Female bodybuilding: A Beginner’s Guide

If you are a novice in the field of bodybuilding then you are at the right place. The following article will help in informing you about the basics of bodybuilding. The most important thing that novices in the field should consider is the nutrition provided to the body during the entire period when female bodybuilderscarry out the activities for bodybuilding.

Following is the basic breakdown of nutrition that one should consider during the entire workout regime. Most foods contain the following breakdown of nutrients i.e. proteins, carbs, and fats.

1.      Protein

Muscles are primarily made up of proteins and so they constitute the primary component of the diet recommended to bodybuilders. Female bodybuilders are recommended to consume 1-1.5g of protein per lb of their bodyweight. The quantities might increase with an individual personal body demands.

Since the past many years there has been a debate that high protein diets are quite dangerous to a person’s body versus that high amount of protein helps in building muscles. Supporters of the former say that high protein diets create a placebo effect as consumption of high amounts of proteins need a lot of water and are thus dangerous to the body. The simple answer to this problem is to drink more water with the consumption of every protein diet. Excessive proteins are thought to be harmful to kidneys. The solution to this problem is the same i.e. drinking huge amounts of water to flush out the toxins and wastes out of the kidneys.

2.      Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates are quite complicated as compared to protein as their sources are different. Following is a basic breakdown of these

• Slow-Digesting Carbohydrates

This includes wild rice, oats, beans, and fruits. These slow digesting carbohydrates are good for most people as the body digests them slowly, thus providing the body with continuous energy required for most physical activities. People having a slow body metabolism tend to gain fat when their insulin levels suddenly rises due to the intake of diets high in carbohydrates. These carbs prevent the sudden rise in levels of insulin and thus prevents the accumulation of fats.

• Fast-Digesting Carbs: these are mostly man made carbs like white bread, white rice, bagels, cold cereals, and fruit juices. These hit the blood stream and produce a sudden rise in levels of insulin. Such a spike is generally required post-workout and not at other times of the day and so their use should be restricted.

1. Fat :

Most females into the sport of bodybuilding are scared of consuming fats in their diets and thus fail to develop good muscles. However the fact is just like other two components fats too are essential for the body.  All you need to do is to consume the right type of fats that will help you gain muscle mass.

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Balance Pose of the Week: Pirate Pose 2.0

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Friday Q&A: Strengthening the Legs

Q: “I am having knee problems and can’t bend my knees very deeply. But my legs are very week overall, especially my inner legs and I want to strengthen them. What poses do you recommend for strengthening my quads, my hamstrings, and my inner legs?"

A: The timing of this question could not be better, as I have been preparing this week to teach my almost annual workshop Yoga for Healthy Knees  at Mountain Yoga in Oakland, CA. So, I have already been thinking a lot about the health of our knees, one of the essential joints that allow us to walk upright. And so many of my students struggle with the same issue of limitation in bending (flexion) the knee joint. The underlying causes are varied, from wear and tear arthritis to a variety of injuries, especially meniscal tears and anterior cruciate ligament injuries, to other less common reasons. 

However, regardless of why your knees might not be able to bend easily, the good news is that you can certainly do many poses that can help address the leg weakness that our reader would like to improve. Some of these poses can be performed reclining, others on hands and knees (I am going to assume that most readers can bend the knees safely to 90 degrees of flexion and can tolerate kneeling if using a blanket for padding), and still others standing. Today I am going to limit myself to more common poses that Nina and I are including in our list of YFHA recommended poses (something we are organizing for our upcoming immersion in August). 

To start, as a way to start thinking about how yoga builds strength, you might want to take a moment and review my overview of strength Yoga for Strength: An Overview

Next, I’ll give you a few general guidelines. Generally, I suggest coming into and out of all of these poses with your breath for 6-8 rounds of dynamic movement, and then coming into the fullest version you can safely perform and holding the posture for a while, gradually working your way up to 90 seconds or so before releasing. In this way you will get both the dynamic effects of what are technically known as concentric and eccentric muscle contraction and the static effect of isometric muscle contraction, all of which will contribute to better overall strength of your targeted muscles. 

