Nine Step Guide to Practising Yoga at Home

Yoga is a great way to improve your flexibility, mobility, and balance. It’s also good for developing strength, improving your posture, and even burning calories and fat. Lots of people do yoga in studios and classes, but there is very little to stop you practicing yoga at home. This could be as an addition to a regular class, or simply because you prefer to exercise in private.
But how, without a yoga teacher, can you learn and practice yoga at home? Let’s discuss!

1. Clear some space

You don’t need masses of space to do yoga, but you need enough that you can move without restriction or limitation. Place your yoga may on the floor and make sure there are several feet of clear space all around it. Move anything that might get in your way. Make sure that overhead light fittings will not interfere with reaching your arms overhead either.

2. Schedule your session 

Life has a way of getting in the way of your intention to practice yoga. You might say to yourself “I will practice tomorrow” but, as that old saying goes, tomorrow never comes. The only way to get better at yoga and enjoy its many benefits is to do it regularly.
With no class to attend, it can be easy to put yoga off until another time or day but then, without meaning to, you end up skipping your practices for days or even weeks at a time.
Avoid this problem by scheduling your yoga practices. Write them in your diary! Decide on the day, time, and duration of your session and then stick to it. Treat this appointment like any other and do your best to honor it.

3. Avoid distractions

Yoga requires peace and concentration so make sure you won’t be interrupted or distracted during your practice. Turn your phone to silent, turn off the TV and radio, and let everyone in your home know that you will be busy for the next hour or so. This is valuable “you” time so make sure you do all that you can to preserve it.
  

4. Plan your practice  

When you go to a yoga class, the teacher will guide you through a specific sequence of poses or asanas. Some sequences are traditional, whereas others created specifically for the class participants. Having a sequence to work through gives your practice direction and focus.
Plan your practice so that you also know what you are going to work on. You can use a yoga book, yoga flashcards, a DVD, a YouTube video, a written or typed list of asanas, or just do a sequence you have learnt in the past. Most sequences start with a variation of sun salutations and then build in intensity and difficulty as you warm up. Your practice should end with a few minutes of relaxion and maybe meditation.

5. Have your yoga accessories ready

While a Thick Yoga Mat is really all you need, many practitioners use additional equipment to make their sessions more comfortable or effective. If your yoga practice involves things like straps, blocks, cushions, or anything else, make sure they are within easy reach. The last thing you want to do is ruin your flow and concentration because you stop to search for a must-have block.

 

6. Think safety first

Yoga is a very safe form of exercise, but that doesn’t mean accidents can’t happen. As you’ll be exercising alone, make sure you don’t overexert yourself or do anything that could be dangerous. For example, headstands and handstands can be a little risky, and lengthy inversions could leave you feeling feint and dizzy. Save advanced yoga moves for class or when someone is on hand to keep an eye on you.

7. Video yourself

In a yoga class, your teacher will spend a lot of their time fine tuning or correcting your technique. With no teacher to guide you, it’s very easy to inadvertently do your chosen asanas incorrectly or develop bad habits that then become hard to break.
If you can do it without disrupting your practice, video yourself so that you can review your performance and be your own teacher. If you spot any issues, make a note of them and make them the focus of your next practice.

8. Get a yoga tune up

While you can teach yourself yoga and monitor your own performance and progress, working with an instructor from time to time can still be very useful. An experienced yoga teacher will be able to spot technique issues and will offer you advice and guidance to make your practices more effective.
If yoga classes are not your thing, consider hiring a teacher and working with them one-to-one. You can do this at a private studio or arrange for the teacher to come to your home. An hour or two with an instructor can teach you more than a week of solo practices.
 

9. Enjoy your practice

Whether you practice yoga at home or at a studio, it’s essential that you enjoy the process. Don’t overdo it, and don’t do asanas that cause you pain. Don’t work so hard that you start to question whether you’ll be able to walk tomorrow! A conservative, consistent exercise program is always better than an extreme but occasional workout.

