Exercise

One of the ‘mystical’ aspects of the martial arts has always been the ability to feel another persons intention.

Sensing intention gives a person the ability to be in instant control of a potentially violent encounter, and it’s one of the ways we use the martial arts to test our energy work and meditation skills in Hoshin.

A simple explanation of ‘intention’.

When a person intends to hit you, that intention carries with it a very subtle vibration. Since most people are unaware of this they put off a variety of these subtle vibrations constantly.

Have you ever come home to an angry spouse and felt the entire house vibrate with the bad energy? This is exactly the same.

When a person tries to hit you they put off a vibration that you can feel, even with your eyes closed. With training a person can distinguish between the intention to strike and the strike itself as there are subtle differences in the feel of the energy vibrations emanating from the attacker.

In Hoshin class we have a student stand with their eyes closed and then, very slowly, send a punch towards their face with the full intention to make contact.

Before I talk about one of the most productive and forgotten Ab Development exercises ever developed, you will need to know how your abdominal muscles actually work. I know for a fact, if I don’t offer some pretty convincing evidence, it will be very difficult for you to believe such a claim so here is where a little education will go a long way to prove my point.

Your abdominal muscles are really one big muscle called the Rectus Abdominus. You do not have upper, mid and lower abs unless you have some genetic anomaly. This is really critical to understand because the long muscle fibers in the abdominal muscles start at ribcage and ends at the pubic region.

So, when you contract your muscles during a curl-up or crunch, the two ends of the muscle fibers move toward each other. It is impossible for the lower portion of the Rectus Abdominus (abs) to function without equally “firing off” all the other muscle fibers in the abs.

Once the muscle relaxes and allows its two ends to move apart and reach its original stretched position, you will complete the full range-of-motion of an abdominal exercise,

A good golfing tip to help you improve your control will have a tremendous impact towards improving your golf game.

Playing good golf consistently requires good control over both the mind and the body. Thus any golfing tip to help you improve your control over both will have a tremendous impact towards improving your golf game.

The golfing tip I would like to give in this article is that by working on improving control over your body, you will in effect also gain more control over your mind. This is simply because the mind gains more confidence that the body will be able to perform whatever instructions the mind communicates to the body.

This is the single golfing tip that has the potential of transforming any golfer’s game literally overnight. Many times golfers work very hard on their minds and preparing them for the ideal golf game they would like to enjoy.

In fact many business executives, who have used the power of the mind to improve their businesses or even to build huge successful businesses, fully understand the potential of the mind in improving their golf games.

"Exercise is good for you!" If you had a dollar for every time you heard this statement uttered, you’d be rich by now, right? Well, proponents of everyday physical activity aren’t just blowing smoke when they repeat this mantra. Medical research has uncovered resounding evidence to back up this "good for you" claim. In fact, the U.S. Surgeon General, the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the National Centers for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion all recommend the same thing when it comes to regular exercise: American adults should aim for 30 minutes or more of moderate-intensity physical activity on most, and preferably all, days of the week.

Inquiring minds want to know, so how exactly will daily exercise impact your health and well-being? Regular physical activity positively affects not only your body but also your mind. That’s right: Exercise simultaneously improves your physical, your emotional and your psychological health. In fact, it’s a triple-threat combatant against the physical and mental disorders Americans most often face: heart disease, diabetes, stroke, stress, anxiety and depression, just to name a few.

Any golfer who has made any effort to improve their golf game will have already heard the often-repeated expression that golf is all in the mind and that the game starts there.

But what many golfers do not know is that they fail to improve their golf game because their minds are not prepared for what they must do to make significant progress.

Mention the word ‘exercise’ to most amateur golfers and rather than getting enthusiastic about using it to improve their golf game, they will start seeing images of heavy sweating from rigorous exercises. The sort of rigorous exercises that super athletes in the NFL or NBA have to do regularly in some gym.

