I have a cousin who is a personal trainer. As I drove back to the house, I happened to have called my mother and a family do was going on. My cousin answered. I told him about my goals and what I do, and asked his recommendations for how to structure my strength training. He had one thing to say:
“If you’re not doing yoga, everything else is just wasting your time.“
His reasoning was that you become stronger when you address muscle imbalances, to say nothing of the overall genius of full-body conditioning via yoga. So no matter what else you do, if you’re not adding yoga in there to balance it all out, at least some of the time spent training is futile.
I believed him, and in fact even when my medical professionals had told me (when I had bad bad cholesterol levels in 2006) that I should not be doing *any* physical activity that wasn’t cardio, I still thought yoga was only a good idea.
And then I tried it.
And I realised it was only a bad idea. 🙂 Kidding, kidding, it’s just bloody hard for me.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I have a lot of tone. At rest, doing nothing, adding muscle mass at the gym, I’m ahead of the game in this one. The downfall of this is that stretching feels totally contraindicated, as I’ve mentioned before.
I’ve been trying to do more yoga, as I mentioned in my New Year’s goals post, when Kath briefly made me disgusted with her because she’s mega-bendy. But I got over it, because, oh yeah, I tend to be relatively strong and I have to move soon. I own a lot of books. Strength will be good.
Back when my awesome Norwegian roommate was here, she went around town and found the best yoga there was. It was at a little studio on my street… in the basement of a union building. It didn’t feel like it had an abundance of feng shui, but we went. This one class that we both liked was good—hard, but good.
I hadn’t been back without her. Blah blah blah, I got busy, disintrested, and again re: the feng shui.
Walking around town last week I saw a sign: “Grand Re-Opening at our new location! Come check us out! Free 30-minute yoga classes every 45 minutes!”
That re-opening was on this past Friday night—and what with my craptacular day Thursday, I figured it was a sign from the universe that I go. I ended up chatting too much with everyone to do a class, as they told me “hot yoga! We’ve got hot yoga!” And I said, “well, thanks, I know I don’t want that. Plus, I actually thrive in cold weather workouts…” So they showed me which were “sorta hot” (is there such a thing as “tepid yoga”? 😉 ), and then they told me about the one-night-only sale… so I made a commitment: 21 classes, $200. FIERCE! $9.52 per class? That’s something like half price what I’d get *anywhere* else!!
On Monday, it’s 4 months until I move: that means 12 weeks of 1 class per week, and 4 weeks with 2. Hello, cardigan? You’ll be mine soon! (and if you’re counting, I’m at only 13 workouts, but have been steadily accelerating since I started.)
Well, this morning, I went for my first class in the new space. It was Vinyasa. Not my beloved Ashtanga, but I’ll cope. 😀 Or SO I THOUGHT!
There was a temperature malfunction in the new space. By the end of the class, it was 29°C. Now, if you want that, and if you’re not cheek-to-jowl with a SMELLY MAN, then that’s FAB! And it’s cool by hot yoga standards. But I ended up so nauseated that the “Bird of Paradise” nearly did me in.
I was almost in tears. They assured me it wouldn’t be like that normally, and that I’d acclimatise anyway, if I kept coming back.
So now, I have my reservations. But I’m committed, and at the very least, it won’t kill me.
(source)
It’ll probably make me stronger. Go figure. 😀