Health & Hygiene

The next time you decide to take a walk during work, you may want to opt for a set of squats and lunges instead. Here's why.

Half an hour of strength training per day, or three 50-minute sessions a week. That's the amount of strength training that reduces your chances of developing type 2 diabetes by a third. And if you do a bit of cycling, walking, swimming or running as well your chance of developing diabetes can go down by sixty percent, researchers at the University of Harvard discovered. They published their study in 2012 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Every time you do intensive exercise, your body produces substances that kill cancer cells. The effect of a single session is limited, but the effect of a lifestyle that has included intensive exercise several times a week for years on end is probably considerable. Sports scientists at the University of Copenhagen discovered this.

Researchers at the Kronos Longevity Research Institute discovered that the fitter you are, the more protective antioxidants your body makes.

If you think that going to the gym 3 times a week or walking to work and back everyday or enough significantly reduce your risk of mortality, think again. Many of us spend the majority of the day sitting down at work.

One of the biggest risk factors for death in the population today is a low level of physical fitness. Regular training where you strive to increase or at least maintain your athletic abilities means that your physical fitness will remain higher and you will live longer!

Some say that hard workers work themselves to death, but according to psychologists at the University of California the reverse is actually true.

Employees, freelance workers and entrepreneurs are less likely to succumb to a burnout if they do an intensive training session twice a week. Psychologists at the University of New England in Australia discovered that both strength training and cardio training reduce the chances of having a burnout.

The firmness of your hand grip is better than your blood pressure at assessing your health, Hamilton researchers have found, and reduced muscular strength, measured by your grip, is consistently linked with early death, disability and illness.

The size of your red blood cells says something about your health. If they are all about the same size then the chance that you'll develop fatal cardiovascular disease is pretty small. How come this happens? We don't know. Sports scientists at the University of Mississippi in the US have discovered that resistance training keeps red blood cells pretty much an even size. And how come this happens? We don't know this either.

The riper the age you reach, the worse your immune system functions, and it declines more each year. At a certain point it becomes so weak that a simple cold can mean the end. In 1999 researchers at the University of Bologna in Italy published an epidemiological study that suggests you can halt the decline of the immune system by doing resistance training.