In the popular "Little Bit of" series: a fresh, accessible introduction to the postures and practice of yoga. Although it is an age-old practice originating in India, yoga is still embraced by many as a means of enhancing physical, mental, and spiritual health. Not only does it calm and strengthen, but yoga can improve flexibility and mental clarity through deep breathing and poses. This accessible introduction presents the history and philosophy of the form, along with basic poses--including Adho Mukha Svanasana/"Downward Facing Dog," Virabhadrasana/"Warrior," and Vrksasana/"Tree"--and advice on incorporating them into a daily exercise program.

Perfect for beginning and advanced fitness practitioners alike, this is an in-depth look into the most magnificent machine ever created--the human body. Using detailed anatomical illustrations, The New Anatomy for Strength and Fitness Training provides you visual insight into what happens to this organic machine during exercise--muscles and tendons working in concert to strengthen your body's building blocks. With a basic knowledge of how the body works, you can buff up your body with the book's 90 exercises, grouped by body region and involving gym machines, free weights, and body weight/stretching, as well as yoga and Pilates. Each exercise is vividly illustrated by a full-color anatomical illustration of the targeted muscles, together with instructions on execution and technique.

Say goodbye to unsightly and dangerous belly fat in just three weeks with this easy-to-follow diet and exercise program-includes 65 recipes. Muffin tops, love handles and pot bellies have finally met their match with The Belly Burn Plan, an easy-to-follow diet and exercise program that yields measurable results in just six weeks. Developed for the millions of men and women with too much belly fat, The Belly Burn Plan will help you shed belly fat fast and for good in just three steps: Eat Right for Your Body Type: Discover the best foods for your metabolism to lose weight naturally. Get Moving: Shorter, targeted, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts tailored to your fitness level help improve glucose metabolism and fat burning. Stress Less, Sleep More: Make the lifestyle changes that will have a lasting impression on your body and overall health. Linked to heart disease, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome, belly fat isn't just unsightly, it can be dangerous to your health. You have the power to not only change the way you look, but also how you feel. The Belly Burn Plan kicks off with an effective 3-Day Cleanse and includes 65 quick and easy recipes that will blow your taste buds away while shrinking your waistline. Prepare to say goodbye to belly fat and hello to a lean, healthy body.

All runners should have a fundamentally sound stride, yet few runners seem to find one on their own. After more than fifty years of studying and experimenting, competitive runner Jim Satterfield shares his method of how he has taught countless others to run like a natural, ultimately improving their stride and their enjoyment of running. As an athlete and coach, Satterfield combines his competitive and personal running experiences in order to provide a unique series of lessons that teach other runners how to master the fundamentals of correct running movements and eliminate the movements that slow them down. Satterfield includes various exercises and routines that will help runners find their best stride, use their core muscles, and make their workouts more efficient while specifically teaching runners how to: Develop a warm-up routine that mimics movements used in running Build strength and flexibility around the core Locate and harness power in a stride Run with a better form that takes advantage of body type and laws of physics Satterfield provides the expert guidance and motivation that will lead runners of all experience levels to unleash their stride and cross the finish line feeling like a winner.

"This useful title, which will also work well as a circulating item, presents that something extra for fitness enthusiasts who want to become serious about their conditioning." -Library Journal (starred review). The revolutionary series Anatomy of Exercise includes eight specialized titles that followed the first title, Anatomy of Exercise, each focusing on a specific sport or exercise programme. Since the release of the first book, the titles in this innovative series have sold over 250,000 copies. Compiling content from all nine titles, Encyclopedia of Exercise Anatomy enables the reader to tailor a personalized and professional programme that will meet specific needs. A runner can dip into yoga to improve his breathing; a muscle builder can shape her legs with cycling workouts; a gymnast can combine yoga with core stability and strength exercises, and a woman over 50 can design a programme that fits into her busy life. Comprehensive and informative, this big compendium includes these standard features: Full-body anatomy illustrations, front and back; Annotated full-colour anatomical illustrations for all exercises; Full-colour photographs of exercises; Visual identification of active and stabilizing muscles; Concise step-by-step how-to instructions and guidance; Level-of-difficulty modifications; "Best For" information boxes; Safety tips boxes; Pre-designed workouts; Visual index of exercises; Glossary of anatomical terms. For anyone who works on their fitness routines, whether at a gym, health club or in a sport personally, professionally or academically, Encyclopedia of Exercise Anatomy is the ideal resource for a lifetime of healthy living.

