Are you a Weekend Warrior? Do you think yoga is 'too easy' for you?
This week is about yoga for Weekend Warriors – dudes and gals with high-pressured office-based jobs leading relatively sedentary lives during the week, who like to party it up at the weekend – the ‘work hard, party hard’ brigade. These Type A’s like to go all in, no matter what they are doing. If they are going to work out, they want a high intensity, high impact, or high adrenalin form of exercise.
Weekend Warriors might think that yoga is not for them – that it’s too slow/too boring/too easy.
Well.
I teach a couple of Weekend Warrior type guys, let’s call them James and Carl*, who now come to my Vinyasa Flow class on Saturday afternoons quite regularly. They are both finance professionals by day and superheroes by night. OK, I’m kidding about the superheroes part, but they certainly work out like they need the strength and power to stop runaway trains and save the world. They do weights. They do cardio. They do boxing/MMA/other cool warrior-type stuff (although they wouldn’t hurt a fly and only ever injure themselves, but still..)
And they do yoga.
The first time I taught James was in a private one-on-one class. At the end he said to me, “I don’t normally do this kind of yoga – I just don’t feel like I get much of a workout. I need to work up a sweat so I only go to hot [yoga].”
“Ha!” I said. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
Luckily, he is a good friend of mine, so I persuaded him to come to another class.
The next Saturday rolled around and it was time for my Vinyasa Flow class. It’s just James and Carl in class this week. As I’m just starting out, my classes are quite small at the moment (though they will remain relatively small – maximum 8 people in a class). This means that I can demonstrate a pose, watch them come into the pose, and then verbally ‘adjust’ them by giving specific instructions to help with alignment.
They set up their mats and wait for me to start. First comes a few minutes of seated meditation. I ask them to focus on the breath and slow everything down. Then we do a few warm-up stretches and twists and onto a more dynamic warm-up. We go through a few rounds of Sun Salutation A, and then a few more rounds of Sun Salutation B. As we start to speed up, synchronising each movement within a single breath, I see a bead of perspiration form on James’s forehead. It was only 10 minutes into the start of the class.
We then worked through some standing warrior flows, holding each pose for 3-5 breaths. Throw in a bunch of arm balances, standing balance poses, inversions and backbends, and you’ve got yourself a pretty good all-body workout, building strength AND flexibility.
60 minutes later and after relaxing in the all-important shavasana, we come back to the start, with a few moments sitting quietly and focusing on the breath.
“OK, that wasn’t easy,” James admits. “I’ve never had so much alignment instruction in a yoga class before! All this time, I’ve been doing warrior 2 wrong!”
Carl, who knows me better than that, knew not to throw around comments like “It’s too easy!” or “Yoga is for wimps!”
“So, err, you do a beginner’s yoga class too?” asked Carl.
At the next Saturday afternoon Vinyasa Flow class, James rushes in and puts his mat down. Carl is already there. It’s 5 minutes before the start of class. James says hi and immediately starts doing a few hip stretches, neck rolls and shoulder openers while I’m chatting to another student. Finally, I look at the clock and ask everyone to find a comfortable seat as we are about to start.
“Wait a minute!” James protests. “It’s not 5pm yet! I’ve still got about a minute left!”
I reassure him that the class is designed to start off with warm-ups and stretches before we launch into the hard stuff.
“Yes, but your whole class is hard,” he grimaces. “I need to do my own warm ups first! I ached for days after your last class.”
Moral of the story: only tell your yoga instructor friend that you think yoga is too easy if you want to be tortured work up a sweat. :-)
Both James and Carl* are regulars now, at my Vinyasa Flow class, and they love it! (I think..!) I’ve also taught them some awesome stretches for their post-gym workouts (like pigeon and lizard) and a few poses that they can do at home, anytime (in particular, the shoulder-roll to open up tight shoulders and the spinal twist to alleviate lower back pain).
***
The problem is that beginner’s yoga perhaps IS very slow/maybe boring/too easy for Weekend Warriors like James and Carl. But it’s usually in the beginner’s classes that you get more technical alignment instructions. Beginner’s classes need to be slower in order to convey the myriad of detail that goes into a pose. It also takes time to learn and remember the ‘correct’ alignment of a pose, especially if you only attend a yoga class once a week. So the teacher will often repeat alignment cues, or choose to repeat poses so that they can give different instructions the next time. I can see why some people think it’s too ‘boring’.
In Vinyasa Flow/Power Yoga or other intermediate-level classes, you get to do more fun stuff, but the teacher generally assumes that you already know the basics. It’s impossible to give as many alignment cues in a more dynamic, fast-paced flow-based practice because you are not holding some of the poses for very long.
It’s important to get the fundamental alignment right before progressing to the more advanced poses. The key is to find smaller classes – up to 8 students, say, where the teacher is able to watch over everyone and give appropriate alignment cues as opposed to general ones. This will ensure that you are getting specific instructions that help YOU improve your practice, even in a more dynamic Vinyasa Flow class. In the larger studios, where you might get 20 or 30 people in a class, it’s especially difficult for a teacher to do this.
If you are interested in joining my small group Vinyasa Flow classes, click here for my upcoming schedule.
*Not their real names – their identities must be protected in case they do in fact turn out to be superheroes.
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