Now let's look at a few poses that you can do lying down, on all fours, or standing that can build strength in the front hip muscles, home to not only the quadriceps, but also the equally important psoas, the back hip muscles, the hamstrings, and the inner thigh muscles, the adductors.

Reclining Poses

Reclining Leg Lifts (Urdhva Prasarita Padasana). This pose builds strengths in the quads and psoas. You can do these leg lifts one leg at time or with both legs simultaneously. If you want to add in adductor strengthening, use a block between your thighs for the two-legged version. If you have a week or painful lower back, use caution with two-legged version if you have a weak or painful lower back.

Locust (Salabhasana). This pose builds strength in hamstrings and back hip muscles. You can do Locust one leg up at time or with both legs simultaneously (see Featured Pose: Locust for basic instructions). For additional adductor strengthening in the two-legged version, you can squeeze a block between your thighs. This pose is generally safe for all, especially the one-legged version.

Bridge Pose (Setu Bandha). This pose another good hamstring and back hip muscles strengthener, and if you squeeze in a block between your thighs, you can add more adductor strengthening. If you have neck issues, be cautious about how high you lift into the backbend.

Poses on All Fours

Hunting Dog Pose. This pose strengthens the hamstrings and back hip muscles along with a whole bunch of other muscles as well. See Featured Pose: Hunting Dog basic instructions. I don’t usually do this pose dynamically, so let’s stick to having you hold it statically for at least 6 breaths on each side.

Downward-Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana). This pose strengthens the quads, psoas, and adductors—pretty much any version you do can help to strengthen the quads. If you start from Hands and Knees position, you can do a nice dynamic version, inhaling into a bit of the Cow position (see LINK), and then exhaling up into Downward Dog. Move back and forth from Hands and Knees pose to full Downward-Facing Dog a few times with your breath, before coming into the static version. In the static version, actively contract your quads (front thigh muscles) while you hold the pose. To work the adductors, once again, squeeze a block between your inner thighs. See Featured Pose: Downward-Facing Dog for basic instructions on the pose.

Standing Poses

Generally, practicing the following basic standing poses while engaging the muscles of your upper legs will building strength in the desired muscle groups:

• Mountain (Tadasana)
• Standing Forward Bend (Uttanasana)
• Powerful pose (Utkatasana)
• Warrior 1, 2, & 3 (Virabradrasana)
• Extended Side Angle pose (Utthita Parsvakonasana)
• Pyramid pose (Parsvottanasana)
• Wide-Legged Forward Bend (Prasarita Padottanasana)

Today, I will focus on just a few recommended standing poses.

Powerful Pose (Utkatasana). This pose strengthens the quads, psoas, and adductors. You can do this pose with or without a block between your thighs, but, as you are beginning to see, squeezing a block between your thighs in the poses helps to address the adductor muscles directly. And you do not need to bend the knees much to get some good results. You can also do this pose with your buttocks on a wall. See Featured Pose: Powerful Pose for basic instructions.

Warrior 3 (Virabhadrasana 3). This pose strengthens the hamstrings and back hip muscles. Your lifted back leg is where you will getting the most hamstring action, but you also will get a some quad strengthening in your supporting leg. If your balance is poor, consider doing a wall version with your hands on a wall in front of you. See Featured Pose: Warrior 3 and Featured Pose: Warrior 3 (Wall Version)for basic instructions.

As you can see, there area lot of different poses to play with, so start by picking a handful that you can begin your journey with, and as you get better at those, add another one or two into your home practice. Try to practice every other day, allowing either a rest day in between or doing a more restorative practice on your strengthening “off” days. Don’t be surprised to find that the strength in your legs starts to improve rather quickly, despite your limited knee flexion ability!

—Baxter

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From the Inside Out: About Our Blog and Our Email Service

by Nina

I’ve received a number of emails about our YFHA email service this week, so I thought it might be a good time to explain some things about our blog and our subscription service. Understanding the tools that I am using (all the work is being done alone by yours truly, Nina Zolotow) to put the blog together will help you realize what the built-in limitations are and will perhaps make you more forgiving about problems that you might encounter. 