New in paperback, Petri Raisanen, one of the world's most popular yoga teachers offers the complete guide to to the yoga poses (asana), breathing techniques and philosophy of Ashtanga yoga. The most physical and dynamic form of yoga, Ashtanga combines an impressive sequence of yoga poses with special breathing techniques to heat the body internally and allow safe stretching of the muscles. Ashtanga's enthusiasts point to the powerful impact of the practice on their overall health and well-being: regular practice tones and strengthens the muscles, cleanses the body of toxins, calms the mind and increases concentration. Each of the yoga poses in the Primary Series is presented both separately and as part of complete practice. The reader will gain a deep knowledge of the multidimensional philosophy of Ashtanga yoga and how it relates to everyday life. This is a clearly and simply written guide, packed full of knowledge and insight, that will delight beginners, advanced students and yoga teachers alike.

Work and life have changed, so it's time to change how we care for our bodies during work hours. From the bestselling author of OFFICE YOGA comes this accessible guide to mental and physical health that works no matter where you find your desk. Organized by Chair Yoga, Standing Yoga, Pranayama & Mudras, and Meditation & Mindfulness exercises, the deck offers 52 practices that can be done anytime, anywhere. Whether you need a stretch break or a mental reset, whether you have 10 minutes during lunch or only 2 minutes between calls, there is something for everyone-no mat required! Approachable, humorous, and easy, this handsomely packaged and affordably priced guide is the perfect self-purchase or gift for anyone who wants an easy way to incorporate yoga into their everyday routine.

A lively, deeply reported tour of the science and strategies helping athletes like Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Carli Lloyd, and LeBron James redefine the notion of "peak age." Season after season, today's sports superstars seem to defy the limits of physical aging that inevitably sideline their competitors. How much of the difference is genetic destiny and how much can be attributed to better training, medicine, and technology? Is athletic longevity a skill that can be taught or a mental discipline that can be mastered? Can career-ending injuries be predicted and avoided? Journalist Jeff Bercovici spent extensive time with professional and Olympic athletes, coaches, and doctors to find the answers to these questions. His quest led him to training camps, tournaments, hospitals, antiaging clinics, and Silicon Valley startups, where he tried cutting-edge treatments and technologies firsthand and investigated the realities behind health fads like alkaline diets, high-intensity interval training, and cryotherapy. Through fascinating profiles and first-person anecdotes, Bercovici illuminates the science and strategies extending the careers of elite older athletes, uncovers the latest advances in fields from nutrition to brain science to virtual reality, and offers empowering insights about how the rest of us can find peak performance at any age.

Endurance Sport and the American Philosophical Tradition, edited by Douglas R. Hochstetler, analyzes the relationship between endurance sports-such as running, cycling, and swimming-and themes from the American philosophical tradition. The contributors enter into dialogue with writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry David Thoreau, and John Dewey, as well as more recent scholars such as John McDermott and bell hooks. Examining American philosophical themes informs issues in endurance sport, and the experiential nature of endurance sport helps address philosophical issues and explain philosophical themes in American philosophy. The chapters bear witness to the fact that philosophy is not limited to abstract notions such as justice, truth, happiness, and so forth, but intersects with and has a bearing on our human endeavors of work and play. Furthermore, the themes centrally related to the American philosophical tradition align closely with the challenges and experiences present and faced by runners, cyclists, swimmers, and endurance athletes in general.

