How Can Stretching Exercise Prolong Your Life
Stretching exercises are not that hard! They are simple and easy to do. Stretching exercises also have many health benefits. It prolongs your life, and helps eliminate hypertension and hardening of the arteries.
According to a recent study, stretching exercise not only will increase your freedom of movement or flexibility, but it is also a key to activate your core muscles and blood vessel cells, thus slowing down the aging process. In fact, you can say that stretching exercise is a form of rejuvenation exercise.
Does Your Body and Muscles Feel Stiff or Tight?
Did you know that a stiff body may indicate hardening of blood vessels? Hardened blood vessels can mean that you are aging with an unhealthy body.
An exercise that consists of flexibility movements may be the answer to your problem.
Take a look at the illustrations below.
The images above show different types of flexibility or stretching exercises. If you cannot perform these exercises, then most likely, you belong to the age group of 50 years old and above. If you think that you are not in a capacity to do stretching exercises, then you may be at a higher risk of developing arteriosclerosis.
But Don't be Disappointed, You Can Exercise the Easy Way
A simple stretch even for duration of only 30 seconds done on a daily basis can mean a lot of difference when it comes to repairing your hardened blood vessels. You can expect a better blood circulation and your body's flexibility will look and feel young again.
Why Does the Human Body Become Stiffer With Age?
If you look at it closely, muscle tissues are literally getting hard with age. We wonder what kind of substance these hardened muscle tissues contain that makes them rigid. Then, we realized that their rigidity has something to do with collagen.
So what is this collagen for? First of all, collagen is a protein found in connective tissues, which provides support and resiliency of the body cells and tissues. Our body is actually covered with a layer of collagen proteins.
Lack of exercise can slow down the production of collagen and induces collapse of these layers of collagen proteins, including the removal of mineral salts.
Here's Why
Less physical activity can lead to high blood sugar levels in the bloodstream. These sugar or glucose molecules bond themselves to the collagen fibers via a process called “glycation”. This is the same chemical reaction that turns meat brown when you cook it.
Now, these reactions lead to gradual formation of irreversible “cross-links” between adjacent collagen molecules. Eventually, the collagen matrix will collapse resulting to loss of muscle and tissue elasticity.
This is where stretching exercises can prove beneficial. It can delay further breakdown of collagen and elastic fibers, and at the same time enable them to be maximally stretched.
Breathing Importance during Stretching
Proper breathing control is as important during stretching as it is in any other type of exercises. It helps relax the body, increases blood flow, and helps remove lactic acid and other byproducts of exercise.
You should take slow, relaxed breaths when you stretch, and exhale as the muscle is stretching.
Here's How it Works
- When you breathe in, your diaphragm presses downward onto the internal organs and their blood vessels, squeezing the blood out of them.
- When you exhale, your abdomen, organs and muscles, and their blood vessels are pumped with new blood.
- This expansion and contraction of the abdominal blood vessels is partly responsible for the circulation of blood in the body.
- Also, this pumping action (referred to as respiratory pump) helps remove waste products from the muscles in your torso.
Respiratory pump is important during stretching because an increased flow of blood to the stretched muscles helps improve its elasticity. The rate at which lactic acid is purged also increases.
Animals Stretch, Too
As you can see from below photos, cats are also stretching from time to time.
You need to stretch every now and then. Stretching is an important exercise and is essential to feeling young.
As you can see, stretching exercises do not have to be difficult or tedious. Do it as often as possible. Stretching exercise not only reduces your chance of getting sick, but it helps cure various diseases, too.
Perform stretching exercises in conjunction with the PYRO-ENERGEN therapy, and you can live healthily even up to 120 years of age, he-he.
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