Yesterday, at the end of my lecture under workers education program, a couple of workers asked me about my philosophy of life, any suggestion for them.. As the time for lecture was already over I gave them short answers and promised to go in to the details next time for sure. The topic of lecture had nothing to do with philosophy of life.
This incident cranked up my thinking process. This blog samanyabuddhi.blogspot.com is made for the same purpose, that is to spread what I have learnt and experimented till date. Why everyone should do all the hard work that I did while learning? and we have this platform for blogging provided by the Google to leverage and multiply my learning. Many successful and unsuccessful personalities knowingly or unknowingly contributed to my knowledge or experiences. So it is not possible for me to mention everyone. But I am going to mention the prominent ones as I will go through.
Before you get bored let's come to the point- my philosophy for life (and this blog too), revolves around the 3 pillars-
1) Health
2) Wealth
3) Happiness
All three are interdependent, we can not chase one and ignore others or we can not chase two and ignore the other one. All three must come together to live a meaningful life, or some may say successful life. We can say these three pillars support our life. If one is weak our life collapses, or if there is imbalance in the dimensions of each pillar then we can not live a balanced life.
We must work on all three at a time to get the best out of life. It is not that difficult, once you start, you will start getting the results and you will do more efforts automatically. This is a positive feedback loop. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, your life will get bigger and bigger. The more you will get results the more will be the motivation.
To achieve this snowball effect, you must start now-
So here we go, one at a time..
1) HEALTH
Wise people say that, "Health is Wealth". It is true, if you are not healthy then you cannot enjoy your wealth or you will have to put a lot of conscious efforts to stay happy. Good health is the foundation for lasting wealth and happiness. Many studies have shown that healthy people receive more salary than weak people. Healthy people are perceived as leaders. The proof is, is there any physically weak actor doing a role of hero in super hit movies? Or which actors do you like? For examples the actors who played the character of James Bond like Daniel Craig, Pierce Bronson, Sean Connery etc.
Second advantage is that, a healthy mind resides in a healthy body. Generally weak and fearful people do illegal or unethical things, simply because they are trying protecting themselves from any imaginable attacks. While healthy people just know that they can deal with anything thrown at them so they just relax and concentrate on something important.
Now enough about the advantages of being healthy, there are lot of them coming to my mind, it will take month to write them down, and probably you also know many advantages and want to be healthy, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this blog.
Let's now think about how to become and stay healthy-
I recommend you to read my post, How to become Happy?? Then also read the post on Ageing and Anti ageing, then the language of exercise. These posts will give you the basic idea about how to become healthy.
I suppose that you have read the above posts. Now I will take you still deeper in the subject of health -
This pillar of health have 2 elements -
A) Exercise & B) Diet
This Exercise part is again divided in to two broad catagories-
I) Strength building exercise II) Stamina building exercise
Our body have muscle and bones arrangement, where muscle provides the force and bones act as lever and together they help us doing movements. These muscles which helps in the movement of our body are called as skeletal muscles. (they are attached to the skeletal or bones)
There are different muscles other than skeletal muscles, like our heart is made up of cardiac muscles, our digestive system also has muscles which does the movement necessary to mix the food with digestive juices and to push the food forward in to the digestive system. That is food is pushed from mouth to stomach to small intestine to large intestine and then out.(in between it gets digested)
Exercise has to do with working on skeletal muscles and cardiac muscles. Rest of the muscles also get strengthened as a side effect of exercise, because of increased demand from them and also the effect of growth hormones secreted by the glands in our body because of exercise.
Our muscles are made up of muscle cells. Muscle cells are made up of muscle fibres. These muscle fibres are made up of proteins.
There are 2 types of muscle fibres in our body - red and white. Red muscle fibres provide us stamina, that is they help us do repetitive movements like cycling, jogging etc. While white muscle fibres provide us explosive power, that is large force for small duration. For example lifting a heavy object. White muscle fibres produce their power without using oxygen, they develop fatigue very soon, where as red muscle fibres produce power with the use of oxygen, they can do the repetitive action for extended periods.
