When most of us think of gardening, we think of a nice, leisuredly stroll around our gardening areas, assessing what looks like it needs some TLC, watering our plants, and maybe pulling a few weeds, but whenever I “garden”, it’s always a couple of hours since I have several decorative beds to tend to, and I’m planning on also starting a small vegetable garden, so it’s actually quite straining to garden for me.

If you have a larger yard and you also have several flower beds or even a vegetable garden, then you probably know what I’m talking about. Today was one of the nicest days we’ve had so far in April, so I ended up being outside for about two and a half hours, cleaning up the yard and the garden beds, and it really was some hard, physical labor that also involved some fairly strenuous pushing and pulling. I had to transplant a few things, which involved hoing the soil and then raking it and tilling a large bed, which is very good muscle work for the arms, and also a little bit of cardio in there too.

I also had to clean the front porch off, which is a wrap around porch, and involves moving furniture, wiping off several items and also carrying large cushions fairly far out of their winter storage place. Since it was sunny and over seventy degrees, this also included a great deal of my body having to cool itself off, which involves the burning of calories as well as cardio output.

It’s kind of like when I get out of our infrared sauna, my heart is working and it feels like I just worked out because I’m slightly out of breath. It feels good! With the gardening today, I started to sweat and had to drink quite a bit of water to stay hydrated. Tilling soil is definitely one of the most taxing of all gardening duties, and weeding can also be somewhat hard, especially with that large, hardy weeds that require a lot of pulling. There’s a lot of bending and many times forceful digging just to get the weeds, root and all, out of the ground.

So, you see, it’s good to garden! Especially if you’re one of those people who cant’ stand gardening, getting a little cardio in and getting the good, fresh air that you get by gardening could be very therapeutic as well as cardio conditioning, which can help with burning calories and also muscle toning since there is some lifting and force going on which requires you to use your leg and arm muscles, which are great for initiating accelerated calorie burning.

I really didn’t know that this was a major problem overseas, but apparently the thin - like anorexic thin - model craze has gone way overboard in France, where I typically like to think of them having a healthy attitude toward weight and eating.

The craze has gotten so out of control in France, where fashion reigns supreme and women are keenly aware of the way they dress and look, that the government there has proposed a ground breaking bill that would make it illegal - that’s right ILLEGAL - to support or otherwise incite extremely low body weight.

This means that websites, television, fashion shows, and magazines will not be allowed to use extremely thin models or otherwise promote women who basically have close to zero body fat and bones sticking out everywhere. The awareness that thinness in the modeling and fashion industry has become a bigger problem lately came when a Brazilian runway model died of anorexia related complications.

The really sad thing is that France used to be looked to as an example for the rest of the world for not only it’s fashion savviness, but also for the way it’s citizens eat, which promotes a very healthy body, heart and lifestyle while not overdoing it . Heck, there’s a reason why almost every diet book you read cites France and their eating habits as a great role model for healthy living and eating right, and in moderation. Americans have taken some pages from that notebook, and tried to modify theirs to emulate France’s.

One look at runways shows that the waif look hasn’t died down, and France is trying to change the ideal to a more realistic one, where women are not putting their health in danger by staying too thin and barely eating anything, and get more healthy ideals up there for young women to look up to. I say this type of thing is long overdue. I’m not a fan of government intervention, but in this case I think it really is in the public’s best interest and needs to be regulated.

I just got my first jog in, outdoors of course, for the spring season. It’s April, and here in Ohio, it seems we are all going a little stir crazy since we’ve been cooped up for another long winter. And of course, we got all of our worst snow for the winter season at the end of the winter, so we are all ready to break out the bikes, boats, skateboards, rollerblades, and other outdoor fitness equipment and accessories, and get outdoors where the air is fresh and we can hear the birds singing again.

Well, just a few days ago, I seized the opportunity for my first spring jog because it was gorgeous outside. It was sunny, almost tipping seventy degrees but not quite, and the birds were out in full force. It’s amazing the difference when the sun comes out around here. You feel a certain buzz and chatter in the air, as if everyone was in hibernation for a year and now they’ve all come out to bask in the sun and inhale the fresh air deeply and appreciatively.

