Massage tips, massage benefits and registered therapeutic massage for your wellbeing.

Relaxing with tea, reading on a yoga staycation

The Benefits of a Wellness Staycation

If you usually feel tired after a vacation due to travel stress or overindulgence, consider a wellness staycation that will leave you feeling healthier, happier, and relaxed!

Mental Focus and Clarity

Wellness staycations allow you to focus on your practice without the distractions of work and rushed agendas. You can pay attention to your own health and well-being at a relaxed pace, and you will meet like-minded people in your community. If you are a complete beginner, a wellness staycation ia great time to try a daily yoga practice and experience its benefits for the body, the mind and the spirit. If you are going to yoga classes regularly but want to learn more, a wellness staycation represents a chance to focus more deeply on your practice.

Daily Yoga Classes

If your normal daily schedule does not leave any time for yoga classes, a wellness staycation becomes a chance to leave routines behind and focus on yoga, relaxation, and well-being. A typical yoga staycation includes a yoga class once a day, with additional classes and workshops as desired. If you are a beginner, a wellness staycation is a great way to try many types of yoga classes quickly, to inform your new yoga practice in a supportive environment. If you are an experienced yogi, you can take your practice to a new level of intensity. There are many benefits to experiencing yoga classes in a group. You soon will notice the benefits of daily yoga practice, and you might be inspired to continue your daily practice on a regular basis.

Massage Therapy

To fully enhance the overall sense of emotional and physical well-being, prioritize registered massage therapy. The benefits of massage therapy are numerous—from reducing anxiety, stress, and muscular tension to increasing lymphatic drainage and joint flexibility. This is a big part of your restorative staycation. Be sure to book ahead to secure your sessions.

Daily Wellness Reading & Meditation

Allow daily quiet time for reading about meditation, relaxation, yoga philosophy, nutrition, and wellness. Add our wellness blog to your reading list to get started. Book a meditation yoga class to inspire your private daily meditation sessions.

Mindful Eating

Plan ahead for healthy meals during your wellness staycations. Allow time to savour and honour the preparation process. Cooking healthy meals can be fun and enjoyable; like yoga, it supports a balanced lifestyle. Smelling, tasting, and feeling the flavours, textures, and colours of food is a great application of mindfulness. Take a moment to feel gratitude for all the various elements that led to this eating moment. A week of healthy and mindful eating may inspire you to make permanent changes in your ongoing dietary habits.

Take a Digital Break

A wellness staycation can also be a break from social media, or it even can be a complete digital detox. A week without constantly checking your phone and your social media accounts gives you time to de-stress, enjoy being fully present, and spend time mindfully in nature.

Try One New Thing

A week-long break from your usual routine provides an opportunity to experience something new and learn something new about yourself. A wellness staycation clears your calendar, giving you time to try something new and gain new perspectives on life and yourself. What activity, skill, group have you secretly wanted to try but didn’t have time to pursue? The creative challenge of stepping gently out of your comfort zone can invigorate your spirit. Also, if you have wanted to change something in your life, a wellness staycation is a chance to make that change.

Plan Your Wellness Staycation

When planning a restorative staycation, ask yourself what your priorities are. Are you looking for a staycation that involves some meditation but also a lot of time for reading, for a personal hobby, for social activities, for being a tourist in your own city of Hamilton, or for relaxing in Hamilton’s nature areas? Would you prefer an intensive week that focuses on yoga classes and workshops, meditation, and yoga philosophy without too many additional activities? Make sure you know what type of staycation you are seeking.

There are many ways to experience a wellness staycation, depending on your personal needs and preferences. A wellness staycation allows you to focus on your wellbeing with like-minded people and without the distractions of daily life. A week of yoga classes, healthy food, meditation, and relaxation will leave you feeling energized and balanced — and you may even want to continue mindful habits after the staycation.

Healing yoga practice and restorative yoga classes increase relaxation.

Looking After Your Health While Living with Hypothyroidism

Massage therapy can be a wonderful and healing part of your routine as you learn to live with Hypothyroidism. Hypothyroidism, also known as an underactive thyroid gland, is a thyroid disease in which the thyroid gland fails to produce an adequate amount of thyroid hormone. It’s an increasingly common condition, affecting more women than men. According to the Thyroid Foundation of Canada, it’s estimated that 1 in ten Canadians suffer from a thyroid condition and half may be undiagnosed.

