is gardening aerobic

Often overlooked as a leisure activity, yard work, gardening, and other physical activities can add years to your life by helping you stay fit.

Benefits of Gardening As Exercise

The physical exertion you experience in your garden can be an effective form of aerobic and muscular exercise, says a 2014 study in the journal American Society for Horticultural Science.

Frozen shoulder can be an incredibly frustrating and painful condition. But before you turn to medication or physical therapy, why not give yoga a try? Check out some of the most effective and easy yoga poses to deal with frozen shoulder.

Source: hindustantimes.com

Whether you are mowing the lawn, digging in the soil or raking leaves, yard work is an excellent way to add exercise into your weekly routine.

Besides being good for you physically, gardening can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol, prevent diabetes, heart disease, depression and osteoporosis when done regularly.

• Gisele Bündchen, 42, recently posted a killer photo on Instagram doing some yoga.
• The Brazilian model also hit her followers with some wellness inspiration in her caption.
• She’s done yoga for many years—but also enjoys Pilates, swimming, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

Gisele Bündchen recently shared some wise words of wellness on her Instagram, along with a photo that shows off her yoga practice. The Brazilian model looked serene and super strong in a trikonasana, or triangle pose.

The 42-year-old model was doing her workout on the beach, in grey leggings and a matching tank top. In addition to her inspiring pose (doesn’t it just make you want to bust out your yoga mat?), she also gave her followers some food for thought.

“Being healthy is more than a clean diet and exercise. It’s about our attitudes, emotions, beliefs, thoughts and actions,” she wrote in her caption. “When life gets challenging always remember that the sun rises everyday bringing a new opportunity for us to try again and do better. It can get intense out there and we can get easily distracted by the noise. Awareness is key. What energy you are nurturing?”

She finished the post off with: “Remember, we are the co-creators of our own reality, what we believe we create!” Her followers sent her lots of love for the virtual pep talk in the comments.

yourself doing yoga, but I can’t expect anything less from Gisele. She’s kind of a yoga queen. The model has been doing the practice for years, and lauds it for the body and mind benefits.

“[Yoga is] so serene that I can be in a state of meditation while I practice … Whether it involves music or mantras or breath work or meditation, [yoga is] a powerful beautiful spiritual practice. Yoga gave me back my life,” Gisele wrote in her book Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life in 2018, via Marie Claire Australia.

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She’s not wrong. Yoga is clinically proven to reduce and build resilience to stress, WH previously reported. It also regulates your nervous system and reduces anxiety. Not to mention its benefits on your body: most yoga is a full-body workout and a quality practice regulates your breathing, too.

Watch on

In addition to providing a great reminder of one the best workouts, Gisele has been blessing her followers with some killer ab moments lately. She must really be working her core with those navasanas, or boat poses. It isn’t all because of yoga, though. The Brazilian model also likes Pilates, swimming, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, according to British Vogue. She also gets up at 5 a.m. every day to workout. Wow!

As for her diet, Gisele has said she eats a lot of fruits and vegetables, with red meat in moderation, according to Vogue France. Her trainer also told British Vogue that she eats a lot, and trains Gisele and her husband, Tom Brady, together. Totally adorable.

BRB, booking a yoga class. Thanks for the inspo, Gisele!

News Editorial Assistant

Olivia Evans (she/her) is an editorial assistant at Women’s Health. Her work has previously appeared in The Cut and Teen Vogue. She loves covering topics where culture and wellness intersect. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, running, and watching rom-coms. 

Source: womenshealthmag.com

Benefits of Gardening As Exercise

Besides the fact that you get exercise, yard work is good for your overall health. It burns calories, improves your flexibility, and reduces stress levels.

You also breathe in fresh air, which helps to lower blood pressure and increase your Vitamin D level. This is especially important for people who don’t have access to natural sunlight.

It started in 2016 when Jessica Huneycutt went on a yoga retreat. She was in the process of getting divorced and found herself thinking about the life that she wanted for herself and her son. After living in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York, among other cities, she suddenly knew she needed to go back to New Orleans, a place that had immediately felt like home to her when she moved there in her late teens.

She kept contemplating how she could make it work. After completing three different 200-hour teacher trainings, Huneycutt had worked as a yoga teacher for the last six years. In addition to her work in a local studio, she spent time teaching yoga to students in an after-school program in Philadelphia. As a single mom, she needed a dependable income.

A light bulb went off. “I just had this crazy idea that I was going to move back to New Orleans, and I was going to be the yoga instructor for the Saints,” she says. Even though Huneycutt had a personal background in other sports, including as a junior Olympic swimmer and a martial arts practitioner, she had never been the yoga teacher for a professional sports team. That didn’t deter her.

