I found myself sweating, even though I was only walking up a gently sloping path. The effort surprised me because I run 5km daily and sprint up steeper slopes without too much effort.

That day convinced me that walking backwards had a lot to offer.

Doing it was challenging the coordination between my brain and body, and using muscles which were otherwise poorly trained and inefficient. That's why I was sweating for such a low level of activity.
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As well as running daily, I also walk 5km daily, which is part of my recovery routine for the daily running. During my walk, I now find ways to walk backwards - most often up slopes or on the beach.

Something we don't do often enough is to experiment with pillows and pillow positions. Read what experts say about choosing the right pillow.

Use of the wrong type of pillow will lower the quality of our sleep. That's bad for our long-term health. 

There's a reason we are programmed to spend a third of our life sleeping. During sleep:

• Our brain sorts the essential elements of the day from the unimportant and stores memories, allowing for more efficient long-term memory recall.
• Our body regulates hormones such as cortisol (to help manage stress), human growth hormone (to repair muscle tissue), insulin (to regulate blood glucose) and others.
• Cell turnover rids waste from our cells, leaving our immune system restored.

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Chronic sleep deprivation impairs our attentiveness, coordination and reaction time. It also increases the risk of obesity, high blood pressure, heart attack, diabetes and depression. 

We take our joints for granted until they're injured. None more so than our feet. 

Our feet have 26 bones (25 percent of all bones in the human body are in the feet), 33 joints, and more than 80 tendons and ligaments. There are also 20 main muscles, each with different actions and jobs that help us walk, run, jump and stand.

These muscles can become weakened, tightened and inflamed just from our everyday activities. There is a lot that can go wrong - a lot of attached parts that can transmit stress through the entire foot and into our leg, hips and lower back.
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That's why keeping our feet flexible and strong is worth a little extra effort. This effort not only helps reduce foot and ankle pain but also strengthen the tendons and improves our mobility and gait.

Working out is known to improve the moods of people with depression, although why it works is still somewhat a mystery. 

What is not a mystery is research which reveals that exercise intensity is not associated with the level of mood improvement. For example, in this study, all participants experienced about the same level of reduced depression after hard, moderate and light aerobic exercise.

Building regular exercise into your day will improve your day, and you can start as small as you like. Here's how.

Judging by the number of other runners who ask me what I am doing, it's apparent that warming up, warming down and stretching our hip flexors is a bit of a lost art. That's unfortunate, and not just for runners.

I do a simple couple of hip flexor warm-ups and warm-downs, which I recommend for all runners. It's attention to these kinds of movements that has enabled me to run every day ~5km for nearly 300 days injury-free.
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Hip mobility is essential for everyone and runners in particular. (When running we use our hip flexors, especially the iliopsoas, to lift the leg with each stride.) With running, hip flexors can suffer from muscle weakness and muscle tightness, causing tenderness and pain.

The pandemic, and working from home, has led to us spending long hours in awkward body positions, typically resulting in hunching our shoulders forward. NYC dentist Tammy Chen, says “I’ve seen more tooth fractures in the last six weeks than in the previous six years".

​It’s not just fractures but jaw pain, tooth sensitivity, achiness in the cheeks and migraines — sound familiar?
The simple, universal cure is an appeal to "better posture". However, this is not the cure, as "better posture" is often a prescription for the wrong disease. 
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In this post, I'll explain what the real cause it, and cures that work. This will not necessarily get you sitting up in a textbook posture, but it should cure you from damaging your teeth.

We've all experienced it - that pain that starts to swell from within about 12 hours after a tough, or unusual, exercise session. From there, it can get worse, making it painful to walk up steps after about 2 days. There's good news and bad news. The good news is that it will disappear. The bad news? There's little that can we can do to make it disappear a lot faster.

We'll take a look at the best four things that scientists regard as proven to reduce the pain. It's a short list (based on recent research).