The Thyroid hormone is responsible for the body’s metabolism and use of energy. Symptoms of an underactive thyroid gland include poor ability to tolerate cold, fatigue, weight gain, and constipation. It’s not known what causes hypothyroidism; it may be caused by a number of conditions including autoimmune disease, radiation, and medications.

In the majority of cases, hypothyroidism is treated by supplementing the thyroid gland with levothyroxine, a synthetic version of the thyroid hormone thyroxine (T4). This medication is typically taken in pill form on a daily basis. In Canada, a common brand name for levothyroxine is Synthroid.

However, many people find that taking a daily dose of levothyroxine isn’t enough to make them feel well, or as well as they did before they developed the condition. If you too find that you’re struggling to remain healthy while living with hypothyroidism, the following may help.

Reduce Stress

It’s especially important that people with hypothyroidism be mindful of any stress they might be exposing themselves to. Cortisol, a hormone released when the body is in a stressful situation, can adversely affect the function of the thyroid gland, in turn exacerbating hypothyroidism symptoms. Take steps to ensure that you’re managing stress as best you can, and if you feel that you’re not coping, then speak to your doctor.

Massage therapy can be a huge source of relaxation and has many additional benefits. For example, hot stone massage therapy is a soothing option. Another example, manual lymphatic drainage is a type of gentle massage which is intended to encourage the natural drainage of the lymph, which carries waste products away from the tissues back toward the heart.

It may be that you can cut back on some tasks or get support from friends or relatives with certain commitments you have. It could be that you just need to slow down. Put your health first and make any changes you feel you need to.

Exercise Right

While hypothyroidism shouldn’t stop you from exercising, you may find that you can no longer maintain the exercise schedule you previously did, or that you now need a lot longer to recover from a workout than you did before you developed hypothyroidism. These scenarios are fairly common for people with an underactive thyroid gland, so it’s important to learn not to push yourself and recognize when you are overdoing your activity. If you’re struggling to stick with an exercise regimen, consider switching from any high-intensity workouts to activities such as aqua aerobics or yoga. The benefits of yoga are many and the various types of yoga classes provide something for everyone. For example, Gentle Hatha yoga classes focus on breathing, basic poses, slow movements, and relaxation to enhance the awareness of the mind-body connection. Yin yoga classes involve passive poses that are held for up to five minutes in order to encourage the softening of connective tissue and induce deep relaxation. These types of activities will still provide a beneficial workout but will be less stressful on your body.

It’s important to continue exercising and remaining active. As well as the physical benefits you will gain, keeping physically fit in group classes can help you avoid feelings of depression, another common symptom of hypothyroidism.

Gluten-Free Diet

Although there’s currently no scientific evidence to prove a gluten-free diet will help those with hypothyroidism, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest it might. This is especially true if you suffer from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, also called Hashimoto’s disease, autoimmune disease and a common cause of hypothyroidism. With Hashimoto’s disease, the body’s immune system attacks the thyroid gland. The anecdotal evidence suggests that gluten triggers an attack on the thyroid gland; therefore, eliminating gluten from your diet may prevent such attacks.

Further anecdotal evidence has linked an immune intolerance in people with Hashimoto’s disease to dairy products. Again, it’s believed the body may mistake dairy for gluten, which triggers an attack on the thyroid gland.

If you’re failing to see improvements in your health while taking the medication prescribed by your doctor and are prepared to make modifications to your diet, with approval from your doctor, you may want to start by eliminating gluten or dairy, or both, from your diet.

Moderate Carbohydrate Diet

While a gluten- and dairy-free diet may help alleviate hypothyroidism symptoms, there is evidence to suggest that those with hypothyroidism should avoid a diet too low in carbohydrates. This is because insulin is needed to convert inactive T4 (which is what the thyroid gland produces) into active T3 (which is what the body’s cells use), and the production of insulin is generally low on a very low carbohydrate diet. Furthermore, restricting the intake of carbohydrates can cause a drop in blood sugar, which the body compensates for by producing an excess of stress hormones including adrenaline. The thyroid gland is needed for the production of stress hormones, so this process can be taxing on the thyroid gland. So you may want to check that you’re including a moderate amount of healthy carbohydrates in your diet if you don’t feel your health is as good as it could be.