The ratio of this red muscle fibres to white muscle fibres is fixed for every individual genetically. But we have choice to develop the type of muscle fibres we require with the help of exercise.
To develop white muscle fibres we must do exercises which include lifting heavy weight with minimum repetitions. On the contrary to develop red muscle fibres we must do the exercises which include lifting medium weights with more repetitions. Cycling, jogging, trekking, circuit running, swimming also develops stamina.
I hope you understood the difference between I) strength building exercises and II) stamina building exercises.
Red muscle fibres also helps in producing explosive power but white muscle fibres can not work for extended periods. Red muscle fibres have this stamina because of their ability to store oxygen. Generally they can store oxygen required for the time of 6-7 seconds. After that if they don't get their oxygen trey start producing the energy without oxygen, thereby producing lactic acid resulting in to fatigue.
Further it is also useful to understand how our muscles get their oxygen -
Everyone knows muscles get there oxygen through blood. But there is much more going on. Oxygen rich blood is pumped from the heart through big blood vessels known as arteries. These arteries then go on branching and as they branch their diameter is reduced, also their wall thickness goes on reducing, this branching continues until the size of the blood vessel becomes more or less hair like. These hair sized blood vessels are called as capillaries. The oxygen and carbon dioxide transfer happens through these blood capillary walls. (carbon dioxide is generated in almost all the cells of our body when different constituents of the food we eat are burnt with oxygen to get the energy for doing required activities) These blood capillaries have very thin walls and are flexible to facilitate this oxygen and carbon dioxide transfer process.
These blood vessels and blood capillaries have network all over our body and they supply this oxygen rich blood to each and every cell of our body including muscle cells. They go through muscle bundles, but as I said these capillaries are flexible. So when our muscle is in relaxed condition, these capillaries remain open and are filled with oxygen rich blood, at this condition, oxygen from the blood is taken by muscle cells and carbon dioxide is given to the blood. So instead of oxygen now the blood contains carbon dioxide and muscles now have oxygen for approximately 6 seconds requirement. Now when these muscles are contracted to do some movement or activity, these blood capillaries gets compressed or squeezed, but o the one side, our heart is pumping the blood with a pressure (this pressure is known as blood pressure) while at the other side there is less pressure, so almost all the blood from the squeezed capillary goes to the low pressure side (out from the muscle bundle), there these capillaries starts converging, their diameter starts increasing, their wall thickness also increases, these blood vessels now has blood which is not under much pressure, therefore to prevent it from going backward, these vessels have non return valves at places, these blood vessels are known as veins. Veins contains the blood under low pressure so the walls of the veins are thinner than the arteries. Every time a muscle is contracted, blood is pushed in to these veins, these veins lead to heart. They are connected to the upper right compartment of the heart where this carbon dioxide laden blood is collected, this blood then pushed in to lower right compartment of the heart because of the arrangement of non return valves and movement of the heart. From this lower right compartment, blood is sent to the lungs.
Now in the lungs the blood vessels again gets divided in to small capillaries which are present near the inner membrane of the lungs. There are large number of air pockets in the lungs. These pockets provide huge area of oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange membrane, through which carbon dioxide from the blood is released in to air contained in the lung and oxygen from the same air is taken up by the blood. Because of the movement of our chest muscles and a diaphragm which is present just bellow our lungs, this carbon dioxide laden air is exhaled out through nose and mouth and then normal air from atmosphere is inhaled for the next breathing cycle.
Now these capillaries again converge and take this oxygen rich blood to the upper left compartment of the heart. This blood then goes to the lower left compartment of the heart through the arrangement of non return valves and movement of the heart. Then this oxygen laden blood is pumped by the lower left compartment to the whole body. (Including itself, as our heart muscles can only use the oxygen provided by the blood running through them in the capillaries. The heart attacks is meany times caused by blockage in this blood supply system to the heart muscles. Because of which our heart muscles also known as cardiac muscles do not get the needed amount of oxygen.)
