Supernatural Botanicals

Did you know that you lose 20 percent of the top layer of underarm skin each time you shave?  (ew!)   

To lessen the pain of shaving, wait until the end of your shower to shave.  The steam softens hairs for smother results.  And always use shaving cream to avoid knicks and cuts. 

Did you know that simple old-school hand-stands like these are super-beneficial for you?   Hand-stands are fantastic to strengthen your arms, shoulders, and wrists.  Once you get comfortable with hand-stands, you can go further into the move by bending your elbows and attempting to lower your forehead to the floor.  It also helps stretch the abdomen and improves one’s concentration, coordination and balance.  Through focused effort, it helps calm down the brain thereby helping relieve stress and tension and mild depression through the meditative effort involved.  When you feel like you have midday “fuzzy-brain”, where you’ve been over-stimulated and cannot focus, try doing a hand-stand to alleviate stress and get blood flowing to your brain again.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a gymnast to attempt a hand-stand.  Use a wall to put your feet against in the beginning.  As time goes on, you can inch away from the wall.  And as you do, you’ll be building your abdominal muscles (try it now…you’ll feel it instantly.)  When I’m feeling unfocused and overloaded with stress, I simply do a hand-stand for a minute or two to regroup and get my mind flowing again.  The stretch in the shoulders, back and arms feels so good.  And talk about instant results…you feel it immediately.

This is what strength training does for you…it gives you amazing, well-defined muscles.  So many women shy away from strength training/weight training, fearing they’ll develop body builder-type arms.  The reality is, women who are body builders not only train to extremes and discipline themselves religiously in their diet, but many also take additional supplements and drugs to achieve a female body builder physique.

Exercises, such as lateral lifts, biceps curls, and triceps extensions with weights, are what’s needed to achieve the kind of muscles that our First Lady has.  She’s gorgeous and healthy.   It’s a beautiful look.  The only way to achieve such lean muscle definition is to use resistance (weights or bands.)

Don’t reach for the 3 pound weights unless you are just starting out.  Challenge yourself.  You can lift a lot more than you think you can.  Biceps and triceps are load-bearing muscles, they can take the challenge.

Try these three exercises to achieve arms like our First Lady.

Lateral raises

Biceps curl.

Triceps extensions.

So you’ve mastered Downward Facing Dog pose in yoga, let’s keep going!  This is Dolphin pose.  This is a super-deep stretch that opens up your shoulders and digs deeper into stretching those hamstrings and glutes.

Benefits of Dolphin pose are:

Benefits

• Calms the brain and helps relieve stress and mild depression
• Stretches the shoulders, hamstrings, calves, and arches
• Strengthens the arms and legs
• Helps relieve the symptoms of menopause
• Relieves menstrual discomfort when done with head supported
• Helps prevent osteoporosis
• Improves digestion
• Relieves headache, insomnia, back pain, and fatigue
• Therapeutic for high blood pressure, asthma, flat feet, sciatica

So the next time your head is pounding from a stress headache, forgo the Tylenol and center yourself with some postures to relieve tightness from the neck and shoulders.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1.  Come onto the floor on your hands and knees. Set your knees directly below your hips and your forearms on the floor with your shoulders directly above your wrists. Firmly press your palms together and your forearms into the floor.

2.  Curl your toes under, then exhale and lift your knees away from the floor. At first keep the knees slightly bent and the heels lifted away from the floor. Lengthen your tailbone away from the back of your pelvis and press it lightly toward the pubis. Against this resistance, lift the sitting bones toward the ceiling, and from your inner ankles draw the inner legs up into the groins.

3.  Continue to press the forearms actively into the floor. Firm your shoulder blades against your back, then widen them away from the spine and draw them toward the tailbone. Hold your head between the upper arms; don’t let it hang or press heavily against the floor.

4.  You can straighten your knees if you like, but if your upper back rounds it’s best to keep them bent. Continue to lengthen your tailbone away from the pelvis and lift the top of your sternum away from the floor.

5.  Stay between 30 seconds to one minute. Then release your knees to the floor with an exhale.

Looking for more great yoga stretches?  Head over to Yoga Journal and find 117 more moves just like this.