Q get started? In 2010, 37-year-old Munjal Shah (who later sold his company Like.com to Google) was running in a 10K and was sent to the ER. He didn't have a heart attack, but the scare was enough to make him commit to improving his health. As Shah says, "The foundation of our company is built off this idea - celebrate the people who are dedicated to their health rather than harass the people who don't take it seriously." I find Hi.Q to be fun and motivational, teaching me things I didn't know about my health, reinforcing those things that I do know, and giving me impetus to launch the app every day. It's free, so you can't go wrong. Oh, and you'll find the story behind the purple carrot logo to be very interesting...

  • Dear Fitbit: technology is designed to make our lives easier

    Over the past few years I have owned five or more Fitbit One trackers. Last year I got an Aria scale, which wirelessly transmits my body fat percentage and weight to Fitbit's servers. Of course, if you have bought into the Fitbit ecosystem you may also be aware that the company charges you if you want to analyze your health data. So it should be little surprise that the company, having tied this data analysis to its economic model, has chosen to not support HealthKit "at this time." I wouldn't hold my quantified breath that the company will choose to integrate its data into HealthKit. That's a shame, really, and I will no longer be using Fitbit products as a result. Apple's Health app offers a dashboard of my health, albeit not a perfect one, as this cogent article from ReadWriteWeb illustrates. But what HealthKit does do well is save me time. It would be nice for all our devices to communicate and show a full report of our quantified selves, wouldn't it? I'm just really exploring this world, but I find it rather annoying to have to type in my weight every day when there's no technical reason why Fitbit couldn't just allow that data to sail into Apple's Health app. Instead, I'm using Carrot Fit to track my weight by manually typing it in. No, this isn't like walking 8 miles for fresh water, but it shows a lack of understanding users on Fitbit's part. Granted, Fitbit is likely making some money from its paid service. Server space, while cheap, isn't free, so I can't necessarily begrudge them in making a hard business decision. Also, Fitbit's Premium service comes with "trainers" who help you improve over time. I'm not sure how far away we are from Siri being your health coach, but I'm betting we're a long way off. However, my understanding of HealthKit integration is that this would not be a tough thing to implement. It is, from all accounts, a rather simple thing to add into your app. So Fitbit has chosen the short-term notion of profits over the longer-term vision of a vibrant community of customers fiercely loyal to its brand. This is why I love Apple, and why you have Apple "fanboys." While you can argue they always want you to buy the next, newest thing (what business doesn't?), ultimately the point of Apple products is to make your life better, and simpler, by using technology. Apple gets it*. Fitbit doesn't. *Apple definitely gets the concept, but unfortunately, as of now, it doesn't get it in implementation. I just today went to the Health app and days of logging data have all vanished. Friends on Twitter are reporting the same. So I can maybe understand Fitbit's position, considering Health and HealthKit have been somewhat of a data disaster since iOS 8 debuted. Apple needs to get its house in order ASAP.

  • TUAW TV Live: The health and fitness hour

    I'm back among the living this week, having somehow survived the viral crud that was causing me to lose my voice last week. That means that the wonderful Shawn "Doc Rock" Boyd and I will be sending a flood of bits out today from the TUAW TV studios. Since I'm feeling so much better, I thought it would be a fun show to talk about all of the connected devices and apps that we use on a regular basis to keep ourselves somewhat healthy. Doc and I will regale you with stories and demos of our favorite connected gear, and we'd love to hear from you in the chat room to see what your favorites are. To join in to watch the live feed and participate in the chat, just click here. You'll join us on the AOL On Network. If you can't watch the entire show today, come back to this page within 24 hours to see the latest video below. Past shows are also available on the TUAW YouTube channel.