Sod Sitting, Get Moving! is the must-have guide to keeping fit and healthy in your sixties, seventies and beyond. Specifically designed for older adults the exercises, stretches and strengthening movements will help keep you fit, strong and supple for the years ahead. You will feel better, look better and younger and reduce your risk of disability and dementia. As we get older too many of us spend our time sitting and not exercising. This is a call to arms - a bonfire of the slippers! Walk more, get moving, get exercising, get fitter, and feel better! This handy book shows you how. With easy exercise ideas created by Green Goddess and health and fitness expert Diana Moran, with text from Sir Muir Gray, author of the bestselling Sod Seventy!, this is the perfect present for yourself, or for anybody turning sixty, seventy or eighty!

There is something terribly wrong with the state of exercise as we know it presently. Sales of treadmills, running shoes, gym memberships, and yoga classes are at an all-time high, but so too are our national levels of obesity and Type II diabetes. Ever since the 1960s the exercising public has been told to stretch for flexibility and to perform low-intensity steady-state aerobic exercise for their cardiovascular systems and some form of resistance training to keep their muscles strong. With regard to diet, they have been told to restrict or omit macronutrients such as fats and carbohydrates and given lots of other advice with regard to calorie-counting. Could it be that this information, however well intended, was mistaken? And is it really necessary to devote so much time to the pursuit?

Fitness researcher and pioneer John Little has spent more than twelve years researching the actual science underpinning our most prevalent beliefs about exercise and has come away from the enterprise convinced that we need an entirely new paradigm, one that would involve reliance on briefer workouts. He presents this revolutionary new approach in The Time-Saver's Workout.

Among the fascinating revelations presented in this book:

• Certain types of exercise can actually make you less healthy and fatter.
• Taking large doses of food supplements might actually shorten your life and put you at greater risk for disease.
• Stretching to become more flexible or to recover quicker from injury has been found to do neither of these things.
• Resistance training, once considered to be the weak sister of exercise, is now looking like the best form of exercise one should engage in.

The new protocols that Little exposes offer a far safer alternative for those looking to become stronger, fitter, and healthier without spending their lives in the gym.

“My experience working with Skyhorse is always a positive collaboration. The editors are first-rate professionals, and my books receive top-shelf treatment. I truly appreciate our working relationship and hope it continues for years to come.”
–David Fischer, author

Silver Winner - 2012 Book of the Year Award by ForeWord MagazineSilver Winner - 2012 Jenkins Living Now AwardFinalist - 2012 Eric Hoffer AwardFinalist - 2012 USA Best Books Award Sunset Tai Chi is a comprehensive introduction to using Tai Chi for stress relief. This mind/body program is designed for beginners and teaches how to calm down and recuperate from the stress of the day, thus preventing and healing numerous stress-related illnesses. A full mind/body workout is presented, which can be practiced sitting or standing. This workout includes restorative poses from yoga, purifying movements and meditations from qigong, tai chi stances and drills, as well as a short Sunset Tai Chi form.* Relax and rejuvenate yourself after a long day.* Incorporate mind/body exercise into your daily activities.* Increase your lung capacity and increase your oxygen intake.* Prevent injuries.* Boost your natural healing of chronic conditions, including arthritis, fibromyalgia, insomnia, osteoporosis, sarcopenia, and cancer.Report from the New England Journal of Medicine: Using elements found in the Sunset Tai Chi program, a controlled study at Tufts School of Medicine showed the benefits of tai chi for fibromyalgia. The results were published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine on August 19, 2010 regarding this single-blind, randomized trial of classic Yang-style Tai Chi as compared with a control intervention consisting of wellness education and stretching for the treatment of fibromyalgia. The conclusion is that Tai Chi may be a useful treatment for fibromyalgia and merits long-term study in larger study populations.

