Billions of dollars are spent every year on pain relievers, diagnostics and surgery to reduce lower back pain. In many cases, these treatments are warranted, but quite often back pain can be alleviated by simple stretching exercises. This makes sense, as our desk-bound, sedentary lives promote muscle and tendon strain, particularly when we incorporate exercise in our schedules. Flexibility is beneficial for both the deconditioned (non-exercisers) and fit alike, and I write about simple exercises that can help here for HairLoss.com.
A particularly important bit of advice from a therapist interviewed for this article on handling stress-filled holidays is how we need to unhook family relationships from holidays. The other thing is how we don’t have to love everything about people (which has a corollary, that we don’t have to hate everything about them as well). Per the website’s fitness emphasis, I also touch on the relationship between interrupted exercise routines and stress.
I’m pleased to announce the beginning of a series of blog postings about fitness and nutrition on UrbanStag.com, an e-commerce site focused on men’s grooming products. Articles are written to draw and hold readers who are interested in appearance, including what can be accomplished through diet and exercise. This first article addresses the erroneous notion held by many men, that they can exercise away the pounds. In most cases, the weight loss is enhanced by exercise but happens primarily by altering eating patterns (just don’t call it a diet).
Ignore everything you’ve ever heard or seen on television exercise product infomercials: to be strong and fit takes time, effort and variation. But still, there are techniques that can speed things up. One is eccentric movements – a.k.a., “negatives” – that portion of any weight-resistance exercise that we typically think of as the easy part. For example, after pressing a weight overhead, it’s the drop-down half of the exercise. If you go super slow on that portion, you significantly increase the muscle-building benefit. I explain it in detail in an article on HairLoss.com, where I am the fitness and nutrition section editor.
You see them at certain gyms: guys, usually, who wear special wrist bands to support that area of their arms and hands because, one assumes, they’re lifting very heavy weights with other muscles in the arms, shoulders, chest or back. This betrays a fitness imbalance, building one part of the body while only artificially supporting another part (weight belts fall in the same category). The balanced exerciser knows the whole body should work in concert, and that instead they need to develop hand, wrist and forearms strength by exercising those smaller muscles. I write about it here on HairLoss.com.
By Russ Klettke, ACE-certified fitness trainer and writer
If you’re like a majority of adult humans, you occasionally experience lower back pain. It may come from exercising, or just simply maneuvering something in a slightly unusual position – for example, lifting a heavy object out of a car trunk. When it happens you know immediately that it will affect you for days or weeks to come. Self management of lower back problems can save time and money – and bring faster relief. Read more here ….