I was no different! I put on my sunscreen and sunglass, pulled on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt, and got my jogging shoes on. I headed down a road that I’d never been down before since we just moved here a short time ago, to investigate what it looked like on foot. It’s amazing how different things look when you’re not whizzing by them in a car, isn’t it? The level of detail you notice, even just if you’re fast walking or jogging, and not leisurely strolling, is amazing.

Since I haven’t been for a jog on uneven terrain (aka, not a treadmill), for a while, I decided to take it slow and started off at a very slow pace, alternating jogging with fast walking, swinging my arms as well so I could get upper and lower body in, as is usual with my jogs and jog/walks. I’m always amazed at how quickly you lose the ability to jog, because I got winded very quickly and had to turn to walking quickly. I’m also always amazed every season at how quickly my endurance builds up again. I guess I attribute that to muscle memory, it’s really true what they say about that I believe.

However, I did get very sore unfortunately, and had to jump in the infrared sauna we purchased pretty quickly after since my legs had a lot of lactic acid built up in them. It quickly soothed away my aches, but I do have about one more day of recovery still since my quads are really hurting. I only went jogging for about a half hour, but my muscles haven’t been exposed to that particular type of resistence for a while, so they may take a little while to recover. I’ll just do yoga for a little while until they get better.

I’ve loved yoga from the moment I first tried it years ago. There’s just something that instills such a sense of peace and tranquility in the moves, and there’s something about it that also makes you feel strong, but not bulky as well. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a super yogi who can bend her body in the most insane poses and hold it forever or anything like that.

And I certainly am not capable of some of the pretzel twisting moves that some more advanced yoga practitioners can do without thought since I do have a sensitive back, but I’m also not inflexible because I do try to normally include this in my fitness regimen, if not once a week, than once every two weeks roughly. It would be more if I didn’t have a pesky 9-5 job, but I do so that does limite the time I can do it since I work out a work quite a bit in the gym and yoga doesn’t fit into that regimen unfortunately.

Another huge benefit, especially for women, with yoga, may be that it can make women walk and be taller. A frequent phenomena for women, especially as they get older, is that they tend to “shrink”, or at least appear to do so because their bones and discs in between their vertebrae tend to wear away due to lack of calcium and women’s genetic inheritance of weakening bones as we get older.

We’ve all seen the “little old ladies”, kind of hunched over, walking very slowly. This is what we want to avoid. We want to stay walking tall, with no curvature in our spines, and yoga reportedly may be able to help us doing that longer into our later years.

Now, here’s the great news coming out of a cool little study that was done on what yoga can do for older women. Women who took a nine week yoga course reported that they could walke taller, with less effort, and had much better balance after taking the yoga sessions for nine weeks.

That’s another thing I left out is that yoga is awesome for balance because the poses really make you focus on your core strength and they kind of force the body to balance itself - that’s why you always feel a little wobbly when you first start yoga and are a beginner, because it involves so much balancing, which not everyone is used to.

Not only were they reported to have better balance and walking more easily, but they also gained an average of a centimeter of height, which researchers attributed to them standing more upright without crouching or bending. Adding to the benefits, the women, who were involved in the program that was made especially for older women, could walk with longer strides, walk faster, and reported having more confidence in their balance abilities. They could also stand much longer on one leg, indicating a better sense of balance.

Wow, reading all this makes me want to pick up and go do yoga right now! And I’m only in my early thirties. Ladies, it’s also important to drink your milk, or get some other good sources of calcium if you’re not a fan of milk like me, like maybe leafy greens such as spinach or a good calcium supplement.

Back pain and back injuries are extremely common as a source of work absences and in the more severe form can cause early disability for many Americans. There are precautions that you can take to minimize the risk of injury to your back and decrease the chance of living with chronic back pain. When you are in a seated position for an extended period of time, such as on an airplane or in your car, tuck a little pillow behind your lower back. This will support the curve of your waist which will leave your joints and muscles in a more relaxed position.