First I’ll tell you about the tools I’m using to create the blog. Then I’ll discuss the recent change in your email. And, finally, for those who have not yet signed up for or who are having trouble signing up for email, I say something about the process you need to go through to receive the emails.

Google Blogger and Feedburner

The Yoga for Healthy Aging blog is not a custom-designed web site. Rather than learning all about how to create and maintain custom web site or hiring someone to do it for me, I opted instead for a simple and free solution: using Google’s free tools for bloggers.

The tool I use to create the blog is called Blogger.

This tool was very easy for me to learn and is very simple to use on a daily basis. And not only do I not have to pay for the Blogger tool itself, but the site where the blog resides is also completely free! On the negative side, the format of the blog is restricted in many ways and there are features I’d love to include on the blog that just aren’t available. And it’s also true that sometimes the Blogger has weird bugs and glitches in it, so sometimes things don’t work as they’re supposed to. Of course, I can’t fix those problems (because they are part of the Blogger’s software), but after years of using the Blogger, I’ve learned that some of these problems eventually go away (as bugs do get reported and eventually fixed by programmers who maintain Blogger).

The tool I use to allow email subscriptions is called Feedburner. 

This tool was designed to work with the Blogger and is also very easy to use. I simply provide a way for our readers to sign up for the Feedburner service (see How to Subscribe for detailed information on how to do this), and then Feedburner takes over from there. Every time I update the blog by adding a new post with the Blogger, Feeburner automatically sends you an email with the new post. Feedburner provides a few options for customizing that “feed” but there is also a lot I can’t change. 

For a long time, people told me that they wanted the email’s subject line to contain the post title rather than just “Yoga for Healthy Aging,” and I had no way to make that happen, until recently, that is, which brings us to….

Changes in Email Subject Line, Etc.

After receiving yet another request to add the post’s title to the email’s subject line, I decided to check to see if any new features had been added or whether there wasn’t some sneaky way that I could make it happen (I have learned to tinker a bit with HTML code when I need to). Imagine my surprise when I saw this in Feedburner:

See that bit about the HOT TIP? It recommends adding a variable (that’s what that weird bit of code is) to the email subject line to get the post title into the subject. So on Monday I went ahead and added that. 

The result was this:

As you can see from this screen shot, although this trick worked for getting the title into the subject line, it also added the variable ${latestItemTitle} to the From field (as well as the Reply-to, and “you are subscribed to” fields), making it look a little weird and nervous making. More than one reader wrote me to report their concerns about this.

So, not only does this illustrate my point above about the weird little bugs and glitches in this (free!) software, but I now have a dilemma: should I remove the ${latestItemTitle} variable from the email subject and return things back to the way they were or should I leave things as they are now?

Or, are you just getting a headache thinking about this? Anyway, if you care to weigh in, let me know in the comments section, in a private email, or on Facebook. (Or, if there are any computer nerds out there who have some suggestions for how I can finesse this or any other problems with the blog, let me know.)

Signing Up for Email

As I said earlier, our email subscription service is managed by Feedburner. For you to sign up for that service is a multi-step process. See How to Subscribe for a detailed walk through of the entire process (I used to be a technical writer). Yes, it’s a bit complicated, but once you’ve gone through the process, you should be all set.

I have noticed, however, that a number of you have signed up for the email but didn’t complete the process. (For privacy, I’m eliminating the email addresses from this screen shot.)

So if you have signed up or thought you signed up but have not started receiving the emails, this is because you haven’t completed the final step of verifying that you want to receive the email. So you will need to find, possibly in your junk mail folder, a message from Feedburner that looks something this:

Then you need to click on that link to verify you want indeed want the email. That’s part of the screening process the Feedburner uses and until you verify, you won't receive the emails.

Final Thoughts

Well, I hope I didn’t bore you to death today! Keep in mind that our blog is completely free to you, and is also written and maintained for free by us, the Yoga for Healthy Aging team (see About Us). We have no ads on the blog and do not receive income of any kind for our work. It’s a labor of love, people! I think that one day I will hire someone to help me put together a better web site, but for now I’m concentrating on content rather than functionality. 