Don’t look at hypothyroidism as preventing you from living the life you used to enjoy before your diagnosis. Massage therapy and activity can be a part of your new lifestyle. All that’s needed are a few changes so that you can better manage your condition, and you’ll be more than able to continue to enjoy life and get the most from it.

Woman trying to reduce back pain

Reduce Back Pain with Massage and Simple Lifestyle Changes

Eight out of every 10 people will experience back pain at some point in their lives. An estimated one in three sufferers finds the symptoms severe enough to affect their daily lives, including interfering with work. These figures come as no surprise, as back problems are more or less an accepted part of modern life. Working to reduce back pain is a necessary part of personal care.

What’s perhaps more surprising is that nearly nine in 10 sufferers never discover the primary cause of their condition, which makes it almost impossible to find a suitable cure. For the vast majority of patients, reducing back pain is all about the reduction of symptoms, allowing you to lead as normal a life as possible while your body works to heal itself. This article will give you helpful steps to reduce back pain.

Here’s how to do that with some simple lifestyle changes that don’t require medical intervention.

1. Light Exercise

When you’re stricken with painful back spasms, exercise of any kind may not feel like the right thing to do. However, staying active as long as possible is one of the best ways to counteract the symptoms of chronic backache. Light exercise, such as walking or swimming will strengthen your muscles, tendons, and ligaments to help support your spine in a natural way.

It’s important not to exercise your way through acute pain, as you don’t want to risk further damage. Make use of relatively pain-free periods to tone your back and reduce the recurrence of symptoms in the future.

2. Pain Management

Sometimes your back pain will feel debilitating regardless of what measures you take to control it. In these situations, soothing the discomfort is important. Pain and stiffness can quickly become a vicious circle where you’re too tense from the pain and immobile from the stiffness to release the spasms. Medication is often the only option here. When taking medication for pain, be careful that you’re not simply masking the symptoms and making them worse by moving when you should be resting.

For a more natural treatment, try alternating between hot water bottles and ice packs, pressing them into the painful area for ten minutes each whenever the discomfort becomes too great. Try relaxing in warm Epsom salt baths to ease muscle pain. A Registered Massage Therapist can also work wonders (Try Evolve’s Registered Massage and Hot Stone Massage therapy sessions.). Some people find that acupuncture and chiropractic therapy offers relief. Try a variety of therapies that won’t further aggravate your condition until you find what works for you.

3. Relaxation

Lastly, trying to relax as much as possible is important although naturally, this is difficult when you’re in pain. Tension, stress, and anxiety all tighten your neck and shoulders, putting extra strain on your back. This can cause you to tense up, further exacerbating the problem. Yoga, meditation, aromatherapy, breathing exercises, and other relaxation techniques can all be of great help during a painful episode.

4. Pay Attention to Posture

Light exercise will help to improve your posture, but it’s also important to be mindful of how you’re sitting and standing throughout the day. Try to avoid putting your back under too much strain. If you feel yourself slouching or bending, try pushing your shoulders outward and backward to gently move your spine into a straighter position.

For more tips on how to stretch to reduce neck stress, click here.

5. Take Care with Sitting

More than half of people with backache symptoms report that they spend the majority of their day sitting down with poor sitting habits often playing a major role in the worsening of symptoms. If you spend your working days at a desk, it makes sense to invest in an ergonomic office chair to provide proper support for your back. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible. It’s important, however, to always choose a solid chair that’s not too soft and giving and that supports your lumbar region.

It’s essential to make sure your chair is properly adjusted for height; your arms and thighs should be in a right angle position when sitting comfortably at your desk with your hands on your keyboard or desktop. Try keeping your shoulders relaxed yet upright and remember to get up from your desk and walk a few steps at least once an hour to reduce muscle cramping.

6. Sleeping

Back pain sufferers need to sleep like anyone else, but spending up to eight hours a night in a soft or lumpy bed isn’t ideal for the lumbar region. Your mattress should be reasonably firm so your body doesn’t sink into it and you should try to sleep on your back, which is the best position for relieving back pain. Although it may be relaxing to read in bed before sleep, this habit is particularly bad for your posture, so try to do your late-night reading in a comfortable armchair instead.

