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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