This circulation of blood goes on till our death. This is how our muscles get their oxygen. You must have understood now why our muscles starts aching when kept contracted. Many times it is very painful to keel a muscle contracted for just a minute. It is because muscles do not get oxygen in contracted condition, blood can only flow through them inside capillaries when muscles are relaxed. Cyclical movements helps in blood circulation. Muscle contraction pushes the blood towards the heart and make room for oxygen rich blood coming from heart. Many times people who has to sit in front of computer for extended periods because of occupation have swollen feet. Or after long journeys we have swollen feet. The remedy is to get up and take a small walk after each hour or even less if possible.
The blood gets this ability to carry oxygen or carbon dioxide because of red blood cells and red blood cells get it because of haemoglobin (an iron containing protein).
Therefore whenever you do your work out, your muscles start healing and growing, grown muscles also have more oxygen demand, this means more haemoglobin in the blood, more powerful heart, more blood pumping capacity of heart, more capacity of lungs is needed.
And you know that our body is a COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM.
Therefore to adapt to all this increased need our body responds by increasing all these supporting capacities. More muscle fibres are build up, more blood capillaries are formed, existing blood vessels increase their diameter( you must have seen professional body builders or actors with lots of visible veins all over their body), the size of the heart and strength of the heart also increases, each pulse becomes more powerful, so heart can now pump more blood with more force with each heart beat. As our skeletal muscles develops new and stronger muscle fibres and new network of blood capillaries, same thing happens with our heart.
All these changes are useful when we do heard work or exercise. But what happens to this increased capacity when we are not doing any hard work? At this time our heart rate falls much lower than normal simply because it can fulfil the requirement of body very easily when not doing hard work. Some sportsman has pulse rate as low as 30 per minute. That is less than half of the average human. Many divers have so much increased breathing capacity that they can hold their breath for up to 5 minutes while diving. Can you imagine doing it?
Our body is a superb piece of genius engineering of nature.
Respect it.
You must be saying we didn't touched the strength building and stamina building exercises much. We will do it in the next post. I think knowing our body and how it functions is important to get the full advantage of exercise.
Next post will be coming soon. Stay tuned..
And have a nice day..
Sumit
The POWER is when,
You use ODDS,
To get EVEN.
This incident cranked up my thinking process. This blog samanyabuddhi.blogspot.com is made for the same purpose, that is to spread what I have learnt and experimented till date. Why everyone should do all the hard work that I did while learning? and we have this platform for blogging provided by the Google to leverage and multiply my learning. Many successful and unsuccessful personalities knowingly or unknowingly contributed to my knowledge or experiences. So it is not possible for me to mention everyone. But I am going to mention the prominent ones as I will go through.
Before you get bored let's come to the point- my philosophy for life (and this blog too), revolves around the 3 pillars-
1) Health
2) Wealth
3) Happiness
All three are interdependent, we can not chase one and ignore others or we can not chase two and ignore the other one. All three must come together to live a meaningful life, or some may say successful life. We can say these three pillars support our life. If one is weak our life collapses, or if there is imbalance in the dimensions of each pillar then we can not live a balanced life.
We must work on all three at a time to get the best out of life. It is not that difficult, once you start, you will start getting the results and you will do more efforts automatically. This is a positive feedback loop. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, your life will get bigger and bigger. The more you will get results the more will be the motivation.
To achieve this snowball effect, you must start now-
So here we go, one at a time..
1) HEALTH
Wise people say that, "Health is Wealth". It is true, if you are not healthy then you cannot enjoy your wealth or you will have to put a lot of conscious efforts to stay happy. Good health is the foundation for lasting wealth and happiness. Many studies have shown that healthy people receive more salary than weak people. Healthy people are perceived as leaders. The proof is, is there any physically weak actor doing a role of hero in super hit movies? Or which actors do you like? For examples the actors who played the character of James Bond like Daniel Craig, Pierce Bronson, Sean Connery etc.
Second advantage is that, a healthy mind resides in a healthy body. Generally weak and fearful people do illegal or unethical things, simply because they are trying protecting themselves from any imaginable attacks. While healthy people just know that they can deal with anything thrown at them so they just relax and concentrate on something important.
