Merchandise Monday: Summer’s just around the Corner!

And you know what that means – bathing suit season! Is your bod beach-ready, or will you be swimming in a t-shirt or cover-up for the foreseeable future?

Fear not. Hinda is here to help you slim down and feel great with a whole bunch of new workout and fitness gear. What are you waiting for? There’s no time like the present to kick off some healthy habits in time for summer!

AFG Elliptical

Engineered for the best combination of body position and movement for the best feel possible, the 4.1AE Elliptical features a Sixstar Certified™ platform, heavy-duty 30-pound flywheel that delivers the smoothest elliptical experience and unparalleled performance, unique MaxTone™ arch pedals that tone leg muscles and glutes with ease and upgraded multi-position handlebars with speed and incline buttons that multiply workout options.

Conair® Weight Watchers® Body Analysis Scale

The Weight Watchers Body Analysis Scale measures body fat, body water and bone mass. It features a convenient carrying handle, 10-user memory and 1.3” digital LCD display. This 330-pound capacity scale displays weight in 0.2-pound increments and will give accurate body weight readings for all users in weight-only mode. Warning: Do not use this product if you have a pacemaker or other internal medical device.

Empower® Boxing Boot Camp

Fight to be fit with this first-of-its-kind, authentic boxing-inspired workout. Empower and Striking Beauties joined forces to deliver a knockout fitness system unlike any other. The 12 Rounds Workout combined with the Empower Boxing Boot Camp will have you jumping rope and using the medicine ball in ways you’ve never dreamed of. Get ring-ready and work your entire body with this empowered fitness solution!

Empower® Portable Pilates Studio

Now you have no more excuses – the Portable Pilates Studio lets you perform reformer-style Pilates movements without heavy equipment in your home. Lightweight and portable, the bar disassembles for easy storage. The package includes a follow-along workout DVD with bonus upper body strength workout. Get fit in the comfort of your own home!

Fitbit® Aria™ Wi-Fi Smart Scale

Get where you want to be. Aria tracks your weight, body fat percentage and BMI, painting a picture of your long-term progress. It wirelessly syncs your stats with online graphs and mobile tools that help you stay motivated and on track. Just download the Fitbit® software, then link your scale to your home wireless network and you’re good to go. You can even log meals or even create a food plan. When you're in control, stepping on the scale feels good.

Fitbit® One™ Wireless Activity and Sleep Tracker

If you want to turn fitness into a lifestyle, the One is for you. For starters, it never rests. During the day, it tracks your steps, distance, calories burned and stairs climbed. Come nightfall, it measures your sleep cycle, helps you learn how to sleep better, and wakes you in the morning. The One motivates you to reach your goals by bringing greater fitness into your life – seamlessly, socially, 24 hours a day.

Fitbit® Zip™ Wireless Activity Tracker

Get a kick out of fitness with this little device. It tracks your steps, distance and calories burned and syncs all those stats to your computer and select smartphones. In doing so, it celebrates how much more you do each day. Zip encourages you to set goals, challenge friends and go farther, one step at a time. That’s how you turn everyday life into a social, achievable, awesome path to fitness.

Horizon Fitness Treadmill

Maximize your results with the T303 Treadmill from Horizon Fitness. The large 20” x 60” running area allows you to train longer and harder, and the robust frame and ComfortSELECT™ adjustable cushioning system aids your workout. The Goal Center and challenging programs help you make the most of your workouts and the contact heart rate grips and cooling fan enhance your overall experience. Get fit in the comfort of your own home on your time and in your way!

Are you feeling the burn yet? You will be soon. Check out even more fitness equipment and healthy living tools in our assortment!

Your Monthly Check-Up: April Means World Health Day

Although World Health Day is technically April 7, there’s no reason not to keep the good health vibes going all month long – and by extension, all year! The World Health Organization held the first World Health Assembly in 1948 and sanctioned April 7 as World Health Day effective in 1950. World Health Day honors WHO's founding and provides an opportunity by the organization to draw worldwide attention to a subject of major importance to global health, with international, regional and local events related to a particular theme.

The theme of World Health Day 2013 focuses on controlling hypertension, or high blood pressure, which WHO calls a “silent killer, global public health crisis.” Both preventable and treatable, hypertension contributes to many cases of heart disease, stroke and kidney failure worldwide, according to WHO, and WHO estimates one in three adults over 25 has elevated blood pressure, or about a billion people the world over.

According to WHO’s website, some specific objectives of the World Health Day 2013 campaign are to:

• raise awareness of the causes and consequences of high blood pressure
• provide information on how to prevent high blood pressure and related complications
• encourage adults to check their blood pressure and follow the advice of healthcare professionals
• encourage self care to prevent high blood pressure
• to make blood pressure measurement affordable to all
• to incite national and local authorities to create enabling environments for healthy behaviors

Following a healthy diet, getting enough exercise and rest and losing weight are all great ways to lower an elevated blood pressure or maintain a healthy one. Generally, lowering sodium intake and maintaining low levels of stress are particularly helpful when it comes to relieving hypertension.

