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Month: March 2019

2019 Health Relaxation

Foam rolling’s secret perk? Doing it *before* a workout makes your muscles even more effective

3 min read

March 19, 2019 at 05:00PM by CWC These days, “foam rolling” and “recovery” have practically become synonymous—despite the fact that you can, apparently, use your foam roller for an actual workout, too. But what you may not know is that everyone’s favorite recovery tool has another important function aside from helping soothe sore muscles after a workout: They can actually be used before your workout to make your time on the mat even more effective. The process, referred to by some trainers as “neuropriming,” helps warm up your muscles so that they are fully relaxed before you start working them. That way, when you enter into your workout, they’ll be able to fully compress—allowing you to reap the full benefits of the work you’re putting in. Basically, it’s giving you a full muscle pump instead of the limited one that tight muscles restrict you to. “That’s 100 percent recruitment of the muscle,” explains John Burns, CEO of Tom Brady’s wellness company, TB12. “Imagine you’re doing your quad exercises with 90 percent of the muscle: How much more stable could you be, how much more powerful could you be, how many more reps could you do [if you were using all 100 percent]?” I mean, a lot. And that’s not the only reason why you should be rolling it out before you’re sweating it out. “Foam rolling before your workout helps increase circulation, decreases tension, and primes the neuromuscular system by driving the parasympathetic nervous system to maximize movement capabilities,” explain Dariusz Stankiewicz and Corinne Croce, the

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2019 Health Vegetarians Yoga

Deliciously Ella’s new app is a one-stop shop for on-demand yoga and healthy desserts—am I in heaven?

2 min read

March 19, 2019 at 04:00PM by CWC Upon first exploring plant-based food blog Deliciously Ella‘s newly minted app, I exclaimed, “My, oh, my! I can queue up an on-demand yoga class and learn how to make plant-based salted caramel sauce in the very same digital location.” The two major tabs of founder Ella Mills’ fresh creation are indeed “recipes” and “yoga.” Meaning, I could literally just eat salted caramel straight off the spoon while practicing camel pose. Casual. For $0.99 a month, users gain access to more than 400 recipes, many of which include tutorials (no more scratching your head if you need to “strain” cashews), and yoga sequences between 10 and 40 minutes in length. Mills plans to add new content each week. Scan through the app’s edible offerings, and you’ll find detailed instructions for peanut butter and raspberry porridge (“fly me to the moon”), butternut squash Wellington (“let me play among the stars”), and cacao mouse cake (“fill my heart with song”). Scan through the app’s edible offerings, and you’ll find detailed instructions for peanut butter and raspberry porridge (“fly me to the moon”), butternut squash Wellington (“let me play among the stars”), and cacao mouse cake (“fill my heart with song”). After drooling all over my phone and mentally pinning everything I want to make, I decided to hop on my yoga mat to try a quick 10-minute stretch to go along with my morning coffee. I chose one entitled “Wake Up Energy.” The instructor guides me through several

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2019 Health City

Shift workers share how they sleep, socialize, and generally function on a nontraditional schedule

9 min read

March 19, 2019 at 03:00PM by CWC It’s 3 a.m. when firefighter Molly* jolts awake. Great, just great, she thinks. Molly works 10 24-hour shifts a month and, but this is a night where she’s home in her own bed. “I fall asleep easily, but have problems staying asleep,” she says. When she clocks her rest at the firehouse, she has to be up and ready in mere seconds at the sound of an (extremely loud) siren. Knowing she might have to be awake and alert enough to make literal life or death decisions makes for terrible sleep during shifts. And because her body’s conditioned to spring into action at any time, she has trouble getting quality sleep at home, too. Kimberly Brown, MD, a 34-year-old ER doctor living in Memphis can relate. Her schedule is all over the place; sometimes she works 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., and other times it’s 8 p.m. to 7 p.m. “My night shifts are never more than three days in a row, so I don’t get too used to it,’” she says. Still, because her hours change so often (and to such a high magnitude), she says it’s hard to get consistent, quality sleep. Chasing enough sleep is a pursuit that keeps so many of us awake at night—and in the case of night shift workers, during the day, too. According to Well+Good’s recent survey of nearly 1,500 people about their sleep habits and health, 92 percent of of us feel fatigued more

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2019 Health City Fashion

I fell in love with pole classes, and TBH I’ve never felt stronger

5 min read

March 19, 2019 at 12:55PM by CWC I start climbing upward, the pole wedged between my knee and my foot. Once I’m as high as I can go without kicking the ceiling, I swivel my hips to the front, flip upside down so that my butt is over my head, and grip the pole with my right knee. I push my arms outward, extend my legs, and drop, tumbling downwards in a dramatic fashion until I catch the pole with my opposite knee. For a moment, I swear I was flying. I’ve been pole dancing consistently for almost two years at this point, which in the grand scheme of things, isn’t an incredibly long time, but it’s weird to think about what I used to do before I frequented Incredipole multiple times a week. I started going during a period when I was very sad, very insecure, and wanted to explore an active hobby that made me feel good—after all, endorphins make you happy, as the great Elle Woods once said. The problem? I didn’t really know how to work out in a healthy way. Former years dabbling with appetite suppressants, counting calories, then attempting to burn off said calories while feverishly pedaling on an elliptical put me in a place where I didn’t know what a happy medium felt like. When I started taking pole, I hadn’t engaged in that sort of destructive behavior in years, but the anxiety associated with going to the gym was very real for me. But,

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