What is the Best Type of Exercise for My Body?

Best Type of Exercise for My Body

There is so much conflicting information about the best way to exercise. How do you know what is best for you?

Our bodies were designed to withstand the need to make surges of speed, but not to withstand long distance running. Our ancestors would run short distances to get out of harm’s way, to chase down dinner or to help a friend in need. We were not designed to run for great distances over long periods of time.

There are many forms of exercise that bring this principle into effect, such as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), where you work out as hard as you can for a short duration of time, potentially even for only 45 or 60 seconds (which seems like a lifetime when you’re doing as many push ups as you can!!) and then resting for the same timeframe or a little less. This kicks your metabolism into high gear, adds a significant surge of adrenaline into your body to keep up with this form of exercise and pushes your body to grow and develop muscle and improves your fitness.

The opposite form of exercise would be traditional cardio. You jump on a treadmill or hit the road for 30-60 minutes of fast walking or jogging until the time is up. Sustained movement for a long period of time, generally at the same pace and difficulty level to make your body move and cooperate. Cardio can help to lower your resting heart rate, increase your good HDL cholesterol and lower blood pressure, as well as improving circulation, blood flow and lymphatic drainage.

But cardio can also cause your body to produce higher levels of cortisol which can stimulate your appetite, increase fat storage and inhibit recovery.

How is this possible when exercising is supposed to be helping you lose weight and/or get fit? It has to do with the hormones that are released with each type of exercise. Cardio can decrease testosterone production and HIIT can improve your growth hormone levels while lowering your insulin resistance to help regulate blood sugar and reduce fat storage.

What is the best form of exercise for me? How do I know?

The best form of exercise for you is the one that you will actually do!! The risks of a sedentary lifestyle are much worse than the risks involved with either HIIT or cardio. Additionally, there are many other forms of exercise that offer corresponding benefits and risks, such as yoga, pilates, rebounding, kickboxing, hiking, crossfit and many others!

So talk with your natural health practitioner about what he/she would recommend as the best form of exercise for your personal situation and do that! Fall in love with joyful movement – find something you love to do and do it often. Or mix it up and take on different forms of exercise to keep your body guessing and working toward your optimal fitness levels. Have fun!

With Sources from:

http://drhardick.com/say-no-to-traditional-cardio

How to Grow an Organic Garden

grow an organic garden

It’s Spring!! It’s time for spring cleaning of the body, mind and spirit. And it’s also time to clean out your yard and gardens to prepare for the new season.

Have you ever wanted to grow your own fruit and vegetables in your own backyard?

It is super easy, a critical skill to know how to grow your own food and is actually very enjoyable to be outside in the warm summer air tending to something that will bring you such joy, nutrition and flavour in just a few short weeks.

Here is how to get started:

If you already have some garden space, move the soil around as well as you can with a hoe or a rototiller. This will break up the hard soil that has gotten hard over the winter months.

If you do not have a garden yet, choose a space in your yard that has the most sun possible and dig the layer of sod off the ground until you reach your desired space. Then dig the soil around, remove any large stones, rototill the soil or use a hoe to break up the hard soil so that the roots of the plants and seeds you will be planting can actually reach down and root themselves easily.

You can add compost or fresh top soil to the earth that you have just turned over to provide fresh nutrients for your plants to grow.

Choose a garden layout that will allow you to walk easily through your garden or be able to reach everywhere from being on the edge. I always plant my garden in rows because it makes it much easier for planting, weeding and harvesting. But some microgardens do well growing in pods rather than rows. It depends on how much space you have.

The easiest vegetables to grow from seed are carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, kale and herbs. They are very hearty and produce decent crops with little tending.

However if your looking to make the most out of your garden, click here to read ‘Backyard Medicine – Grow Your Own Natural Remedies”, before choosing what to plant.

Once your soil is soft and you have chosen your seeds, make a shallow row, approximately 1” deep, for your seeds to drop into.

Plant your carrot seeds about 1” apart in the row, as you can imagine how much space each carrot needs to grow and expand to become full sized.

