Keeping the Mind Healthy

Everyone are all too concerned about keeping fit and healthy… physically. When people say keeping fit and healthy, all they could think of is physical exercise. Everyone loves to exercise. Exercise works up a good sweat after all.

However, I personally knew someone who had an obsession about health and fitness. He loves to play tennis, well though his thirties. He rarely eats meat and concentrates on vegetables. However, he was surprised to learn that he had a blocked artery. How did that happen, if he rarely ate meat and supposedly little to no cholesterol could have made it into his veins and arteries.

The answer was: poor mental health. He was constantly in stress, from his business and from his personal life. Thus, the stress caused complications to his heart including high blood pressure and constant anxiety attacks. Even though he was consciously trying to be physically fit, his mental state was far from it.

How does one keep the mind healthy and fit, when it is something intangible and not physical? The answer is, meditation.

Meditation is always touted as a spiritual exercise. People would wonder a spiritual exercise can keep the body healthy, but if you understand how it works, improvement of your spirit causes improvements to your physical body as well. When you meditate, you learn to relax. This relaxation results to the release of all stress in our system, and thus improve mental and emotional health.

Stress, after all, is known to cause ailments such as ulcers and high blood pressure. It can even cause you to age quickly, since all that stress is burning your body inside and out. Stress can also cause some people to become emotional eaters, resulting to obesity which is also a cause of complications in the heart.

According to this site, meditation supposedly causes the reversal of the effects of aging. This is also implied by the Taoists, who point to meditation as a path for immortality and longevity. Scientifically, when you are meditating you are concentrating all your mind at one point of your body which causes the brain to send in more blood to that point in your body. The cells at this part of your body receive more of the needed oxygen for their maintenance. Most meditation routines place one’s focus on the brain, so your brain becomes more healthy and able to function more effectively.

The site also points out that meditation can improve one’s concentration. With all the anxiety and stress removed, and all the added nourishment to the brain, you can do all of your tasks with a higher degree of efficiency and effectiveness.

The next time you think about exercising your whole body, be sure to include meditation as a warm up. It would really help a lot.

Effective Leg Exercises

The legs are important parts of our body. We need to have strong and well-defined muscles in the legs. Having these will greatly improve one’s confidence and balance, as the legs carry all our weight when moving about. Can you think of any good leg exercise? Actually, I do. I have tried and tested these exercises, and they actually work.

These exercises are:

1. Squat

2. Lunges

3. Calf Raises

The Squat

The squat exercise is initially designed to be done with a barbell on your shoulders, but even without the bar bell it still is quite effective in firming up the thighs. This is how you do it:

First, stand with your legs a shoulder’s width apart. Inhale, then as you exhale, slowly lower yourself as if there’s an imaginary chair behind you. Don’t forget proper posture, and keep your back straight. When you’ve gone as low as you could go, hold it for a second then slowly raise yourself up. Maintain posture all the while. Do three sets of 12-16 repetitions, or as long as you could endure.

Lunges

The lunge exercise is designed to firm up the whole leg, as well as the butt. It is fairly easy to do. Stand with your legs at shoulder’s width distance, then step forward with one leg. Remember to put all your weight on the lead leg and, to avoid injury, line up the knee with the tip of your toes. Keep your back straight. Pull back to your starting position, and do the same with the other leg. Repeat 12-16 times, and do 3 sets as well.

Calf Raises

This exercise is quite strenuous on the toes, but after a while doing calf raises, you’ll find you can stand on tiptoe a bit longer than you used to. To do calf raises, you simply raise yourself on your toes, hold it for a second, then lower yourself. Do three sets of 12-16 repetitions.

So what are you waiting for? Start building and firming up those legs now!

Dog Walking: A Good Workout

Most of us take dog walking for granted, but does anyone of you know dog walking is actually a good whole body workout? This is, of course, provided that your dog is one of those big and powerful ones.

First off, dog walking strengthens the arms. This because when your dog is strong enough to pull you, you are exerting force to pull and keep the dog from dragging you away. To be exact, dog walking as an exercise results in firm and strong forearms.

