Yoga Practice

Please enjoy the guest piece from our ambassador Luisa Howell (@noelleh33). Check out more on her blog site www.newyorknewyou.com!

Over the years of working with everyday people to olympic athletes, I always have one recommendation that I give across the board in order to improve ones living through promoting enriched movement and mindfulness:  yoga.  As much as I absolutely personally love different ways of challenging and improving my body and mind, I feel like there are certain things that yoga has to offer that not many other forms of movement naturally do as well.  A well rounded yoga practice seamlessly will improve your mobility, stability and overall self awareness over time.  

An improvement in mobility and stability means reducing your chances of injury and eventually improving your athleticism over time.  For the most part, we are all born and naturally learn healthy movement patterns perfectly.  We start by our nervous system figuring out how to roll, to sit up, to crawl, to stand to walk and then run.  For some of us it stops there, but for others, we venture off into becoming athletes to learn very complicated and sophisticated movement patterns.  Somewhere along the way in life, we incur an injury(s) and our nervous system figures out how to rewire to compensate for that injury.  If you are fortunate enough to never have an injury, maybe you fall in the class of people who sit too much, don’t cross train enough or even stand imbalanced for too long!  The point is, somewhere along the way we build patterns that are not functional and can become problematic over the long run.  A regular yoga practice helps keep a mindful eye on these changes that occur in the movement patterns of your body.  The default design of well rounded yoga practice will naturally ask for ones body to achieve a healthy amount of mobility as well as maintain and improve its ability to stabilize.  To learn more about how athletes benefit from yoga click here.

Mindfulness of oneself is another priceless take away from a regular yoga practice.  As we grow up our lives tend to be a little bit more busy with thoughts and serious decisions compared to our younger days.  A regular yoga practice creates space and stability of the mind.  The mental space created is something we can then always have access to in order to have a little bit of grace when dealing with lives challenges as they arise or just to help you live your best life.  It’s a chance to give yourself something new by just offering a little bit of extra ease and mental space to have a new idea to move into.  If you do not have a regular yoga practice challenge yourself to start one with just 5 minutes a day to start.  It’s a great way to either start/end your day or your workout!

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