During the hours of sleep, your muscles can become stiff and immobile. A wake-up stretch routine will wake up your muscles, allowing them to feel more supple as the blood flow increases.

If you’re putting up with aches and pains, or if you’ve recently suffered a muscular injury, you’ll likely do anything to find relief. For many people, though, yoga doesn’t readily come to mind as a therapeutic tool to help provide that relief. In this article, we’ll shed light on the benefits of yoga therapy for injury recovery.

Stress is something that we can’t avoid in this hectic, fast-paced society. But we can do something about the way we respond to it. By regulating our breathing, we are able to trigger the body’s relaxation response to counter stress.

Warming up is a crucial part of every exercise session. But so is warming down. Over recent years, research has made it clear that, while dynamic stretching should feature as part of your warm up routine, static stretching should come at the end of your routine. In this article, I’ll lay out a 7-minute stretching routine that you can do after a workout. It also works well as a stand alone stretch session, especially first thing in the morning. When performing these gentle stretches, you should keep the movements smooth, gentle and relaxed. For maximum benefit, hold each stretch for 15-30 seconds, ensuring that the correct posture is maintained. 

Stretching is one of those activities that we all know we should be doing but too few of us actually follow through with. In this article, we’ll present a simple 15-minute stretching workout you can do on a daily basis to reduce muscle pain and tightness, rejuvenate the muscle and prepare the body for rest. 

Taking care of your muscles’ connective tissue is a key part of staying supple and pain-free. Your connective tissue is otherwise known as fascia and consists of a thick band of tissue that surrounds each of your muscles. In this article, we provide 3 key strategies to keep your connective tissue flexible and your muscles pain-free.

Stretching and working out can be a confusing topic. There was a time when static stretching was the done thing before a workout. Now, however, we now know better. Static stretching will actually lead to a decrease in strength, power and explosiveness during the workout. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stretch at all. Before the workout, you should do dynamic stretching, with static stretching coming at the end of your session. Here are 6 must do stretches, 3 for before and 3 for after, your workout.

Saunas have been used to make people feel better and improve their health for thousands of years. Today, the use of heat for health benefits is widespread with everything from Hot Yoga to Heat Baths being used by people all over the world. Yet, the sauna remains an extremely popular option. In this article we take a look at the science based benefits of regular sauna use.

Heat Stress

Heat stress is one of the few goods types of stress that actually benefits the human body. Positive stress is known as hormesis. It’s the type of stress that comes from exercise and results in adaptations that make the body stronger and healthier. Heat stress acts in a similar way.

Connective body tissue is also known as fascia. It is a spider-like network of webbing that covers our muscles. When it’s healthy, it is fluid, flexible and smooth. But when it’s not, it becomes stiff and immobile. The result is that our muscles don’t function as they should and we feel stiff and uncomfortable. Stress and inactivity are key contributors to poor connective tissue health. In this article, we reveal three things you can do every day to keep your connective tissue fluid and flexible. 

The fitness industry is rife with half truths, false beliefs and outright myths. This has led countless people down the wrong path, with the result that they waste a lot of energy for very little result. Here are 5 persistent fitness myths and why they aren’t true.

I’m willing to bet that you don’t think very much about your lymphatic system. In fact, you may not even know what it is. Yet, this system is vital to your very life. In this article we discover what the lymphatic system is and how you can ensure that it continues to operate optimally.

There have been a lot of advances in our understanding of stretching around workouts in the last decade. It is now understood that the best type of stretching before the workout is dynamic stretching where you move a body part through its full range of motion, such as when doing arm circles. Static stretching is best done after the workout. Doing so will increase flexibility, reduce delayed onset muscle soreness and lessen the chance of injury. Here are seven simple post workout stretches to polish off your training session.

Sleep deprivation is a chronic problem worldwide. A recent study revealed that one in three people in the United States suffer from chronic lack of sleep. And we’re paying for it with a raft of health problems from weight gain to heart disease. In this article, we focus on how your eating habits can help you to get a good night’s sleep.

If you have been experiencing knots to the back of your neck or to your mid back, chances are the pain is coming from your upper traps. The upper traps are attached from the base of the skull and inserts to the thoracic spine. This triangular muscle extends to the width of the shoulder and is responsible for moving and rotating your shoulder blade, stabilising your arm and extending your neck.

Stretching before a workout prepares our muscles for the activity we’re about to engage in and stretching afterwards helps to encourage recovery. A single stretch makes the muscles, tendons and ligaments more flexible but only for a short period of time. However, over time with regular stretching, this may induce the growth of tissues that leads to a more long-term increase in flexibility. But, if your muscles are sore, stretching won't necessarily make them more flexible, but it will help them to feel better.

When it comes to recovering from a workout, nutrition and sleep are top of the list. Unless you feed your body with nutrients and give it the rest it needs to replenish, recover and regrow, you will only be getting smaller and weaker. The next most important factor is known as active recovery, and the big three when it comes to active recovery are the sauna, spa and swim. Let’s find out how the Big 3 can enhance your post-workout recovery.

You’ve absolutely crushed a workout, but now you’re finding you are suffering even more than when you were in the workout. You’ve done a big leg day and now you can’t even walk down a flight of stairs? Or hit your arms hard and can’t even put on a t-shirt? You probably have DOMS. Although this level of soreness might sound like something you’d want to avoid, they aren’t necessarily a bad indication.