1 Year Yoga Journey: What I’ve learned and why I will continue
/Hello everybody and welcome back to the blog. This week I’d like to touch on something that I’ve been quite enamored with for the past year- yoga. At the beginning of 2018, I made it my resolution to practice yoga every day and to try to learn as much as I could about the practice. It is now more than a year later and I thought I’d take some time to look back on the past year and everything that I’ve learned with the hope of sharing something valuable with you all.
So, in no particular order, here are my most valuable takeaways from the last year of practicing yoga:
I’d be remiss if I didn’t state the role that consistency and patience played in my yoga journey. Making a commitment to myself was the easy part but showing up every single day to push past my comfort zone and into the pain that yoga brings was very challenging. Seeing other yogis float into a handstand or slide gracefully into the splits filled me with mixed feelings of motivation and envy. I wanted so badly to master these skills and I knew that it would take time and hard work on my part to get there. One thing that really helped me was documenting my progress on Instagram because I could look back to see just how far I’d come. In the beginning, the poses were not only difficult but often quite uncomfortable as my body was not used to moving in such a way. Overtime, my body slowly started to give in and the positions became easier and enjoyable. It is now a part of my day that I genuinely look forward to.
The biggest takeaway of this year-long practice is the value in showing up for yourself every single day and dedicating time to improving yourself. Whether that means yoga, exercise, meditation, reading or listening to music, I think it’s really important to do something every day that makes you feel good and helps you find peace.
2. Importance of core strength. As the name suggests, the core is an essential part of our body and affects how we stand, move, sleep, breathe, laugh, and many of our other daily functions. While many associate a strong core with chiseled, washboard abs, I have found over the past year that a strong core goes much beyond the aesthetic. Strengthening your core improves your balance, posture, breathing, and can help to reduce any lower back pain. A strong core is an essential part of an enjoyable yoga practice as it allows you to perform the moves with ease.
One particular area of core strength that I started studying in November of last year is compression. It entails using the strength of your abdominals to pull your upper body down, essentially compressing your upper and lower body together (hence the name ;)). The body needs to recruit this core compression to perform moves such as the pike, the forward fold, crow pose and hanging leg raises. In November, I started implementing core compression exercises into my workouts about four times a week. I have since noticed less discomfort in my back and that I can now perform difficult yoga poses with more ease. If you all are interested in seeing some of said ab exercises, check out the Youtube video I made here.
3. Importance of the breath for stretching deeper and working through the discomfort. A daily yoga practice is a time to focus on the body and push it into unknown and often uncomfortable areas. In order to successfully do this, we must utilize our breath. Beyond yoga, control of one’s breath is incredibly useful for dealing with stressful situations or for detoxifying the body. There are many types of breath work utilized in yoga and I am just beginning to scratch the surface, though if you’re interested in this I wrote a blog on the Wim Hof breathing method that you can read all about here.
4. The body as a complex and sophisticated machine. Though I’ve been working as a personal trainer for a few years, this is one aspect of my work that yoga really helped me to appreciate. In yoga there are absolutely ways to target and strengthen specific muscle groups, though the practice as a whole incorporates the strength of your body as a single unit in order to successfully execute the poses and sequences. That being said, more often than not, the stronger you get in one area, the more your strength develops overall. To me, this means that a daily yoga practice is a fabulous way to develop a well-built and balanced physique.
5. Now I’m becoming a certified yoga teacher! This is something I definitely did not expect to happen but I ended up loving the daily yoga sessions so much that I decided to become certified to teach yoga myself. I’m really looking forward to combining my love of fitness with the ancient and meditative aspects of yoga. If you all would like to see some of the information that I learn in the course (i.e. breathing techniques, yoga sequences, benefits of a pose) please let me know down below or on my instagram because I think it would be great to share :)
Takeaway: it was all so worth it. In order to grow we must challenge ourselves and push past what’s comfortable. Run towards your fear and I promise you it will pay off.
One thing I forgot to mention that I did not embark on this journey blind. Thankfully we live in a time with hundreds of free resources at our fingertips 24/7 which makes it much easier to learn new skills. Two resources I used were Youtube (there are thousands of yoga tutorials and flows on there) and a fitness e-book called The Fit Yogi Trainer by Kenzie Morley. The latter was a wonderful addition to my exercise routine as it combines fitness and yoga. Each day I would complete a short 20 minute workout and follow it with a yoga flow designed to strengthen and stretch the muscles I had just worked out. Since the flows were generally less than 15 minutes it made it easy to keep my commitment to practicing daily.
If you’re looking to pick up a new skill or learn something new, I would highly recommend using the free resources you have around you first. If it’s health or fitness related please know that you don’t need designer clothes or the most state-of-the-art equipment to get into shape, just start by moving your body in a way that challenges you every day and you will progress.
Much love and see you all here next week for another blog post :)
xoxo,
Alexandra