Whether you practice yoga daily or weekly, every session is beneficial. Doing yoga at home means you are your own teacher, and that can be very empowering. The benefits of yoga are huge and practicing at home means you can enjoy all of those benefits whenever it suits you best.

Squat Your Way to Picture Perfect Legs

Squats are often referred to as the king of leg exercises. That’s a title that is truly deserved because no other exercise comes close to offering the benefits of squats. Whatever your fitness goal is, squats will help you get there faster. Squats ARE challenging, and you’ll need to learn to do them right, but your investment of time and effort will soon be rewarded!

Squats are a compound exercise. This means they involve two or more joints and multiple muscle groups all working together. In this instance, multiple muscle groups is something of an understatement – squats work virtually every muscle in your legs, and even some in your upper body too.

This not only means that squats are a very time-efficient exercise, they are also great for calorie burning. All of that muscular activity means that squats use a lot of energy. That’s good news if you want to tone up and lose weight at the same time.

Squats are also a very functional exercise. They closely replicate and benefit the activities of daily living. You will probably have done several squats already today – sitting down and standing up, getting on and off the loo, and getting in and out of your car for example. And walking up or down stairs? That’s a whole sequence of one-legged squats.

Because squats involve a lot of joints and muscles, as well as a large range of motion, they are a technically demanding exercise. Well-performed squats are the answer to your workout prayers, but badly performed squats can lead to aches and pains. You need to learn how to squat right!

There are lots of different types of squat you can perform, but they all share these common characteristics. Apply these rules to whichever type of squat you do, and you’ll get great results with fewer injuries.

1. Stand with your feet between hip and shoulder-width apart, with your toes facing in the same direction as your knees. Your stance depends on what you find comfortable, and taller people often prefer a wider stance. Experiment to determine which one works for you.

2. Initiate your descent by pushing your hips back. This will help activate your hamstrings and glutes, as well as keeping your weight on your heels for better balance and less knee stress. Just after pushing your hips back, it’s time to bend your knees. Do not allow your knees to travel forward of your toes.

3. Squat down until your thighs are approximately parallel to the floor or as deep as your flexibility allows. Do not round your lower back, and make sure you keep your chest up and look straight ahead throughout.

4. Drive down through your heels and stand back up. Stand fully upright but do not lock out your knees or lean back. That’s one flawless rep done, now keep going!

Squat variations

Regular bodyweight squats, also known as air squats, are a great exercise but if you can do more than 20-30 reps without feeling your legs working overtime, they are too easy to be of much benefit. Crank up the intensity with these more demanding squat variations. Remember though, whichever squat variation you try, make sure you do each and every rep properly, following the guidelines outlined above.

Goblet squats

Goblet squats involve holding a dumbbell, kettle bell, or medicine ball in front of your chest. This increases the demand on your leg muscles but also forces you to use great exercise technique. If you lean too far forward, the weight will fall away from your chest and you’ll end up with more weight on your arms than your legs. Goblet squats are an excellent way to learn and develop good squatting technique.

Barbell back squats

This gym staple is one of the exercises contested in power lifting competitions. With a barbell resting across your upper back, this is the squat exercise that will allow you to lift the most weight. However, it’s also a tricky and sometimes uncomfortable exercise to master. It’s a good job there are plenty of other variations to try!

Barbell front squats  

As the name suggests, where back squats involve resting and holding a barbell behind you, with front squats the barbell is held in front of you. It rests across your shoulders and is held in place by keeping your upper arms up and parallel to the floor.
Front squats are popular with Olympic weight lifters and are a divisive subject amongst exercisers. Some people love them, while others hate them, finding them awkward and difficult. Try them and decide which camp you are in.
 

Zercher squats

This unusually-named exercise is one of the most accessible ways to squat. Similar to the goblet squat, it’s very hard to do this exercise incorrectly. Light weights should present no problems but, as you increase the load, you may find Zercher squats hurt your arms. This is easily remedied by using a barbell pad or wrapping the bar in a towel.

Bulgarian split squats

If you have mastered squatting with two legs, why not try squatting with just one? That’s not exactly the case with this exercise, but roughly 75% of the work is done by your front leg and only 25% by the rear leg. This exercise is not just a good leg exercise, it’s also good for your balance and your mobility too. Master this exercise with just your bodyweight before progressing to dumbbells or a barbell.
 

