Lust for Life
Bike riding back to work today I put on Iggy Pop's 'Lust for Life', and suddenly my legs felt spring loaded with burning coals and liquid nitrogen. Music blasting, I wheeled and span my way through traffic, roughly leaping over curbs, tearing down sidewalks, sliding through traffic and just enjoying the sheer vigor of pumping hard on my pedals and moving fast. It felt good. It felt terrific, and while I'm now sitting here at my desk covered in a sheen of sweat with my thigh muscles twitching and breath coming in deep, slow inhalations, I'm suddenly supremely aware of why I blog about health and fitness, why I research vitamins and nutrients, why I care about what I eat and how I exercise and the whole complex multifarious never ending shebang that is this job I have.
You know the drill. As soon as you start to sneeze and feel congested, as soon as you start to feel run down and tired, everybody tells you to start taking Vitamin C. Some people talk of it as a miracle cure, as if a few tablets will immediately reverse the cold, stop it dead in its tracks, and so off everybody goes to the store to buy supplements.
Happy Thanksgiving from the Extreme Fitness Results crew!
We're a new company, we're growing fast, and we're just bursting with reasons to give thanks this year. Thanks for having such an excellent team to work with, thanks for having such good friends and supporters encouraging and supporting us in our growth, thanks for working so hard to promote health, good nutrition and better living, and thanks for meeting so many exciting and educational people on the blog and in our general line of business.
You've been working out for months and years, your friends know of you as being the guy who never misses a workout, and you're pretty certain that you're in the top one percentile when it comes to being in peak physical condition. But are you really in peak condition? If you can do these 5 exercises, chances are you are.
We're a few weeks into our backyard experiment, and without looking closely all seems to be going exceptionally well. The Mesclun Greens and the Arugula are sprouting nicely, the squash plants are growing wide and stately, and the corn has sprouted hand high seedlings that look delicate and pale but promise a luscious bounty in three months time. From a distance, all is verdant, growing and peaceful.
But. Then I saw the aphids.
I've recently begun to practice Vinyasa Flow yoga, going a couple of times during the week for hour and a half classes and awakening my body to its old flexibility and strength. Given how great I've been feeling every time I leave class, I've been wondering of late what the actual health benefits are. Some quick research has revealed a host of them, and as you may have guessed, I'm going to share them here. Perhaps this post will alert those who have not taken a yoga class as to unexpected benefits, or simply confirm that what current practitioners already know, but either way, I hope you find it as fascinating an array as I do!
There are certain standard exercises that are classics. The push-up, the crunch, the chin-up. Each one has been performed and perfected for years, and is abandoned for the latest fad and then returned to when wisdom prevails. Each requires no piece of fancy equipment, and relies instead on gravity and your body weight. Today let’s take a closer look at the chin-up, and ask a few basic questions. Why do them? What are the benefits? What do you do if you can’t even do one? Is there a way to perfect your form, and what common mistakes should you be looking out for?
Tea time is not only a delightful and civilized ceremony (ask anybody from England, India, China, Japan or any other number of places) but a way to keep your teeth health, prevent dental caries, perhaps aid in weight loss, prevent cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. So set that Coke aside, brew yourself a pot, and kick back and enjoy yourself a cuppa!
Here at Extreme Fitness Results we're dedicated to living as healthy a life style as possible. That involves eating well, exercising, and getting our sleep (surprisingly tricky). Given how hard it can be to find healthy, nutritious food, we decided to turn the backyard behind our office into a vegetable garden, and after some discussion, got to work digging and planting. It's surprising how rewarding and satisfying it can be to dig your hands into the dirt and tear up roots and weeds, how good it can feel to just plop seeds into little holes you've shaped with your fingers. The brains behind the operation was Esteban Bressan, our CEO and a man with 8 years of experience as a professional agronomist out in California, where he worked with organic foods and oversaw industrial sized projects. So, after we'd washed the dirt from our hands and had a glass of water, I sat down with him to ask a couple of basic questions.
Maybe you're a fire jumper, riding helicopters into the heart of blazing infernos, where you run around putting your life on the line to put the blaze out. Or a professional marathon runner, exercising day in and day out, racking up the miles and the awards. Or a cop, working your beat, or a nurse, on your feet through the graveyard shift. But, most likely, you're not. You're an office worker, reading this on your office computer, in your chair where you spend eight hours a day. No judgment! I too work in an office all day long. However, you and I should look out-recent studies show that spending your day seated has a high correlation with a radically increased chance of heart disease. So, unless you actually are a fire jumper, read on and learn what you can do about it!