Hello and welcome to another edition of the Lounge Fitness roundup. Every weekend, we bring you a selection of the best fitness stories published the previous week on our website. We take your fitness journey very seriously, so we aim to bring you the best possible advice.
It’s the same this week, as we have three great stories that you may have missed earlier in the week. This includes a story on exercises to control your blood pressure, one on managing back pain and one on why people need to stop ego lifting in gyms.
There has been a lot of buzz about a recent UK study which found that people who exercise stand a much better chance of being able to effectively manage blood pressure. The outcomes become even better if the exercises performed are isometric ones.
As writer Shrenik Avlani points out, this makes perfect sense. Isometric exercises are great at both increasing strength, as well as conditioning. In this story, Avlani discusses the findings of the paper and then lists out five great isometric exercise and how to do them.
Never before in human history have we been so unfit. This is a direct result of the increasingly sedentary lives that humans have been leading over the past century or so. This has also resulted in a bunch of negative physical outcomes, like back pain, that probably didn’t even exist, 150 years ago.
Fitness expert Jen Thomas tries to find out why this is so, and what we can do to banish back pain. She finds many answers in a scientific study that looks at the shape of Neanderthal early Homo Sapiens spine structures, give us some home truths on why we need to adopt a more active lifestyle.
This is a phrase that most people who lead an active life would have heard. And that’s especially true for those who go to a gym to workout. Sadly, nearly all of us have been guilty of trying to lift heavier weights than we are capable of, out of a misplaced sense of competitiveness.
However, as Pulasta Dhar writes in this story, not only is this a road to a bad injury, but also that ego lifting rarely results in actual strength gains. In fact, As Dhar explains, if you love strength training and want to both look good and feel stronger, you need to do the exact opposite of ego lifting.
