Yoga Mats: What You Need to Know

• Yoga mats have many purposes, not just yoga. These mats can be used for Pilates, or some people even use the mats as a place to lay on a gym floor to allow them to do abdominal workouts or claim an area that might be highly populated in the gym.

• You’ll experience a different type of grip on these yoga mats because they are specifically designed to be used to prevent hands and feet from slipping during practice. The mats are frequently used for in home use or at a studio but can also be used outdoors on different types of surfaces.

• Germs and odors will be the least of your worries when it comes to these mats because the bacteria can be easily wiped away with just a mild soap and cloth. The closed cell construction prevents bacteria and odors from absorbing into the mat.

Four suggestions to finding a perfect Yoga Mat

1. THICKNESS

Choosing a thickness of a mat is important for many reasons. First, comfortability is essential when selecting your yoga mat. A thicker mat will allow you to be more relaxed. It also allows people with pains in their back, legs or arms to have a more serene session. Thicker mats also may prevent many strainful injuries that could happen to the body. For example, weakened wrist due to lesser support.

If selecting a mat that is on the thinner side, it will provide you with a more surface-based feeling. This meaning if you are on the beach the sand becomes the ground, and the mat is there for covering. The thinner types of mats are more efficient and allow more space when traveling.

The standard size of a yoga mat tends to be about 1/8 inches thick. Some mats may vary from 1/2 inch, which provides more comfort, to the thinnest mats at about 1/16 inch allowing for a more grounded feel.

Essential buying guide to consider when choosing a size for your mat: are you going to be always traveling with this? Is this mat going to be used at home where it could have potential not to relocate? And what is your sweet spot of comfort?

2. MATERIAL

The material of a mat is crucial when considering what type to buy. Materials used in the mat dictates the texture, stickiness, eco-friendliness, sponginess and how it wears over time. Having a material that best suits your lifestyle is important and should be taken into consideration when purchasing a mat.

Most standard yoga mats are made of PVC, otherwise known as vinyl. Have a newer, more earth-friendly options include natural and recycled rubber, jute, and organic cotton or natural cotton. This meaning, the fabric is not usually treated with synthetic finishes during manufacturing.

Basic buying guidelines: If you’re allergic to latex, avoid yoga mats made of natural rubber. If you want to stick with the tried and true sticky mat, choose a yoga mat made out of PVC, which can endure your use and abuse for more than a decade. Sponginess can vary widely with different blends of materials, but in general, PVC has the most “give” of any yoga mat material; jute and cotton have the least.

Beyond these fundamentals, read on and let your other priorities — texture, stickiness, and eco-friendliness — be your guides.

3. TEXTURE

The surface of your mat is important to understand because it provides traction for you. The overall stickiness of the yoga mat will prevent you from slipping and sliding across the surface. Texture also affects the way a yoga mat feels, so it becomes an overall component of comfort.

Texture can be either human-made or dictated by the materials. A pattern of raised bumps, for example, a jute yoga mat has a slight roughness to them. Some yoga mats are usually textured and have a smooth feel.

Options: There are yoga mat textures to suit every person’s needs — from very sleek and smooth to very textured with ridges and grooves.

Basic buying guidelines: If you’re looking for a yoga mat that prevents slipping look for rubber, jute, or cotton yoga mat that has a raised, tactile pattern. The added grip the raised texture provides can help you stay put no matter how sweaty or vigorous your practice gets.

If you prefer stickiness but are curious about the newer, more earth-friendly options, try to test drive a few before you buy. Some of the eco-friendly yoga mats may surprise you with how much traction they provide even though they don’t have the traditional “sticky” feel.

4. STICKINESS

Why is stickiness important? Having a sticky yoga mat keeps you from sliding all over the surface and helps allow you maintain your position as you move from one pose to another, as well as when you hold poses for several seconds. Having a grip that holds to the floor is essential while picking a mat.

source http://www.healthy4lifeonline.com/yoga-mats-what-you-need-to-know/

Benefits of Yoga for the Elderly

Getting older presents many gifts much like maturity, grace, wisdom, experience, and perspective, to name just a few. Growing older can also carry many challenges for some people.

Physically, it becomes harder to keep extra weight off your body. According to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, it is found that over one-third of adults 65 and older are obese.

Yoga can, in fact, be suitable for adults of all ages, especially seniors. Studies show that yoga can be extremely helpful when it comes to fighting stress, fatigue, and strain. Some yoga poses can increase your core strength and your balance, which can reduce the risk of falling-related injuries. Other poses can alleviate some senior-related health issues such as menopause. Above all, yoga is a form of exercise that can help seniors feel much younger.

