By Administrator 0 Comments Health Tips, Markham

Exercise Recommendations

It is important to incorporate physical activity in our daily lives. The American College of Sports Medicine has released new recommendations on the quantity and quality of exercises categorized by cardiorespiratory, resistance, flexibility, and neuromotor exercises.

The recommendations are as follows:

  • Cardiorespiratory exercises: Adults should get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week.
  • Resistance exercises: Adults should train each major muscle group two or three days each week using a variety of exercises and equipment.
  • Flexibility exercises: Adults should do flexibility exercises at least two or three days each week to improve range of motion.
  • Neuromotor exercises: Neuromotor exercise (sometimes called “functional fitness training”) involving balance, agility, and coordination is recommended for two or three days per week.
By Administrator 0 Comments Health Tips, Markham

Ways to Prevent Job Stress

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  1. Take frequent breaks when you find yourself procrastinating, daydreaming, have a mental block or just feeling tense in general.If your task requires more concentration, take more breaks.
  1. Set your proirities every morning. Have a list and sort them from high to low priority. Make sure you can complete at least one of the high priority items, even if you have to say no to a low priotiy item.
  1. Make a day where you can clean up your desk, sort your mail, and return phone calls, preferrably on a Friday, so you can start your next week fresh.
  2. Try to avoid stressful / unneccessary meetings that you can accomplish by a quick call or memo.
By Administrator 0 Comments Health Tips, Learn, Markham

Balance!

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Foam Rolling is an amazing self help tool that helps alleviate stiffness, muscle tightness, and pain. Some people make the excuse about not having enough time for anything additional in their daily routines, but this will take 5-10 minutes. You can target your problem areas only or do a whole body routine.
Foam Rolling for beginners: Get a foam roller that is firm and smooth – NO knobby parts on it. It will hurt if you have not foam roller before, but the knobby ones REALLY hurt if you haven’t done it before. You’ll utilize your arms/hands and legs to customize how much pressure you’re putting on each body part you’re foam rolling. You can graduate to using less assistance which means more pressure on the foam roll as the foam rolling gets easier and less painful.
Now, why am I suggesting you put yourself through pain when you’re in pain?! The body gets stressed from injury or just every day activities, the muscles tighten, the joints stiffen, you’re in pain. Foam rolling works on the muscles and fascia to loosen the muscles, get knots out, which leads to the joints having less stress on them, and in turn less pain.
One key point to foam rolling your back: do NOT position your lower back on the foam roller without tilting your body to the side. The pressure should be coming from the side, not directly on your spine!! On the rest of your spine that attaches to ribs, you can have the foam roller directly on the spine because the ribs support that pressure.