Reasons for Doing Yoga

by Nina

Bees Sipping Nectar by Michele Macartney-Filgate

Yesterday in his post Yoga for Healthy Eating, Baxter wrote about a study that showed that obesity in modern societies was not caused by our sedentary lifestyle but instead by our eating habits. But the fact is, our current culture is a very sedentary one, and if weight loss isn’t a good reason for exercising, there are many, other important reasons, including both physical and mental health. If you’ve been reading our blog for any amount of time, you’ll surely have noticed that we’re strongly encouraging exercise in the form of yoga asanas as one of the most important strategies for fostering for healthy aging.

By chance on the same day Jane Brody of the New York Times addressed the issue of motivation for exercise (see Changing Our Tune on Exercise) by saying that the usual reasons experts give for encouraging us to exercise, including a desire to lose weight or improve your figure, to keep heart disease, cancer or type 2 diabetes at bay, to lower your blood pressure or cholesterol, to protect your bones, and to live to a healthy old age, turn out not to be good motivators for people. Instead, it's the short-term benefits of feelings of well-being and happiness that keep us exercising:

Now research by psychologists strongly suggests it’s time to stop thinking of future health, weight loss and body image as motivators for exercise. Instead, these experts recommend a strategy marketers use to sell products: portray physical activity as a way to enhance current well-being and happiness.

Doesn’t that sound like one of the real purposes of yoga? Many years ago, my then teacher Rodney Yee, asked me why I did yoga, and struggling to find the right (and truthful) words, I could only come up with the following:

It makes my life better.

I went on to say that I almost always felt better after taking a yoga class or practicing at home on my own. And that is what kept me coming back to my mat day after day. Of course, I’m delighted that the practice I’ve chosen will have most likely provide many significant long-term benefits for me (and I can already see that I’m aging well compared to more sedentary people my current age), but in the meantime, I’ll be practicing today because, well, it makes my life better. Jane Brody put it this way in her article:

I walk three miles daily, or bike ten miles and swim three-quarters of a mile. If you ask me why, weight control may be my first answer, followed by a desire to live long and well. But that’s not what gets me out of bed before dawn to join friends on a morning walk and then bike to the Y for my swim.

It’s how these activities make me feel: more energized, less stressed, more productive, more engaged and, yes, happier — better able to smell the roses and cope with the inevitable frustrations of daily life.

For more information, see the original study Brody references, The role of motives in exercise participation.

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What Are The Risks Of Doing HIIT

Today we are going to be looking into HIIT to help you get more from your workouts. Too many fitness enthusiasts suffer unnecessary setbacks in the gym because they are not taking the time to weigh up the possible risks beforehand.

We live in an impatient world. A world where gym users rush into buying products like creatine with no idea what it actually does for them.

Like all forms of training, interval training comes with a certain element of risk and it should be assessed before you attempt it. [

See the top 5 types of hiit sessions and what they are designed for.

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The overwhelming majority of gym users who wish to adopt this method into their workout program are more interested in the potential fat loss benefits it could yield. However, it would be foolish to jump in without first addressing the two most common risks. They are:

1) What is the recommended frequency for interval training?

2) How can you avoid unnecessary injuries?

Do not make the common gym mistake of presuming that more means better. In fact, your body needs adequate time to recover from each workout you perform and it is during these rest periods that your muscles grow bigger and stronger. If you choose to cut these rest periods out of your schedule and train every single day you run the risk of damaging your results rather than helping them.

You may have heard that the top fat loss benefit of interval training is EPOC, also known as the afterburn. This is the process by which your body will continue to burn off more calories after your leave the gym. It lasts for up to fourteen hours in total, meaning you should allow adequate rest between each workout if you want to get the most from this desirable phase. Because of this recovery period it is recommended that you perform no more than three hit workouts in any given week.

Injuries can occur during high intensity workouts, making this particular style of exercise a very dangerous thing to throw into your program if you don't take the time you research it beforehand. Usually this is due to lack of warm-up exercises.

A warm-up need only take five minutes and the benefits are clear. However, we live in an impatient world where folks want to get in and out of the gym as quickly as humanly possible and this sometimes means skipping the warm-up and cool-down sessions. Much like if you tried using whey protein or creatine supplements without researching them first. this only comes back to haunt you and your hiit sessions will suffer as a result.

About the Author:

By Russ Hollywood

Writer Details: To Now try info on how to implement hiit and using supplements like creatine to maximize results, be sure to pick up Russ Howe PTI's comprehensive free guides which have already helped thousands of fitness entusiaststs worldwide.