Yea Burpees!

You’ve made great gains in your fitness level. You’re feeling pretty good about what you’ve achieved and you’re looking to upgrade your performance. Time to join the elite ranks of the super fit. Think you’re ready for any challenge? Boy, have we got the exercise for you. Okay, it has a funny name. But the burpee is no joke. Try one. Who’s laughing now?

As you’ll quickly discover, there is every reason to take the exercise with the silly name very seriously—it just happens to be an outstanding conditioner and one of the most challenging exercises you can perform. Burpees, as arduous as they are beneficial, test the strength, endurance and coordination of the fittest athletes.

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Core Strength

That last explosive sprint to the finish line, a baseball soaring out of the park, the elegant posture of an elite skier, extremities neatly tucked, making a thrilling descent down the mountain — that’s core strength in action.

“Core stability is the catch phrase in therapy and fitness,” says international fitness personality Lisa Westlake, author of several books, including Strong to the Core and Get on the Ball, (available on Amazon.com). “The tricky thing is these deep muscles are ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ so people either don’t know about them, don’t know how to turn them on or don’t care about them — until they have a back injury, that is.”

By developing your torso — abs, obliques, upper and lower back, hips, glutes and hamstrings — you improve posture, agility, stability, balance, coordination, speed, flexibility and endurance.

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Eyes Wide Shut

You have an important decision to make. You lean this way and then you lean that way. Indecision is making you crazy. What do you do?

“Sleep on it.”

A cliché maybe, standard fare when you’re facing a difficult problem that needs a solution, but research suggests that it might also be the best possible advice you can give or get.

There is a growing body of evidence indicating that unconscious thought is superior to conscious contemplation. The unconscious mind is far more capable of absorbing and analyzing information than its more limited wide-eyed counterpart.

Think of conscious thought as the data stream and the unconscious mind as the central processing unit. Yet despite its superior capacity, the unconscious mind remains a mystery to us.

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On A Roll

If you’re in the market for a fitness routine that combines working out with massage and chiropractic sessions, perhaps body rolling is for you.

“Yamuna Body Rolling re-educates muscles and stimulates bone, creating positive, permanent changes in the body. YBR allows you to work specific muscles in detail, to create suppleness in tight areas and optimize range of motion. YBR frees your body of restrictions, aches and pains, increases circulation, improves posture, corrects alignment, relieves stress, increases bone density, and boosts energy and vitality,” says Yael Zake Becker, assistant manager of Yamuna Body Rolling, New York City.

By artfully manipulating a specially designed firm vinyl ball — six to 10 inches in circumference — and using your body weight in a series of sequential floor exercises that replicate the patterns of the neuromuscular system, you’re elongating muscles by stimulating from the point of origin to insertion.

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Duct Tape for Christmas

During the month before the holiday season it is the habit of counselors and therapists to ask their clients, especially those they perceive as lonely, or isolated, without family and friends, how they will be spending Christmas. Psychiatrists ask the same question of their depressed patients. Nurses and emergency services expect an increase in calls of distress, emotional crises, and exacerbations of illness. But this usually doesn’t happen. For hospitals, Christmas is a quiet day.

I think on that one day our hearts open up; our idea of family expands and loosens. We take in strangers. We smile and greet one another. There is quiet talk, shared food and drink. The psychiatric hospital, at best an unhappy place, softens around the edges. The air becomes lighter, burdens accepted; for one day we are all part of the same family.

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Be Good to Your Heart

Yoga is an important component of the Dr. Dean Ornish Program, internationally noted for successfully treating heart disease by showing patients how to make critical lifestyle changes through exercise, low-fat vegetarian diet, stress management and emotional support.

“Yoga is a huge tool in the fight to prevent, stop or reverse the heart disease patterns we are seeing,” says Vicki Lindberg, yoga instructor and coordinator with the Dr. Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease at Alegant Health, Bergan Mercy Medical Center in Omaha.