How to program squats

With more than a few variations to try, there is nothing wrong with squatting twice or even three-times a week, preferably on non-consecutive days to allow time to rest. It’s also a good idea to use a variety of loads and set/rep schemes to avoid overtraining and boredom.
For example:

• Monday – barbell back squats, 4 sets of eight reps, heavy weights
• Wednesday – goblet squats, 2 sets of 20 reps, light weights
• Friday – Zercher squats, 3 sets of 12 reps, moderate weights

Some people think that squats are bad for the knees. This simply isn’t true. Performed properly, squats strengthen the knee joint and all the associated muscles. They can actually reduce or prevent knee pain. However, if squats DO hurt your knees, you may be doing them wrong or are using too much weight. Check your technique, dial back the load, and start over. Gradual progression is the key to successful squats and picture-perfect legs!

How To Lose Belly Fat Quickly - 5 simple And Effective ways in which

Step 1

One of the easiest ways to lose excess fat around the belly quickly is to go on a diet that is low in carbohydrates. A low crab diet always eliminates fat around the belly area first. However, if you do not want to eat a special diet low in crabs, you can just cut your usual intake of carbohydrates in half. This will still aid you in losing fat round your waistline but not at as fast a rate as you would if you were to consume a low carb diet.

Step 2

Next, instead of eating three meals a day, you can try eating five meals daily that are smaller. This will help you speed up your metabolism as well as to balance your levels of insulin. Both are essential actions where losing weight is concerned.

Step 3

Getting a lot of sleep and cutting back on your stress levels are also important actions that need to be taken for both your mental health and weight loss goals. They are critical when you are looking to lose belly fat, which could be rather stubborn. The reasoning behind this is that when you are under a lot of stress, your body releases a hormone by the name of cholesterol. This hormone causes the body to store fat right around the midsection.

Step 4

In addition to what was already discussed, you need to take at least fifteen minutes out of your daily routine and look to distress and relax. This action will cut down on the levels of cholesterol that your body creates, which in turn will promote the loss of fat around your belly area.

Step 5

Last but not least, if you are looking to burn more fat while you are exercising, you should look into interval training. These can be delineated as high intensity exercises that are followed by periods of rest. These exercises, along with abdominal activities like crunches and yoga, all work well to assist you in getting rid of excess belly fat.

The bottom line is that in order to get rid of extra fat around the belly, you need to eat healthier, exercise more, get adequate rest, and lower your stress levels. Fat around the belly can lead to serious health complications, such as heart attack or stroke, and it is thus critical to follow a healthy regimen each day that will seek to keep you at your optimal weight.

In conclusion, there are many ways that you can look on how to lose belly fat quick. People usually follow a mixture of these things, and they include cutting down on the amount of crabs that you eat, eating five small meals a day, getting a full night's rest, cutting down on your stress levels, taking some time out of the day to relax, and looking into certain exercises that are meant to Fastest way to lose belly fat.

Yoga Vs. Pilates – What’s the Difference?

The fitness industry has seen a lot of exercise fads come and go and, quite often, come back again. Two forms of exercise that could never be described as fads are yoga and Pilates. Both have been around a very long time and have become accepted as mainstream forms of exercise. Yoga and Pilates share several characteristics but are also quite different. 

 
YOGA

Yoga, which comes from India, is so old that its exact origins are very hard to define. Much of what we know about yoga has been translated from ancient Sanskrit texts and because this is a “dead” language, opinions differ as to the precise meaning of many of the words.

What we do know is that yoga has been around for not hundreds but thousands of years (some yoga inscriptions date back as far as 3,000 BC) and modern yoga is an amalgamation of individual exercise systems that differ according to their geographic region of origin and the guru who devised them.

The word yoga is a derivative of the Sanskrit word “yuj” meaning united or integrated, a reference to how yoga combines the body and mind into a single, healthful system. Despite having roots in spiritual practices, yoga has no religious affiliations and is practiced all around the world by people of many religious denominations.

