Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked (19 page)

There are a few circumstances in which sex is not recommended for a pregnant woman. If the woman is having bleeding, significant pain, or leaking amniotic fluid, the doctors will often recommend not having sex. Women with a history of having babies prematurely or with signs of premature labor might also be warned against having sex. Any of these recommendations would be individualized decisions between a woman and her doctor. Moreover, there is not much scientific evidence to support that sex would make any difference in these scenarios, so it is likely a matter of being extra cautious.

There are only two precautions that other pregnant women should be concerned about when it comes to sex. First of all, if they are receiving oral sex, their partner should not blow air into their vagina. In very rare circumstances, this can cause a bubble of air to go into a blood vessel and cause problems for the mother or baby. This is easy to avoid. The other thing that really could be bad for a pregnant woman or baby is if the mother has sex with someone who is infected with a sexually transmitted disease or HIV. You may not be able to tell if your partner has diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea, or HIV, and these can create terrible problems for the baby. These infections and other sexually transmitted diseases can cause birth defects, infect the baby, and sometimes even kill the baby. Safe sex is important during pregnancy to protect the mother and the baby, so use a condom if there is any question as to whether your partner has any infections.

Pregnant women do not always want to have sex. Depending on their fatigue and nausea during the early stages of pregnancy and their general discomfort during the latter stages, woman’s interest in sex might fall off. On the other hand, it is important for pregnant women and their partners to know that, if they want to do it, sex is safe and healthy.

You should not have sex or masturbate before a big game

Before a big game or competition, athletes are often warned that they should not have sex. Surveys of coaches and athletes reveal that many believe that pregame sex does or might hurt athletic performance. Legend even has it that amazing performers like Muhammad Ali would not have sex for six entire weeks before a fight. The worry is that sex or masturbation will take too much of your strength or leave you too spent to perform at the peak of your abilities. Many people believe that sexual frustration may also increase your level of aggression or strength. In contrast, having a sexual release is thought to decrease how much testosterone you have.

If you look at the physiology or the science of how the body works, there is no reason to abstain from sex before a big game. In fact, you might actually perform better if you have sex the night before! In one study, men who had sex the night before a sporting event actually had higher testosterone levels the next day. This directly contradicts the fears that having sex would leave you without energy or strength the next day. Ejaculation does not decrease your testosterone levels, and instead seems to enhance it. It is possible that higher testosterone levels would lead to better performances in terms of aggression or strength. Studies have also found that leg muscle strength and flexibility do not get any worse after you have had sex.

Most of the studies of the impact of sex on athletic performance have been done with men, but there is also evidence that sex might improve women’s performance. In particular, women who had sex the day before are found to better block the release of a neuropeptide that transmits pain. Experiencing less pain could be a bonus for competitors.

Just how much energy sex might use up before your big game is another matter of mythology. As much as you might like to think that your antics in bed are strenuous exercise, this is not the case for the average person. Most people only use about twenty-five to fifty extra calories when they have sex. They only burn about six calories a minute during sex, and the average sexual encounter does not last as long as you might imagine. Sex takes about as much work as walking up two flights of stairs. Most athletes would never worry about two flights of stairs zapping their strength.

Of course, the effect of sex on the body is not purely a matter of physiology. The brain plays an important role too. There might be psychological or emotional reasons why it would be good to abstain before an important athletic performance. If sex distracts you or takes away the mental focus that is key to your putting in your best game, experts say that sex might then have a negative effect on your performance for psychological reasons. On the other hand, if sex helps you to have a good night’s sleep, it may be just the thing that you need before that competition. The key for the psychological state of any athlete is reaching the right balance between being well rested and being alert, with just enough anxiety to keep you sharp and focused. For some, sex might be an important factor in this equation.

In terms of your strength and hormones, having sex or masturbating before a big game is unlikely to do any harm. Of course, staying awake all night or becoming embroiled in an interaction that leaves you distracted or tense might not be a good idea. The safest strategy is probably to follow your usual routine when deciding what activities ought to make up your pregame evening. And if you need a testosterone boost, this gives you a good excuse for sex!

Sex is bad for your heart

Once a person has had a heart attack, they often worry about whether they will be able to have sex again. Everyone has heard horror stories of people dying of a heart attack in the middle of sex, and those with a history of heart disease may be particularly afraid that sex is going to be too much for their heart. People seem to believe that various sexual antics are particularly strenuous for their heart.

Sex is not bad for your heart! In fact, having sex more often is connected to having a healthier heart. In a study that followed 1,165 men for an average of sixteen years, the men who reported having sex twice a week or more had a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease (things like heart attacks, strokes, or peripheral artery disease). In contrast, the men who engaged in sexual activity once a month or less had an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease during the study. The men who had sex less were 45 percent more likely to develop these heart-related problems, and this was unrelated to age or erectile dysfunction. Whether having sex more often was a marker for being in good shape overall or whether it was tied to having a strong intimate relationship, having sex was strongly tied to having a healthy heart.

The chance of having a heart attack while you are having sex is also very low. A large study called the Framingham Heart Study has given us good information on these kinds of risks by following lots and lots of men since 1948 and looking at their risk factors and heart problems. This study tells us that, if you are a man who does not have diabetes and does not smoke, the chance that you will have a heart attack during sex is one in a million! Even if you have heart disease, if you are able to pass a basic stress test, the chance you will have a heart attack during sex only goes up to ten in a million. From another study that looked at the determinants of heart attacks, we have learned that a fifty-year-old man who does not have heart disease and who has an annual risk of 1 percent for having a heart attack will only increase his risk of a heart attack to 1.01 percent if he has sex once a week. In case the numbers are confusing for you, the summary is this: the chance that you will have a heart attack during sex is quite low.

