7 Benefits of Cat Cow Pose

How often do you slow down and really take the time to move your spine through a controlled rounding and arching of your back, consciously trying to move each vertebra independently? If you’re like most people, probably not very often. This is exactly why you should be adding a cat-cow stretch to your regular workout routine. The cat and cow movements not only stretches your back but also your abdomen, hips, lungs and chest. This will improve the flexibility and relieve tension in these areas.

So, what are the benefits of this pose?

1. It gently stretches and warms up your spine. Could be used before any type of yoga practice, any stretching routine, could be performed also seated or standing.
2. This breath-synchronized pose is beneficial for your body and mind. This simple pose powers up your brain and improves focus, coordination and mental stability. Try to inhale on arching your back and exhale on rounding, this is very natural for your body. If you would like your mind to stop over thinking processes try to reverse
3. The cat/cow pose improves blood circulation between the vertebrae of your spine and it helps in relieving back pain and stress.
4. It also calms you down. 
5. Gives rest to your low back.
6. Since lungs don’t have muscles Cat and Cow movement helps to improve health of intercoastal muscles, the muscles between your ribs and spine.
7. Improves concentration and balance

The variation that is shown in our video below is done specifically for people who have bulging disks in low back and neck area.

Tips:

• Make an effort to inhale in as your body comes into cat and exhale on your way into cow. Breathing allows the body to reap the full benefits of your stretch, keeping muscles from tightening.
• Keep eyes gazing forward as your head moves with the rest of your body.

Warnings:

• Do not attempt to overextend body. This may cause injury to back or neck.
• Perform pose on a soft surface and stop at any point if you experience knee or wrist pain.

Why Runners Incorporate Foam Roller Stretching Exercises

Foam Roller Stretching Exercises for Runners help to recover from muscle fatigue and release pain from tightened leg muscles. Foam rolling is a self-myofascial release technique. It can help relieve muscle tightness, soreness, and inflammation, and increase your joint range of motion. Foam rolling is an effective tool to work with trigger points of fascia, the connective tissue wrapped around muscle tissue.

Within the muscle, this fascia exists in multiple layers. First, it wraps around every individual muscle fiber or cell. Then, it wraps around bundles of muscle fibers, called fasciculi. Lastly, it wraps around the entire muscle body. Together, these layers of fascia, apart from helping to give muscle its shape, attach to tendons and bones to help you pull, push, squat, run, bike, whatever it is you want to do.

Foam Rollers Stretching for tight Quadriceps

The thing is, all on its own, muscle fascia is pretty solid and not very pliable. That could theoretically limit range of motion, or give you that feeling of stiff, tight muscles. That’s especially true if the fibers that make up your muscle fascia form what’s called “adhesions” or “trigger points”. Ideally, all of these fibers are sliding by each other with ease as you move, like silky hair, but sometimes these fibers can get like hair that got some ice cream in it and it’s all stuck together. Experts say that these tangles in fascia can form for a variety of reasons such as muscle injury, inactivity, disease, inflammation, or trauma. The tissue binds to each other, loses elasticity, and forms taut bands of tissue that can be painful. Myofascial release may help separate these fibers and re-establish the integrity of the tissue.

Meanwhile, foam rolling could also improve your workouts by literally warming your muscles. The friction induced by foam rolling on targeted muscles might also help to increase temperature of the fascia and muscles.

Here is the video with a Foam Roller Stretching exercises

Swollen Feet and Ankle Pain Relief

Swollen legs and ankles affect safety and quality of life. The symptoms of swollen feet and swollen ankles depend on the underlying causes, such as previous foot or ankle injury, toes injury, blood clots, varicose veins, pregnancy, etc.

Most people who spend long periods standing or sitting and those people with causes listed above are at risk for feet and ankle swelling. Legs, ankles, and feet swell when excess fluid is pulled down by gravity and builds up in the lower body. This is called edema and it’s common in older adults and usually happens on both sides of the body.

Doing simple exercises can help reduce swelling in the lower limbs by helping the body pump fluids up from the feet and back into the center area of the body. Once the excess fluid is in the trunk of the body, it can be eliminated via urine.
Swollen feet and ankles can also crop up as a side effect from medication or from long periods of standing, lengthy car or airplane rides or even sudden changes to warm weather. If this is the case, and the root cause of your swollen feet has more to do with lifestyle choices or environmental factors (as opposed to injury or chronic illness), there are exercises you can do to address your issues with circulation. If you do have an injury or illness, check with a doctor first before taking on any of these exercise. The exercises listed below are designed to improve circulation in your feet by increasing range of motion in your feet, ankles and legs.

