So you want to try yoga? Here’s what to expect when you’re trying it for the first time.
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Stress we all have experienced stress at one point of our lives. Stress can be a good thing if used as a sudden burst to get things done but if it gets out hand or the stress keeps building up without an outlet it would lead to health issues and anxiety. As we grow older, stress tends to build up due to work exhaustion, financial commitments, raising the kids having less time for ourselves. During our younger years stress just comes and go may it be from the upcoming exams, a pile of assignments, school projects and other social activities though they do pile up our younger self can handle stress and just shrug it off and go on living carefree. Why? Because there are less responsibilities when we are young, we are also much active and have a good balance of life to work (or school), fun social interaction and activities, we also eat and drink anything we want and have much time to do crazy stuff.
But what if we can bring that die hard, no surrender mindset to our current older selves. It’s hard to maintain a carefree lifestyle of you have kids and a family that depends on you. But it’s also harder if you’re almost on the verge of a breakdown.
You can still regain that carefree stress free lifestyle but still have to tailor fit it to your current lifestyle.
Once in a while, you really have to focus on yourself, find a time when you are alone (Since I’m a late riser, I do my “me time” at night when everyone’s asleep) and just think of yourself and your life priorities aside from thinking of what to do, I plan my day, though things may not go as planned the next day and that may lead to more stress but having a multiple plans and scenarios set for the day ahead calms me, it helps me be in control (even if most of the time, I’m not).
My “me time” or my alone time helps me recharge my batteries, helps me focus more on what I want and what I need. Even if things go wrong the next day, I still have a time for myself later that day, where I can remember all the details that happened may it be good or bad and look at it a different angle. If you do it that way you can remember simple details you may have missed because of the emotion tied to it. Looking at it from a different angle reveals the funny side of something that made us angry or sad earlier.
Go ahead and plan the most awesome day for yourself even if it’s just for a couple of hours this can help you forget about your worries, think, why do women go on a shopping spree or go to the salon to get their nails or hair done or to the gym for a quick workout? That’s because it’s their form of stress release, feeling good about yourself helps manage the stress and anxiety. Though I definitely won’t suggest a shopping spree, it could be a simple as playing a video game or the newest gadget or upgrades to your gaming pc. I mostly game when I have free time so for me checking out gaming peripheral reviews are my stress managing weapon. I also like to DIY stuff so planning a weekend project calms me down.
Breathing exercises help a lot you can also read our article on the best exercises to start your day right. Nothing can go wrong with exercising, the benefits are great plus helps your body produce that feel good hormones for countering the stress buildup. Don’t be afraid to go out breathe the fresh air, to sweat, to get tired physically. If you are tired physically it helps take your mind off the things that make you worry. Exercising helps you sleep better rather than being tired mentally while your body is still awake.
Always remember, have fun! What is fun for me may not work for you, so plan a time where you can do all the things you love, talk to your family and friends you need their support. Having a me time as well as a family fun day. Really helps manage stress.
I’ve been reading health fitness articles on my spare time and since I was asked If I could share my thoughts and contribute on this site. This article is mainly influenced by the post: Benefits of Exercise
Most moms are too busy taking care of their family. While other focuses on building their career. That leaves doing some physical exercise on their least priority.
This should not be the case. How can you take care of your family or to have a higher position you want at your office if you will not take good care of yourself? Make sense, right? Eating healthy meal and getting 8 hours sleep is not enough.
So, here are 6 benefits of exercise that may entice those loving mothers to put on their rubber shoes.
This maybe the first reason to why moms will consider to do some exercise. Who wouldn’t love eating? After finishing a very stressful project that you want to indulge yourself to your favorite milk tea. Or after giving birth it’s very hard to lose those baby weight. As your food intake increases balancing it with exercise will increase the metabolic rate as well which help with weight loss. Having a firm body and muscles on the shoulder is a plus.
Exercising can also help the skin stay healthy and vibrant. Pores open up when you sweat it flushes out toxin. It also makes you look younger.
Starting your day with any kind of exercise will give you all the energy that you need. From cleaning and moving the furniture in the house; to picking up the kids at school and running errands. You will still have the energy to cook meal at night feeling less tired.
After finishing a lot of chores during the day and still can’t get the good night sleep that you want. Doing aerobics helps you get a deeper and longer sleep.
As you exercise, the heart rate increases which helps the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain. This means regular exercise prevent you from chronic disease such as diabetes and heart attack. In addition to this, exercise is a powerful depression fighter; a natural and effective anti-anxiety treatment and relax you muscle when under stress.
It is common for women to have menstrual cramp as part of their Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS). It has been studied that doing stretching and moderate-intensive exercise may reduce the pain from having menstrual cramps.
After a long day work. All you want to do is to get home and throw yourself on bed. But once, you start doing physical activities you’ll get excited to go home early and have romantic time with your husband. Exercise can improve sexual performance and sexual pleasure. Not to mention, you’re getting back the curve that was lost for years.
