Song Yi Shin, M.S.How can you improve your vascular health? You would undoubtedly answer that it is the exercise, and it is true. Your arteries deliver blood and oxygen to organs and skeletal muscle. When you start to exercise, your legs would need more blood to match the metabolic demands. At rest, a majority of your blood volume is in your veins. But during exercise, blood flow through tissues change dramatically, with 85% of blood going to your active muscles through arteries in hea...

Christine Latham, M.S.Currently, rodents are the most commonly used model for human aging, but because they have much shorter lifespans and many physical dissimilarities from humans, they may not be the best possible model for humans. So, what should we use if the time-honored rodent model is not the best option? Interestingly enough, horses may be able to fill the gap between easy-to-use mouse models and hard-to-control human studies. But why horses? Horses are an athletic species, they have th...

Deanna Kennedy, M.S.Coordinating movements between the limbs is important for many activities of daily living and sport specific skills. Buttoning your shirt, opening a bottle, driving your car, and serving a tennis ball are tasks that involve some type of coordination between the limbs. Although these examples of bimanual movements are relatively easy for most individuals to produce, other more complex coordination patterns have proved to be quite difficult. Bimanual tasks like playing the pian...

Meredith Luttrell, Ph.DWe seldom think about physical effects of aging until that first wrinkle appears. While it’s easy to associate aging with changes in appearance, changes that occur within the body, such as impaired blood vessel function, are more likely to affect the quality of life even more. Cardiovascular disease affects 1 in 3 Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and the risk of developing it increases with age. The term cardiovascular disease (CVD) encompasse...

Meredith Luttrell, Ph.D As we get older, a vibrant quality of life enables us to keep doing the things we enjoy and that bring meaning to our lives. Exercise is important for health, but it is also one of the best ways to stay energetic and independent with age. Aerobic exercise has numerous health benefits, including healthier blood vessels. While we tend to think of only the heart with cardiovascular health and disease, blood vessels play a very important role in maintaining cardiovascula...

Jason Boyle, Ph.DOur nervous system is highly adaptable in perceiving, analyzing and executing movements in relation to an ever-changing perceptual environment. We use vision, knowledge of limb location, and anticipation of force production while simultaneously recognizing variability in our judgment to execute movements through the world around us. Whether it is simple (reaching for a door knob) or complex (threading a needle), goal directed movement has been repeatedly shown to follow a speed/...

Ramon Boudreaux, M.S.It is often joked that if exercise could be given as a pill it would be the most prescribed drug in the world.  While some benefits of exercise are well known (e.g., the prevention of heart disease, high blood pressure, and obesity), some remain esoteric. Osteoporosis, a condition in which bones lose density by an increase in porosity, is one such example.  Low density bones are at a much higher risk of fracture.  If one were to compare the architecture of a b...

Travis Irby, M.A, M.EdThe concept of dog years lets us quantify how man’s best friend ages. The popular myth is that a dog ages every seven years for one human year. While that is not necessarily the most scientific explanation for the canine aging process, the idea of aging many years in one is something that many people can relate to. As people get older, they tend to feel older, and the feeling of aging seems to increase exponentially with time. These changes can even be ...

David Ferguson, Ph.D, RCEP   We have all heard the late night talk show hosts joke about an athlete’s inability to retire. In fact, there seems to be a consensus that once an athlete reaches a certain age, he should retire from the sport. One such example comes to mind; when I was sitting in an airport restaurant which had a football game on the television, the gentleman sitting next to me made the comment, “Brett Favre has been playing as long as I have been alive, he shou...