What if your heart has already had problems? One of the big concerns people have about having sex after a heart attack is that it will be too strenuous on their heart. While people who have had a heart attack do need to exercise some caution in terms of resuming normal activities, they do not need to be so afraid of having sex. As we’ve already pointed out, the truth is that most people just do not exert themselves that much during sex! The physical exertion most people put in when having sex, as we have seen, is similar to walking up two flights of stairs; sex does require some exertion, but it is not like running a marathon. Walking at about four miles per hour on a treadmill—the kind of stress test that heart attack victims will usually have to complete before they leave the hospital—is about the same level of exertion that you would have during sex that produces an orgasm. If you can do the treadmill walking, you are probably ready for sex. While a person who has had a heart attack usually needs to be careful about building up to their previous level of exercise, you will probably be ready for sex much sooner than for other activities. How soon you can resume sex also depends on what you mean by sex. Some sexual activities are more strenuous than others. The best way to know what you should or should not do and how soon you can do it is to talk with your doctor about your individual heart condition and what you would like to do sexually. Patients with particular symptoms or on certain drugs may need to be more careful than others, but your doctor can help you determine what your risk level is.

Moreover, fear itself may be your biggest problem with having sex after a heart attack. If you are too afraid to have sex because you are afraid it will hurt you or your partner’s heart, that fear could become the barrier to having healthy, enjoyable sex after a heart attack. This is another reason to talk with your doctor (and your partner) about the real risks involved, but also about the ways in which you can engage in and foster the loving, caring aspects of your sexual relationship.

Sit-ups

Sit-ups or crunches will flatten your stomach

Most of us have had that moment where we look down at our too soft belly and decide that something needs to change. When confronting our undesirable gut, many of us resolve to do more crunches. Sit-ups are considered the key to a flat, hard abdomen. Sadly, the truth is that you might do more sit-ups than you care to count and still have a flabby gut. Why is this?

When you do crunches or sit-ups regularly, you do strengthen and define your abdominal muscles. However, if you are not burning up more calories than you take in, you will not lose fat. And that means that those toned, defined abdominal muscles might still be well hidden underneath a layer of belly fat. Crunches may work the muscles of your abdomen, but they are probably not enough to make you lose the weight you need to in order to let you show them off.

Unfortunately, working the muscles in a particular spot does not mean that you will lose fat from that area. As you’ve probably heard over and over, spot reduction does not work. Reducing the amount of fat in your body usually requires cardiovascular exercise that increases your heart rate and gets your entire body moving, so that you burn enough calories to tip the balance toward weight loss. For example, a study of obese women found that high-intensity exercise training was the most effective way to eliminate the total fat around the abdomen, as well as the abdominal fat under the skin and the fat around the organs of the abdomen.

It is also difficult to predict or target where on the body a person will lose weight. When scientists study weight loss through restricting calories (dieting), dieting plus engaging in moderate exercise, and dieting plus engaging in vigorous exercise, there is no preferential loss of weight from the abdomen. Among people who lose the same amount of weight, different types or intensities of exercise did not make them any more likely to lose weight from their bellies. While losing weight from anywhere on the body is a good thing if you are overweight, we don’t get to pick and choose which areas get smaller.

Another important note related to sit-ups is that they are often not even the best exercise for strengthening your abs. Sit-ups actually engage the flexor muscles in the trunk, specifically the iliopsoas muscles, more than they do the abdominal muscles that would be part of that six-pack you’re striving for. The iliopsoas muscles are best thought of as the inner hip muscles, and they actually connect to your lower back. These muscles are important for walking, running, and standing, so it is worthwhile to keep them in good shape, but you may want to consider other muscles when working on toning your abs.

Sneezing

Your heart stops beating when you sneeze

People have believed a lot of scary things about sneezing over the ages. In some traditions, the soul was thought to leave the body when you sneeze, allowing evil spirits to sneak in unless you are protected with a “God bless you.” Another belief was that the forceful sneeze actually expelled evil spirits out from the body. Tradition also holds that people began blessing each other after they sneezed because those who were stricken with the plague did a lot of sneezing. Since the plague killed so many people, religious authorities suggested that blessings or prayers should be offered for those who were sneezing. Perhaps the scariest belief that has persisted over time is the idea that your heart stops beating when you sneeze.

Your body operates with an impressive amount of force when you sneeze. Sneezing engages muscles in your face, neck, chest, and abdomen to spew out air and mucus at an average of 100 miles per hour. Your body sneezes in reaction to things that irritate the lining of your nose and upper respiratory tract. Whether it is dust or pollen in the air irritating your nose, or a cold virus multiplying on the inner surface of your nose, these irritants trigger a particular reflex in your body that makes you sneeze. This is one of the ways that your body protects you—whether from invaders or from all the powderlike little things that might otherwise end up in your lungs. In some people, the sneezing reflex can also be triggered by light; people with photic sneezing may sneeze when they walk out into the sunshine or see a very bright light. Scientists do not fully understand how this works, but they think that the light somehow triggers the nerves involved in sneezing by working on your retina in a certain way or by how you squint.

As powerful as sneezes are, and as strange as the mechanisms that trigger sneezes may be, your heart does not stop when you sneeze. The contracting or beating of your heart is controlled by an electrical system that runs through the muscles of the heart wall. The heart’s electrical activity is not stopped by sneezing. Your heart keeps beating.