The New York Times bestselling author and human performance expert tests his knowledge and theories on his own aging body in a quest to become an expert skier at age fifty-three. Gnar: adjective, short for "gnarly," def: any environment or situation that is high in perceived risk and high in actual risk. Country: noun, def: any defined territory, landscape or terrain, fictitious or real. Cutting-edge discoveries in embodied cognition, flow science, and network neuroscience have revolutionized how we think about peak performance aging. On paper, these discoveries should allow older athletes to progress in supposedly "impossible" activities like park skiing (think: jumps and tricks.) To see if theory worked in practice, Kotler conducted his own ass-on-the-line experiment in applied neuroscience and later-in-life skill acquisition: He tried to teach an old dog some new tricks. Recently, top pros have been performing well past a previously considered prime: World-class athletes such as Kelly Slater, the greatest surfer of all time, is winning competitions in his fifties; Tom Brady can beat players half his age. But what about the rest of us? Steven Kotler has been studying human performance for thirty years, and taught hundreds of thousands of people at all skill levels, age groups, and walks of life, how to achieve peak performance. Could his own advice work for him? Gnar Country is the chronicle of his experience pushing his own aging body past preconceived limits. It's a book about goals and grit and progression. It's an antidote for weariness that is inspiring, practical, and, often hilarious. It is about growing old and staying rad. It's a feverish reading experience that makes you put down the book, get out there, and move. Whether hurtling down a mountain side, running your first 10K race, or taking your career to new heights, Kotler challenges us to test ourselves, surpass our limits, and achieve our own impossible, whatever it might be. Part personal journey, part science experiment, part how-to guide, Kotler takes us on his punk rock, high-velocity joy-ride for a better life in spite-and often in defiance of-the perceived limitations of the aging human body.

The positive benefits of physical activity for physical and mental health are now widely acknowledged, yet levels of physical inactivity continue to be a major concern throughout the world. Understanding the psychology of physical activity has therefore become an important issue for scientists, health professionals and policy-makers alike as they address the challenge of behaviour change. Psychology of Physical Activity provides comprehensive and in-depth coverage of the fundamentals of exercise psychology, from mental health, to theories of motivation and adherence, and to the design of successful interventions for increasing participation. Now publishing in a fully revised, updated and expanded fourth edition, Psychology of Physical Activity is still the only textbook to offer a full survey of the evidence base for theory and practice in exercise psychology, and the only textbook that explains how to interpret the quality of the research evidence. As the field continues to grow rapidly, the new edition expands the behavioural science content of numerous important topics, including physical activity and cognitive functioning, automatic and affective frameworks for understanding physical activity involvement, new interventions designed to increase physical activity (including use of new technologies), and sedentary behaviour. A full companion website offers useful features to help students and lecturers get the most out of the book during their course, including multiple-choice revision questions, PowerPoint slides and a test bank of additional learning activities. Psychology of Physical Activity is the most authoritative, engaging and up-to-date book on exercise psychology currently available. It is essential reading for all students working in behavioural medicine, as well as the exercise and health sciences.

The guidance in this book teaches Course #1. Before anabolic steroids started to infest the body-building world, variations of Course #1 were famous, popular, and responsible for building tons of muscle. But in the 1960s, when the use of steroids became popular among competitive body-builders, the popularity of Course #1 began to wane. Since then, the routines most commonly promoted in the body-building world have been those used by physique stars who were genetically gifted for body-building and on steroids. But those routines do not work well, if at all, for most other body-builders. The guidance in this book is founded on the amazing progress that Peary Rader made -- around 50 pounds of natural muscle growth following 12 years of failure on other routines. Here are the three primary characteristics of Course #1: 1) It is very effective. Its track record for producing lots of muscle growth is illustrious (even for hard gainers); 2) It is up to date. The routine that Peary used has been modernised in this book. The version you can apply is even better than the original one. (There are better training tools today, and knowledge of nutrition and the other components of recuperation is much greater nowadays.); 3) It is personalised. You will be taught how to modify the routine so that it suits you perfectly. When applied properly, this may be the #1 muscle-building routine for drug-free, genetically typical body-builders. And because this legendary routine does not require long or overly frequent workouts, it is suitable even for busy people. But be ready for training concepts that are radically different to what you are used to. And set aside any doubts you may have. Simply apply Course #1 as it is explained in this book, and experience the muscle-building magic yourself. Then you will really be a believer. This book provides the most complete, up-to-date and useful guidance ever published on this fabulous body-building routine. It includes the background and history of the routine, the modernisation of it, the essential foundation phase, the special training schedules, how to train (including exercise technique in great detail), the components of recuperation (including nutrition), and two inspiring illustrations of how to put Course #1 into practice (from Peary Rader and Stuart McRobert). If other instruction has not produced the muscle mass you want, why stick with it? Instead, apply the routine that is explained in this book -- it is proven to build lots of muscle mass fast. Why a New BRAWN Series? The new series complements the best-selling books BRAWN and BEYOND BRAWN. Building on the philosophy, principles and methods promoted in those two classic works, the new series presents premier body-building routines that are immaculately detailed, rich in new material, thoroughly up-to-date, and proven to be super-effective. This first book of the new series teaches Course #1, which was mentioned only very briefly in BRAWN and BEYOND BRAWN, although not by that particular name.