Landing the Job

Immediately upon her return home, she read up on Dan Dalrymple, the strength and conditioning for the Saints at the time, and wrote a PowerPoint for him titled “Yoga for Elite Athletes.” In her report, she detailed the benefits of the practice and identified four other professional sports teams that offered yoga to their players.

Huneycutt, who was still living in Philadelphia, gave herself a week to make her goal a reality, starting by hopping on a flight to her desired home. She literally stood in the Saints’ lobby for hours at a time, waiting to speak to Dalrymple. Eventually, on the fourth day of waiting, the front desk staffer emailed Dalrymple to inform him Huneycutt wasn’t leaving. She presented her report to him, explaining how yoga could help prevent injuries to his athletes and save the team money.

“He was just like, ‘Thank you for the information. There’s really no precedent for yoga in the NFL—but stay in touch,’” says Huneycutt. Dalrymple’s hesitation at the time didn’t stop her from making the leap to Louisiana. She and her son moved to New Orleans, even though Huneycutt hadn’t landed the gig. Six months after her move and no word from Dalrymple, she was considering applying for a job at Whole Foods when she spotted an article about NFL players practicing yoga. She emailed it to Dalrymple.

It worked. She finally got a text from him, asking her to come by the training facility that Friday. When she arrived, she quickly realized this wasn’t a typical second-round interview. There were 90 guys on the indoor practice field when she arrived—and she was told she had 15 minutes to warm them up.

“I just literally popped them in a squat,” she says. “And I was just like, ‘Hi guys. My name’s Jessica. I was a junior Olympic swimmer. I’m trained in yoga, martial arts, Russian kettlebells, and natural movement. I’m here to keep you guys injury-free. Fold forward and touch your toes.”

That was her first session. She returned the following week. Seven seasons later, she’s still with the team.

Teaching Yoga to NFL Players

Starting each July, Huneycutt spends two to three days each week at the facility until the team is eliminated before or during the playoffs, which begin in January. By the time the players opt to head to her station in the afternoon, they’ve already weight lifted, practiced, and worked out for the day. They’re in need of a stretch.

She classifies what she teaches as “yoga for athletic recovery.” While, yes, the students she works with are professional athletes, they range in experiences—and mobility— when it comes to yoga. Because of that, her practice needs to be inclusive and accessible.

The team’s schedule usually includes a couple hours for her “yoga station,” where anywhere between 10 and 30 players pass through looking for a quick 5-minute individual session or a deeper hour-long practice. Unlike typical yoga classes in which a teacher prepares a single sequence, Huneycutt works off of the requests of the players. One player may come over wanting to stretch out his hamstrings for five minutes, while another may want to spend 20 minutes on his quads. She’s teaching different practices to multiple students at one time—jumping between players as she guides them from pose to pose. That’s the hardest part of her job.

“I’ll have three linebackers come in…and they want 10 minutes of a gentle stretch,” she says. “But I’m already working with a quarterback who wants to do an hour of power yoga.” It’s a constant challenge. Luckily, her long-standing relationships with the players has helped make cueing and leading different practices a little easier. “I can look at their feet, and they’ll immediately fix their foot posture,” she says.

Typically, most of the poses she moves the players through include lying on their backs or prone, targeting the feet, ankles, and hips. The most common pose she leads them through is Viparita Karani (Legs Up the Wall Pose). Marjaryasana (Cat Pose) and Bitilasana (Cow Pose) are two other go-tos.

She also takes into consideration a player’s position. “If you’re a kicker, and you’re constantly kicking with your right foot, we’re going to work to counterbalance that,” she says.

More Than Stretching

As with teaching yoga in any situation, the ability to adapt to the needs of each individual student is key. “With some of the players, I’m using Sanskrit and talking about [philosophy], and then the other guys just want to stretch out for a few minutes,” says Huneycutt.

“I remember the first time that Drew Brees came over, and I was so nervous,” she says. After he experienced one of the biggest injuries of his career—five fractured ribs and a collapsed lung—she continued to work with him on mindfulness and breathwork techniques. The two studied James Nester’s latest book, Breath, and Brees dove deeper into breathwork.

The team, in turn, has supported Huneycutt through one of the more challenging periods of her life: her two breast cancer diagnoses. “I’m no stranger to adversity, and the team and my yoga practice with them kept me going,” says Huneycutt. She credits the young men practicing yoga and meditation with switching roles and becoming her teacher in her time of need. They provided reassurance and constant support.

All of the yoga sessions are voluntary for players. That makes their decision to engage with yoga that much more meaningful, Huneycutt says. Some players just need to stop moving for a few minutes—a responsibility Huneycutt takes seriously.

