Healthy Lifestyle Alternatives

Archive for April, 2010

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This isolation exercise gives you a challenging workout with your arms outstretched over your head. It can be a bit hard to do if you are used to having your hands beneath your head, but can still be done even if you are a beginner. Just make sure you do not have any neck injury or neck problems for your neck is not supported by either your arms or your hands.

Before doing this exercise, make sure you have done your warm up and stretching exercises. Lie down on your exercise mat with your head, neck, and back in a straight line. Stretch your arms above your head with your palms crossing over each other. Have your elbows in a slight bend to prevent your arms from pressing on your ears. Plant your feet firmly on the floor with your knees bent at a 60 degree angle. This will be your starting position.

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Perform the crunches by exhaling as you lift your upper body off the floor with the use of your abdominals. Your upper torso, shoulders, neck, head and arms should be maintained in a straight position. Do not lean your head or shoulders forward during the motion to help isolate the contraction in your abdominals. Hold this position for a second and exhale as you slowly go back to starting position while still maintaining the tension in your abs.

Repeat with the recommended number of reps and sets. To increase the difficulty, you can hold a plate of weights in your hands during the exercise.

This abdominal technique is a more advanced workout that is meant to isolate the core and maximize the workout. If you find you are unable to perform this workout you may want to build strength in your core by doing less difficult ab workouts.
Written by Christine Robins. Great Power push up stands, and your best source for the Shaun TInsanity Workout routine.

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HEALTHY LIFESTYLE ALTERNATIVES

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Can stress affect my health?
The body responds to stress by releasing stress hormones. These hormones make blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar levels go up. Long-term stress can help cause a variety of health problems, including:

• Mental health disorders, like depression and anxiety
• Obesity
• Heart disease
• High blood pressure
• Abnormal heart beats
• Menstrual problems
• Acne and other skin problems

Feeling Frazzled? Try These Tips
Balancing work, bills, chores and family can feel like a losing battle, especially if you’re in need of some serious relaxation. Factor in social commitments and exhaustion and you may feel like you’re on the verge of a meltdown. Before you let anxiety get the best of you, though, try these eight surprising stress busters. They’ll help you stay cool, calm, and collected no matter what comes your way.

Give Yourself Breathing Lessons
The way you breathe can either calm your body’s response to stress or fire it up. “When you breathe shallowly, you set up the body’s fight or flight response, including the release of stress hormones, and you get less oxygen—all of which makes stress worse,” explains Alice Domar, Ph.D., director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health in Waltham, MA, and co-author of Live a Little.

To relieve stress and calm yourself, practice diaphragmatic breathing: Inhale deeply, allowing your chest and your abdomen to rise to a count of four, then exhale slowly to a count of four; repeat this exercise four times. Do this several times throughout the day, every day, and you should feel a lot less stressed, says Domar.

Take a Tea Break
Skip the coffee and opt for tea instead. Research at the University College London found that drinking black tea on a daily basis can actually help you recover more quickly from the stresses of daily life by lowering levels of stress hormones and inducing greater feelings of relaxation. Whether you prefer your tea black or with milk or sugar, the choice is yours. Just sit back, enjoy your time-out, and sip the soothing brew.

Seize Control Over What You Can
Feeling bogged down by too much to do? Don’t sweat it. Write up a to-do list of small tasks you’d like to accomplish. Clean out your purse. Organize your desk. Schedule overdue check-ups. Even such simple steps can help you feel on top of things, Domar suggests. And taking charge of what you can control will help you feel less overwhelmed and disheartened by what you can’t.

Ban the Word from Your Vocabulary
Describe a situation in your life as “difficult” or “challenging” instead of “stressful,” and you’ll open yourself up to more options for taking action, rather than making stress an immutable fact of life, says Scott Sheperd, Ph.D., a psychologist in St. Louis and author of Who’s In Charge? Attacking the Stress Myth.

“If you look at a situation as challenging, it gives you some power to do something about it instead of making it seem like something that’s happening to you. Words not only describe states—they also create emotional states

Use Good Scents
Dab essence of rose oil or ylang-ylang oil on your wrists. A recent study from Srinakharinwirot University in Thailand found that when healthy people absorbed rose oil through their skin, their breathing rate and systolic blood pressure decreased, and they felt more calm and more relaxed than those in a control group.

Previous research at the same university found similar effects with oil from the ylang-ylang, a fragrant, flowering tree found in tropical areas. Apply a few drops and let the soothing scents de-stress you from the inside out,” says Sheperd. Just by changing your choice of adjective, you can take some of the punch out of an unpleasant situation and make it seem much more manageable.

Reinvent Your Daily Grind
Instead of rushing through the day on auto pilot, elicit the relaxation response while folding the laundry, washing the dishes or performing other ordinary tasks. They may seem tedious but the repetitive quality of activities like these can actually have a soothing effect by short-circuiting stressful thought patterns, explains Herbert Benson, M.D., director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and co-author of The Breakout Principle.

The key is to focus your attention on a particular aspect of what you’re doing, such as putting a crease in your pants as you iron them, which will keep your mind from drifting to more stressful thoughts.

Pour Your Heart Out—On Paper
Don’t keep your angst all bottled up. Vent it by putting pen to paper. A recent study at the University at Albany, State University of New York, found that writing about stressful events in your life for just 20 minutes dramatically lowers your perception of your own personal stress. Whether it’s because this gets your worries out of your head and into the real world where it’s easier to do something about them, or because it simply stops you from ruminating about your problems, the result is the same: Less stress, less depression and a better mood.

Give Your Work Space a Makeover
Put out a bowl of green apples, which have a soothing scent. Turn off overhead fluorescent or bright lights and turn on soft, indirect lighting (say, from a desk lamp) instead. Choose a screen saver that’s in sea blue or green; research has found those colors have calming qualities.

Create visual resting spots like a photograph of someone you love, a flowering plant that provides a dose of beauty, or a piece of artwork that you find peaceful, suggests Allen Elkin, Ph.D., director of the Stress Management and Counseling Center in New York City and author of Stress Management for Dummies. When you feel your stress level rising, take a deep breath and redirect your eyes to one of those resting spots for an instant calming effect.

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