Over the last 18 months, many individuals have chopped and changed their exercise regimes. While coming out of the hard lockdown, many took to the outdoors to run or walk. Schedules have changed, where people are now working-from-home, which means that those who enjoyed exercising closer to work, have had to look at alternative solutions. Living within OceanDune, exercising is made hassle-free, where individuals can enjoy a quick run, swim or yoga session just a few steps away from their front door.
Swimming is one of the few forms of exercise which is suitable for all ages. Beyond being a way to keep active, swimming, and time in water has other benefits as well – it can help relieve pain, aid in relaxation, and also help improve cardiovascular health too. Let’s take a look at some of the other reasons why swimming is such a great form of exercise:
Good for joints
If you have any joint issues, or perhaps are recovering from joint surgery then swimming is ideal. Exercising in a pool is great as it is low impact and takes pressure off your joints. You won’t be at risk of putting unnecessary pressure on your joints, but the resistance of the water will enable you to work on joint mobility and to build up strength in the surrounding muscles.
Keeping your cool
Keeping active during warmer months like Summer can be quite uncomfortable, and you need to break more frequently to cool off. It’s a fact that we lose body heat 10% faster in water, so by keeping active in the pool, you won’t overheat.
Forget the equipment
You won’t need much to get the most out of your session in the pool. Moving through water is already more challenging than moving on land as water has natural resistance. If you want to up the ante, you can add ankle, wrist, or waist weights to do so.
Relief from back pain
A lot of people find high-impact exercise puts a lot of pressure on their spine, and many people with back issues will avoid exercise all together. The buoyancy of water helps to take pressure off the body and the spine while still offering the resistance needed to get a good workout.
You can keep it simple
Some people find swimming laps in a pool to be rather repetitive and boring while others enjoy the time to de-compress. The traditional forms of swimming training are great for improving all-round muscle tone, cardiovascular health, and increased blood circulation. You can opt for endurance training by swimming at one pace for an extended period of time or go for something with more intensity like sprints or sets of sprints. You don’t need an Olympic size pool to train for Iron Man or the Midmar mile either- all you need is a solid and consistent training plan.
Maintaining or improving your health and wellness by exercising daily needn’t be costly or complicated, and OceanDune has 2 pools to help you stay fit without having to be a member of a gym.
If there is one thing we’ve taken away from 2020, is the importance of health, wellness and interaction with family and friends. New Year’s resolutions can be dated back over 4000 years ago, and many individuals set various types of goals to meet by the end of the year to enrich themselves in all kinds of ways. Take the time to create a holistic ‘360’ goals to ensure the three main areas of your life are enhanced.
Wellness
Let 2021 be the year that you focus on your health and overall wellness. The benefits of looking after your wellbeing extend to many aspects of your life, including your mental health, physical health and social wellbeing. Cook a new recipe each week; find fresh ingredients and a recipe to challenge your cooking skills and embrace your inner chef to enhance your diet. Take a stroll for your physical wellbeing and explore the natural assets that surround you at OceanDune. Opt to get out at the end of a long day or go for a morning walk. Get in touch with another side of you, whether you’re spiritual or not, find some time to reflect on your days and weeks to get some clarity on life.
Career
This year might just be the year to kickstart or better your career life. We spend more hours at work than we do with our spare time. Look back on the challenges you faced last year and look at how you can enhance these areas and your strengths. Take a few moments to think about what you want to achieve this year by setting a few goals for yourself – own that business idea, challenge your skills at the office or take that hobby to the next level.
Personal
There are many layers to your personal life, from activities you are passionate about to relationships with your friends and family that you can focus on over the course of 2021. What brings joy to your heart? Now go and do more of that! Explore the social side of life and join a club or community, such as a book club or get in touch with community service centres where you can get involved in making a difference to others.
Living at OceanDune helps you achieve these holistic goals by providing you with a close-knit community, access to facilities in a safe environment and is perfectly located to all that you need.
Not only is Durban The World’s Greenest City but it is also one of the world’s most sustainable cities.
We humans are on a constant quest to be happier, to be healthier, to live longer. Snake oil salesmen punting the next best thing are reaping the rewards. As we cover more ground about what it means to live better, we also come to discover how easily attainable it really can be. We don’t need shelves of potions and pills, we need the outdoors, sunshine, time in nature and green spaces.
