The Fitness journey

Sometimes it just feels great to start the day with a good workout. That being said, springing out of bed and hammering out a session of Plyometrics can be a tall order. If this scenario sounds familiar, you might want to consider a little morning yoga—a workout that increases energy, performance, mental clarity, strength, and flexibility. Furthermore, doing yoga has all kinds of other benefits: it can help strengthen the immune system, improve digestion, and ease anxiety.

So let’s take a look at some of the reasons a few vinyasas can do you a world of good!

1. Yoga offers options for your changing day-to-day workout needs

Luckily, there are tons of options when it comes to choosing your morning yoga routine. You can opt for a high-impact or core-focused sequence to build heat and energy, or select a slow-flow video to warm up your muscles and lubricate your joints. You can pay attention to stretching your tight hamstrings in Downward-Facing Dog, or work on strengthening your quadriceps using Warrior II or Chair Pose. One of the primary benefits of doing yoga first thing in the morning is that it can help warm up your body after it’s been at rest. At the same time, those tight, sore muscles might be a little more vulnerable at this point, so check in with your body to get a feeling for its injuries and limitations.

2. Yoga can help you detoxify and recover from the weekend!

These days, a lot of yoga is geared around the theme of detoxification, as depicted in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where a heartbroken Jason Segel attends a yoga class. His teacher, played by Kristen Wiig, urges him to “sweat it out, sweat out all the toxins,” as he’s desperately struggling in Downward-Facing Dog.

The reasons yoga aids in detoxification are complex and interesting. When you lengthen and stretch your muscles (as well as contract the opposing muscles), you’re increasing the function and flow of your lymphatic system. This means that stretching your muscles can help you fight infection and aid your body’s removal of toxic waste. After a twisting posture, your internal organs experience a flow of more oxygenated blood, resulting in better function of your organs and more energy throughout the body. So if you had a “big” weekend and you’re feeling a little seedy first thing in the morning, consider a good toxin-purgin’ sweat. Maybe Monday should be Yogaday!

3. Yoga is about helping clear, focus, and ultimately free your mind

Early writings about yoga define it as having control over the fluctuations of the mind. I like to use the term “monkey mind,” which is the state when your thoughts seem to be jumping around in all directions. The focus on breath and action in yoga increases mental clarity and focus. If you have a tendency to lose your keys or forget files on the kitchen counter when you’re on your way to work in the morning, a focused and intense yoga routine can help organize your thoughts. Yoga can help you get out the door on time, keys in hand.

4. Yoga can be prescribed to help manage pain

Doctors often suggest yoga as an aid for patients who suffer from joint pain, inflammation, and arthritis. A 2010 study in the journal Pain showed that the practice of yoga can also potentially counteract some of the symptoms of fibromyalgia. Because yoga works out the whole body, it can help strengthen the muscles around the spine, which can help relieve pain and ease compression, particularly when it comes to the lower back, as demonstrated in a 2005 study published in The Annals of Internal Medicine. Spinal disks, which are very vulnerable to herniation or compression, can benefit greatly from increased freedom of movement. Doing yoga just once or twice a week can help your back become more supple and flexible. Yoga can be a great way to alleviate the pain of an aching lower back, a symptom many people experience first thing in the morning, after having not moved for 8 to 10 hours.

5. Yoga can help your recovery process after injury

If you’ve lived an active life, odds are you’ve sustained an injury or two at some point, the symptoms of which can return from time to time. I suffered a hamstring injury a while back, and if I don’t stretch regularly, I find that my hamstring can tighten up or become tender. After having injured any muscle or tendon, strengthening and lengthening are an important part of recovery and rehabilitation. Also, overuse injuries, like carpal tunnel syndrome, can be painful and debilitating, and Plank Pose and Dolphin Pose are great ways to strengthen muscles in your forearms to help support your wrists.

6. Yoga can help teach techniques for self-actualization

Phil Jackson successfully coached the L.A. Lakers to five NBA titles, helping a group of hostile players transform themselves into a well-structured and highly communicative team. The secret to Jackson’s success earned him the nickname “Zen Master.” His coaching methods have always emphasized teaching tools for self-actualization, which can often lead to success: meditation, breathing, visualization, and the ability to “live in the moment.” You can apply the visualization and meditation techniques embraced by the Lakers and their coach to your own yoga practice by focusing on controlling your breath while ignoring the temptation to leave the present or let your mind wander. It’s a great way to lend focus and calm to the start of your busy, potentially stressful workday.

If you’d like to add visualization and meditation to your yoga routine, a great way to begin is simply to sit on your mat, close your eyes, and set an intention. Your intention could be a feeling you wish to generate by meditating, or a theme that can help motivate personal success during the rest of your day. For example, I like to set the intention for stability. The visualization that I apply is the image of a tree. Once I grasp the image or sense of stability by imagining a large oak tree, I try to embody that feeling by imagining growing roots and planting them in the earth. The result of this meditation leaves me feeling confident, focused, and in control. Yoga Booty Ballet® Pure and Simple Yoga is a great example of an intention-based yoga routine.

