Tag: practice

Fitness, Guest Post

Summer Fitness Idea: Swimming

Posted on by mghdiabeteseducation

By Sara Evans, Aquatics Supervisor
The Clubs at Charles River Park

Swimming is a great, total body exercise for building strength in your muscles as well as your heart and lungs. Swimming is also a safe activity for anyone. Because you’re weightless in the water, there’s less wear on your joints and you don’t need to worry about tripping or losing feeling in your feet. Unless your healthcare provider says no, there’s no reason not to try swimming.

Swimming uses every muscle in your body, but especially your core. A strong core is needed to keep your head above water, and will help improve your posture in other activities like running or walking. Since the whole body is used to pull you through the water, swimming is a great time saver workout. Just 30 minutes in the pool is about the same as at 45-minute run on the treadmill. You can also adjust how hard you work by making small changes to your hand positions. For instance, keeping your hands flat adds resistance and challenge.

If you’re new to swimming, the first steps are learning to float and developing good breath control in the water. Most of all you’ll need to have confidence about swimming in the deep end. The best way to build confidence is through practice. I recommend beginners start with 15 minutes twice a week at either the beginning (warm up) or end (cool down) of your workout. Remember, swimming is much different than running so it’s best to take it easy to start so you don’t wear yourself out. As you get stronger, you can increase how long and how often you swim. Eventually you’ll be able to swim every day of the week if you want! Swimming is a life-long activity and there’s no risk of injury from overuse.

One last thought: There’s no one “right” way to swim. You’ll soon develop a style that works for you. Be comfortable with your stroke, even if it’s different from someone else’s. The best fit for you is whatever gets you to the other end of the pool and back.

 

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Blood Pressure, Health, Heart Health

Meditation

Posted on by mghdiabeteseducation

It may be easiest to understand what meditation is by first explaining what it is not.  Meditation is not thinking.  It’s seeing, smelling, feeling and experiencing without applying thought.  It is a quieting of the mind where the thinking part of the brain is turned off.  If you’re thinking, you’re not meditating.  Meditation is often viewed as an exotic or foreign activity, but it’s really just using a different part of the brain.

Two of the defining qualities of meditation are focused awareness and a receptive state of mind.  The body was not meant to live in the stress response, yet in this modern world we often find ourselves living in a constant state of low-level stress.  Stress aggravates everything.  It causes inflammation in the body, tightening of the muscles, and interferes with getting good quality sleep (in fact fatigue is the number one symptom of stress).  Turning off the stress response helps encourage broader awareness and adaptability.  There is an expansive feeling in this adaptive state as all the muscles stretch and relax; a feeling of “oneness” or connection to everything and everybody (contrast this with the stress response which is very disconnecting).

A good place to start when beginning a meditation practice is with the breath.  Focusing on the inhale and the exhale develops a moment to moment focus of simply being.  You may also find it helpful to focus on an image, or choose a word or words (or phrase/phrases) to link with the rhythm of your breath.  Observe the sensations you experience mindfully, try not to be too “thinky,” and avoid judgments.  It may be difficult to keep your mind from wandering at first, but a wandering mind is not a sign you can’t meditate – it’s a sign that you need to meditate!  Catching yourself drifting and bringing your attention back to the present moment helps build your meditation practice.

It’s recommended to spend 10-20 minutes in quiet meditation 1-2 times a day.  Maintaining focus for 20 minutes at a time can be challenging in the beginning, but you can slowly work your way up to it.  The more often you practice, the more the brain changes (in a positive way).  Meditating daily for just 20 minutes has been shown to remodel your brain away from stress to more pleasant and steadying states of mind – so you can see, it’s well worth the effort!

(Post written in collaboration with the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine)
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