You may want to try different physical activities at first until you’ll find the right one for you. Here are some activities you may consider: running/brisk walking, Zumba, trampoline, weight lifting and boxing.
Enjoy these activities with your friends, your kids or even your husband.
There you go! So, skip your fave TV program and getting to your feet to do some crunches. You only need an hour and I guarantee you’ll love exercising.
Remember, taking care of yourself is also part of taking care of your family.
Living healthy means living happily.
Planking is a very simple and short exercise that you can do anywhere, anytime but don’t get fooled by the simplicity, it’s easy to do but very hard to keep doing.
So the team tried planking for about a month, no competition but the only deal we had is that we list the duration of our planks, how many times we do the planks, and also record our experiences and here are some things we discovered and experienced.
The first week we tried 1 minute, three times a day, by the end of the day, we reconciled to do 30 seconds, three times a day then gradually increasing the duration of the planks.
Careful not to put pressure on our lower back and hips, we amazingly aligned the position of planks, on the second week of planking we noticed that we had been sitting and standing straight planking does help with our posture. Especially for us, who usually sit in front of the computer or couch and/or slouching all the time. Correcting our posture helps our planking and thus helped us maintain a longer plank. As planking strengthens the core it also helps reduce back pains.
Planking benefits the body and the muscles as we’ve learned later that it strengthens the abdominal muscles, works out the four muscle group in the stomach. Helps control the beer belly from getting out of hand, though I didn’t get the six-pack abs I was dreaming about at least I got it toned down a notch and not going wild (think Dad bod).
We were able to hold our planks longer as the week progresses, we also noticed that we’re much more active and flexible that we started adding other variations of planks but during the first few days my body was already shaking and in pain as we stare into our timer waiting for the clock to reach the desired time.
With increased energy comes the increase in our appetites, we never followed a strict diet but we tried to eat healthy but cutting down on bacon, the body tends to reject some foods that we usually like before we did the Plank Challenge so we ate less of the junk foods and more of the carbs and the proteins.
During the first few days of the planking challenge, I was prepared to quit. But encouraged by the tFI team, I decided not to abandon the challenge. Overall we felt more alive and ready to take on the next challenge, I’m glad I didn’t quit early in the game, for every exercise or any physical activity the body releases Endorphins which helps relieve stress and boosts your mood, which is the “feel good” chemicals your body releases, partner it with the fact that body is fit and healthy gives a very positive active mindset.
With changes to our body, the 30-day plank challenges encouraged us more to stay fit, healthy and eat right. We plan to continue doing planks and adding it to our daily regimen. We plan to do more Biking, hiking, and other outdoor activities, we are really excited to share all of our experiences in the coming days.
The warm-up. One of the most important aspects of working out, or any physical activity. At the same time, it is also the most ignored / neglected. Ask any fitness guru or any professional athlete. They will tell you just how important warming up really is!
Let me tell you a few very important facts about warming up.
The main objective of doing a warm-up is to slowly raise the body temperature in a state where the muscles will be at its optimum level of performance. At a higher than relaxed temperature, your muscles gets loosened up and well lubricated. This state is what we want to achieve before doing our main physical activity, or the workout itself.
So, how do we do the warm-up? I get that a lot. The key to a good warm-up session is to keep it simple. First, think of the main activity you will do. Whatever it is, warm up by doing some movements exactly like it or very similar to it, but of less intensity. Much less. Here are a few examples:
If you would be doing a bodybuilding type of workout, though, It will be different. You would have to do a light warm-up set for every muscle group you would be attacking.
For instance, if it happened to be a chest day, you will be doing all sorts of chest exercises. Probably the bench press, the flyes, the pec deck or the crossover. All these movements attack the chest muscles. The ideal warm-up before you do your heavy chest work is to probably do a few reps of push-ups. (that is if push-ups are easy for you).
Please keep in mind that the objective of stretching is not to loosen up or warm the muscles up. It does nothing for warming up. As in nothing, nil, zero, naught, blank, zilch, dry hump! Stretching does not do anything to increase body temperature. The main objective of stretching is to increase the range of motion ONLY. It is safe to say that stretching should be done, after the workout, when your muscles are thoroughly heated and lubricated, ready to be trained for flexibility. If the activity or workout you need to do requires better flexibility or a wider range of motion, go ahead and do your stretching routine, but ONLY after you are thoroughly warmed-up. Capisce?
The idea is, an ideal warm-up routine shouldn’t last any more than 5 minutes. Even 3 minutes should suffice. The warm-up routine should leave you warm enough to get the muscles well lubricated and ready for action, or even a bit breathless. Once you achieve this state, your muscles can do pretty much anything you would sanely subject them to.
Considering the very low level of difficulty of warm-ups, everything to gain and nothing to lose, the dangers of not doing it, do you suppose you could now promise yourself to do a warm-up routine every time you would workout?