Find connection, calm and happiness. Yoga Happy is an essential companion to help you through life, whether you're a complete yoga beginner or wanting to deepen your home practice. In this beautiful, full-colour book you will find everything you need to build your inner strength and resilience, and help you find calm, happiness and the resilience to navigate the modern world. Written by yoga and meditation teacher Hannah Barrett, who has helped hundreds of thousands of people both online and through her workshops and classes, Yoga Happy encourages you to incorporate key disciplines, thoughts and actions into your everyday life. No matter how little time or space you have, Hannah shows how you can find your energy, reduce stress at home or at work, get a good night's sleep and learn to cope better with whatever life throws at you. This inspiring handbook will also guide you through short, illustrated yoga sequences adapted for all abilities, plus give you breathing techniques, meditations and other proven mindful practices that will help to nourish and support your mind and body.

"Sal Di Stefano's raw fitness truths about motivation, resistance training and intuitive eating can help anyone, at any age, at any level."--Jason Fung, MD, New York Times bestselling authorTired of spending hours on the treadmill? Dealing with the joint paint of high impact exercise? And seeing very few results in terms of fat-burning and weight loss? If so, it's time to join the revolution. Sal Di Stefano, the founder of the mega popular Mind Pump podcast, reveals how resistance training is the best form of exercise to burn fat, boost metabolism, and achieve health benefits you cannot obtain from other forms of exercise. Based on Mind Pump's Muscular Adaptation Programming System (MAPS), The Resistance Training Revolution features: *How to optimize your workout time with over 60 fat-burning, metabolism-boosting workouts you can do at home *Raw fitness truths about what works and what doesn't *The newly discovered health benefits of resistance training in terms of heart health, bone strength, joint protection, and especially antiaging *The exact formula for nutrition that makes losing fat while sculpting your body a breeze *Dozens of self-assessments to track your progress, and much more "Stop those mindless hours of 'cardio' and make real gains in health and weight loss... Resistance exercise that builds muscle is key to weight loss, metabolic health, even healthy aging."--William Davis, MD, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wheat Belly book series

The Whole Body Breathing offers a clear practice. The simplicity of this practice will have a profound effect on your whole body, and will guide you in the gradual discovery of the vitality of your spine. Sequences of walking, standing, sitting and lying down will nurture and revitalise the whole body, uncovering and awakening special places along the spine. Explore the reality of rooting into the earth and expanding into space at the same time. Following in the footsteps of Vanda Scaravelli's teaching, where awareness, breath and freedom are the essential elements, The Whole Body Breathing stimulates and supports yoga students and teachers alike in the lifelong yoga journey, with joy and playfulness.

The ultimate guide to getting fit at home with an easy 28-day workout plan. Not able to get to the gym? Even if you are time poor and stuck at home you can get the body you have dreamed of: all you need is a plan! Instagram fitness star Courtney Black has pioneered the home workout and has developed her own proven method of getting fit and looking good, with dramatic results in just 28 days. Anyone can achieve a positive mindset to food and fitness. Courtney will guide you though the ultimate 28-day plan to transform your life and your attitude. Let Courtney show you how she went from self-punishment to body confidence, and how you can do it too.