Get more information on hypertension and other global health concerns here.

Your Monthly Check-Up: Meditation, Down Time and the Power of a Good Night’s Sleep

Part III: Sleep

(Click here for Part I: Relaxation and here for Part II: Meditation)

So far we’ve covered relaxation and deep relaxation in the form of meditation. Now let’s talk about the ultimate in relaxation – sleep. Everyone needs it and most aren’t getting enough of it – to the detriment of every area of our lives. You’ll want to stay awake for this.

In “The Healing Power of Sleep,” Pamela Weintraub, Executive Editor of Discover magazine and author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic, uncovers just how sleep deprived we are as a nation, the detriment sleep-deprivation does to our bodies and minds and how we can turn this nocturnal habit around.

“People devalue sleep and are completely unaware of what happens to them when they have a deficit,” says James Maas, PhD, a recently retired Cornell scientist and one of the world’s foremost sleep researchers, according to Weintraub’s article. “As a society we are so habituated to low levels of sleep that most of us don’t know what it feels like to be fully alert and awake.”

University of Chicago sleep researcher David Gozal, MD, adds that we treat sleep like a “tradable commodity,” sacrificing it for everything from work responsibilities to entertainment or other lifestyle choices. We create this deficit because it can take upwards of months or years for symptoms of a sleep deprivation-related disease to surface, according to Gozal.

How many of you have used the phrase, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead?” I know I have.

According to Weintraub’s article, sleep deprivation, even by as little as one hour a night, can wreak massive havoc in the body and mind. Most people are aware by now that lack of sleep creates increased food cravings, increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol and disrupted metabolism, all of which can lead to weight gain. However, not getting enough Zs can perpetuate a plethora of other lesser-known symptoms, such as hair loss, hearing loss, skin problems, insulin resistance, vision problems, sexual functioning and even cancer.

In her article, Weintraub recounts the story of Jason Karp, a 36-year-old hedge-fund manager and restaurateur who had reached a dangerous level of sleep deprivation before he sought help. An ambitious learner, Karp taught himself to speed-read and would spend long hours reading as opposed to getting adequate sleep – sometimes sleeping just two or three hours a night.

Karp began seeing double and was diagnosed with keratoconus, a disease that causes the cornea to progressively degenerate, sometimes necessitating a transplant. Then, he began experiencing prostate pain. His hair fell out in clumps and he broke out in a rash. Finally, one doctor told him his cortisol level was so high he may not live to see 40. Karp legitimately believed he was dying.

When Karp came across a bit of research that linked his rash to his keratoconus, he decided to try and cure himself by getting more sleep and altering his diet. Though it took some time for Karp to retrain himself to sleep, about six months later he had recovered from every symptom he was suffering with. And although Karp is an extreme case of someone who trained himself to forgo sleep, these are real symptoms that can occur in anyone suffering from lack of sleep.

Find out if you are sleep deprived by taking the quiz devised by James B. Maas, PhD. How else can you incorporate more rest, relaxation and sleep into your weekly agenda? Do you think you’d benefit from slowing down and taking time out for yourself during the day? What positive changes do you think you’d see? Talk to us in the “Comments” section below!

Your Monthly Check-Up: Meditation, Down Time and the Power of a Good Night’s Sleep

Part II: Meditation

(Click here for Part I: Relaxation)

While you’re on one of your breaks, why not try a little meditation on for size? Meditation may seem like a fad due to its recent rise in popularity in the States, but it’s a wellness practice that’s been helping people around the world for thousands of years. As daunting as it is to even think about sitting still and being quiet in this time of hustle and bustle, even adding a few minutes of meditation into your daily or weekly routine promotes life-sustaining benefits.

In “The Strength to Sit Still,” EXPERIENCE L!FE fitness editor Jen Sinkler recounts her first attempt at meditation as a fitness buff and how it not only altered her thoughts about meditation, but her thoughts about thinking in general.

Instead of “crack[ing] open the meditation CDs that I bought three years ago,” Sinkler went all out for her first meditation experience with a 3-day beginner’s retreat at Shambhala Mountain Center (SMC) in Red Feather Lakes, Colo. “…stillness emanates from the surroundings here, and when I arrive I finally feel like I have time to meditate,” Sinkler says. “Cell phones don’t work and my laptop is back home, edged out by the towel on the SMC packing list. I suspect this sort of sacred space can be created anywhere, but signing up for a retreat has given me formal permission to carve it out for myself.”

According to Sinkler’s instructor, Charles Rosicky, “The first rule of meditation is to have no expectations,” Sinkler recounts in the article. “It’s like being excited to go on vacation. The vacation you go on is never the vacation you think you’re going to go on. In the same way, it’s better to meditate without ambition.”

