Exercise Science | VITAL SPHERE

By Alexis Louise Reda

In the world of body building likely due to the ‘external’ nature of the process and culture surrounding their sport, many amateur athletes lack a deeper awareness required during training. This very awareness which I will be discussing here, that I have had to relinquish from yoga and apply in the weight room due to chronic pain, has anecdotally, turned out to dramatically affect adaptive volume progression requirements*.

Bodybuilding is quite a demanding sport. You are required to progressively and systematically overload your body both structurally and overall. To grow muscle and to lose fat, you can’t always go by “how you feel” to sustain progress. As we know from quantum science and emerging research on yoga, very simply, your mental states affect your physical; so as your ‘mental’ subtly gets ‘messed up’ when pushed deeper into a program’s progression set on taking your body to places it doesn’t naturally want to go, intuition becomes somewhat unreliable. Moreover, I’ve realized several yogic-practice integrations that are imperative to being the bodybuilder who is in it for the long-run. Let’s check them out:

by Nora Reda

Committing to regular exercise is no children’s play. Or is it? Here is how we could shift our attitudes toward exercise and develop the muscle that moves us every time.

The Joy of Movement

Movement is one of the most innate nature of humans, and every living being. It begs the question then, why we need motivation to move as adults when we are so naturally and joyfully moving as children? What happens to the muscle that moves us in our young age later in life? It sounds so funny to ask this question in a world where we are constantly bombarded with messages about how to motivate ourselves to lead a more active life.

Within this statement lies a clue to the answer. So what logically follows is a movement that is done consciously for the betterment of our physical shape and thus the meaning has changed from movement being done for joy to performing it to reach a certain goal or expectation. There is innately nothing wrong with goals and expectations. However, what this mentality leads to is another thing to insert into our busy schedule. (Read more on training optimality here!)

Shifting our mentality about exercise has to do with changing the meaning associated with movement.

Category: Exercise Science

The Yogic Advantage for Body Builders

The First Muscle that Moves You

The Joy of Movement