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Mindfulness off the Mat list)
With its surge in popularity, yoga is thankfully being recognized more
and more for its legitimate merits, and the more we investigate it, the more
we realize that yoga’s benefits don’t stem from fantastical,
when-the-white-eagle-of-the-north-is-flying-overhead cosmic alignment
hocus-pocus, but rather, from very solid physics and biochemistry….which
makes those of us who enjoy the practical explanations of things very happy,
and those who like to sell catchy-sounding book titles, well, unhappy.
Take your neuromuscular relationship….this simply refers to the nerves
that send signals to muscles to contract, and the muscles that receive these
nervous impulses. Have you ever noticed that first thing in the morning, you
cannot make a strong fist? Part of that stems from the fact that your brain,
to put it in simple terms, has yet to fully wake up; when your brain is not
fully engaged, you lack the focus and strength of nervous impulse to any
given muscle; hence, the muscle isn’t “stimulated” to contract beyond a bare
minimum intensity.
Here is an extreme example of that: the sloth—you’ve all seen a sloth
right? Muppet-like, cute little furry animal that moves as though in
slow-motion. Well, a sloth's muscles are almost 100% “fast-twitch,” which is
a term you need not understand, other than knowing that a fast-twitch muscle
needs a heck of a lot of nervous impulse in order to receive adequate
stimulation to contract. That impulse will be delivered in a hurry when a
sloth is in danger—you’d be amazed at suddenly how incredibly fast they can
move when at full adrenaline alert!—but most of the time, even when fully
awake, the sloth just doesn’t have enough nerve signal to move these
powerful muscles any faster than grass-growing speed. Luckily for us humans,
we have other types of muscle besides fast-twitch, or else we’d all perform
our daily activities looking rather T’ai Chi. Come to think of it, maybe
that wouldn’t be such a bad thing! Õ
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