Warming Up Before Exercise: What are the benefits?
While it can be tempting to skip the warm up, warming up can both improve our performance and reduce the risk of injury.
The World Upon Your Shoulders - The Effect of Stress on Your Traps
Stress can result in us holding our shoulders is a partially ‘shrugged’ position which activates our trapezius muscles. Day after day the traps can become shorter and shorter. often resulting in soreness and even headaches. Try these mobility exercises, self-massage techniques and yoga poses to help lengthen a loosen these stressed-out muscle.
Short- and Long-Term Memory – The Odd Couple
The short-term and long-term memory systems are very different but work together. The short-term memory has limited capacity, is easy to get information from and acts as a gateway to our long-term memory. Meanwhile our long-term memory is thought to have unlimited capacity but takes longer to get information from.
Agonists and Antagonists – How we move
Muscles can only pull not push so therefore must work in pairs. While one contracts (agonist), the other lengthens (antagonist). Meanwhile others help the agonist (synergists). By knowing which muscles are do which roles we can look for imbalances and know when synergists have taken over and are causing issues.
Rectus Abdominus - Your Six-Pack Muscles in Action
The rectus abdominus muscles are our ‘six-pack muscles’ and help us to bend forward at our lower spine and tilt our pelvis back. Overuse and poor posture can make them tight and/or weak which can lead to lower back pain. These mobility exercises and yoga poses may help strengthen and lengthen our rectus abdominus muscles.