Now enough about the advantages of being healthy, there are lot of them coming to my mind, it will take month to write them down, and probably you also know many advantages and want to be healthy, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this blog.
Let's now think about how to become and stay healthy-
I recommend you to read my post, How to become Happy?? Then also read the post on Ageing and Anti ageing, then the language of exercise. These posts will give you the basic idea about how to become healthy.
I suppose that you have read the above posts. Now I will take you still deeper in the subject of health -
This pillar of health have 2 elements -
A) Exercise & B) Diet
This Exercise part is again divided in to two broad catagories-
I) Strength building exercise II) Stamina building exercise
Our body have muscle and bones arrangement, where muscle provides the force and bones act as lever and together they help us doing movements. These muscles which helps in the movement of our body are called as skeletal muscles. (they are attached to the skeletal or bones)
There are different muscles other than skeletal muscles, like our heart is made up of cardiac muscles, our digestive system also has muscles which does the movement necessary to mix the food with digestive juices and to push the food forward in to the digestive system. That is food is pushed from mouth to stomach to small intestine to large intestine and then out.(in between it gets digested)
Exercise has to do with working on skeletal muscles and cardiac muscles. Rest of the muscles also get strengthened as a side effect of exercise, because of increased demand from them and also the effect of growth hormones secreted by the glands in our body because of exercise.
Our muscles are made up of muscle cells. Muscle cells are made up of muscle fibres. These muscle fibres are made up of proteins.
There are 2 types of muscle fibres in our body - red and white. Red muscle fibres provide us stamina, that is they help us do repetitive movements like cycling, jogging etc. While white muscle fibres provide us explosive power, that is large force for small duration. For example lifting a heavy object. White muscle fibres produce their power without using oxygen, they develop fatigue very soon, where as red muscle fibres produce power with the use of oxygen, they can do the repetitive action for extended periods.
The ratio of this red muscle fibres to white muscle fibres is fixed for every individual genetically. But we have choice to develop the type of muscle fibres we require with the help of exercise.
To develop white muscle fibres we must do exercises which include lifting heavy weight with minimum repetitions. On the contrary to develop red muscle fibres we must do the exercises which include lifting medium weights with more repetitions. Cycling, jogging, trekking, circuit running, swimming also develops stamina.
I hope you understood the difference between I) strength building exercises and II) stamina building exercises.
Red muscle fibres also helps in producing explosive power but white muscle fibres can not work for extended periods. Red muscle fibres have this stamina because of their ability to store oxygen. Generally they can store oxygen required for the time of 6-7 seconds. After that if they don't get their oxygen trey start producing the energy without oxygen, thereby producing lactic acid resulting in to fatigue.
Further it is also useful to understand how our muscles get their oxygen -
Everyone knows muscles get there oxygen through blood. But there is much more going on. Oxygen rich blood is pumped from the heart through big blood vessels known as arteries. These arteries then go on branching and as they branch their diameter is reduced, also their wall thickness goes on reducing, this branching continues until the size of the blood vessel becomes more or less hair like. These hair sized blood vessels are called as capillaries. The oxygen and carbon dioxide transfer happens through these blood capillary walls. (carbon dioxide is generated in almost all the cells of our body when different constituents of the food we eat are burnt with oxygen to get the energy for doing required activities) These blood capillaries have very thin walls and are flexible to facilitate this oxygen and carbon dioxide transfer process.
