Health improves with increased strength and muscle mass. And that’s true for women as it is for men.
In a study of elderly women who were disabled to varying degrees, researchers for the US national institute on aging found that those with the least strength were twice as likely to die from heart disease as the strongest. Researchers used hand-grip strength as a measure of total strength.
Another study was done – testing the strength of quadriceps (muscles on the front of your thighs). The weakest women had 1.65 times higher the risk of death from any cause, compared to the strongest.
Strength and physical fitness has very real implications for your quality of life. You should be incorporating strength training at least 2 times per week per muscle part to your fitness program.
When I insist on change, deep down inside I hate change. I love change! I hate change!
Why is it that big opportunities, the really obvious chances that get to improve our health, shape, our careers, almost always pass by?
Big opportunities bring change, and change is painful. As long as “opportunity” means change, and as long as “change” means pain, we will continue to miss our chances.
So don’t miss your chance today to have a little exercise, because there lies a big opportunity for you and your body to improve your health and feel good.
No matter how badly you have used your body, however improperly paired your muscle groups have become, you can reverse the trend. And you can do it at home.
Yoga is the answer. Yogais the most simple and effective way of keeping the joints young and healthy. The superiority of yoga is that it undoes our complex and often used patterns of movement.
You can start at your own level and progress at any rate. Yoga is about journey not the destination. Start slowly and stick with it. The little improvements along the way, feeling looser in your own skin, feeling lighter and feeling younger, that’s the goal.
Start with the most modest, disarmingly gentle stuff, where you really find hard to believe anything is happening at all and eventually progress to more difficult poses-asanas.
But yoga does take time and effort. Sometimes it’s hard just to hold a stretch for a matter of seconds, but this is what it is all about. The harder you find the stretch, the more you need it.
In time, all soft tissue will loosen, even blood vessels and nerves as the body is reintroduced to it’s extremes. Elasticity is restored and so is streamlined, smooth-gliding function. The stretches pull the tissue and create a much more vigorous blood supply and the skeleton is cleansed and rejuvenated.
