Yoga has been a savior for me during times of high stress. I’m not saying that it’s totally superior to actually just getting a good, sweaty workout in, but I am saying that I think yoga provides benefits that just plain old elliptical or treadmill type exercise can’t really touch, and that is the realm of stress management and breath regulation, both of which are critical to us living stress free, happy and fulfilled lives.

I have suffered many times with stress, and even have had numerous problems with breath regulation and panic attacks. Panic attacks are basically where a person feels they cannot catch their breath, and feel as if they are in a constant state of hyperventilation. The seriousness and the feelings can vary per person and per attack, but for me personally they have been sort of a mixture of more serious and long lasting, and short bursts of breathlessness.

I really need to get them under control when they start to occur, because stress is one of the leading causes of health problems and early deaths here in the US, it’s just not well documented or widely reported because no one wants to take the time to make the correlations between stress and anxiety and debilitating diseases and health and mental issues.

While working out helps to substantially curb my anxiety attacks (panic attacks) it doesn’t quite combine the relaxation and exercise experience of yoga. Yoga has a way of calming the nervous system, and because their movements are timed with the breath, you learn better how to control your breathing and get better control over your diaphragm movements, which is critical to gaining the most control over your breathing as possible.

Running can be an excellent way to burn calories and melt the fat right off, especially for those high intensity long distance runners. Rarely do you find a person who is heavy or overweight who is a regular habitual runner. However, there are some of us that find that running bulks up our legs, me included, and have opted for workouts that don’t tend to bulk up the quads and the calves, but rather create that longer look we want, especially if you’re short like me and don’t want to look bulky.

I prefer working out on an elliptical machine any day over working out on a treadmill, and that is because my quads do tend to bulk up from running. Not only that, but I beleive that running makes your muscles and joints more prone to injury because it is a very high impact activity that only seasoned people are immune to injuries from.

Now, if you take your time stretching every time of course this lowers your risk for injury, but I think back to my highschool days of shin splints from running (perhaps through my own fault of not wearing good shoes or perhaps not warming up and stretching enough), and think that I’d much rather do something more low impact that still burns as many calories.

If you’re looking for reviews on good elipticals see our elliptical machine reviews page. You’ll find reviews of my favorite brand of exercise equipment like Horizon and Reebok, and others that rank high in the “gym quality” category, which is what you want instead of something that is not sturdy or smooth and will actually hurt you if you don’t be careful.

I have discovered a new show that I love, and have DVR’d so that I can do it any time I want called Namaste Yoga, on the Fit network (I think it’s actually called Fit TV). The practices they do are very flowing and actually pretty quick, but I can keep up even though I’m nowhere near perfect with my yoga.

I will say that for a beginner, Namaste yoga is probably not good since you do have to constantly be changing positions and sometimes need to know what position they are talking about since you can’t see the TV in some of the positions and can only hear the calming, soothing voice of the narrator directing you what to do.

And that’s another reason I lvoe Namaste Yoga on Fit TV, the voice of the narrator is extremely calming. The girls who they show doing the practices are very peaceful and serene looking, and watching them alone can help lower your heart rate, especially since their graceful moves are set against peaceful backdrops that are reminiscent of a professional yoga studio or something one might find in a paradise like Bali or Hawaii.

The only complaint I have about Namaste yoga is of course that it has commercials. Although I fast forward through them, it kind of breaks my rhythm, and it’s hard to get back in the practice after they come back from a break. You will break a sweat however, doing their practices, which are all choreographed by someone who obviously has a great love for yoga and intermingling different positions while also making the movements seems liquid and easy, giving a soothing feel to the series.

I just had the most “luxurious” workout ever, I think. I did a yoga DVD with Suzanne Deason called Fat Burning Yoga, which is about a 45 minute long exercise, and then afterwards, after already being sufficiently taxed physically, yet oddly relaxed at the same time, I hopped in our new far infrared sauna for some dry heat therapy to soothe my already stretched out, worked muscles.

Let’s just say I ended up taking about a 15 minute nap in the sauna, because I had already heated it to an ideal temperature for me, which happens to be about 113 degrees, and the dry heat and the wood that houses the sauna smelled so good, and so natural as I stepped into it. It’s almost like as soon as I step into the dry heat enveloping me, I immediately relax and let my stresses drift away, which is not an easy thing for my Virgo-perfectionist personality and type, believe me.

I guess that infrared saunas are good for after workouts of any sort where there is muscle work, because they help prevent too much lactic acid from pooling around the muscles, which is what causes muscle soreness after you’ve done a hardcore workout or anything that your body is not used to doing on a daily basis.

Because with yoga and other forms of muscle stretching and burning like tai chi and pilates, where you are not physically doing intense cardio, and yet your muscles are doing so much work that you are burning calories anyways, it’s easy to keep pushing the boundaries, because you can get deeper and deeper into the poses as you go, and sometimes you go further than you realize and you feel it the next day.

Since we’ve had the sauna (see the infrared sauna reviews) though, as long as I use it after my workouts, no matter what type of workout it is, I rarely experience serious muscle soreness to where it hurts if I move a certain way. It has also helped my back and neck problems immensely, and I don’t need to see a massage therapist as often, which is good because it saves me money and time.

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’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.

I just read an interesting article by a fitness professional that advocated sticking strictly to cardio, and lots of it, if you are looking to shed weight. They recommend that instead of focusing on strength training when trying to slim down quickly, it’s better to focus more on more intense cardio workouts, to the tune of one hour at a time!