Knee Pain – Exercise them safely

Knee pain can happen for a variety of reasons. Certainly a fall or accident can cause issues in the structures around the knee. A more common occurrence however, is an overuse injury, often caused by a muscle imbalance.

Our knee lies right in the middle of the hip and lower leg so it’s very important that all of these muscles are as strong as they can be to support the knee. Check out this video to see what exercises you need to be doing.

Increasing the strength and function of the muscles that act on the knee joint is a great way to decrease pain, and improve function. Now when we talk about the mechanics of the knee, it’s a relatively simple joint. It flexes (bends) and extends (straightens) and that’s about it. The muscles that are primarily responsible for these two actions include the quadriceps, hamstrings, and one of your calf muscles. Increasing strength and function in these muscles has been proven to have a positive effect on decreasing knee pain.

However, as a Yoga Teacher and a trained movement specialist, we are taught to find the CAUSE of pain, not just the location. Often times knee pain is simply a manifestation of faulty mechanics either higher or lower in the leg. It’s actually your hip and ankle that primarily determine where your knee joint bends and straightens and therefore play a bigger role in the mechanics at the joint. Improving strength and stability in these areas is vital in knee rehab and decreasing pain in the knee joint.

Presented in this video are the best exercises to increase strength of the muscles that flex and extend your knee as well as those that play a key factor in knee joint mechanics and function.

Morning Yoga will help you alleviate sciatica

The cause of low back stiffness: The vast majority of cases of low back stiffness or what is worse, sciatica have a spinal cause, such as disc herniation or rupture causing impingement of L5 or S1 nerve roots. Other common causes of sciatica can include spinal stenosis, degenerative disc disease, and spondylolisthesis. There are also many non-spinal causes or sciatica, which are less common: these include piriformis syndrome, trauma, postoperative complications.

Sciatica is mainly diagnosed by history taking and physical examination of the patient by a physical therapist.

Sciatica sign and symptoms:

– Moderate to severe pain in the lower back, buttock, and down their leg.

– Numbness or weakness in their lower back, buttock, leg, or feet.

– Pain that worsens with movement; and may cause loss of movement control.

– Pins and needles” feeling in their legs, toes, or feet.

While the pain in low back could be eased up with stretching there is also another element that has to be included into exercising routine. There has to be safe strengthening along with stretching and you will be able to perform it with our model Tanya by following this video. Make sure that you stretched your low back first to ensure that nerves are freed up and you have enough space in your low back. You can do it by checking the link below.

Relaxation for tired eyes / Natural Eyesight improvement in just 5 minutes

When your eyes are tired the vision naturally deteriorates. In this video I demonstrate how you can easily improve your vision by relaxing your eyes.

We do not even notice when our eyes stop moving and we do not even know how to relax them. We think that we are relaxing when we are in front of the TV, but it is an illusion. We just add up the stress to our own precious eyes.

This is the most important point in any eye exercising routines. We have to learn how to relax our precious eyes in the environment we live in today.

Now, let’s introduce a few different techniques of eye relaxation. Practice these simple EYE RELAXATION EXERCISES throughout your work day, while you are stopping at the red light, while you are in an elevator, in a subway, while you are standing in a lineup, during a TV commercial, etc.

There are different techniques used :

– eye relaxation massage

– lazy gazing

– hard blinking for lubricating eyes

– light blinking for relaxing tightened eye muscles, lubricating and cleansing

– closed eyes hard blinking for activating tear glands in the eye, especially for people with dry eye syndrome

Also, make sure that you correct the situation with your neck, releasing tension from neck and shoulders

Easy exercises for shoulders and neck pain release

If you ever tried to lift with a stiff neck you quickly find out how difficult it really is. Not only will your lifts suffer but you may wind up hurting yourself even more by attempting to do this. That said, imagine if you had a quick weapon in your arsenal that allowed you to quickly make the pain go away and restore the range of motion that you were lacking because of the stiffness. I’m going to show you exactly that in this video.

If you have a tough time rotating or turning your head to the left or right, you likely have one of two scenarios that are contributing to this problem. The first is a tissue restriction (most often muscle) that is preventing your vertebrae from moving as they would like. The second is a stuck joint that is preventing the vertebrae from moving as they would like. As you can see, in either case, the cervical vertebrae are not moving as they should and this is causing you pain and discomfort while limiting your ability to lift.

Time to fix that. We start by realizing that rotation of the head in one direction or the other has an opposite reaction when looking at the spine from the standpoint of the spinous processes that sit behind each vertebrae body. In other words, when you turn your head to the left, your spinous process on your vertebra are turning to the right. This is important to know since this forms the basis of your treatment.

For example, if you wanted to turn your head to the left you would pull forward and with more force on the right hand. The left hand would be there to simply stabilize the towel. As you pull forward you then want to rotate your head to the left. You should find that both your range of motion will have been greatly improved and your pain should have subsided.