Use 2 pillows when you sleep at night. If you sleep on your side, use 1 pillow for between your knees thus keeping pressure off your back. For those that sleep on their back, put a pillow under your knees to diminish pressure to your hips. Try to avoid sleeping on your stomach since this arches your back and causes trouble.

Choose the chairs you sit in carefully. Low soft chairs and couches are tough on your back as you throw yourself forward to get up, increasing the possibility of wrenching your back. Avoid twisting your back when you transfer groceries from the cart to the car. Keep your hips and shoulders parallel.

Twisting your back for transferring puts seven times the force on your spine. Worktables should be keot at a height that’s beneficial to your back. Your worktable should be no more than 4 inches below your elbows when standing. For a seated position, your worktable should be at elbow level. This will keep you from bending over while working.

When packing suitcases, don’t overstuff one and carry it on one side of your body. Instead, evenly distribute into 2 bags and carry one on each side to avoid straining one side of your back. Lift properly to avoid back injuries. Keep your legs apart slightly and bend your knees and hips. Keep what you’re lifting close to your body. While lifting, take a deep breath, exhale and tighten your abdomen muscles to decrease stress on your back. Stay active to keep all of your muscles more toned . Inactivity will make you more likely to suffer from back pain and injuries.

Exercise seems to be a debate whenever someone is in an altered state from what their “normal” is. It’s no different for expecting moms. One time you hear that exercise should be strictly limited, and more and more now though, you are hearing that exercise not only benefits the mom, but it also benefits the baby in her womb. We are talking moderate exercise though here, not any kind of contortionist, heavy lifting and heavy cardio work type of exercise.

The benefits that early results are showing on moderate exercise for a fetus is that it benefits the unborn baby’s cardiovascular and neurological development, helping things work better like the blood pressure, the heart rate, and the peak function of all internal organs at the time the child is still in the mother’s body.

They tested this theory by testing babies that were exposed to exercise while in the mother’s womb vs. mothers that didn’t not exercise with child, and they found that the babies who had moms who moderately exercised while pregnant with them had better autonomic responses, which means involuntary bodily functions as we discussed previously, such as heart rate, breathing and blood pressure as well as organ function.

Experts are claiming the because of these findings on how well regulated a baby’s heartbeat is in the womb, exercise may be a way for mothers to be to increase the chances their child will have a healthily functioning heart and other organs. I could definitely see how this would logically benefit the child, especially since it seems there are several crucial stages where a mother to be and her child share the same chemistry and often the same reactions to certain foods etc.

We just purchased a far infrared sauna for several different reasons, and we’re already loving the relaxing and soothing effects this heating machine has on our muscles both after workouts and at night after a busy and stressful day at work when mucsle tension seems to take over at night. What makes an infrared sauna different from regular saunas though?

Well, a regular sauna, which was popularized by Sweden, whose population liked to take long hot baths in the moist heat, used regular saunas, which were simply wooden boxes that heated anywhere from 150 to over 200 degrees by heating the air around the body, and using a centrally located heater with rocks in it that water could be poured on to make it more of a hot steam bath. It was relaxing, but it was not easy to make it very long in the stifling high temperatures.

So, the infrared sauna was designed to use infrared heat, which emanates around and penetrates the tissue of the body, instead, heating the body itself directly, not just the air around it. The consequence is that you get a deeper tissue penetration of the therapeutic heat, and consequently you also get a relaxing experience and other therapeutic benefits such as skin clearing, muscle relaxation, and and excellent added benefit of increased circulation of blood. See reviews and ratings of far infrared saunas for more information on better brands to choose.

This increased circulation of blood is supposed to help burn calories, but there is a lot of debate out there as to whether an infrared sauna can help you lose weight by using it. Unfortunately, the water you sweat out does come right back on as soon as you drink more water, but proponents of the infrared sauna say that the calories you burn while your heart is pumping out more blood to keep the body cool is still a benefit because it cardiovascularly conditions the heart and causes a benefit to those losing weight because of the extra calorie burning ability.