Yoga is commonly thought of as a system of stretching but yoga is much more than that. Although flexibility is an important part of yoga, other fitness components are also developed including strength, endurance, and even cardiovascular fitness. The fitness components emphasised in yoga depends on the form practiced. For example, the non-stop flow of an Ashtanga class will challenge your heart, lungs and muscles whereas yin yoga is much more gentle, restorative, and relaxing.

There are a number of different branches of yoga. Some, like Hatha and Ananda, are quite gentle while others, such as Bikram and Power yoga, are far more demanding and strenuous. Each of the branches share common poses, called asanas, but have been uniquely shaped by the founder of each branch.

Many of the asanas are based on nature, such as positions adopted by animals like the well-known downward facing dog and cobra. Other asanas, such as inversions, are thought to improve blood flow to a specific region of the body.

The style and format of a yoga class depends on the branch of yoga being practiced although there are commonalities across most branches. Classes usually begin with calming exercises to focus the mind for what is to follow and then a warm up consisting of the sun-salutation sequences.

Once you are warm, the class will progress to more challenging asanas involving forward bends, twists, back bends, balances, inversions, core, seated and prone/supine poses. The class usually ends with relaxation and meditation. Breathing and breath control play an important part in yoga. Called ujjayi, breathing is used to time poses and control the transition from one pose to the next.

PILATES

Pilates is a conditioning and strengthening system known for developing a strong abdomen and good posture. Originally called Contrology and popularized by media stars such as Madonna, Nicole Kidman, and Jenifer Aniston, Pilates is practiced in specialist studios full of fascinating-looking machines and in aerobics studios where nothing more than an exercise mat is required. Pilates, in all its forms, is immensely popular and enjoys a cult following.

Although nowhere near as old as yoga, Pilates has a long history and has been around for nearly a century. This system of traditional exercise was the brainchild of German Joseph Pilates and was originally popular with dancers as a means to improving strength, posture and flexibility and reducing the incidence of injury.

Pilates himself was a weak and sickly child and he developed his system of exercise as he sought to improve his health and wellbeing. At one point, and as a direct result of his improved fitness and strength, he earned his living as a circus performer and even taught self-defence at Police headquarters at Scotland Yard. Pilates moved to America in 1926s and wrote two books describing his system of exercise; Your Health in 1934 and Return to Life Through Contrology in 1945.

There are two main divisions in modern-day Pilates: authentic and contemporary.  Authentic Pilates uses specially designed machines based on Joseph Pilates original designs to strengthen the muscles. In contrast, contemporary Pilates is often floor or mat-based but also utilizes equipment such as stability balls, small dumbbells, metal rings, and foam rollers.

Much of Pilates’ work has been adopted by the mainstream fitness industry. The term core, a fitness buzzword, originates from Pilates. Modern strength and conditioning experts agree that the muscles of the core (essentially your abdomen, waist and lower back) are central to safe and effective performance of almost all physical activities. A strong core also minimizes your risk of suffering non-specific back pain and can enhance posture and appearance.

Pilates referred to the muscles of the core as the “power engine” or “powerhouse” of the human body and taught that these muscles should be integrated with the rest of the limbs to boost functional performance. Pilates also introduced the concept of maintaining a neutral spine while exercising for safety and for good posture.

Many of the exercises popularized by Pilates have been adopted by fitness instructors all around the world. The plank and side plank, bird-dog (known as swimming in Pilates) and hip bridges are all featured in the Pilates’ method although ironically, many of these so-called Pilates exercises also appear in yoga.

There are six basic principles in Pilates. These principles describe how each and every exercise should be performed. Adherence to these universal principles makes even the simplest of Pilates’ exercises both effective and challenging. The principles are concentration, control, centre, flow, precision, and breathing.

As with all forms of exercise, yoga and Pilates are only effective if performed correctly. Seek out properly qualified and experienced instructors so you get the best from these traditional forms of exercise. Despite appearances, both yoga and Pilates can be very strenuous and incorrect exercise performance could result in serious injury.