The Ornish program uses Hatha yoga, which involves specialized breathing and a series of poses — in combination with complementary techniques — meditation and visualization, for example — to help lower pulse rate, cholesterol level and blood pressure, improve respiration, endocrine function and circulation, normalize weight, enhance flexibility, and impart deep relaxation. Yoga, like resistance training, increases muscularity, but without making excessive demands on the body.

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Blueberry Almighty

Beautiful, versatile, sweet, hard working — about the only thing the blueberry can’t do is blow its own horn. Now it’s time to give this small miracle worker its due.

Recent research lends support to a centuries-old belief that blueberries have unique health properties and may help protect against cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke, urinary tract infection, macular degeneration and Alzheimer’s disease.

The Swedes have been using it for years in extract form as a remedy for children’s diarrhea and in Japan it’s taken for eyestrain and night blindness. However you swallow it, the blueberry shows promise as an important tool for personal health.

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Stressful Times

Radical diets can be dangerous to your health. The thought of purifying the body with a detox diet is a seductive one for some people. Occasionally we over-indulge or eat foods we know aren’t good for us and we’re all well aware that we live in an environment that tainted by pollutants, so it’s no wonder that a quick fix for perceived health woes sounds attractive. But instead of feeling better, health experts say you may end up feeling worse.

Taylor, who helped oversee a study that looked at how women experience and cope with stress, coined the phrase “tend and befriend” to describe the way women adapt biology to form a pattern of behavior. “Certainly, hormones come into play,” says Dr. Taylor. “They’re not the whole story but they nudge things along. In both sexes, oxytocin is released in response to stress. It’s the same drug released after birth that helps bond mother and baby. In women, the effects of oxytocin are magnified by estrogen, which may influence them to seek comfort by protecting and nurturing their children or through female companionship. It’s how they cope during stressful episodes.”

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Watch Your Form

Whether its 5-lb free weights or ‘big boy’ barbells, lifting weights on a regular basis will leave you stronger, more toned, and more efficient at burning calories. But when done without good form, weightlifting weighs in as a potentially harmful waste of time.

"Many times you'll go to the gym and see people watching TV instead of focussing on the weights they're lifting, or showing off by lifting weights that are just too heavy. That's a sure-fire recipe for injury," says Toronto-based personal trainer and fitness consultant Jody Armstrong. "To weight train properly you've got to flex your mind, not just your muscle. That means forgetting about what's going on around you, making that mind-body connection, and concentrating on every movement your muscles make with those weights."

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Secrets Of The Raw Kind

The raw food diet might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to people who hate to cook.

The diet’s followers – including celebrities such as Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson and designer Donna Karan – claim that it will make you lose weight, increase your energy level and make your skin glow.

Sounds great – but what does the raw movement really mean? A lifetime of crunching carrots and celery? Not exactly. Followers consume unprocessed, whole-plant-based food, of which at least 75% should be uncooked. Raw foodists nosh on organically grown fresh vegetables and fruits, beans, grains, seeds, nuts, dried fruits, seaweed, and purified water. No-nos on the raw food diet include meat, dairy, baked goods and bread.

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What's the Deal With Acupuncture?

Although acupuncture is at least two thousand years old, it’s undergoing a glamorous makeover. Acupuncture is enjoying newfound status as the alternative therapy du jour—even making a cameo appearance on Desperate Housewives as a treatment for anxiety and stress.

Published reports suggest that a number of high-profile celebrities have successfully used the artful application of the needle to ease anxiety.

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Harmony

Most people see harmony as a difficult attainment. It’s not. It is neither difficult nor an attainment. Wherever it is that you are, you are in fact already harmonious, you just may not know it. Nothing new is to be added and nothing is to be discarded; you are as perfect as possible. NOW. It is not that you are going to be perfect sometime in the future, it is not that you have to do something arduous to be yourself. It is not the journey to some other point somewhere else; you are not going somewhere else.