That seems like a long time, especially if you’re like me and you tend to max out on cardio workouts at about 45 minutes, and it is a lot of time, but you may have to work up to it if you are serious about slimming down quickly. They even recommended that you do what’s called “split training”, and do an hour of cardio in the morning and then another cardio session at night.

This way you are keeping your metabolism higher at both ends of the day, making it more likely that your body will continue to be a calorie burning machine so you can drop those excess pounds quickly.

I know more cardio is not what most people want to hear who want to lose weight, but the simple truth of it is that intense cardio is excellent at rapidly burning off calories and speeding up the metabolic rate at sustained periods of time. Extra pounds are, after all in essence just extra calories that need to be worked off because when we pile on pounds, it is from excess calories and fat that have no where else to go besides our thighs, love handles and bellies.

You could probably at least mix it up a bit and do a little on the elliptical, the recumbent bike and then the treadmill, as long as you are doing a solid hour, I would think. At least then you wouldn’t get bored with the same excercise for a full hour, which seems like a long time to be doing any one thing. Again, the key is to keep that metabolic rate up for that whole time, so as long as you’re moving and preferably sweating a little, you should be fine.

If you’re looking to get those sleeker, more toned and tight arms that are on the likes of stars like Sarah Jessica Parker and Madonna, you may not want to be looking to the weight benches to get their signature sinews. If you’re looking for more tone, but without the bulk, then pilates for your arms may be just what the doctor ordered.

I do pilates periodically for my arms, and it’s both because I want those more toned and taut arms without the bulking up, and also because my arms tend to have fat on them, especially my upper arms, which is a common places for fat to be stored on women, but also because I do not need to bulk up what I’m trying to slim down essentially.

Pilates are a combination of yoga and calisthetics, in that they are slow moving, very deliberate and targeted specific exercises that use a slightly isometric motion to target tone specific areas of the body. They are very popular for women who don’t want to bulk up, but rather want that longer, leaner look to their body, and want to tone areas such as their inner and outer thighs, butt, tummy and arms.

For my arms, the pilates I do are a small, targeted circular motion where the arms are extended out from my sides, and I am moving forward with them for about twenty counts, and then backward for about twenty counts, all while maintaining that small range of motion and the tight, specific region of the movement stays the same.

Yep, there is supposedly some new fangled piece of exercise equipment (not sure if it’s actually on the market yet), that claims to give you a total body workout in just ten minutes. This type of workout is obviously going to appeal to those of us that feel we don’t have enough time in the day to work out - which, oh yeah means all of us!

It’s called the ROM machine, and it is a crazy looking contraption that requires the user to combine form and technique in the movement, working first the upper body for four minute, then giving a break and then working the lower body for the rest of the time. Users and club owners that offer the ten minute workout say the workout is so intense and requires so much concentration that users cannot hold a conversation while using it.

However, they do say that it can be tailored to each individual’s state of physical fitness. If I had to describe what the machine looks like, I’d say it looks like a combination between an elliptical machine, bike, and nautilus machine for the upper arms, with handle bar-like contraptions at the top, but it looks like you’re sitting at some points. It definitely is an interesting device!

So, if you’re a beginner or novice and are just wanting to get in quick workouts apparently this machine can work you out too. Many people are saying that they notice a quick difference after using the machine. There are centers that employ the ten minute workout now popping up in major cities and more fitness centered areas. I have not heard of any as of yet in my area, but I’m sure it’s soon to come since I have some major metropolitan areas around me.

Jazzercise, which began 38 years ago, is still extremely popular as a means of getting toned and fit and having fun while you’re at it. Judi Sheppard Missett created the Jazzercise program in 1969. Jazzercise is a dance fitness program that incorporates dance steps into an aerobic exercise routine.

Instructors for Jazzercise must be certified and are trained in dance technique, injury prevention and the science of anatomy and physiology.

Throughout the years, some transformations and additions have taken place within the Jazzercise programs. Jazzercise classes began as dance routines done to pop music but now have incorporated different fitness styles into it. Yoga, pilates and cardio-kickboxing have been integrated into many of the Jazzercise classes.

Jazzercise classes last an hour and start with a warm up. After that, there is 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, then strength training. To enhance the Jazzercise classes, the use of weights, exercise balls and stretch bands helps you to further tone your muscles.

Jazzercise classes have different formats specifically tailored to your level of fitness, age or time constraints. For a novice, seniors or pregnant women, there is the Jazzercise Lite program. Teenagers enjoy the Jazzercise Team Dance and children can participate in the Junior Jazzercise.

If you want to define your muscles more, there is the Jazzercise Body Sculpting workout that lasts 45 minutes with weights incorporated into the program. People who are always in a time crunch can sign up for the Jazzercise Express that is a 30 minute version of the traditional program.

The corporate website for Jazzercise can help you locate the classes near you. A varied range of contemporary music is used for the classes. At www.jazzercise.com, the basic aerobic movements can be looked up online to get a preview of what a Jazzercise class will consist of.

Also featured are the power legs movements, fancy footwork and side to side movements spelled out on video to view. Some general recommendations for participating in the classes are covered online. These are aimed at your posture and ways to move properly throughout the Jazzercise program. Jazzercise welcomes all different levels of fitness.