Lifestyle

Whether you’re a top-class athlete or someone who trains for fitness or weight loss, a sports or holistic massage can help you reach your personal fitness goals, help prevent injury, improve your flexibility and give a wonderful sense of relaxation and well-being.

Specifically, massage will benefit you in the following ways:

1. Pumping: Tight or damaged muscles can squeeze blood out of tissues thus depriving them of vital nutrients. Massage manually pumps the blood into the tissue to help speed up growth and repair.
2. Permeability: Massage allows the pores in tissue to open, allowing waste products out and nutrients in.
3. Stretching: Massage is a far more effective way of maintaining or improving flexibility than stretching alone.

Ladies do you wear a sports bra when training? If not, why not? You wouldn’t go jogging in a pair of high heels. You probably have a decent pair of training shoes, because you’ve invested in protecting your feet and legs. Well, the same should apply to your boobs.

Even if you are small, you should wear a sports bra. The breasts have very little natural support, they only have ligaments as the first support and then only skin as secondary support. That’s all. Once these ligaments, known as Cooper’s Ligaments, are stretched too far that’s it, they never go back again.

At this time of year there are a lot of obstacles to those of you who are looking to stay fit and lean. The Festive Season will probably have taken it’s toll, with excessive amounts of calories having been consumed, and the cold weather makes it much more inviting to stay indoors rather than go training. And while the old weight-loss mantra of Eat Less and Move More is always a good place to start, it won’t solve all the issues.

Lifestyle factors like sleep and stress play a huge role in how your body will react to any training regime. Simply put: if you appear to be doing “everything right” but aren’t getting the expected results from your exercise and nutrition programme, the chances are that your sleep or stress patterns are working against you.

Today we’ll look at the importance of a good night’s sleep and what you can do to ensure that you get as much quality rest as possible.