My boyfriend and I have recently gotten a far infrared sauna installed in our basement, and we really purchased it because both of us have problems with both our necks and backs due to car accidents and other unknown injuries. Before purchasing our sauna, I had done a lot of reading about the different types of saunas available on the market today, and came up with two basic types.

The first is an “old school” sauna that uses normal, circulating heat to heat the cabin to very high temperatures and heat the surface of your body with a dry heat to produce perspiration.

The second is the infarered sauna, which also uses high temperatures to heat the body and soothe muscle and joint pain, but instead of heating the outside of your body, infarered heat waves have (supposedly), the ability to penetrate the tissue a little more deeply and are therefore supposed to be able to provide a little more relief from muscle and joint stiffness.

After reading about the two, even though the infarereds were typically a bit more expensive, I decided that for my purpose of muscle and joint pain, we should go with the infared type of sauna. This way we could use it at night after a long day of sitting at work and stiffening up, and after workouts to help loosen up our muscles from the vigorous activity.

So far, so good. We love it and we’ve had it for not even one week. We’ve been in it every night, and it does appear that it’s helping both of us with our forever-tight muscles and loopy backs. More to come on this as we hopefully discover more and more health benefits from the infrared sauna.

Yep, that’s right, all those boring chores around your home, or more specifically, those projects that seem to never end around the house, like painting a room, picking up the yard, landscaping, shampooing the rugs, or sanding floors or decks, are excellent for the heart and getting the heart rate up in ways that you don’t get from your everyday exercise on treadmills, ellipticals and the like.

For this reason, these types of dreaded home improvement projects tend to really rack up the calorie burning and the muscle building because they are different ways of movement that the body is not necessarily accustomed to. This creates muscle confusion, gets the heart rate up, and yes, sculpts lean muscle and burns more calories because you guessed it, your body’s not used to this type of activity so you haven’t built up a tolerance for it yet.

An unfortunate side effect of the extra calorie burning and muscle sculpting is the obvious though. The next day after strenuous yard work, painting or sanding a deck, you almost always experience muscle soreness. This is the time when I know to have my Aleve ready, because of all that naughty lactic acid that has invariably built up in my muscles from the unusual and often repetitive motion.

I just painted an accent wall the other day in my bathroom. I was just bored and decided to run out and buy paint and try it out just for the heck of it because I suddenly wanted a “change” and was bored with the way it looked. About 3 hours later and a lot of blue taping and preparation that required me carrying heavy ladders up the stairs, paint cans and other supplies, I was done.

Today I’m really feeling the exertion in my neck and back because I was leaning in ways that my body is not used to. I also really worked up a sweat being up close to the ceiling since heat rises, so I’m sure there was some bonus calorie burning happening too. So you see, you really can get a little health into your regimen of home improvement in the summer and the winter time!

I have to admit, I was no fan of the big blow up fitness balls, or balance balls if that’s what you call them, that are found in many gyms now. I do know a lot of people who swear by balance balls though, and say that they rely on them to strengthen their “core”, which is their belly, or abs. They also are hailed as a great benefit for those with back troubles because they do essentially help strengthen the “core”, which is essential to having a strong back that is more resistant to injury.

Many of us have extremely sensitive backs, especially as we get older, and the problem is if you don’t know how to use a balance ball, then you may end up doing your back more harm than good. I’m the perfect case in point. Instead of positioning myself correctly on the balance ball, I was actually arching my back too much, so that I was relying on my back muscles to lift me back out of the momentum of going down, instead of my abdominal muscles.

Balance balls come in a few sizes, and the one that is most commonly used for the abs is the larger one. Sometimes a smaller one may be used as well for the abs, just in a different capacity. For example, I used a smaller balance ball to go in between my knees and my legs to help get more of a solid center-belly workout instead of just working out the top of my abs, which is the most common part we go to when we’re working on the abs.

Balance balls are great because they almost force you to work on your upper abs, which is very hard for a lot of people to do, including me. They also work your abs in a way that makes them flatter and will give you that washboard look, but one that is not too ripped, because the whole time you use them, you are subconsciously using every part of the abdominal muscles without even knowing it, and this is what creates that flat, uniform, toned look to the abs.