Yoga Is Not Just For The Flexible

Sure, yoga is helpful to stretch and lengthen our muscles, but there’s a lot more that’s part of a yoga practice.

In the yoga poses there is muscle engagement so that you’re stable and achieving healthy flexibility. Muscle engagement is important to keep ourselves safe from injury. Certain bendy poses might look very acrobatic and flexible, but it requires a lot of muscle strength as well.

Strength

In this week’s class we’ll go through strengthening poses for every part of the body. Followed by full body yoga stretches. It’s a complete work-out with a warm up and proper cool down. To tone and strengthen, the cool-down part is also very important to lengthen the muscles and prevent soreness.

The warm-up

We’ll start warming up our spine with a seated cat-cow exercise and at the same time synchronizing breath with movement. Connecting breath with movement, is what makes this yoga work-out different from other forms of physical exercise. The breath will help maintain focus and optimizes our work-out.

We will also do shoulder rolls and a wrist warm up since we will be on all fours and in plank poses.

From a seated warm up we’ll be moving on to all fours, get ready for the burn!

Embrace the burn!

Dancing cat exercise: lots of good things happening here! As our spine start to warm up, our core gets a nice work-out and to top it off, we’ll be balancing with opposite arm and leg lifted! If you loose balance, just smile and come back to your pose! Have fun with it!

Then we’ll turn things around…

Reversed Table Top for toning our arms: arm drops/elbow bends for triceps, remember to keep breathing and no cheating: don’t just drop your bum, but really bend your elbows for the full effect!

If you feel like a challenge you can try Reversed Plank Pose: a great full body strengthening pose! 

A work-out wouldn’t be a work-out without some core work. I’ll admit that I always dread doing any abdominal muscle work-outs. But we’re in this boat together…

Join me in Boat Pose for our abs: I’ll show you different options and variations so you can personalize it.

Now that we’ve ignited the burn let’s keep it up with plank poses.. Oh yes, get ready, we’ll do all kinds of variations! Remember to always keep breathing and that all the effort will pay off!

We’ll finish our work-out with different stretches to gently cool down. 

This yoga work-out can be done a few times a week and is great to do in the morning!