Now that I’ve had a full four week run at experimenting with yoga, what are my thoughts? My key takeaways from the experience fall into a few categories. Health and fitness benefits, social benefits and the impact of coaching on getting better.
Health Benefits
Flexibility was always felt out of reach for me…see what I did there?
Saying that yoga has some great health benefits may seem obvious to some and questionable to others. For me personally, I found great benefits in recognizing imbalances on each side of my body and as already mentioned flexibility. The focus on holding poses for building muscle strength was interesting as well, as my background in conditioning was always very lifting oriented. Whenever a hold type exercise was on the agenda, I struggled with things like wall sits, but now I definitely see the impact after
The biggest takeaway I learned about my body by far was finding imbalances that I don’t think I would’ve noticed otherwise. There are a few spots, but especially in my hips that my right side feels much stronger and more capable. I experienced this with a number of poses that I was able to find easily on my right side, but as soon as weight shifted over, I struggled to maintain it. I hope to use this knowledge to try and correct these imbalances to the best of my ability.
If you’ve read any of my posts for this trial, I’m sure you’ve read me mention the benefits I’ve seen in the regular stretching yoga required of me, so I won’t bore anyone too much. In addition to stretches, the actual workout element of some poses was pretty intense. Shifting body weight into a shoulder stand can be brutal on the shoulders and back muscles, and be a damned good workout.
Social Benefits of Yoga
There is a huge community of yoga enthusiasts out there. Nearly every class I went to was packed from wall to wall with other students. If you are looking for a community of very welcoming and kind people, I definitely recommend checking out a class. Anyone who has participated in a class can likely reassure this point.
There will clearly be differences ranging from geography down to specific instructors, but I really do think the community deserves a highlight. If you’re not able to join a class, there is a great presence online as well. For the first two weeks, I followed along with a completely free program on YouTube and that was one series of hundreds of videos on the channel.
Benefits of Having a Coach
It may sound self-explanatory, and I suppose I didn’t really know what I had until it was gone, but the influence of a coach is extraordinary. As an athlete for most of my schooling years, I had many coaches throughout my life and I would easily say most of them had a huge impact on who I’ve become as a person. After graduating college, I no longer had a coach, yet it wasn’t until this point that I actually realized how beneficial having a coach is. A coach serves a number of roles including holding you liable, constructing a program for you to follow and adviser on a number of decisions, in and outside of their area of expertise.
When I decided to go to an actual studio, it made a huge difference in my practice. Having someone around to help ensure I was doing a pose correctly was worlds different than standing in my living room, assuming (hoping) I was doing it right. I remember one day, in particular, I was holding a pose, and the instructor walked up and slightly adjusted the way my hips were facing and I felt on a different level. Likely seeing the expression on my face change from relaxed to “Oh shit!” She simply said something along the lines of, “see how much more you feel that.”
What I’m Doing Next
I hope you enjoyed following along my journey so far and would love to hear if you gave yoga a try at all. Leave a comment below or hit me up on twitter.
Now for my next trial. It was slightly inspired by waking up extra early to make some classes before leaving for work, crafting a morning routine. Creating a good morning routine is something I’ve tried from time to time, but haven’t fully gotten one down yet. I fall in and out of different routines, and right now it pretty much consists of reading a quick page from The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and making my bed. Finally biking over to work to start my day for real. I want to try new activities and see what their impact is. I came up with the following buckets of tasks to do each morning. I plan to do something that falls into each of the following each morning: physical priming, mental priming, and achieving the first win of the day before leaving for work. I’ll go a bit more into detail in a future post, but to generalize: Physical priming will be a brief 5-10 minutes of exercise to wake up the body. Mental priming will be waking up the mind thru different practices like journaling, meditating or reading. The first win of the day involves accomplishing a task of some sort. Could be progress on a project, hobby or as simple as making one’s bed.
I hope you’re looking forward to this next trial as much as I am. If you want to join in, let me know and I’ll be sure to give you a big shout out in the next post!
Trying Out Before Buying In 