Do this for about 10 reps and then rest. You can do it again a few more times if needed later in the day to reestablish the proper mechanics and allow your spasmed muscles to subside. Once your neck is back and moving free of discomfort you can resume your hard training and start making those gains again.

Meditation. Part 2. Cleansing Emotional Body

This particular meditation will help you eliminate negativity at the subconscious level, remove emotional and mental blocks and dissolve negative mental patterns. We don’t notice how some negative particles of energy sink into our bodies and grow there on emotion and mental levels. The frequency of surrounding birds singing and natural sounds is highly effective in cleaning up trapped negative energy and dissolving subconscious fear, excessive thinking, and worry. This meditation can be used as a means of opening yourself to communication with your higher self, awakening your intuition and inner strength. Regular meditation increases awareness and allows you to return to the spiritual order.

This meditation helps particularly with:

• removing mental blockages,

• eliminating subconscious negativity,

• cleansing aura meditation,
• trashing emotional negativity, aura cleansing,
• Stress reduction (one of the most common reasons people try meditation)
• Control anxiety
• Promote emotional health
• Enhance self-awareness
• Lengthen attention span
• May reduce age-related memory loss

Meditation Part 1 – Connection breath and heart beat meditation –

Meditation. Part 1. Connection of breath with heart beat.

One of the biggest problems of anxiety is racing heart beat. Stress also speeds up our heartbeat. This leads to high blood pressure, tension in head , tension in blood vessels and to much more serious conditions.

Can we do anything about it?

The answer is firm Yes. And it is done through something that is absolutely free to us – our breath.

If we can control our breath we can control our heartbeat.

Connection between heart beat and breathing will help to:

– Reduce stress. Stress reduction is one of the most common reasons people try meditation

– Control anxiety

– Promote emotional health

– Enhance self-awareness

– Lengthen attention span

– May reduce age-related memory loss

– Can generate kindness

– May help fight addictions

Just follow this video and practice it every single day for 5-10 minutes

Muscle knots in the neck and shoulders

How do you get rid of muscle knots?

What are muscle knots? Why do you get muscle knots?

What simple things can you do right now at home to eliminate your muscle knots?

Learn all about this common condition in your neck, shoulders, and back from our articles and videos

So, WHAT ARE MUSCLE KNOTS?

Muscle knots are hard, sensitive areas in our muscles where the muscle is in a shortened, contracted state even when the muscle is supposed to be at rest. These muscle knots are commonly found in our neck, shoulders, upper back, and hips and are a common condition that affect millions of people everyday. These tight areas of contracted muscle are also referred to as “trigger points” as oftentimes touching these areas can “trigger” pain in different location in your body. Muscle knots can cause a painful, aching sensation in the muscle that can refer to nearby joints as well. When you touch it it feels tight and contracted despite your efforts to relax that area.

Muscle knots can also feel swollen and inflamed and can contribute to other associated problems including headaches, stress, anxiety, and difficulty sleeping. Muscle knots are a common condition that I see in patients in my physical therapy clinic all the time. Fortunately there’s a lot that you can do about them to treat them safely and effectively right at home!

Today I wanted to share some of my favorite tips, tricks, and exercises to help you get rid of muscle knots in your neck, shoulders, and upper back. I’ve also included video demonstration of each of these methods to ensure you do them correctly and maximize your outcomes.

HOW TO TREAT MUSCLE KNOTS

Keep in mind that treating your muscle knots can take some time. You didn’t develop them overnight; chances are they’re not going to go away overnight, also. To treat your muscle knots you’ll need to break up the knotted tissue and calm down the inflamed nerves. Below you’ll find a list of the most effective methods to alleviate your muscle knots at home.

1. Heat: applying heat to an area causes capillaries to dilate, thereby promoting more blood flow into that area. Increasing blood flow to a muscle can be an effective means of getting knots to release.

2. Stretching: muscle knots are areas of the muscle that fail to fully relax/elongate. Stretching the muscles in which these knots lie is an effective way to stretch out the knot,

3. Muscle Activation: by working the muscle in which your knot lies you can increase blood flow into that spot and promote relaxation. Contracting these muscles is also a good way to fatigue this area and get the muscle knot to release.

4. Postural Correction: poor posture is one of the primary contributing factors predisposing one to muscle knots. Taking actions to correct poor posture and promote improved alignment can significantly improve muscle tension and pain.

5. Postural Strengthening and Muscle Activation: Stretching the tight structures through the front of the chest and shoulders while strengthening the weak muscles of your upper back in between your shoulder blades is key in improving posture and decreasing propensity for muscle knots.

Watch our video to see how to do it properly