A recent study conducted in the UK has released a set of guidelines for feeling better, and it advocates 2 hours a day in nature, be it sea, forest or savannah. What was consistent across all the control groups no matter age or income level, is that the benefits, both mentally and physically are evident with both healthy individuals and those with chronic illness reporting greater wellbeing and a general sense of feeling better. The results also revealed that it didn’t matter how the participants divvied up their recommended 2 hours- it could be in one large chunk or spread throughout the day; there also wasn’t a dramatic difference for those who went over the allotted 2 hours either. There are other benefits which cascade as a result from time spent outdoors- people who spend more time outdoors are more likely to engage in physical activity even if it means simply walking.
Findings like this, show us that nature is integral to our wellbeing; something we have ignored for too long but which is now slowly creeping into hallowed science and medical journals. If ‘2-hours-a-day’ is the new ‘apple-a-day’, we need to design not only our lifestyles but our cities and urban spaces to support this, which can be challenging in the concrete jungles of the modern world. In 2016, researches from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in partnership with the World Economic Forum, launched the Treepedia project with Durban ranking 6th out of the list of the top 10. By using data from Google street view, they are able to measure the volume of green space in 27 cities across the globe. Treepedia serves, not only as an index to compare cities in this way, but also to encourage relevant authorities to protect and look after their green urban spaces.
Durban is definitely leading the way in the urban green space revolution with large precincts, like the Sibaya Coastal Precinct, instating a “no-development” ethos in certain portions within its perimeters. Stretching over 1000 hectares between the Umhlanga and Umdloti estuaries, 60% or roughly 600 hectares (or basically 600 international rugby fields) of this precinct will remain undeveloped. In a bid to turn residents into conservation custodians, certain key areas of the “no-development” zone will be accessible to the public. Walkways will move through the protected Sibaya coastal forest to join the precinct to the beach via a network of elevated walkways dotted with bird hides, viewing decks and protected by precinct security.
Our oceans are littered with plastics and our seabeds are awash with what is termed ‘ghost gear’ – lost, abandoned or deliberately discarded fishing gear. Greenpeace just recently released a report which revealed that right now, about 640 000 tonnes, approximately 10% of all ocean waste is ghost gear. This waste ends up in our oceans for a host of reasons, whether it be lost due to bad weather conditions, human error or the expense it takes to retrieve lost gear.
Ghost gear is a serious threat to marine life- sea animals and fish either imbibe, or swallow the stuff or get trapped and tangled in vast kilometres of discarded trawler nets and other related gear which is carried by ocean currents or caught on reefs, wrecks and the sea bed. Sea animals trapped in submerged ghost gear in turn attract other species of marine life, which too, become trapped and this creates a cascade of negative consequences. Ghost gear is a threat to both the largest mammals and smallest life forms which live in our oceans.
Humanity knows that ocean waste is a serious problem, and ghost gear forms part of the larger issue here. It is believed that by 2050, only 30 years from now, there will be more plastic in our oceans than fish- if we had to put a number on it, that would be 937 million tons of plastic. Us humans have, throughout the course of history, waited until the 11th hour to solve the globe’s most serious issues; a sure demonstration that supports the idea that necessity, really is the mother of invention. We are now at the 11th hour, and there are groups of humans all over the globe trying to find ways to put ocean waste to good and practical use.
One of the forerunners in the fight against the scourge is Adidas. Adidas manufactures 400 million pairs of shoes every year; and mass production is a practice damaging our environment. With the clout of a multi-national and vast amounts of cash and resources at its disposal, Adidas has turned a clever trick to bring us the decades most intriguing sneaker- the Parley. This partnership has enabled Adidas to remove 2810 tonnes of plastic from the oceans already. The process starts with the rubbish being collected in coastal areas, sorted and sent to their plastic processing plant to be sorted, crush and compressed into tiny pellets. The second phase sees the plastic pellets spun into polyester yarn with petroleum as an ingredient here. Currently up to 75% of the Adidas Parley collection is made up of this marine waste. By 2021, Adidas hope to have produced the world’s first 100% recyclable shoe, which can be broken down and re-used to make a new pair thus creating a never-ending life cycle for the materials in the shoe.
Locally, the green plastics market is growing. GiLo Lifestyle, a Cape Town fashion brand, is taking plastic bottles from South Africa and beyond and turning it into men’s shorts. This is a huge step in the fight against single-use plastics (think: water bottles) as each pair of shorts is made up of 20 plastic bottles. The shorts themselves are nothing to be sniffed at either; they’re super comfy, dry quickly, are water repellent and have a nifty seamless inner thigh- a surfer’s dream.
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