These blood vessels and blood capillaries have network all over our body and they supply this oxygen rich blood to each and every cell of our body including muscle cells. They go through muscle bundles, but as I said these capillaries are flexible. So when our muscle is in relaxed condition, these capillaries remain open and are filled with oxygen rich blood, at this condition, oxygen from the blood is taken by muscle cells and carbon dioxide is given to the blood. So instead of oxygen now the blood contains carbon dioxide and muscles now have oxygen for approximately 6 seconds requirement. Now when these muscles are contracted to do some movement or activity, these blood capillaries gets compressed or squeezed, but o the one side, our heart is pumping the blood with a pressure (this pressure is known as blood pressure) while at the other side there is less pressure, so almost all the blood from the squeezed capillary goes to the low pressure side (out from the muscle bundle), there these capillaries starts converging, their diameter starts increasing, their wall thickness also increases, these blood vessels now has blood which is not under much pressure, therefore to prevent it from going backward, these vessels have non return valves at places, these blood vessels are known as veins. Veins contains the blood under low pressure so the walls of the veins are thinner than the arteries. Every time a muscle is contracted, blood is pushed in to these veins, these veins lead to heart. They are connected to the upper right compartment of the heart where this carbon dioxide laden blood is collected, this blood then pushed in to lower right compartment of the heart because of the arrangement of non return valves and movement of the heart. From this lower right compartment, blood is sent to the lungs.
Now in the lungs the blood vessels again gets divided in to small capillaries which are present near the inner membrane of the lungs. There are large number of air pockets in the lungs. These pockets provide huge area of oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange membrane, through which carbon dioxide from the blood is released in to air contained in the lung and oxygen from the same air is taken up by the blood. Because of the movement of our chest muscles and a diaphragm which is present just bellow our lungs, this carbon dioxide laden air is exhaled out through nose and mouth and then normal air from atmosphere is inhaled for the next breathing cycle.
Now these capillaries again converge and take this oxygen rich blood to the upper left compartment of the heart. This blood then goes to the lower left compartment of the heart through the arrangement of non return valves and movement of the heart. Then this oxygen laden blood is pumped by the lower left compartment to the whole body. (Including itself, as our heart muscles can only use the oxygen provided by the blood running through them in the capillaries. The heart attacks is meany times caused by blockage in this blood supply system to the heart muscles. Because of which our heart muscles also known as cardiac muscles do not get the needed amount of oxygen.)
This circulation of blood goes on till our death. This is how our muscles get their oxygen. You must have understood now why our muscles starts aching when kept contracted. Many times it is very painful to keel a muscle contracted for just a minute. It is because muscles do not get oxygen in contracted condition, blood can only flow through them inside capillaries when muscles are relaxed. Cyclical movements helps in blood circulation. Muscle contraction pushes the blood towards the heart and make room for oxygen rich blood coming from heart. Many times people who has to sit in front of computer for extended periods because of occupation have swollen feet. Or after long journeys we have swollen feet. The remedy is to get up and take a small walk after each hour or even less if possible.
The blood gets this ability to carry oxygen or carbon dioxide because of red blood cells and red blood cells get it because of haemoglobin (an iron containing protein).
Therefore whenever you do your work out, your muscles start healing and growing, grown muscles also have more oxygen demand, this means more haemoglobin in the blood, more powerful heart, more blood pumping capacity of heart, more capacity of lungs is needed.
And you know that our body is a COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM.
Therefore to adapt to all this increased need our body responds by increasing all these supporting capacities. More muscle fibres are build up, more blood capillaries are formed, existing blood vessels increase their diameter( you must have seen professional body builders or actors with lots of visible veins all over their body), the size of the heart and strength of the heart also increases, each pulse becomes more powerful, so heart can now pump more blood with more force with each heart beat. As our skeletal muscles develops new and stronger muscle fibres and new network of blood capillaries, same thing happens with our heart.
All these changes are useful when we do heard work or exercise. But what happens to this increased capacity when we are not doing any hard work? At this time our heart rate falls much lower than normal simply because it can fulfil the requirement of body very easily when not doing hard work. Some sportsman has pulse rate as low as 30 per minute. That is less than half of the average human. Many divers have so much increased breathing capacity that they can hold their breath for up to 5 minutes while diving. Can you imagine doing it?
Our body is a superb piece of genius engineering of nature.
Respect it.
You must be saying we didn't touched the strength building and stamina building exercises much. We will do it in the next post. I think knowing our body and how it functions is important to get the full advantage of exercise.
Next post will be coming soon. Stay tuned..
And have a nice day..
Sumit
The POWER is when,
You use ODDS,
To get EVEN.
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