Health Day

Having a training diary can really make your bulking up much more efficient and most professional bodybuilders use this method to keep track of their training. If you’ve made the decision to get the body you’ve dreamed of, a training diary can help you to stay focused and maintain your motivation.

By keeping track of your training in this way you make sure that you work the muscles in the right way, that you don’t overdo the training and that you get the right amount of nutrition. To be able to see your progress in this organized way is quite an exhilarating feeling.

You’ll be surprised to note how fast you can increase the weights you’re lifting. Keeping a diary like this is somewhat like having a carrot in front of a donkey, making it fun to reach for the next level.

All you need is a notebook, unless you prefer a proper training log. Make different columns in this book to keep track on different training aspects. The main ones should be: time and date, muscle group trained, used exercise, weight lifted and number of reps and sets.

If you want you can also use a different page to keep track of your nutritional intake. Those categories could be: what you ate, time and estimated calories.

Planning is another part of your training that can make it more efficient. Take some time once a week and write down a plan on when to work out and what muscles you want to focus on. This helps you to fit the training into your daily schedule and will soon make it a part of your healthy lifestyle.

If you want to gain muscle you have to give your training the importance it deserves. You can also make a goal for each month on how much you want to increase the weights lifted. In this way you might find it easier to stay motivated.

If you do this all properly your focus will be on your achievements and the more you set your mind on muscle growth, the more you will gain. With a training diary the work out becomes a natural part of your life and the results will come for sure.

In a development that could dramatically cut the time needed to identify victims of mass disasters, Japanese researchers have developed an automated identification system that uses X-rays and image-correcting software to produce fast, accurate matches of dental records.

The researchers say the speed and reliability of the computerized approach significantly improves on current dental identification methods, which rely on painstakingly slow body-by-body forensic work.

And the new approach should enable public health workers to better respond to the aftermaths of earthquakes, tsunamis, plane crashes or acts of terrorism, the researchers said.

“In the event that a person’s body is damaged beyond recognition — facial features, clothing, personal possessions — then often a person’s teeth are our last chance to identify the victim,” explained study lead author Dr. Eiko Kosuge, a dentist, radiologist and lecturer with the department of oral and maxillofacial radiology at Kanagawa Dental College in Japan. “Teeth are very hearty in nature and tend to keep their features even when the body is severely damaged.”

“Manual dental identification works fine when the number of victims are few,” she said. “For example, a house fire or single auto accident.” However, as the number of victims increases, the time required to identify the bodies increases exponentially, and the risk of identification error increases sharply as well, she added.

Kosuge pointed to the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami disaster and the crash of Japan Air Lines flight 123 in 1985 as two examples of the identification challenges posed by mass disasters. She noted that after the JAL crash, 325 of the 520 victims had to be identified by dental X-rays. In that case, “more than 2,800 doctors, dentists and forensic scientists worked for over three months to identify all of the bodies,” she said.

“Our system will cut the workload of forensic scientists by 95 percent [and] will drastically reduce the chance of error,” Kosuge said.

Kosuge and her team are to present their findings Tuesday at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting, in Chicago.

To develop the new dental identification system, the researchers relied on “Phase-Only Correlation” (POC) technology. This image-matching software automatically adjusts and corrects the kind of distortions that commonly appear in dental X-rays.

Kosuge and her colleagues tested the viability of POC software while analyzing the dental X-rays of 60 Japanese patients both before and after dental treatment. Following POC image corrections, the computerized system generated a list of the three closest identification matches for each set of X-rays. Total computation time needed to generate the match list was just 3.6 seconds per pair, on average.

Next, a group of forensic experts evaluated each of the three matches to arrive at a final identification decision. They found that 87 percent of the patients were correctly “recognized” by the POC method’s first match. The success rate rose to 98 percent by the second match. A perfect 100 percent identification match rate was achieved by the third go-round.

Kosuge and her colleagues estimated that by accurately zeroing in on just three X-ray-to-patient matches from among all possible combinations, their computerized approach would effectively reduce the forensic workload by 95 percent.

The team said the system would be available for use in Japan within a year.

Kosuge said the new system could also ease some of the emotional turmoil caused by a mass disaster.

“In Japan — primarily a Buddhist nation — tradition dictates that we cremate a deceased loved one within a few days to a week at the most,” she said. “Imagine the compounded pain of not only loosing a loved one but then not being able to perform proper funeral proceedings. When our system is employed, no one will know about us, no one will know about our system. What they will know is — as sad as it was to loose a loved one — they were still able to properly perform funeral proceedings.”

Dr. Norman “Skip” Sperber, chief forensic dentist for California’s Department of Justice, said the new technique sounded “very promising and worthwhile.

“This could certainly revolutionize our armament and help us greatly in the event of a mass disaster,” he said. “The numbers are very impressive, and the researchers deserve a lot of credit.”

But Sperber cautioned that every dental identification system has its limits.

“This method they developed would greatly enhance dealing with mass disasters where bodies were in relatively good condition,” he said. “It’ll work for traumas that didn’t destroy the bodies, or where bodies have decomposed but the teeth are intact, such as in situations involving poison, radiation, a boat disaster, that kind of thing.

“But I was one of the senior people working on identifying people in New York after 9/11, and, based on dental records, we were able to identify only about 1,500 of the 3,000 missing people,” Sperber added. “A lot of the bodies were just vaporized. And if you get a trauma like we did in New York, no system is going to work, because there are no teeth left. So, this sounds very good, but it won’t help in every situation.”

Eating meals together as a family can reduce a teen girl’s risk of turning to alcohol or drugs, a new study suggests.

In families who ate at least five meals a week together, the teen girls were much less likely to drink alcohol, or smoke marijuana or cigarettes five years later, said study author Marla Eisenberg, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

The same effect wasn’t seen for boys in this study, although Eisenberg can’t say why.

“One of the key findings we have here is for girls,” she said. “We found girls who had regular family meals had half the odds of initiating cigarettes, alcohol or marijuana use in the five-year time period.”

Eisenberg’s team followed 806 Minnesota teens, about 55 percent of them girls and 45 percent of them boys. They first surveyed the children in school in 1998 to 1999 when they were about age 13, asking how often their family ate meals together and the kids’ use of substances.

The researchers followed up with a second survey five years later.

At age 18, the girls who had regular meals with their family — defined for the study as five or more a week — had a much lower risk of substance abuse. And the meal didn’t have to be dinner, Eisenberg said.

A previous analysis of the same study participants found a stronger association for girls than boys between family meals and a lower risk of eating disorders. Yet to come is an analysis of the effect family meals have on a teen’s mental health.

The findings are published in the August issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Other research by some of the same University of Minnesota researchers has revealed a link between regular family meals and a lower risk of high-risk behaviors, including violence, school problems and substance abuse in both boys and girls.

While Eisenberg can’t explain why regular family meals don’t seem to keep boys away from alcohol and drugs, she said parents of boys can focus on other strategies, such as having brief, ongoing conversations about the dangers of substance abuse.