Now that you know you can turn to yoga for a boost of energy and more, it’s definitely worth fitting into your routine.

6 Reasons yoga is fantastic for guys!

By Denis Faye (World renowned yoga instructor)

All right, gentlemen—how often have you been in this situation? It’s Thursday afternoon and you got off work a little early. It’s been a stressful week and you could use a good sweat. You try to get a few friends together for some hoops, but no luck, so you pop in a P90X® workout.

Which one do you pick? I’m betting most of you went for Shoulders & Arms or Chest & Back. A couple of you iconoclasts might have slid Plyometrics into the DVD player. But odds are none of you picked Yoga X. And why not? Well, despite the fact that Yoga X features Tony Horton, the most manly of all manly men, and despite the fact that it’s a gruelingly difficult 90 minutes, when presented with this ancient practice, most men choose to listen to their inner caveman and come to the same conclusion: Yoga is for girls.

And that’s just sad, because the truth is that yoga probably has more to offer the typical brute-force-lovin’, emotion-repressin’, stretch-avoidin’, pain-ignorin’ American male than it does to any other human being on the planet. Here’s why …

Women dig guys who do yoga

If you’ve seen the Mel Gibson film What Women Want, you know that the first thing Mel does when he gets the power to read women’s minds is hit the yoga studio. Yoga has its own language, and if you speak that language fluently, you’re in. Next time you’re at a party and you overhear three babes talking about their yoga preferences, slide in with, “Normally, I prefer hatha, but sometimes I do a little kundalini, you know, just to take off the edge.” You just got yourself three dates. I guarantee it.

Yoga works your stabilizer muscles

Basically, we have two kinds of muscles, big ones that move you around and smaller ones that keep the big ones from moving the wrong way and injuring you. These smaller ones are called stabilizer muscles. They aren’t as sexy to look at as your pecs, your abs, or your biceps, but they’re just as important. While yoga may not necessarily give you huge guns, it’ll strengthen the stabilizer muscles that’ll make sure you don’t injure yourself while you’re doing the heavy lifting to earn yourself those guns.

You can do yoga whenever

Most physical activities call for certain conditions. Basketball requires other players. Surfing requires waves. Skiing requires snow. Lifting requires 48 hours between workouts. Yoga, however, only requires a little free space and some comfortable clothing. That’s it. It’s the ideal filler exercise when you don’t have the personnel, environment, materials, or time you need to do something else.

Yoga promotes body awareness

One of the main things new yoga practitioners, both men and women, complain about is the fact that yoga is booooo-ring. When you first start, this may be true, but if you stick with it, things’ll change. With other activities, you’re forced to pay attention to what’s happening around you. With yoga, the trick is to stop looking for those external stimuli and start looking internally. I’m not talking about the whole hippie spiritual thing; I’m talking about feeling how your body is reacting to the poses. This increased body awareness can translate to a more intuitive ability to improve in other physical pursuits, as well as a heightened awareness of what’s happening internally when you incur a sports-related injury. With a little time, you might even be able to work toward lessening the effect of such damage before it even has a chance to happen.

Yoga builds your stamina

If you own the P90X ONE on ONE® yoga DVD Fountain of Youth, you’re probably familiar with one particularly painful sequence in which Tony appears to forget he is in chair pose as he gabs away with Mason for what seems like hours. As they chat, you’re forced to wince, swear, and do your best to breathe into the pain. I hate Tony at that point, yet I love him in the long run for helping build my stamina. For me, stamina lessons learned with yoga make the paddle out to the lineup so much easier when I’m surfing. It has similar benefits across almost all other sports. “Basketball is an endurance sport, and you have to learn to control your breath,” explains legendary player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “That’s the essence of yoga too.”

Yoga increases focus

This combination of body awareness and stamina reap a third benefit: increased concentration. This is especially useful for you athletes out there, given that concentration is the ultimate guard against smack talk. Basketballers, golfers, and soccer players alike love to drop the occasional well-placed put-down in the middle of that crucial shot. Try mastering the Warrior III pose, which requires you to extend both hands and one foot while balancing on the other foot flawlessly for 60 seconds. The Zen state you achieve doing that will help ensure that those pithy little playing-field put-downs bounce right off you. Now that you’ve learned more about yoga, you may be concerned because the whole it-makes-you-more-manly-and-attractive thing seems like it’s being diluted by the whole sensitive-self-aware-lover-boy thing—which may not be quite what you were shooting for when you started up with P90X in the first place. But the truth is, yoga can be as tough, demanding, and punishing as any other physical activity out there. It’s a win-win. So unroll that mat and pretzel up. As Tony Horton once said to me, “You coming to yoga with us, dude? You know you need it.”

Note: I will add my yoga routines soon on another page