Even though you may never be able to bend yourself into a pretzel, you can learn some simple yoga poses that can increase your overall quality of life. If you’re just starting out with yoga, you should look for a beginning class taught by a certified yoga instructor. Good instructors can help you attain the right body positioning and encourage you to learn your body’s limits. You may not be able to reach all the poses shown or hold them for a long time, but good teachers understand that and encourage you to do your best. Yoga books and DVDs are other tools that can help you reap the benefits of yoga.

The risk of life-threatening illnesses, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancer also increases with age. Joint stress, osteoarthritis, and other forms of pain will also commonly show as you age.

Psychologically and emotionally, elderly may experience increased rates of minor depression, acute anxiety, and possibly other mental health disorders. Memory can sometimes decline, your balance might be impaired, and with that, a person’s sense of self can suffer.

Not to mention the number of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease which can alter the ability to form and have relationships and to function in the world this doubles almost every five years after age 65.

With these statistics, the topic of aging can often render fear as birthdays pile up and you become eligible for social security benefits. There is good news, and that is, there are many things you can do to increase your overall health and well-being as a senior.

Eating healthy and exercising can help aide in preventing disease, injury, and keep your physical body in excellent shape, and by using meditation and brain training exercises can keep your mind sharp.

Yoga, especially restorative yoga, can also offer a wide array of health benefits—working physical and psychological wonders. Seniors, who often struggle with pain, joint stress, imbalance, osteoarthritis, and other physical limitations, can benefit from incorporating a yoga practice into their daily routine.

Here are just six of the many advantages of a daily yoga practice for seniors.

Yoga Helps Improves Your Balance and Stability

Many yoga poses focus on balance and stability, both incredibly important as you age. Strengthening your muscles and improving your balance prevents the likelihood of falls, which can be a common concern for elderly.

Not only does it prevent them in the first place, but an increase in strength and stability also helps seniors bounce back and recover, should a fall occur.

Yoga Improves Your Flexibility and Your Joint Health

If you’re looking for a gentle exercise that increases flexibility, yoga is a great option. Flexibility exercises such as yoga are great if your joints tend to be achy or stiff. In a study that looked at the effectiveness of yoga as an exercise to manage osteoarthritis in senior women, researchers found that it provided therapeutic benefits.

Not only can these low-impact moves loosen your muscles, but they can also tone your supporting muscles and help prevent injury.

Yoga May Contribute to Improving Your Respiration

With aging comes some respiratory limitations and reduced tolerance to physical exertion. Anything that reduces oxygen in the respiratory system can have adverse effects on your mind and your body. Recent studies have shown that practicing in a 12-week yoga program can significantly improve your respiratory function in many senior women.

Breathing is the foundation of life for humans. People can go many weeks without food, but you can’t go more than just a few minutes without breathing, so it is a good idea to keep your respiratory system in excellent shape at any age in your life.

Yoga Helps Reduces High Blood Pressure

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, might lead to cardiovascular disease and is this is known to be the second leading cause of kidney disease. Recent studies have found that yoga reduces oxidative stress in the elderly. Oxidative stress is considered to be one of the underlying causes of high blood pressure and, in particular, for seniors citizens, it is a strong risk factor for heart attacks.

Yoga Helps Reduces Your Anxiety

Yoga classes are restorative, relaxing and calm to your body and mind, especially those geared toward elderly. When you practice regularly, yoga can reduce your sympathetic nervous system’s fight-or-flight response, which can cause inflammation of all kinds and wreak havoc on your mind and body.

Yoga practice involves focusing on the breath you take in and slow movements through your body, which can generally help you trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, reducing the byproducts of stress and feelings of anxiety.

Yoga Encourages Mindfulness

Since so much of yoga is so focused on just breathing and listening to your body respond, an added benefit is the expanded awareness of Self through practice.

As you start to practice yoga and start to become more mindful of not just your body, but also of your thoughts and emotions, you will be made more connected to and aware of your environment, your community, and the world around you.

Looking to get started? Here’s a list of some of the best Yoga Mats we have reviewed

source http://www.healthy4lifeonline.com/benefits-of-yoga-for-the-elderly/

Top 10 Benefits of Yoga

There are more than ten reasons why yoga is overall good for you, and the physical, psychological, and subtle benefits of this practice could fill plenty of books. But the following is a brief overview of some of the reasons you should consider adding yoga to your world. Here are ten health benefits of yoga;

Strength, Agility, And Flexibility Are All Increased

• Many sports will give you strength. While others will give you more agility, but few practices will increase your strength, your agility, and your flexibility all at once. Professional athletes can overcome injury by increasing their range of motion with yoga, and victims of a double mastectomy regain full mobility after debilitating surgeries that left loads of scar tissue in their bodies. Nothing compares for repairing the body and making sure that the ligaments and connective tissues are just as vigorous and pliable as the muscles themselves.

