Getting Strong with Yoga

Yoga is regarded among the best exercises in the world because of it's many benefits to spiritual, physical and emotional health. 

 

The use of savasana meditation, balance, strength and flexibility makes yoga one of the most well rounded forms of exercise that one can practice.

 

Because of the many different exercises utilized throughout the practice of yoga, there are many areas in which to focus your training. 

 

I took a yoga class in 8th grade and while it was very basic, it did give me a simple understanding of some beginner poses. It also sparked an interest in me and made me want to dive deeper into yoga at some point in my life.

 

Recently, I have started taking a yoga class again. 

 

With COVID-19 shutting down gyms, yoga studios and other public workout areas, the class that I've been taking has been offered online through Zoom, allowing me to call in from my living room in order to take the class.

 

The studio I am calling into is  One Yoga Center in Arvada. Owners Dave Jozefczyk and Chelle Atma Devi are the teachers as well and offer many different classes from gentle yoga, yoga 1 and 2, and yoga for strength. 

 

Because of all the different yoga poses, each pose has it's own unique purpose. Jozefczyk and Atma Devi have thoroughly explored this in their practice and have granted people access to experience yoga in a variety of different ways.

 

Gentle yoga provides a more relaxing experience focused on stretching and meditation. People who practice gentle yoga often have great posture, as these classes often ask for students to hold poses for long amounts of time and focus on perfect form.

 

Yoga 1 and 2 are more flow-based classes. These faster paced classes move through poses quickly and ask students to focus on hitting the different checkpoints of each pose while flowing through them in a smooth manner. These classes focus more on stamina and even involve some cardio. 

 

The class I have been attending recently is the yoga for strength class.

 

Some of the poses we focus on during class are designed to strengthen certain parts of your body, like classical warrior. 

 

This pose is designed to isolate and strengthen your quadriceps by distributing most of your weight on one foot. 

 

Other poses focus on other things originally but have variations that can accomplish something else as well. 

 

For example, warrior two is a balanced based pose, but in yoga for strength, our variation has us bend over, put out hands together and place our elbow on the outside knee of our leading leg.

This maneuver strengthens the quadriceps while still working on balance like the original pose

Not only does yoga grant you the ability to work on many different things separately, with poses like warrior two that has different variations, you can work on more than one of these areas of fitness with one exercise. 

 

While I am still new to the practice of yoga, I can feel the benefits of it already. Not only has my strength improved through the different poses we have done, my balance and posture are two things that we haven't necessarily focused on as much during the strength class, but have also gotten better as positive side-effects of the things I practice during yoga.