Life is motion.
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Movement, activity, sports are an indispensable part of the life of a healthy and developed person, not only maintaining physical and mental vigor, but also shaping personality.
Dear parents, be careful: choosing this or that sport for your children, you not only develop this or that type of physical activity, you choose the character and destiny of your children. Skiing for long distances, like a sport, forms the psychology of a loner who knows how to move through tension, on one will, to a goal, which he always looks at a little frowningly. Swimming develops the will less, but gives more attention to the technique of movements and gives the ability to enjoy life. Tennis is a feeling of a couple, the ability to build tactics, not be afraid to lose and be able to deliver accurate strong blows. Football, as a sport, is the feeling of a team, the ability to catch the excitement and kick backhand, throwing all your aggression into the punch!
As for girls, a lively and cheerful girl with a slender and athletic figure has more chances for an excellent family and success in life, so sports are a must. It is advisable to choose sports that are associated with being outdoors and with physical activity — running, cycling, rollerblading, figure skating and skiing in winter. However, the girl also needs her own, special sport, since the girl needs not strength, but three other things, namely: a) flexibility, b) general coordination of movements (dexterous hands) and c) grace, beauty and smoothness of movements. Therefore, from power loads — we swing the press and do squats, but we replace the horizontal bar with push-ups.
Swimming is very good for health, but with professional training, girls form quite masculine shoulders, which is not quite feminine. For the same reason, rhythmic gymnastics is more useful than sports gymnastics. Tennis is useful both big and small, both yoga and fitness are good, while team sports are more for guys, for girls individual and pair dances are more useful. Once again: the most important and absolutely obligatory sport for any girl is dancing. Dance, dance, dance! You can start with folk dances, continue with any modern ones, but sooner or later the experience of pair dances is required, at least hustle (the simplest and most affordable) and salsa (a little richer). In pair dances, the fear of the partner’s body disappears, in dancing you can stand close and take the hand, which is not easy for teenagers. If hustle is a minimum program, then ballroom dancing and sports dancing is already the world of princesses.
When choosing a specific sports section or dance studio, it is usually more important to pay attention not to a specific sport and not a type of dance, but what kind of people are there and what is the style of communication there, first of all, what is the culture of the coach. A high-quality, worthy coach teaches not so much a specific sport or dance, he teaches attitudes towards people and life. If you have found such a coach, you can be calm. However, for a girl of different ages, you need to select different coaches …
As for adults, physical activity is the best medicine for maintaining physical, mental and spiritual shape. Megan Outen, a psychologist, and Ken Cheng, a biologist, from Macquarie University in Sydney recently finished testing a new treatment that increases self-control (from Kelly McGonigal’s book Willpower: How to Develop and Strengthen). And the data they received amazed them. They hoped for a positive result, but no one expected how massive the consequences would be. The experimental rabbits were six men and 18 women aged 18 to 50 years. After two months of treatment, they focused better and were less distracted. Attention spans reached 30 seconds, which is very commendable. But that was not all. The subjects smoked less, reduced their alcohol and caffeine consumption — although no one asked them about it. They ate less junk food and more healthy food. Less time spent watching TV and more time studying. Saved money and spent less on spontaneous purchases. Feel in control of your emotions. They even put things off less often and were less late for meetings. Good God, what is this wonderful drug and who will write me a prescription?
Treatment was by no means pharmacological. Miracles of self-control were created by physical exercises. Participants who had not previously exercised regularly were presented with a gym membership and encouraged to use it. In the first month, they practiced about once every seven days, but by the end of the second month, they were already visiting the gym three times a week. The researchers did not ask them for other changes, and yet, thanks to sports training, people seemed to have discovered a new source of strength in themselves and began to better control themselves in all areas of life.
Scientists have found that exercise is most like a panacea. To begin with, the benefits of exercise are immediate. Fifteen minutes on the treadmill reduces cravings: Researchers have unsuccessfully tried to tempt weight loss people with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes. The long-term effects of training are even more impressive. Not only do they relieve everyday stress, but they are just as powerful an antidepressant as Prozac. Most importantly, training strengthens the biological foundations of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability. When neuroscientists examined the brains of newly minted athletes, they found that they had an increase in both gray matter (nerve cells themselves) and white matter (neuron glia cells, which allow neurons to communicate quickly and efficiently). Physical exercise, like meditation, enlarges and accelerates the brain and primarily the prefrontal cortex.
When my students hear about this study, they immediately ask, “How much should I study?” I always answer: “How much are you ready?” In 2010, a review of 10 studies on the topic found that five-minute rather than hour-long exercise was the most effective for improving mood and reducing stress. So it’s not at all embarrassing — and very useful — just to walk around the house for five minutes.