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Yoga Helps Both Rheumatoid Arthritis and Osteoarthritis: New Scientific Evidence

by Nina

A Poppy Bud by Melina Meza

“Preliminary evidence suggests yoga may help sedentary individuals with arthritis safely increase physical activity, and improve physical and psychological health and HRQOL.”

Well, I really like everything about that sentence except that last acronym, which turns out to stand for “health-related quality of life.” (I not only wouldn’t have guessed that’s what HRQOL stood for in a million years, but as just looking at the acronym is causing my stress levels to spike a bit, it is causing the opposite effect of its own meaning.)

But, anyway, that sentence is the conclusion from the abstract of a scientific study Yoga in Sedentary Adults with Arthritis: Effects of a Randomized Controlled Pragmatic Trial by Moonaz, et al  that I wanted to tell you about. We have written a number of posts about arthritis in the past (see Arthritis of the Hip Joint, Arthritis of the Spine, Arthritis of the Shoulder, and Arthritis of the Knee, among others) so it’s obvious we’re convinced of the benefits that yoga provides for people (including me!) with this condition. But still it is always good to have a scientific study to back us up. And this new study is both the largest randomized controlled trial of osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis and the first to “assess physical health and fitness using self-reported and performance measures along with psychological function and HRQOL.” 

The goal of this study was to contribute evidence about outcomes associated with yoga practice in sedentary people with arthritis. The researchers hypothesized that yoga would improve physical health, fitness, psychological function, health-related quality of life (HRQOL), and arthritis self-efficacy with no worsening of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) disease activity. They thought that yoga would be well suited for arthritis because it combines physical activity with potent stress management techniques, including breathing, relaxation, and mindfulness. So they asked a registered yoga therapist, with input from the Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center faculty, to develop an 8-week yoga program emphasizing individualized adaptations and monitoring, which they could introduce to beginners who had either rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis of the knees.

Although the full study isn’t available to the general public, I was able to obtain a copy (thank you, Brad). So here’s a basic summary: 

1. The study was done on 75 sedentary adults 18 years or older, with rheumatoid arthritis or knee arthritis. Participants were mostly female (96%), white (55%), and college-educated (51%), with a mean age of 52 years.

2. The subjects either participated in 8 weeks of Integral-based hatha yoga (two sixty minute classes and 1 home practice) or were waitlisted. (Eight weeks was selected for the intervention because this provides sufficient time to introduce independent practice and is a common duration of introductory classes.)

3. Two yoga therapists with 10+ years of experience led the yoga classes, and they provided close supervision and individual attention. 

4. The yoga classes included breath work and chanting (5 min), warm-up and moving sequence (surya namaskara, 15 min), and isometric poses (asanas, 20 min) to increase strength, flexibility, and balance. Classes ended with deep relaxation (sivasana, 10 min), a closing chant, and meditation (5 min).

Poses included gentle forward bends, backbends, twists, balances, standing, sitting, and lying poses, and were modified for individuals at the discretion of the teacher and/or participant. Props included blocks, straps, blankets, and chairs. Participants were encouraged to try new skills, but to remain safe and avoid discomfort. Written instructions with pictures for home practice and selected readings describing potential benefits of yoga components (breathing, meditation, mindfulness) were provided weekly. Home practice evolved gradually to develop the skills and confidence for long-term adherence. 

5. Participants were asked to keep arthritis medications constant and were queried regularly by coordinators about any changes. 

6. The waitlisted group received usual care for eight weeks. (They were asked to maintain current levels of physical activity and inform coordinators of changes in health or arthritis medications. After Week 8 assessments, they were invited to participate in upcoming classes.)

7. After eight weeks and again after 9 months, both groups were measured fitness, psychological function, and HRQO using standardized protocols

The researchers concluded that eight weeks of yoga classes and home practice was associated with “clinically significant improvements in physical and mental health, fitness, psychological function, and HRQOL, with no adverse outcomes.” And they said that the strongest evidence of benefit was for reducing pain and improving mood, both of which were carefully tracked in the two groups. 

