Welcome to the positive corner of the internet. Every weekday, we make sense of the confusing world of wellness by analyzing the headlines, simplifying the latest research, and offering quick tips designed to make you healthier in less than 5 minutes. If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free daily email here.
Today’s Health Upgrade
The lifespan of loneliness
A pre-workout rinse and spit
Exercise of the week
Arnold’s Podcast
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Connection
The Lifespan of Loneliness
Social connections are like muscles—if you don’t use them, you tend to lose them.
New research found that loneliness peaks later in life unless you work to maintain your social connections.
The study found that loneliness follows a U-shaped curve—it declines through young adulthood and middle age, rises again after 60, and peaks into your 80s.
The scientists examined people over four decades and found a consistent trend toward disconnection. Paying attention to this lifecycle might be essential to slowing aging and improving longevity.
Studies have found that loneliness is a threat to your health and is linked to everything from heart disease and dementia to depression and weakened physical fitness.
While it’s not a competition, research suggests that approximately four to six deep, meaningful relationships are enough to maintain your “social fitness” and fight off loneliness.
While aging and death contribute to loneliness, research suggests that disconnection might start earlier because of technology and mobile devices. Studies have found the more you use social media and spend less time interacting with people, the stronger the association with poor mental health.
If you feel your relationships slipping, the study authors have a few practical tips that anyone can pull off to help jumpstart your social life. Random acts of kindness — such as taking a friend out for a meal — can help maintain and strengthen your friendships. Or you can help your friends with a project — such as something they’ve wanted to do around their home or taking a class with them to learn a new hobby — as a way to bond. By supporting someone else’s goals, you will improve your relationship and get an added mental health boost from helping others.
From The Positive Corner
Something To Consider
Nutrition: On Our Radar
Why You Might Start Spitting Out Your Pre-Workout
Have you ever seen how a sommelier tastes wine? They take a sip, swirl it around their palate, and then spit it out. Turns out you might be able to do the same thing with your pre-workout and still see the benefits.
Researchers found that rinsing your mouth with a carb-based drink before sets can improve workout performance.
The scientists tested the effectiveness of the som-style pre-workout approach by having each participant test the sip-swirl-spit method on both a carb-based drink and a placebo before performing deadlifts.
The carb drink helped increase power and how much total weight people could lift during their workout without increasing their perceived exertion (they didn’t feel more exhausted even though they worked harder).
This isn’t the first time researchers have found a result from a pre-set carb rinse. Prior research found that a pre-workout carb-rinse also improves cycling performance.
What’s wild is the research suggests you don’t even need to consume carbs to see a performance benefit. Studies suggest that receptors in your mouth send a signal to your brain that affects motor unit activation, motivation, and reward. As we’ve discussed many times in the exclusive content inside the Pump App, motor unit recruitment is one of the most important variables of muscle growth.
What does it mean? For starters, you don’t need to bring a spit bucket to the gym. But it might explain why so many people benefit from an intra-workout drink (sipping on something during your training), even though many ingredients (such as BCAAs) repeatedly fail to show a benefit for muscle growth, strength, or endurance.
Even flavored water during your workout might be enough to help activate the sensors in your mouth. Based on what we know right now, the swirling method doesn’t appear to help maximum strength, but it can assist with muscular and cardiovascular endurance and power.
Training
Exercise of The Week
You don’t need fancy abs exercises to build a strong midsection, but you do need to perform the moves correctly.
Check out this never-seen-before footage of Pumping Iron of Arnold performing cable rope crunches.
There are many ways to do this move correctly (you can also face away from the cable stack), but the finer details about the range of motion, how you contract your abs, and avoiding momentum make all the difference between carving your core or feeling the exercise in all the wrong places.
Watch the video, read the caption, and then give it a try!
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell
