This past weekend, I did something I've never done before - attended a yoga workshop! 

Above is a group picture of our Friday night class.

The workshop was given by two local yoga studios: Argenta Healing Arts and YogaYou (in Cabot).

The instructor was the guy pictured in the middle above, Adam Ballenger, who flew in from Salt Lake City!

I dragged along a friend of mine who regularly does yoga with me at our gym - Rachel - seated to my right in the picture. Thanks, Rachel!

I've been doing yoga for about 10 years now, and I love it. I love the quietness of it, the strength of it, the way you push your own body to new places, and how those places may be different every day.  I love that it stretches out muscles and aligns your spine and makes you breathe deeply and steadily. I love that it gives you opportunities to discover what your body can do - whether that means twisting in a pose you've never done, holding a pose longer than you thought possible, and sometimes balancing in bizarre positions for several breath cycles. I love that something so different from running or lifting weights can so strengthen and shape your muscles. And when you do run and lift weights, there is nothing so good for your body as stretching it all back out. Mmmm!

Here, Adam used me to demonstrate one way to work into a hand stand. You start out in Downward-Facing Dog (aka Down Dog) and then walk your legs up the wall. One main difference is that you shift your body weight over your arms, aligning your shoulders up with your wrists and supporting your spine. You squeeze the muscles a little below your shoulder blades while softening up your neck. And then you hold that with your back arched. I had to hold that pose FOREVER while he talked everyone through it. My arms were ready to collapse!

A different view of the demonstration.

If you don't know much about yoga, it's basically a series of poses, called asanas, that flow into each other and become vinyasas. There is nothing loose or floppy about the asanas. They are all precise movements in which you concentrate on stretching muscles away from each other, towards each other, lengthening, broadening, scooping, pulling in of your core...it often looks so serene and even sounds serene as everyone is working very hard to breathe easily...but your mind is often racing through a mental checklist to make sure your body is aligned safely and strongly.

In the above picture, everyone is preparing to move from Down Dog into another asana. Yoga is all about balance...not just balancing on one arm or leg, but also doing the same movements to the left and right side. So you move slowly through the different poses one side at a time. Usually you incorporate a series of poses (vinyasas) beginning and ending with Sun Salutations - a very common vinyasa that lets your body recover between positions.  So what you see above is Adam calling out "lift your right leg and then swing it through into a low lunge". That usually leads to Warrior 1, Warrior 2 or some other lunge posture. Yoga is GREAT for your legs simply because you always come back to a lunge of some sort. 

Actually, yoga is great for all parts of your body!