Five minutes? There is nothing to talk about! Well, who would be able to find this time in his/her rich biography and spend it in such a boring way as maintaining a healthy lifestyle?! However, that’s the whole charm about it: any of the recreational activities mentioned below will require less than the stated 5 minutes!
1. Walk down the stairs instead of going upstairs
In magazines, some optimistic athletes recommend the readers to abandon the elevator and go upstairs to the desired floor. However, no prize in the form of a healthy heart and a slim figure will make a normal person creep upstairs every day. It is boring, long, and tedious. But few people know that running downstairs is almost as useful: in this case, there is a quite decent load on the muscles and blood vessels. Well, most importantly, it is funnier and easier to do this. Another trick is to sometimes let yourself go downstairs backwards. Except the risk of injuring your head and earning the reputation of a weird guy among your neighbours, you will also give a pretty good load to the muscles that are usually half-idle, namely the hamstring and the lower back.
2. Write the alphabet with a pencil clamped between your teeth
The neck of a person who has come in symbiosis with the computer begins to suffer greatly from a pretty miserable existence. And occasionally it demonstrates dissatisfaction: you get pain in the shoulder muscles and miserable crunching each time you turn your head. This eventually prevents you from writing in blogs, shooting monsters and performing other important duties at work. If you want your neck to feel nice, do the following exercise at least once every day: hold a pencil in your teeth and write the entire alphabet from A to Z in front of you in the air. The cervical spine is sure to be delighted. However, the Chinese people will have to sweat a lot with their minimum compulsory education of 10,000 hieroglyphic signs.
3. Rinse your mouth with salty sea water
Buy sea salt powder or granules. Every morning or evening, pour a tablespoon in a glass of warm water and rinse your throat with the solution. Teeth, tonsils and nasal membranes will get ecstatic: caries, tonsillitis and acute respiratory diseases will find it much more difficult to attack them. But at the same time, you should not rinse your nose with salt water like the Hindus people do, even though their hygienic practices are now taken into consideration in Europe. Inhaling water in the nose without adequate practice in childhood, it is very easy to drive this water to the ears, where it will stay for a long time, leading to otitis, especially since the climate you have is not an Indian one.
4. Stop breathing until you get bored
Many people think that breathing exercises are made to inhale more oxygen. In fact, the opposite is true: during these exercises, it is better not to breathe. Any cell primarily needs load and limitation. According to late doctor Amosov, breathing exercises should block the access of oxygen to cells to see how they will find the way out. Inhale, then exhale all the air from the lungs and try not to breathe. When you are very, very tired doing this, have some rest and repeat the procedure. Try to hold your breath for at least three minutes – with regular practice, you will succeed easily. And remember: the world record set by diver Gianluca Genoni is 18 minutes and 3 seconds. So you have a long way to go.
5. Eat a raw carrot, a turnip, an apple or a cabbage leaf
You cannot imagine how many people at the age of 30 are proud owners of the beginning hemorrhoids – varicose veins in the rectum or anus. For your information, in the developed countries the number of such people reaches 40%! And every birthday of yours will increase the risk of having to pay with blood for the neglect of fibre in the form of vegetables, fruits, cereals and rye bread.
6. Stand on all fours and arch your back as much as possible
This is an incredibly useful exercise which should be performed in a room with curtained windows and a barricaded door. Get on your knees, bend the back as much as possible and make smooth circular movements with your pelvis – up and down, left and right – for two minutes. As a reward for this humiliation, you will soon get a healthy lower back, which will not cause any discomfort when you try to get to the top or bottom shelves of your wardrobe to find something interesting there.
7. Before going to sleep, pour cold water on your feet up to the knees
One minute would be enough to perform this action. Firstly, this will help you fall asleep faster and deeper; secondly, you will pay due attention to the veins of your lower extremities; and thirdly, you will get strong and healthy just as the fanatic who pours cold water over his whole body every day and then wonders why he often catches a cold.