Less pain and a better mood sounds pretty good to me! And an additional benefit that yoga provides, which wasn’t measured in this study, is that by moving your joints through their entire range of motion, yoga keeps your arthritic joints nourished (see Yoga for Osteoarthritis). I know from personal experience that practicing yoga with an arthritic joint (a hip in my case) can be pretty challenging, but I'm more convinced than ever about how it important it is not to give up.

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Common Minor Health Problems that Yoga Can Help With

by Baxter

The Sick Doctor by Jehan Georges Vibert

One strong motivator these days for starting a yoga practice is all the publicity about the benefits of yoga for your health. Seems a week doesn’t go by without some new study being published on the benefits of yoga for this health issue or that serious illness. In a few upcoming posts, I plan to address some of the more serious problems that yoga seems to be able to help with, but today I thought I’d start with a genera post about some of the more common minor problems yoga can help with. As Nina reported on a while back in Medical Conditions Benefitted by Yoga, our past blog contributor Dr. Timothy McCall keeps an ongoing list of the conditions that yoga has been shown to help with via scientific studies (see www.drmccall.com).

A quick perusal of Timothy’s list reveals a lot of fairly serious conditions! Since I am interested today in common minor problems, let me state that in compiling my list, I am assuming that the conditions I list are often inconvenient, uncomfortable and potentially disruptive to daily life, and may carry a degree of seriousness for those affected by them. But in their milder forms they are not usually life-threatening or seriously debilitating. There are always exceptions, of course.

My list includes some that you will find on Timothy’s list and a few of my own, which I’ve gleaned from my years of experience working with a wide variety of students. 

Common Minor Problems Yoga Can Help With

1. General body stiffness and body aches, non-specific
2. Mild arthritis
3. Mild muscle weakness from inactivity or general aging
4. Poor balance, not associated with other serious illness
5. Poor agility
6. Morning stiffness associated with mild osteoarthritis
7. Posture-related problems and kyphosis
8. Mild back and neck pain
9. Elbow pain
10. Mild scoliosis
11. Bunions, flat feet and overly high arches
12. Pelvic floor health (including incontinence)
13. Leg cramps
14. Edema and varicose veins
15. Restless Leg Syndrome
16. Shingles
17. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
18. Frozen shoulder
19. Tinnitus
20. Vertigo
21. Costochondritis
22. Hernia
23. Minor injury recovery, for example, common ankle sprains
24. Minor digestive issues, for example, mild Irritable Bowel Syndrome
25. Menopause symptoms, such as, fatigue, hot flashes, joint problems, headaches, and frozen shoulder
26. Common tension headaches
27. Mild, infrequent migraine headaches
28. Insomnia
29. Mild anxiety
30. Mild mood disturbances, for example, mild forms of Seasonal Affective Disorder
31. Poor impulse control, for examples, around food or emotions such as anger
32. Poor concentration, for example, in school age children
33. Sinusitis
34. Stress management
35. Healthy pregnancy
36. Post-operative orthopedic recovery, for example, meniscal knee repair
37. Hemorrhoids

Now, I am certain that I have left a few things off that our esteemed readership could chime in on! However, you get the drift that yoga can be very helpful for a wide variety of common problems that we, our family and friends, and our students (for the teachers out there) encounter each day.

For some of these conditions, the “why” is a bit harder to state exactly, as even in those conditions studied by scientific means, the underlying reasons why yoga is helpful is often merely hypothesis or theory yet to be proven. And that is not the purpose of this post. But for those interested in knowing more about the "why," Potential self-regulatory mechanisms of yoga for psychological healthis one example of researchers attempts to explain how yoga works for psychological issues. It’s pretty heady stuff, but you will get the clear sense that we still have a long way to go to understand “why” yoga works. However, we all have had the distinct personal experience that yoga really does help with these common minor conditions. I will update the list over time as I think of more common minor problems yoga helps with come to me, and will add your suggestions as well!