You are already here. That which is to be obtained is already attained. This idea must go deep, only then will you be able to understand why such simple techniques can help. Read more...

The Walking Cure

It may come as news to the uninitiated among us but meditation and movement aren’t mutually exclusive states. Walking meditation is an ancient practice that fosters greater mental awareness, improves concentration and promotes general physical health.

Meditation is a multi-faceted practice and though most of us are familiar with seated or cross-legged meditation, meditative states can also be achieved through walking and in a lying-down posture. In fact, many practitioners alternate all three forms or work in variations (walking for 15 minutes and remaining seated for 45 minutes, for example.) Read more...

After Hour Food Spooks

For some people, late-night snacking is more than a bad habit; it’s pathology. Raiding the refrigerator before you fall asleep may be a symptom of a bigger problem than impulse control. If your favorite late-night companion is peanut butter then maybe your social life isn’t the only thing that needs attention. Carbohydrate-rich peanut butter is the preferred first choice in comfort foods for those who suffer from nocturnal eating syndrome.

Overeating in the evening, lack of daytime appetite, and insomnia are classic symptoms of this serious, frequently untreated clinical illness, which is believed to affect 1.5 percent of the world’s population. Dr. Albert J. Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania first diagnosed this highly complex ailment in 1955. Multi-faceted, nocturnal eating syndrome has numerous behavioral and hormonal components. Read more...

Immune For The Future

Our bodies are constantly battling foreign invaders, but victory in this war depends on the help of a powerful ally – the immune system.

"The immune system and its response characteristics are as variable as there are humans on the face of the earth. From the gene perspective, mice have been selectively bred for immune response differences ranging from increased tumor resistance to proneness to autoimmunity. Given these facts, one must conclude that the immune system in humans is as variable as our genetic background might be. However, disease resistance is not just a function of our genes," says Dr. Mark Laudenslager, director of Behavioral Immunology at the University of Colorado’s Department of Psychiatry. Read more...

Squat This

The experts may not always agree about the way you should perform a squat but they have reached a consensus on why you should make squats an integral part of your workout regime.

It’s not often you can learn good fitness techniques from a two-year-old. Danny M. O’Dell, author of Strength Training Secrets (www.explosivelyfit.com), claims that small children execute perfect squats, unlike adults who usually perform them incorrectly: "I find a kid anywhere from about two-to-six-years-old automatically does a perfect squat. If you watch any of these little tykes squat you will see their seats hit the floor, and their back and lower legs are straight." Read more...

Your Sweet Tooth

Of course sugar is an easy target and the favorite bogeyman of dietary habits. The average North American consumes the equivalent of 20 teaspoons of sugar a day – more than double the recommended amount — and drinks 53 gallons of soft drinks per year, a whopping 40 per cent increase over the consumption levels of 20 years ago. But that’s just the beginning of the good carb vs. bad carb debate . . .

If your sweet tooth doesn’t undo your best intentions with regard to sugar, count on the body to perform its own secret act of sabotage. When you severely restrict carbohydrate intake, your body gets sweet revenge by converting available fats and proteins into blood sugar; essentially forcing other nutrients to become unwitting soldiers in the carbohydrate army. Read more...

Brain Food for Thought

I think, therefore I am…eating properly. Mental acuity doesn’t need to diminish with age. Research supports the idea that certain foods can help keep you sharp and protect against degenerative diseases while they reduce the risk of cognitive decline.

Fat content and caloric measurements are valuable considerations for maintaining a trim body. But what diet best serves the mind? Buoyed by startling results, some researchers are claiming that the key to preserving mental capacity as we age may lie in the multicolored storehouse of Mother Nature’s bounty.

The human body possesses the potential to be as creative and destructive as the individual that inhabits it; consequently, some of the body’s necessary operations, frequently compromised by lifestyle, are also what contribute to its problems as we age. Read more...