8. Twist and warp everything
Surprise your colleagues or family members. Take the most uncomfortable position for you: hunch, strain and warp everything possible: your back, legs, arms, neck, lips, fingers. And so you need to try to make every muscle in your body get angry and ask, “What are you doing?!” If your feelings are weird, it means you have involved “lazy” muscle fibres. In fact, they usually live quietly in your body, burdening you with almost nothing. They need to hold on for a minute in such a way. Next time, try not to repeat the already practised position because this shortened version of Pilates encourages absolutely different muscles, joints and ligaments to get static load.
9. Lean with your back against a wall, trying to press both shoulders to it
Now, staying in this rectified position, get away from the wall, take a heavy book, put it on your head and try to sit down ten times so that the source of knowledge does not fall on the floor. Ironically, even such a simple exercise will have an unpretentious small, but positive effect on your posture, which is so important for an undisturbed existence of the spine.
10. Eat with the help of the skin
You’re probably used to thinking that nature has entrusted you only with the mouth to eat. Meanwhile, your skin is also able to devour almost anything. If you apply honey on your face and arms and give it 3-4 minutes to get absorbed before you take a shower, your dear skin will absorb a very decent amount of more than forty kinds of vitamins and trace elements, which typically do not reach the skin. Digestion is a traditional witty process, which is not always most effective in terms of consuming many useful, but easily decomposed substances that are almost always a scarce commodity for your body because of the abundance of hydrochloric acid in the stomach.
11. Close your eyes
A perfect holiday for our eyes would be to give them the opportunity to see nothing. Nothing! Alas, our eyelids are too thin and cannot serve as dark curtains for the eyes. They cannot cope with bright light and images. Moreover, the brain does not give our eyes any rest even in the dark and forces us to look at points, stripes, and spirals. However, you can still try to give your eyes a few minutes of this holiday by means of fraud. We need to close our eyes and put a hand on the forehead in such a way that it should cover the eyes without touching the eyelids. Wait until all sorts of different wild patterns stop blazing in your eyes and try to imagine that you are looking at black velvet. This velvet is very, very black; it reflects no light and has no bright glowing hairs, which now and then prevent you from concentrating on the contemplation of perfect darkness. After a couple of minutes you will finally make sure that the exercise does not work, but now you can look at the computer again: your eyes are more or less rested.
12. Drink lemon juice
A microbicide is a crime against microbes that have settled in your body. But do not worry too much: many of them are still pathogenic and do not deserve a better fate. To make this massacre, it is enough to squeeze the juice of one lemon into a glass of cold water and drink it. We do not talk about the amount of vitamin C that you will get – you know this perfectly well. More important is the ability of fresh lemon juice to support the weakening immune system with its microbicidal effect. However, if you have decided to become a father, you should refrain from the drink until conception occurs. According to the researchers from the University of Melbourne, lemon juice lowers the concentration of active sperm.
13. Pinch your ears regularly
If to rely on Eastern medicine, our ear lobes have 11 “lunar spots”, which are directly responsible for the livelihood of 11 organs: our heart, eyes, penis, teeth, liver and so on. Massaging the ears was considered a great way to combat male impotence and female frigidity. However, modern medicine is always happy to refute all sorts of primeval superstitions. According to doctors, they do not want to know anything about lunar spots, but there are several large clusters of nerve endings on earlobes and so they are marked by very high sensitivity and the ability to transmit signals to the brain, especially the dorsal one, very actively. Thus, active massaging of the earlobe (it involves fairly vigorous tingling) has a very strong tonic and analgesic effects. Now, you can believe either the Chinese or the Europeans; the main thing is not to forget to regularly pinch your ears.
14. Take absorbents
If you are not indifferent to alcohol and drink it regularly, take 6-7 absorbent pills once a week (and in case of hangover). Absorbents effectively remove all kinds of toxic substances, contained in alcoholic beverages, from the gastrointestinal tract. In addition, they are able to absorb heavy metals, poisons and plant toxins, secreted by various bacteria. Unfortunately, this great cleanser cannot be taken too often because an absorbent binds and absorbs not only harmful but also helpful substances from your body.