“Most of them need to have their eyes closed for a few minutes and not have their phones—and not have to worry,” she says. “They all have agents, business, foundations, wives, and kids.” It’s often their chance in the day to take a deep breath. Because even professional athletes need to find a moment of peace and quiet—just like us.

Jessica Huneycutt is an independent contractor. Her views do not represent those of the New Orleans Saints organization.

Source: yogajournal.com

Many people know that yard work can burn calories, but gardening as exercise offers even more benefits than just a good sweat. It can build strength, strengthen muscles, and lower blood pressure levels in some cases.

Gardening can also increase vitamin D in your body as you spend time outdoors. This helps you feel healthier and boosts your immune system.

Whether we’re working at a desk or watching TV from the couch, many of us spend a large portion of our day sitting down. This is often unavoidable, but by staying in the same position for such a long time we risk seeing our muscles tighten and our core weaken due to a lack of use.

To prevent this, it pays to introduce a bit more movement into your day. This sequence of seated stretches from yoga teacher Adriene Mishler (Yoga With Adriene (opens in new tab)) offers impressive benefits for your mind and body, and it can be done at your desk in just six minutes. 

Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (opens in new tab) journal shows. This is because your back and core muscles are largely inactive when you’re supported by a backrest. 

Your hip flexors can also become tight, and your legs and glutes may weaken, for the same reason. However, the same study found that regular muscle contractions (using your muscles) can prevent these effects. 

So, whether you’re trying this session, going for a walk during the working day or taking time to stretch, it’s well worth finding time to move your body every once in a while.

To see the benefits for themselves, our writer tried doing yoga every day for 30 days (opens in new tab), and they were amazed to find they felt “stronger inside and out” by the end of the experiment. 

If you want to break-up your habitual sitting adding some yoga into your weekly routine, take a read of our feature on anti-aging yoga moves (opens in new tab). Or, if you’re new to the practice, try these beginner’s yoga exercises (opens in new tab) for building strength.

Source: fitandwell.com

Yard work, weeding, digging and raking can burn the same number of calories as 30 minutes of aerobics.

Gardening improves your overall health and boosts mood. It also fights stress and reduces cortisol levels.

Frequent yoga practice and a healthy diet help to lower bad cholesterol and boost good cholesterol. Here are 3 effective yoga asanas that you should try to reduce high cholesterol levels.

High Cholesterol is also called a ‘silent killer’ as if not timely diagnosed and managed early, it can cause serious health problems. High or bad cholesterol won’t present itself in early signs which can lead to detecting the condition only after it has deteriorated your health. When you have too much cholesterol in your blood, it starts building in your arteries which can lead to certain body signs that you should not ignore. High cholesterol can be hereditary, but oftentimes it is because of an unhealthy lifestyle, making it treatable. Regular exercise and a healthy diet can easily reduce high cholesterol. Yoga can be a big change that can aid the process. Frequent yoga practice and a healthy diet help to lower LDL (bad cholesterol) and boost HDL (good cholesterol). Here are 3 powerful yoga asanas that you should try to control high cholesterol levels.

3 Effective Yoga Asanas to Keep Cholesterol Levels in Check:

1. Sarvangasana: Sarvangasana is one of the best yoga asanas for lowering high cholesterol. This asana can help lower the body’s harmful cholesterol levels.

• How to do: Raise your legs to your back, then balance yourself by placing your weight evenly on your head, shoulders, and elbows.
• Pull your legs straight up as high as you can until you are perfectly stable.
• Anyone suffering from thyroid, heart, or hernia disorder should avoid this pose.

2. Kapalbhati Pranayama: This yoga asana has the potential to be a very successful method for lowering cholesterol. It also controls obesity.

• How to do: Sit up straight, take a deep breath in, inhale your stomach in, and exhale.
• Continuously performing it also prevents laziness in the body
• Kapalbhati Pranayama should be avoided during migraine attacks, pregnancy, and menstruation.

3. Paschimottanasana: This pose can also be highly effective at lowering blood cholesterol levels.

• How to do: Sit with your feet straight to accomplish this.
• Exhaling, slowly lean forward until your nose is touching your knees without lifting your legs.

Source: india.com

If you enjoy yard work, gardening can be a great way to get your exercise. It’s a whole body activity that gives all major muscle groups a good workout.

It can help you lower your blood pressure and cholesterol, prevent diabetes and heart disease, and boost your bone density. It also helps to reduce your stress levels.

At the Berlin headquarters of the art magazine Blau International, editor in chief Cornelius Tittel doubles as an instructor of Kundalini yoga classes.

Source: nytimes.com