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How to Stay Safe While Practicing Yoga

by Nina

Danger by Eugene Grasset

Although we can’t guarantee you’ll never hurt yourself while doing yoga (no physical activity is risk free—I mean, you could hurt yourself walking your dog, taking care of your garden, or even just sitting at your desk), there are some common sense approaches you can take that will greatly reduce your chances of injuring yourself. And as you’ll see when you read through these guidelines, taking these approaches will also enable you to practice your yoga asanas mindfully—paying attention to pain levels, breath, energy levels, motivations for doing poses or not doing them—which is one of the points of the asana practice.

So we recommend that you use the following guidelines to keep practice yoga wisely at home or in class. And we recommend that if you’re a yoga teacher you share these guidelines with and encourage your students to follow them to keep your class safe. 

1. Inform your teacher. If you’re in a class, tell your teacher about any injuries, illness, conditions or problems that might affect your ability to certain poses or put you at risk so your teacher can help you figure out what you should not be doing and give you alternatives. See What Your Yoga Teacher Really Wants to Know for information about the kinds of information to share with your teacher.

2. Pay attention to pain. Learn to tell the difference between sensations that are potentially good for you, such as the healthy stretch of a tight muscle, and those that are potentially injurious to you, such as over-stretching a tendon or ligament, or compressing structures to the point of injury. And if you catch yourself moving into a sensation that feels dangerous or that you are concerned about, try backing out a bit, perhaps by letting go of a stretch or by using a prop. If you can’t back out for some reason, come out of the pose and rest (see below). See Tensions versus Compression for information on the difference between a healthy sensation and a potentially dangerous one.

3. Listen to your breath. Although your breath may come more quickly in demanding poses such as backbends or long-held standing poses, gasping for breath indicates you’re over-stressing yourself, so see if you can back out of the pose a bit, possibly by using a prop. If you can’t back out for some reason or if doing that doesn’t help you catch your breath, come out of the pose and rest (see below). Likewise, if you are suddenly sweating much more than normal, this may also be a sign that you’re over-stressing yourself, and you should take the same precautions.

4. Rest if you need to. If you feel you’ve reached our limit with your time in a pose, no matter what the rest of the class is doing, come out and take a rest. See Resting Between Poses for information about ways to rest. And if you feel like you just can’t finish the rest of a class, either let the teacher know so they can give you a resting pose to finish with or just lie down in a comfortable Relaxation pose (Savasana) Don’t just leave in the middle of a practice, without cooling down.

5. Stay balanced. If you are weak or have trouble with balance, use props, such as a chair or the wall, to stabilize yourself so you don’t fall over and can practice with confidence. You can practice with your back to a wall, with one foot on the wall in standing poses, or with a hand on the wall in certain poses. If you know you have problems with balance, come to class early and stake out a place next to the wall so the wall will always there when you need it.

6. Use props. Even if you have not been specially instructed to use a prop and you know that it is important for your safety (to keep you from over-stretching or falling or to use as padding for sensitive areas), go ahead and use it. And if you know you typically need a certain prop, such as a block or blanket, have one ready at your side before class starts. (If your teacher disapproves, consider finding a new teacher—see Cheating at Yoga?)

7. Resist peer pressure. If your class is doing a pose that you feel is beyond your capabilities or that you just aren’t ready for, just don’t do it. Ask your teacher for an alternative or take a resting pose. Or, you can just watch the others do the pose, and learn through observation.

8. Only do inverted poses if they’re okay for you. Inverted poses are contraindicated for people who have uncontrolled high blood pressure or who are having eye problems, such as glaucoma or detached retina (see Friday Q&A: Cautions for Inversions for other situations in which you might want to avoid inversions). And if you are having neck problems, refrain from Headstand and Shoulderstand, please.

9. Talk to Your Doctor. If you have had a surgery, or if you have a medical condition or an injury, explicitly ask your doctor or physical therapist which physical actions are safe for you and which are not. Don’t wait for the medical professional to tell you! Some doctors in particular (no offense, Baxter) often don’t even consider that you might be going upside down or twisting yourself like a pretzel, so you have to be sure to ask: Can I go upside down? Can I round my spine? Can I twist my spine? Can I cross my legs? Can I put pressure on this or that part of my body? And if you get no for an answer to any of those questions, be sensible, and follow the doctor’s recommendations.

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