health

by Baxter Hours of Operation by Melina Meza This past August I was back in Ocean Springs, Mississippi at River Rock Yoga , leading a weekend workshop. One of the students, who has been a regular in class with me there over the years, brought in a few pointed questions for me that he hoped I could address on YFHA. He has been a regular reader since we started, and practices yoga on his own as well as attending classes regularly. In his search for the perfect home practice, he was very curious if I thought that there was a recommended minimum time for a home practice, realizing that some yoga is better than none! In his own attempt to answer the question, he cited an April, 2013 article in an issue of Prevention Magazine which claimed, referring to a study done in postmenopausal women, that 42 minutes of vigorous exercise over 3 days (that means 14 minutes a day) maintains telomeres. As regular readers of this blog will know, telomeres are little �caps� or tails on the end of DNA stands...

by Nina I don�t know about you, but Ram�s post yesterday  The Dangers of Being Sedentary  scared me a bit. Findings from a recent study showed that individuals who sat for more than 11 hours daily were 40 percent more likely to die within the next three years than those who sat for four hours or less daily�even when people�s physical activity at other times of the day was accounted for. Studies have also indicated that sitting daily for less than 3 hours and watching TV for less than 2 hours extends life expectancy by an estimated 1 to 2 years. Studies reported in the prestigious journals Lancet and the British Medical Journal suggest that a sedentary lifestyle is the cause of one in 10 deaths worldwide. It�s now known that Americans are working less (26 minutes a day less compared to Y2007) and idling off more. Adults in the U.S. spend an average of 55 percent of their day engaged in some kind of sedentary behavior (see Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA: a ca...

by Nina   Image "Borrowed" from The New York Times The exercises should be performed in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each, while, throughout, the intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Jordan says. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you�re done. �New York Times Did anyone else happen to see the recent New York Times seven-minute exercise routine? Well, I did. And my first response was irritation. Something seemed so wrong to me about the routine. At first, I thought it was the seven minutes part. That seemed to me a crazy amount of time for doing twelve exercises, and I thought it would be healthier and more effective to divide up the routine into, say, three or four different routines, and cycle between them on different days. That way, you could spend more time on each exercise and not do the same thing every day (which could lead to boredom or even injury). But even after I h...