Beets need a little bit extra space because each beet seed will produce 4 beets.

For the lettuce, it depends on the type you are growing – leaf lettuce can be planted fairly close together because it grows just as leaves, but romaine lettuce will form into heads and needs a few inches of space.

The important thing is to keep in mind the amount of space the vegetables need to become full sized (like you would find at the grocery store) and give them that much space to grow.

Once you plant the seeds, cover them with dirt and pack the dirt lightly. You can water them every day until they start to sprout and then keep watching them. Once you can see the actual rows forming, then you can begin to see what each of the plants look like and you can decipher the vegetables you want growing from the weeds that will also pop up!!

Pull out the weeds so their roots don’t crowd out your vegetables’ roots and keep watering them regularly throughout their growing season.

You can also plant already growing vegetables such as tomatoes, because they need a longer growing season than our climate allows for. By purchasing tomato plants that are already well established, you can enjoy their fruits in mid-late August. This is the same for pepper plants, but they are often difficult to grow!! (Or at least I don’t seem to have much luck with them!!)

Good luck with your garden adventures, and be sure to share this hobby with your children. There is no better way to spend the summer months than being outside and enjoying time with Mother Nature.

Why Do We Make Young Children Sleep Alone?

Sleep

Let’s think about this for a moment. Announcing to your children, “Go to sleep and stay there by yourself all night.” (while Mom and Dad get to share the night together)

This is simply an outdated model of children’s sleep habits, as research is now coming to light that there is an incredible amount of value that is added to the health of the child and the family by co-sleeping.

Putting a baby into a separate bedroom at night causes parents to wake for much greater periods of time and creates added exhaustion in early parenthood. It is much easier to have the baby or toddler right beside the bed with you, or depending on your level of safety comfort, sharing the bed with you. This makes it much easier to be able to comfort and nurse or feed your baby when he/she is unsettled in the night.

Babies are born very immature neurologically, and require close connection to their parents – not just during the daylight hours, but also at night! Being separated for too long elicits a stress response in the young child (ie. abandonment, fear, separation anxiety) and can cause issues with healthy development.

Additionally, when each child has her/her own separate room, it forces the size of the home to grow significantly, as the family is spread out across much more space (which requires more resources to build the home, energy to heat it, light it and maintain it). Sleep has become a detriment to our environmental that adds a huge carbon footprint.

Why did we stop co-sleeping?

Our ancestors used to co-sleep for much of their growing-up years, as well as many families across poorer nations where they simply do not have the real estate to have separate sleeping rooms.

In the 20th century, there were several prominent physicians, such as Dr. William Whitty Hall, who insisted that it was uncivilized to sleep as a family, and that it was associated with poverty and social ills. In 1928, behavioural psychologist John Watson argued that children should occupy their own rooms or risk stunting the child’s development. And in 1985, Dr. Richard Ferber wrote that solitary sleep was meant allowing the child to become independent and reminded readers that co-sleeping was a primitive practice.

What are the benefits of co-sleeping?

• improved infant emotional health
• promotes more convenient breast feeding• it is natural and healthy
• creates closer-knit families
• can help to prevent SIDS
• helps your baby feel safe and protected
• less intergenerational conflict
• deeper sleep as individuals learn to be unaffected by snoring, a trip to the bathroom or tossing and turning
• kids grow up to be more tolerant of each other and fight less
• have better capacity to share
• more caring attitudes toward each other

What are the risks of co-sleeping?

• loose bedding
• waterbeds
• if parents are under the influence of drugs or alcohol – won’t have same level of alertness and responsiveness as usual
• parents who smoke should not co-sleep – some studies indicate a higher risk of SIDS
• if parents are incredibly deep sleepers

If you are worried about the safety of co-sleeping with your little one, talk to your natural health care provider. There are also many options for having them sleep very close to you, but with a little added protection, such as this bassinet: https://www.thebump.com/a/best-bassinet-halo-bassinest-swivel-sleeper-luxe-plus

With Sources From:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-sleep-alone-20170324-story.html