Yogasana and Exercise to build Traps

Traps is the muscle between neck and shoulders. It stabilize your shoulder and upper back. Before you start building any muscle, you need to make the muscles flexible.

Usually, if you don't do any exercise, your traps will be tight and short. Start with Yoga stretches to lengthen and relax the traps. Then, to increase the size of the traps muscles, you need to do exercises that compress the muscles either with your body weight or with weights like dumbbells.

Yoga Stretches:
1. Child Pose
2. Eagle Pose
3. Self-Hug
4. Downward-Dog (for lower trap)
5. Savasana


No-weight resistance exercise: (These exercises contract the muscles)
Shoulder Blade Squeeze
Stand with good posture, with your arms at your sides.
Slowly squeeze the shoulder blades together, and hold for three seconds.
Slowly release the shoulder blades back to their relaxed positions.
This exercise can also be done holding your arms out front in a goal post position.

Shoulder Shrug:
Stand up straight with good posture.
Raise your shoulders as high as you can get them, as if attempting to touch your ears with them.
Hold for a count of two.
Release them back into their relaxed positions.
Repeat 20 reps.

Upright row:
Stand up straight.
With your fists clenched together, lift your arms as high as you can while bending your elbows, keeping your hands close to the front of your body.
Hold for a count of two.
Release your arms back into a relaxed position, fists still together.
Repeat for 20 reps.

Push-Up(Body Weight resistance exercise for middle and lower traps):
The key here is to lower your body till the ground level. If you lower your body only up to elbow level, only your pects gets work-out. To give resistance to traps, you need to lower your body below your elbow level. Then, your traps gets contracted

Weight-bearing Exercise:
Keep dumpbell in your hand while doing first three exercises above. The dumbbell weight give more resistance to the traps muscles.

Simple Raw Breakfast Recipes

Beetroot Salad:

Ingredients: Grated beetroot, soaked groundnuts, finely chopped capsicum, grated ginger, grated coconut and lime juice.

Method: Mix all ingredients well and season with salt, pepper, coriander and curry leaves. 

Carrot Salad:

Ingredients: Grated carrot, sprouted green gram, finely chopped capsicum, grated ginger, coconut and lime juice. 

Method: Mix all ingredients well and season with salt, pepper, coriander and curry leaves. 

Curd Ashguard:

Ingredients: Grated Ashgourd, grated ginger, curd 

Method: Mix all the ingredients and season with salt, pepper, coriander leaves and curry leaves. 

Ashguard Groundnut porridge:
Ingredients: Ashguard, Soaked Peanuts
Method: Blend all the ingredients and season with salt, pepper, coriander leaves and curry leaves.

Groundnut-Banana
Take a handful of groundnuts (soaked overnight in water). In the morning, eat the soaked groundnuts with 1 or 2 bananas.

Hair Growth

There are plenty of products available in the market, though we are not sure how good or bad they are. Here are the few techniques which I believe it will work.

Hair growth is directly related to your stress level. If you are stressed because of your job or family problems, there are chances that you loose your hair and go bald.


As far as I know, the following steps would help to improve hair growth than the hair growth products.

• Keep doing abdominal breathing whenever you get time.
• Keep doing Anulom-vilom Pranayama whenver you get time during the day.
• Comb your hair with wooden comb frequently during the day.
• In the evening, apply coconut oil on your scalp and massage your scalp. leave the oil on yur scalp overnight.
• Clean your hair with water alternative days or once in three days. Use only raw herbal powder such as Shikakai powder.

Law of Garbage Truck

Many people are like garbage trucks. They move around full of garbage (frustration, anger, and disappointment, etc.). As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they’ll dump it on you.

Don’t take it personally. Just ignore and move on. Don’t take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.

Everyday, you get several situations where people treat you badly, even though you are right. Just think of them as garbage truck. It will help you to reduce your stress level.

3 Must-Do Bodyweight Exercises

These exercises are simple and works out all the major muscles in our body. It also applies our own body weight as resistance to the muscles. Because of that, these exercises strengthens and builds our muscles.

1. Push-up ( Upper Body Muscles - Pects/triceps/deltoids)
2. Sit-up (Abdominal Muscles)
3. Squat (Lower Body Muscles - Glute/Quads/Hamstring)

It's always a best practice to do warm-up before the exercises and cool down after the exercises.

Here is the complete sequence:
1. Major Joints Exercise (Neck/Shoulder/Spine/Pelvis)
2. Surya Namaskar (3 rounds)
3. Push-up
4. Sit-up
5. Squat
6. Savasana (5 minutes)

Why most of us are not successful in meditation

Meditation is nothing but slowing down your mind. It's not possible for us to slow down our mind, since our mind is supposed to process all the data received by our sensory organs (eyes,ears, nose, tongue and skin). With the technological development, we keep occupy our mind by watching TV, texting to friends, talking to friends, listening to music and working on the computer/ipad all day.

Suddenly, in the name of meditation, if you sit in a quiet room and start thinking nothing, your mind simply can't do it.

First, You have to train your mind to focus on something. The simplest exercise is to chant 'gayatri mantra' (or any mantra based on your religion/belief) multiple times. The key is to repeat it several times. Initially, you feel bored, since your mind expects variety, not the same mantra over and over again. If you persist, you can win.

Yoga for posture problems

Many of us don't even know that we have poor posture. For long time, I had flat back which I didn't even know until I started noticing changes in alignment of my lower back due to continuous practice of Surya Namaskara (Sun Salutation of Sri K Pattabhi Jois).

There are three postural problems that are very common among people.
1. Hunch back (rounded shoulder)
2. Flat back (flat lower back)
3. Sway back(excessive curve in the lower back)

Surya namanskara is the excellent full body work out that corrects all these posture problems effectively.

Please note that you should have complete focus of your mind on your body movement while doing it.