Unfortunately, Sinkler broke this rule. “I didn’t expect to find enlightenment over the weekend, but I did want the act of meditating to feel blissful, life-altering and important,” she says. “I didn’t go on the vacation I thought I was going on. Meditation felt…ordinary. Unspectacular and, at times, like déjà vu.”

But here is where Sinkler’s moment of insight came through. Although she arrived at SMC thinking she had never meditated before, she had in fact experienced the “flow state” of meditation many times, “during particularly good workouts or standout rugby games, where my focus was so singular it became everything.”

That’s all meditation is, anyway – focusing your attention on the task at hand; remaining in the present moment when unrelated thoughts attempt to disrupt your meditative flow. Focusing on your breath is a great way to get started. Sit comfortably and breathe. When your mind starts to wander, which it inevitably will, bring your focus back to your breath. The point of meditation is not to clear your mind. That is impossible. The point is to allow your thoughts to pass by your consciousness without reacting. You can always come back to them later.

“One of the first benefits is that you begin to see that you are not your thoughts,” says Ron West, ecologist for Boulder County Parks and longtime meditator, who was one of Sinkler’s instructors on the retreat. “We self-identify with our thoughts – meaning, bad thoughts equal bad person. You slowly see that thoughts arise in a vast and neutral space, and that it is possible to see that the mind is not solid. The thoughts just become interesting-to-look-at fish swimming in a very large aquarium.”

Sinkler has since incorporated 10 to 30 minutes of near-daily meditation into her weekly routine and has been singing its praises and reaping its benefits ever since her weekend retreat.

Stay tuned later this week when we wrap up our series with Part III - Sleep!

Your Monthly Check-Up: Meditation, Down Time and the Power of a Good Night’s Sleep

Part I: Relaxation

We’ve talked a lot about exercising, eating right and the benefits of corporate wellness to your bottom line in our monthly column. But something we haven’t discussed is how sleep, relaxation and meditation all contribute to your overall health and well-being.

The March 2013 issue of EXPERIENCE L!FE magazine is chock full of information related to all three of these areas that seem to fly under the wellness radar. Many people don’t realize that rest, recovery and relaxation are just as important to a healthy lifestyle as nutrition, exercise and hydration. Relaxation in particular is beneficial in the workplace, since giving your brain a break lets it recharge and gear up for the next big task.

In “Take a Break,” the EXPERIENCE L!FE team urges that, “Random moments of ‘unproductive’ time don’t just make you healthier, happier and more resilient. They help you work smarter, too.” For example, have you ever come up with a brilliant idea whilst showering? We have, too – and so have plenty of other people, which prompted a discussion of this very topic in “Take a Break”:

You’ve no doubt heard the rumored story of Archimedes, who shouted his now-legendary ‘Eureka!’ when he stepped into the bath, saw his bathwater rise and suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he’d submerged, abruptly intuiting the answer to what had previously been an intractable mathematical problem.

“There’s a reason so much genius has occurred in bathrooms…and it’s the same reason we often get great ideas while puttering in the garden, getting a facial, taking a walk or just waking up from a nap,” the article states. “Because these are precisely the types of circumstances in which we’re not trying to come up with genius ideas, or really any ideas at all.”

Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Jung-Beeman, PhD, a researcher at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., has dedicated his working life to studying the brain circuits involved in these eureka moments and offered up his insight for the article:

The body is relatively relaxed; the brain is being allowed to do whatever it likes, its circuits freed up for whatever associations and information-shuttling activities it deems worthwhile. And it’s those random associations that seem key both to large-scale breakthroughs and handy “aha!” moments. … While the brain lays much of the groundwork for insight by expending focused attention on a particular problem, certain parts of the brain must actually relax and be allowed to wander a bit for the necessary connections and associations (most of which are churned up by the more loosely organized right hemisphere) to be made.

According to the article, psychologist Joy Bhattacharya, PhD, a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London, has perpetuated this point by using electroencephalography (EEG) to predict these aha moments up to eight seconds before they even occur. One key indicator is the presence of alpha waves – the brain-wave pattern associated with relaxation – emanating from the right hemisphere of the brain. Bhattacharya suggests this activity makes the mind more susceptible to new and creative ideas.

The moral of this story is that, “Beyond a certain point, sitting for hours at your desk and working harder to solve that problem or come up with that big idea may actually work against you.” The article suggests listening for your “ultradian rhythms” – bodily cycles that occur many times throughout your day – and paying attention to when your body is telling you it’s time for a break. Get up for 20 minutes after every 90- to 120- minute cycle of energy expenditure and let your brain recharge. You’ll end up being more productive than if you don’t!

Stay tuned next week when we cover Parts II and III of our series - Meditation and Sleep!