  • 8 Exercise Mistakes That Could Hurt You

    SPECIAL FROM Grandparents.com The anti-aging benefits of exercise — both aerobic and strength-building — have been well documented. What's encouraging is that 50% of adults get the recommended amount of aerobic activity, 30% do enough muscle-strengthening activities, and 20% fully meet the federal government's physical activity guidelines, according to a 2013 press release from the CDC. "With regards to exercise, we sometimes exercise for the sake of exercise and especially in our age group, we don't think about what the goal is," says Jim Thornton, President of the National Athletic Trainers Association.

  • Sickweather app will either help you avoid a cold or make you feel ill

    You know that feeling you get when you're in line at the grocery store and the person in front of you coughs and doesn't cover their mouth? You immediately feel slightly ill and begin subconsciously searching for symptoms that might not even be there. The new Sickweather app is kind of like that, only it's on your phone and you can't give it a mean glare like you can with a real person. The app is designed to help you avoid illness, in theory, and while that may indeed work for some people, for me it does the exact opposite. Sickweather presents a local map of your neighborhood, including eateries, stores and any other public place, and then overlays reports of illnesses. So if a person down the street has strep throat or the proprietor of a nearby gas station has the whooping cough (and bothers to report it) you're going to know about it. You can even set the app to push notifications to you based on specific illnesses. The idea here is that if you know a bug is in the area, you can do your best to avoid it. Unfortunately, as soon as I see a report of "The Common Cold" pop up within 100 yards from me, I'm going to start guzzling Airborne and searching for The Walking Dead marathons on cable. What you do with the information is up to you, but the app is free, so it's hard to pass up a glimpse into your local flu scene.

  • 2 Moves Proven To Tone Arms

    When celebrity trainer Joel Harper works with post 50 clients, there are five areas they all want help with, he says: arms, stomachs, thighs, buns and hips. How to exercise those problem areas away may elude many, but lucky enough for us, Harper -- whose clients include Dr. Mehmet Oz -- gave us a number of exercises that targets and firms each of those problem areas. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • How To Avoid Common Knee Arthritis: Study

    What might a channel-surfing couch potato have in common with marathon-running exercise fanatic? Both individuals are at risk for knee osteoarthritis, according to a new study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Both rare and frequent exercise accelerated the degeneration of knee cartilage -- a trigger of knee osteoarthritis -- in middle-age adults, according to the study by researchers at the University of San Francisco (UCSF).

  • New Gym Only Welcomes Overweight Clients, Skinny Uninvited

    The fitness industry has long featured toned and perfect figures effortlessly gliding on an elliptical machine or treadmill. With locations in Chicago and Las Vegas, the gym first opened its doors last fall with the goal of creating a non-intimidating environment where members can focus on working out, Headline News reported.

  • Get Fit or Get Fined: Web Service Offers to Charge You for Skipping the Gym

    Toni Nadal, the uncle and coach of current world No. 2 tennis player Rafael Nadal, once explained to a journalist a lesson he'd drawn from life: "Victory does not feel so good as losing feels bad." "When you have a son,"

  • Do You Worry TOO Much About Your Health?

    "The worried well is most of us," says Burton. You're watching TV when a depression commercial comes on asking if you experience sadness, lack of interest, trouble concentrating. Carol Greenwood, Ph.D., a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto, works with older populations and finds many of the worried well among them.

  • Why You'll Eventually Love The Way You Look

    In one of her last televised interviews, cinematic icon Bette Davis explained the phenomenon to journalist David Hartman. Beauty brand founder and makeup artist Bobbi Brown -- whose successful "Pretty Powerful" campaigns celebrate real women of different ages and ethnicities -- says that even she was struck by feelings of ugly duckling in her younger years. "When I first started out as a makeup artist, I didn't exactly feel confident.

  • EXPLAINED: Do You Burn More Calories In The Cold?

    During the warm-up stage of a run or other outdoor workout (including, say, shoveling the driveway or even skiing), the cold (particularly if it's so cold that you shiver) might result in more calories burned than if you, say, were on a treadmill in a climate-controlled environment. Overall, it seems like the cold weather may boost your caloric burn slightly -- just not enough to make up for, say, a Thanksgiving feast that included multiple servings of pie.