7. Slim Down a Little

There’s no need to panic about carrying a few extra pounds, but being overweight will put extra strain on your back. Making the effort to shed even a little extra weight will help. If you’re already suffering from back problems, the extra misery of a crash diet is probably not the answer. By bringing the yoga mindset into your eating routine, you can transform your body into its healthiest version.

8. Quit Smoking

If you smoke, you’re probably already well aware of the many good reasons to kick the habit. However, you may not know that smoking can also contribute to backache among all the other health problems it causes. Not only can smoking cause degeneration in the spinal discs, but every bout of coughing places extra strain on your back and can quickly lead to spasms when you already have a weakness.

9. Comfortable Footwear

Poorly fitting footwear that makes it difficult to balance will eventually create problems, such as back spasms and back pain. Specially made orthopedic shoes can be extremely helpful, but even padded insoles can help correct poor walking posture. Avoid high heels whenever possible. If you must wear them, switch to flats when you can, i.e. when you’re sitting at your work desk.

Back pain can quickly make life a misery. Surgical treatments are to be considered if no primary cause can be found, but they are a gamble at best. Thankfully, making these simple lifestyle changes can reduce back problems to a level where they don’t interfere too much with daily life, allowing your body the chance to heal naturally.

Our Top Tips on How You Can Sleep Well

Have you ever imagined how good it would be if you didn’t need sleep at all and could just use the 24 hours in a day as you wish? We all know how we feel after a late night or a light and interrupted sleep! The reality is that deep and uninterrupted sleep helps us make better decisions, be more efficient and feel happier during the day.

Stick to a Regular Sleeping Pattern

One way to improve your sleep habits is by going to sleep and waking up at around the same hour each day. The amount of sleep required can vary by the individual and it can change throughout your life. Generally, it is recommended that you get six to eight hours of sleep every night. You might find it difficult to respect your sleeping hours each night, but getting your body used to a routine will help you calibrate your inner clock. You will soon notice that falling asleep and waking up gets easier over time.

Exercise Every Day to Help You Sleep Well

What you do during the day inevitably will affect your sleep pattern. Exercising each day, even for a little bit, will help you use your energy productively and sleep well at night. Yoga is wonderful for you because not only does it tone your body and add strength, it also teaches you how to focus on the present, connect to your mind and practice calmness. Include at least a few yoga poses in your daily routine and you will notice the difference.

Create Your Own Wind-down Ritual at Bedtime

Switching from daily activities to a more peaceful state of mind before going to bed is crucial, especially if you have trouble falling asleep. Many of us use our smartphones to browse social sites before going to sleep. This habit is counterproductive; it engages your mind and doesn’t allow you to switch to sleep mode. Turn off all screens (phone, tablet, TV, etc.) a couple of hours before bed. Consider reading a book or listening to calm, serene music instead.

Evening Yoga Techniques that Help You Sleep Well

Practicing yoga helps your body in many ways, but you also may be surprised to see how much it helps you sleep. Adding a yoga practice to your evening wind-down ritual will help you channel your energy into the present, by releasing the rush and stress of the day. One of the most effective ways to fall asleep is a yoga asana called the corpse pose, which commonly is used to end yoga class. Lie in a comfortable position and start relaxing all of your muscles. Start with your toes, move through your legs and arms, then all the way to your neck and head. Regulate your breathing by inhaling more slowly and deeply. You will notice how your body is preparing to go to sleep.

Finding your Peace

These are only a few basic guidelines you can use to start regulating your sleep routine. Once you have a regular sleeping pattern and learn basic breathing techniques, you can experiment further with yoga. (Learn yoga in a group class. Once you become familiar with the movements and techniques, you will be more confident to use them at home.) There are many poses that will relax your body and mind and get rid of the day’s clutter and tension. Yoga nidra is a technique you may also want to learn. It is meditation that helps you achieve a deep state of peacefulness and joy.

Massage can also play a part in your overall state of mind and body. From relaxation to pain reduction, therapeutic massage can help you ease into your dreams.

If you have sleeping problems, especially stress-related ones, invest in yourself. Mindfulness, yoga, and massage are healthy, natural, and fulfilling ways to find your inner peace and sleep well.