Their minds are tightly shut to the idea of exercises such that they can never get to the point where they can examine the subject deeper to find out what sort of exercises professional golfers do to improve their golf game and maintain the quality of their performances as much as possible.

Almost everyone has bought home exercise equipment at some point in their life, be it a few rusty dumbells at a garage sale all the way to a complicated new home gym.

But how many people continue to use it consistently? Here are some uses (that you should never, ever actually take seriously, of course!) you may not have thought of for your forgotten purchases.

Efforts to expand the limits of human strength and endurance have kept the scientist and the athlete occupied for centuries. The quest for another pound of muscle, or to lift next couple of kilos has been relentlessly pursued in the gym and the laboratory alike. As the questions and conquests became more challenging, the answers have become more elusive and complicated. Few concepts and conclusions have withstood the test of time in exercise physiology. Even as we tackle the metabolic and genetic basis of skeletal muscle response to strength training, there are only some things that we know for sure.

Strength is the cumulative expression of the innumerable myofibrils orderly arranged to form the muscle. Strength training attempts to boost these protein motors and the biological machinery that supports them. Resistance exercises create a biochemical environment in the body wherein the turnover of proteins is optimized and the protein synthetic machinery is primed for growth. All that is needed to trigger a spurt of growth is a protein rich meal. This response occurs in all age groups, although it is less efficient in the elderly. According to Philips SM, Tipton KD and others, in young individuals, the muscle is receptive to protein and amino acids for 48 hours after a workout. The only limiting factor for the hypertrophy of skeletal muscles during this period is the availability of high quality proteins.

Online golf lessons have grown tremendously in popularity, for the simple reason that they address a problem faced by most golfers. The problem is that of finding the time away from their golf game to take golf lessons.

Not everybody is a professional with all the time between tourneys to brush up on their skills. Most golfers are amateurs who have to take care of business elsewhere in-between their precious moments on the course. Online golf lessons have proved to be the ideal answer.

One of the positive results of online golf lessons is that they have inspired many a golfer to take positive and deliberate steps to improve their game. One of the key advantages that the online golf lesson has going for it is that it is easy to use visuals and diagrams to illustrate and clearly explain many key points.

For example posture in the setup stage before the golf swing is easy to illustrate and show in an online golf lesson. One of the things that comes out from many of these online golf lessons is that posture and a lot of the factors that are vital to playing good golf are only possible when a golfer makes a decision to take action. One of the vital actions is to start getting involved in exercise and the conditioning of various parts of the body so as to be able to make an enormous improvement on their golf game.

You already know that getting at least 30 minutes of exercise each and every day is good for you, but putting that assertion into actual practice is an entirely different matter, right? Contrary to what you might think, making physical activity an everyday habit isn’t rocket science. There’s no secret code for success waiting to be cracked. In fact, it’s something that can be worked into your usual routine with minimal, sometimes no, interruption or adjustment.

The U.S. Surgeon General, the American Heart Association and many other reputable health organizations all agree that 30 minutes of moderate-intensity workout is optimal on most, if not all, days of the week. The good news is that they also all concur that this recommended prescription doesn’t have to be taken all in one large dose. While the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) once called for continuous exercise of 20 minutes’ duration or longer, new guidelines allow for bouts of physical activity (as few as 10 minutes at a time) intermittently spread throughout the day.

Golf exercise is not necessarily in a gym. Getting creative with what you have can make all the difference and have a very positive impact on your game.

Even extremely busy executives can get 15 seconds at a time while seated at their computer or work station in the office, for some golf exercise.

There are actually many different stretch golf exercises you can get done in your office, here is one.

I call it the seated twist golf exercise. Sit upright in your chair with your chest high and back straight. Reach behind you with one arm, which will rotate your upper body. While staying erect, twist as far as you can go and hold. You can then twist the other way and repeat.

Go both sides 2-3 times, holding for 10 seconds. This is a very effective golf exercise for eliminating or even reducing back pain and at the same time tremendously improving your backswing and follow through range of motions. The result will be a much better swing, higher club head speed and much more distance.