Yoga Enhances Memory & Cognitive Functioning

• It may seem strange that a practice which involves breathing and stretching can enhance your cognitive functioning, but yogis could be better at learning, show increased memory capacity, and have high levels of concentration. These benefits are attributed to meditation such as yoga. The goal of all yogic practice can also help you at school or on the job by improving your brain functioning.

Body Weight Normalizes- Health Benefits Of Practicing Yoga

• While doing an hour of hot yoga, or even power yoga won’t likely burn as many calories as doing a high-intensity interval workout, yoga has a way of normalizing your body weight by restoring your normal hormonal balance in the body.

• By lowering levels of cortisol in your body and our nervous system’s constant fight or flight response, we less likely to overeat, eat to suppress unpleasant emotions, and we also train our brains to feel more satisfied more quickly because we aren’t in constantly in panic mode. Stress is commonly known to cause obesity and fuel virtually all disease, and yoga is a perfect countermeasure.

Yoga Naturally Reduces Pain

• Countless studies are proving that yoga can be very effective at relieving pain. It doesn’t matter if you suffer from fibromyalgia, arthritis, or migraine headaches, yoga has been proven actually to reduce pain from all these ailments. And if you are one of the millions of people that suffer from back pain practicing yoga can make that pain practically disappear. Meditation has even been proven to be better than morphine at reducing pain.

Respiratory Efficiency Increases

• Adding to the health benefits of yoga, Yoga is becoming one of the few practices that utilize pranayama. The cultivation of life force or chi through breathing. While many people practice pranayama as a means to have higher states of awareness. They also end up having some side benefits which include increased lung capacity, more tidal volume meaning the total amount of air your lungs can hold at any one time), and ability to reduce the pace of their breathing which has been dire linked to a longer lifespan.

Blood Pressure Is Normalized

• Yoga provides specific benefits for hypo-reactors in blood pressure. For those who suffer from hypertension, yoga has been shown to be even more effective than dietary changes for improving blood pressure.

Mental Health Is Greatly Enhanced

• Yoga offers many benefits in the psychological department of health. It ‘s hard to name them all in a brief overview, but some of them are an improved overall mood and sense of well-being, more connected-ness with others, lowered depressive states, less hostility toward the self and others, less anxiety, feelings of self-actualization increase, motivation increases, and more.

Yoga Prevents Degenerative Diseases

• The ways in which yoga prevents disease are astounding. When you understand how, it can be more evidence than you would ever need to take to the yoga mat, stat! Here are just some of the reasons yoga helps to keep you young and healthy longer:
• Glucose reduces
• Sodium reduces
• Triglycerides decrease
• HDL cholesterol increases
• Total, LDL and VLDL cholesterol reduces
• Hemoglobin increases
• Total white blood cell count decreases
• Vitamin C increases
• Total serum protein increases
• Oxytocin increases

The Parasympathetic Nervous System Takes Over In Yoga

• Why is this a good thing? Both the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems work to keep us stabilized in the face of stress. These systems are connected like a see-saw. When one goes up the other goes down. When the sympathetic nervous system is active, it usually means we are on ‘high-alert’ either responding to stress or trying to minimize it.

• This is the part of our nervous systems that is most often triggered especially from flashing lights, traffic noises, emails from our co-workers or boss, family responsibilities. Yoga strengthens the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system which is primarily responsible for the ‘relaxation response.’ Obviously you wouldn’t want to be zoned out or lethargic regularly, or on high-alert, so yoga helps to put the circular motion, the balance, back into the two nervous system’s dance.

You Can Do Yoga Anywhere

• One of the most current health benefits of yoga is that you can experience yoga in just about anywhere. Yoga in studios, at the airport, in a house, at a friend’s house, in a hotel room, outdoors, in parks and even forests, on top of rocks, or on the rooftops of tall buildings in a busy city. You don’t need anything (except maybe a yoga mat), but even that isn’t necessary to do yoga.
• There are no gym memberships required and no expensive gear. You don’t have to be in shape to start, and it will continue to challenge you even if you are in shape. Yoga is timeless and can be done almost anywhere without a great cost or inconvenience.

For more reasons to practice yoga, visit a class in your area and learn first hand what the benefits of yoga can do for you and your body. Also, if you are elderly, here are some reasons you should consider yoga

To see our Top Yoga Mat Reviews, Click Here.

source http://www.healthy4lifeonline.com/top-10-benefits-of-yoga/

The Health Benefits of Omega 3 Fish Oil

We’ve all heard of the benefits of Omega-3 Fish Oil. Here are some of the problems that this amazing product may help remedy:

High Cholesterol

Omega-3 fatty acids which have very high HDL levels, transport all fat molecules around the body which help promote good heart health. People who typically eat fatty fish, also tend to have increased HDL cholesterol and decreased triglycerides which are fats in the blood.

