From IEHealth Jan 2010

Last Saturday, I spoke to a woman who broke some of her ribs when she fell off of a bicycle.

She saw a doctor close to where she works who is one of the pioneers in using vitamin D3.

He dramatically, though for just 3 weeks, increased her vitamin D. The results may interest you.

Her pain stopped more than four times sooner than the doctors at the emergency room told her to expect. Then when she got an x-ray at the point when the doctors were checking to see if the progress they expected to see towards full healing, about 25% there, had happened, she was 100 % healed.

I then began thinking about the news story I saw recently that found that calcium was ineffective in improving bone strength; but calcium plus taking vitamin D at the same time DID increase bone strength.

Then I remembered the number of athletes and others that have had to stop their work outs or stop playing their sport due to stress fractures in their feet. (I had gotten a mild one myself not that long ago as well.) And, I suddenly realized that taking a bit more vitamin D3 ahead of time might prevent these. And, it definitely looks as if it would help heal them more quickly.

In addition, many injuries from exercise happen to your tendons. Complete breaks detachments, tears, & inflammation all happen to tendons. Tendons are attached to the bone and I’m pretty sure contain some calcium to increase their strength. So, I believe these uses for extra vitamin D that can prevent bone fractures and help any you do get heal rapidly may well do the same for tendons also.

Similarly, studies have found that vitamin D3 helps prevent muscle pain. What if this is because it helps prevent injuries and heals them quickly in much the same way?

If these things are true, it could be a major help to exercisers who do progressive strength training or progressive interval cardio, to the military for training new soldiers, and to professional athletic teams and all athletes.

This is speculation & wishful thinking on my part so far. But, it’s what one brilliant psychologist called an “experimental” question.: If you try it, does it work? As he points out, it’s silly to argue about it. It’s NOT that kind of issue. So, check it out.

And, I am personally going to do so & pass the idea on to the athletic teams in my area.

As some of you have read, one of my goals for this year is to lose 32 pounds of fat and gain 18 pounds of muscle to net a 14 pound loss on the scale and a more than 4 inch reduction of my waist.

Jumping exercises, jumping jacks, jumping rope, and jumping on a minitrampoline, see:
http://www.urbanrebounding.com , all have a track record of success in doing that kind of thing exactly.

One proponent of jumping rope played in the NFL and virtually never got injured — which he attributed to his jumping rope in addition to the other drills and strength training he did. But when he stopped playing, he got out of the habit of jumping rope. As many people do who stop exercising so much and get older, he gained a good bit of fat on his tummy.

Then he decided to see what he could do by resuming his jumping rope that he used to do. He rapidly lost over 20 pounds and several inches off of his waist.

So, since I can fit in 5 to 10 minutes of exercise in four places in my week, I’ve decided to do jumping jacks 2 of those days every other day and jumping rope the other 2 days. My performance goal is to do 8 sets of 98 for jumping jacks and for jumping rope at the four sessions by the end of the year.

But I’m writing this post in part because in beginning this effort, I noticed some soreness in my Achilles tendon and my left foot where I had been injured before.

Oops! THAT could jeopardize my using this method which looks as if it might be a major contributor to the success I want in taking excess fat off of my waist.

By being very slow in my build up and doing it regularly, those twinges have gone away for now. But I’m not doing that much yet.

So, instead of taking 3200 iu a day of vitamin D3 as I have been doing, I’m going to add a 5,000 iu capsule of vitamin D3 each day in addition to that. I’ll then be taking 8200 iu of vitamin D3 each day.

(In case you haven’t read the other current research or my previous posts on vitamin D3 — For today’s people who live mostly inside, away from the sun – or use sunscreen in the summer or both, the real minimum daily requirement is between 1700 & 3,000 iu a day; and the RDA or ODA, recommended or optimum daily amount, is between 3,000 iu a day and 10,000 iu a day, particularly in the winter. You can get too much vitamin D3, taking 50,000 iu a day for more than a month or two might be too much. And Wikipedia lists research showing that 100,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 clearly is too much. But all the current research shows that 10,000 iu a day or a bit less is completely safe and may even be desirable in some cases.)

If by next January, doing this both prevents my old Achilles tendon injury in my right leg and the previous stress fracture in my left foot from acting up as I keep doing more jumping each week, I’ll be doing a follow up post on this – as I will if it isn’t enough to prevent these problems.

But, as I’ve just written, there is some real reason to believe that this will work.