The legs, obviously, are also worked out in dog walking. You are using your legs to walk, and at the same time, you are working to get a good root so that you maintain your balance in coordination with your arms to control the dog. When the dog pulls, you try to plant your feet firmly into the ground while pulling with your arms meaning tension is exerted by your legs. This strengthens the thighs and the calves of your legs.

In line with the dynamics of balance, you work to keep your weight on your waist when controlling your dog. When you do so, you are tensing your abs, slightly working them out although not to the scale of crunches or a bicycle exercise. Finally, dog walking helps you to regulate your breathing and build lung capacity as dogs are energetic animals. It’s not at all times that you have to control your dog, you have to run with them sometimes.

The next time you think that dog walking is a boring chore, think instead that you are working yourself out. Dog walking is not just for dogs, but is also beneficial to the people who walk the dog around. You are keeping yourself healthy and fit, as well as your dogs. Dogs are man’s best friends indeed.

The Bicycle Exercise

The Bicycle Exercise

Here’s a very good ab exercise that I found in this site. It’s very simple, and pretty effective too. It’s called the bicycle exercise. Like its name suggests, your legs are moving as if pedaling a bicycle. However, it is done face down so that the stomach muscles are tensed and exercised.

Here’s how this ab exercise goes:

First, you need a flat and clean floor to lie down in. Lay down on your back with your fingers laced behind your head. Now, slowly lift your shoulders off the ground. You must do this without moving your neck, or the ab exercise fails. Next, slowly lift your right leg towards your chest until it forms a 45-degree angle, at the same time moving the left elbow towards the right knee. Then straighten your right leg, while moving the left leg and right elbow towards the same position. Alternate between the two sides for 12 to 16 repetitions, or more if your body can take it.

Take note, this ab exercise strengthens the abdominal muscles, but it does not burn the fat away if that is what you expect. I will publish more abs exercises for flat abdomens in the near future.

Move Softly with the Power of a Whip

Move Softly with the Power of a Whip

Have you seen that old man or woman exercising in the garden with slow and soft movements that look like they are just weaving their bodies around slowly? That’s Taijiquan, the Chinese internal martial art that look weak but yet can strike you with the power of a whip.

You might be thinking, “Wait, that old man is a martial artist?” The answer is, technically, yes. Taijiquan was created as a fighting art hundreds of years ago in China. It only became some sort of fitness program in modern times when the art, just like all other martial arts, were proven to be effective at promoting fitness and health as well as prevent aging.

How Does Taijiquan Improve Health?

Taijiquan follows the Chinese (Taoist) theories of Yin-yang and Qi. Yin and yang is the Chinese philosophy concerning two opposite yet complementing forces, while Qi is the energy that is found within all of us.

To summarize it, in the context of Taijiquan, the Qi is defined as having two aspects: Yang Qi and Yin Qi. Yang qi is described as vigorous, fiery and active. Yin qi, on the other hand, is weak, soft and passive. By default, the energy in our body is always Yang qi, and becomes Yin qi only when we are sick. Yang qi, being fiery, contributes to the natural degradation of our bodies hence we all age. However, if we are always Yin, our bodies become weak and we still die though not through aging but through poor health.

Simply put, if there is an imbalance in the Qi system in our body, we get sick. Of course, we are initially unbalanced between we are always too Yang. However, being Yang means our body is energetic but at a price: our bodies degenerate. When the body starts to turn Yin, that means the balance has been tipped and we get sick.

In line with this theory, we could see that there is a need to constantly balance the Qi in our body. That is what Taijiquan does. When you perform its exercises, you learn to regulate your breathing as well as your Qi. What results is balance between the Yang Qi and Yin Qi. In a scientific point of view, there is a strong immune system that helps us resist sicknesses and diseases in a natural way. Our internal organs, which are thought to be reservoirs of Qi, are maintained healthy and fit.

So don’t think that Taijiquan is for old people only. It’s for the young, and it is best to start young in the path of fitness and health.