High Blood Pressure

People with hypertension or high blood pressure use omega-3  to lower their blood pressure. An analysis of daily fish oil usage may reduce blood pressure in individuals with untreated hypertension.

Heart Disease

EPA, eicosapentaenoic acid, and DHA, docosahexaenoic acid, the two omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil reduce the risk of heart disease, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Fish oil is known to lower levels of triglycerides (fats in the blood), and to lower the risk heart attack, stroke, and abnormal heart rhythms in people who have already had heart diseases. Omega – also appears to help prevent and treat atherosclerosis by slowing the development of plaque and blood clots, which can clog arteries.

Diabetes

Diabetes is known to have high triglyceride and low HDL levels. Omega-3 fatty acids help lower triglycerides and apoproteins (markers of diabetes), as well as raise HDL.

Rheumatoid Arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation in the joints. Studies have found that omega-3 fish oils help eliminate symptoms of RA, including joint pain, morning stiffness, increase grip strength, and improve walking pace. A study on people with RA who take fish oil may be able to lower their dose of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs which creates fewer payments.

The results suggest that omega-3 fatty acids, along with conventional therapies, such as NSAIDs, may help relieve joint pain associated with these conditions.

Systemic Lupus Erythematosus: SLE

An autoimmune condition characterized by fatigue and joint pain may help reduce symptoms of lupus.

Osteoporosis

Omega-3 eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acid are the main acids that decrease inflammation, and by decreasing the inflammation in the body puts less stress on bones to break down and become brittle

Depression

Researchers have found that people who took omega-3 fatty acids with their regular prescription antidepressants had a greater improvement in symptoms than those who took antidepressants alone. Also, studies show that omega-3 fatty acid intake helps protect against postpartum depression, among other benefits.

Bipolar Disorder

People with bipolar disorder who took omega-3 fish oil in addition to standard prescription treatments for bipolar disorder for four months experienced fewer mood swings and relapses than those who received a placebo pill.

Schizophrenia

Scientific evidence suggests that people with schizophrenia who take omega-3 fatty acids experience an improvement in symptoms. The most recent research found that EPA supplements were better than a placebo pill in improving symptoms of this condition.

Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder: ADHD

Children with ADHD have lower levels of essential fatty acids such as EPA and DHA. In a study of boys, those with lower levels of omega-3 fatty acids had more learning and behavioral problems such as temper tantrums and sleep disturbances than boys with normal omega-3 fatty acid levels.

Studies show that omega-3 fatty acids help improve behavioral symptoms, and eating foods that are high in omega-3 fatty acids is a reasonable approach for someone with ADHD.

Cognitive Decline

Scientists believe the omega-3 fatty acid DHA is protective against Alzheimer disease and dementia.

Many studies show that reduced intake of omega-3 fatty acids is associated with increased risk of age-related cognitive decline or dementia, including Alzheimer disease.

Skin Disorders

In one clinical study, 13 people with sun sensitivity known as photodermatitis showed less sensitivity to UV rays after taking omega-3 fish oil supplements. However, sunscreens are much better at protecting the skin from damaging effects of the sun, those who took EPA with their prescription medications did better than those treated with only medications.

Inflammatory bowel disease: IBD

Studies suggest that omega-3 fatty acids may help when added to medication, such as sulfasalazine which is a standard medication for IBD.

Asthma

In a well-designed study of children with asthma, those who took omega-3 fish oil supplements rich in EPA and DHA for ten months experienced fewer symptoms compared to children who took a placebo pill.

Macular Degeneration

3,000 people over the age of 49 were asked who ate a more consistent diet of fish and ones who did were less likely to have macular degeneration than those who ate less fish. Another study comparing people with macular degeneration to people without the eye disease found that those with a healthy dietary balance of omega-3 fatty acids, as well as more fish in their diets, were less likely to have macular degeneration.

Colon Cancer

Omega-3 fatty acids seem to reduce the risk of colorectal cancer. People who tend to have a high fatty acid diet have a low rate of colorectal cancer. Studies have found that omega-3 fatty acids prevent worsening of colon cancer. Researchers suggest taking fish oil daily to help slow the progression of colon cancer in people with early stages of the disease.

Breast Cancer

Women who have omega-3 fatty acids consistently in their diet over many years may be less likely to develop breast cancer.

Prostate Cancer

Omega-3 fatty acid fish oils may help prevent the development of prostate cancer.

Looking to Purchase Omega-3 Fish Oil? See our favorite Fish Oil Products.

source http://www.healthy4lifeonline.com/the-health-benefits-of-omega-3-fish-oil/