Tag Archives: muscles

Warming Up

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Ensuring your body is properly warmed up is very essential to your activities.

Very often this involves stretching, but can also include shaking of limbs or a nice walk to get the blood flowing.

So, the idea is that by warming up, the muscles get used a little bit, get stretched a little bit, and the blood gets properly circulating into the muscles to ensure they can handle the activities.

Let’s try something.

When you wake up in the morning, try to reach down and touch your toes. Now, after half a day of doing your regular activities, try to touch your toes again.

Notice how after having some warm up time during the day, your muscles are now much more flexible and ready to bend in various directions?

This is because your muscles have had some sort of a warm up time to let them loosen up from the activities.

warmup

Now, think of going from rather mild exercise of your day to day activities, into a fun activity like soccer. Your muscles still aren’t as limber as they should be, so you will want to warm them up even further.

This is why many coaches will make their team run circles around the field before a soccer match, or around the ice rink to properly get the limbs warmed up, get the blood flowing, and the heart pumping!

If you do this, you will be helping your body reduce muscle pulls, and ensuring the muscles repair as quickly as possible after strenuous activities.

NOTE: I would even suggest a proper warm up for any task that you do all day, especially manual labor jobs, but even including office desk jobs where you’re sitting still all day.

stretching

Pilates Resistance Rubber

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Pilates rubber bands, also known as Resistance Bands, are probably the most versatile, compact, and quick piece of exercise equipment that can be used and owned. Exercising at the gym, at least for me, tends to focus on free weights, doing three reps of 15-20, and around four different exercises sets. But, with pilates rubber bands, I do about 20 minutes with them and I’m exhausted. This falls into my ideal range, as I like to do short spurt workouts all day, rather than focused into one hour long exercise routine.

resistancebands

They work the muscles in an entirely different way than dumbbells do, in that you’re pulling the rubber apart, rather than fighting against gravity. Dumbbells do provide a lot of freedom when compared to a machine, but the rubbers provide that much more freedom than dumbbells do. On top of this, you’re pulling against your own resistance, so you’re working your muscles in multiple ways at once. In this way they’re more of a defining exercise than a muscular building one.

resistance_bands

I find that using the pilates rubbers makes my routine more like that of a yoga routine; I do about 4 or 5 positions for as long as I can in each position, and then take a little break, which I often infuse with some sit-ups (on an exercise ball)! At the end of doing this, which is usually twice, my body is more exhausted than an hour of exercising at the gym. Don’t get me wrong, the gym is a very good exercise, but the pilates rubbers are a different type of exercise. It’s more of an intense but short, full out push, where as the gym for me is usually a focused and steady muscular refinement where I come away feeling my muscles ache, rather than my whole body dead. Maybe you get it or maybe you don’t, but I highly suggest you try and work the rubbers into your routine.

ExerciseBandsThe pilates rubbers can be picked up at most sporting good stores, Wall-Mart or Zellers. Good luck!