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http://omboston.com/blog/2014/10/14/the-merits-of-a-little-instability
Live to Exercise, Exercise to Live
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Why You Can't Reach Me
My phone is
generally within easy reach and I am often not very good at ignoring its
seemingly constant buzzing. If you text
me, I generally will get back to you fairly quickly. It’s the culture we have created with our
technology and our need for instant gratification, and it doesn’t seem to be
going anywhere. That leaves me trying to
mitigate it so that I’m not spending the entirety of my days interacting via a
small screen and an even smaller keyboard.
I am always working on being less technology-dependent. When I’m spending time with friends I do make
a conscious effort not to answer messages and open emails, but my phone is
still nearby and I am still aware of its presence. If a text comes in that seems really
important, I will probably still open it even if I am trying my very best to be
present without my technology. Constant
phone monitoring has become the norm when hanging out in a casual setting. Phones are in laps, in pockets, clutched for
dear life at all moments and we are all guilty of it.
That being said, there are certain
parts of my day during which you will be absolutely unable to reach me. Some of these are not done on purpose, such
as the fact that I am not going to answer my phone when I am in the
shower. However, when I am exercising I
purposely disconnect from my phone, from email, from social networking, from
any sort of digital communication. At
the gym my phone is in an armband and is only there because I use my phone for
music during my workouts. I am vaguely
aware that it might be lighting up and buzzing but I will not check it. Lately I have even been using the Do Not
Disturb setting. Whatever it is can
wait. I will not answer texts until I am
done working out, and I certainly will not answer a phone call. I am completely checked out from anything
that is not the physical exercise task at hand.
Gym time is also no phone time. When
it comes to yoga, I am even stricter with myself about my phone. During class, my phone is in my bag in a
locker in a completely separate room.
While I’m on my mat, I forget that my phone exists. I forget that most things exist besides my
flow of poses and my breath. I am not
even a little bit aware of whether my phone is dinging or vibrating or
spontaneously doing a funny dance in the locker. The room in which I am practicing yoga is a
sacred space, free from communication with anyone outside that space.
As I increase the amount of time I spend consciously disconnecting for the purpose of yoga or gym time, I find myself less attached to my phone throughout the rest of my day. Spending time unplugged and focused on my body does wonders for clearing my mind of all the clutter. On my mat, I can visualize outside thoughts as little bubbles that I can just pop to make them disappear. My vinyasa is my number one priority whether it is for those 90 minutes of class or for five minutes of sun salutations in the morning. Exercise is what keeps me physically healthy but it is also what keeps me mentally sane. Disconnecting is an important part of that, and so is prioritizing my gym and yoga time for the sake of the benefits it provides me. You can’t reach me while I’m practicing yoga because nothing is more important in that moment than what I am doing on that mat.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Start Each Day With an Intention, Not an Expectation
Sometimes a
yoga teacher will have us start class with an intention for our practice. It could be an intention to really push
yourself to your limits during this class, or an intention to listen to your
body and respect what it needs, or an intention to focus on your breath and on
clearing your mind of outside thoughts.
In the same breath, yoga teachers often remind us to enter into the
practice without any expectations for ourselves or for the outcome. This can seem like a contradiction. At first glance it is, but upon closer
examination it makes a lot of sense.
There is a difference between
having an intention and having an expectation.
An intention is a hope and a focus for your practice, kind of like a drishti (visual focal point used in
various poses) but for the mind. You
have succeeded with your intention if you can honestly say that you worked on
it by the end of the class. It is not a
specific goal that you should feel badly about not attaining if you do not
succeed. In fact, it is not even
something that you can check off that you absolutely completed because the
whole point is to work on living this intention, not to approach it like a work
task. It is something to be mindful of
during your practice without allowing it to distract you from the practice
itself. It integrates into the flow of
your poses and can be applied as broadly as you need it to be. It is your ruling philosophy for the course
of the class and you can form it based on how you are feeling mentally or
physically to begin with, or based on how you anticipate you might feel during
the particular sequences you will be practicing during that class.
An intention is not an expectation
that today you will finally come up into headstand. It is not an expectation that you will take
the most advanced modifications of every pose offered, and conversely it is not
an expectation that you will have to take the easiest modifications offered for
the poses. These are far too specific to
be in keeping with the spirit of having an intention in the first place because
at the end of the class you will definitively have either done or not done
these things. While this can be exciting
if you do accomplish what you expect to, it can leave you feeling like you
failed if you do not reach these expectations you have set of yourself and that
is not the point of a yoga practice.
Yoga is meant to uplift you regardless of the outcome of the practice.
If you
apply the concept of starting with an intention to the start of your day, then
each day can be uplifting regardless of the outcome. You can base your intention for the day off
of how you feel when you wake up, or you can base it off of the tasks you know
you will be facing during your day. If
you wake up feeling sad, anxious, or just generally negative about the day then
a helpful intention might be to acknowledge and honor your emotions. You can use this intention to focus on
allowing yourself to feel various emotions, even the negative ones, without
allowing them to take over your day and prevent you from being productive and
functional. You can’t just delete or
ignore negative emotions, but you choose how much you let them affect you. Of course, you can be mindful of your
emotions on any day but you can make it your intention if you feel that you
will need to pay extra attention to them on this particular day. If you know you have a jam-packed day of
places to be and things to do, then a good intention might be to focus on being
aware of your breath throughout the day.
Keeping your breath in mind will allow you to manage the amount of
stress that a non-stop day can cause.
An
intention for your day can serve as a backdrop to everything that happens, as
it does during a yoga class. At the end
of the day you can return to your intention, as you do at the end of a yoga
class, to reflect on the role it played in your day. It won’t be a matter of having completed
something, but rather a matter of having actively worked on taking care of
yourself. An intention is an
acknowledgement of what you will need mentally and physically during a practice
or during your day, and you can always check in with yourself and come back to
that place where you started.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Work in Progress
Your
physical body and your self are always going to be a work in progress. As someone who is not exactly thrilled by
uncertainty, this is not an easy fact to accept. Building muscle definition takes a lot of
dedication and hard work and it is not something that will show up
overnight. But, if you actively work at
it over an extended period of time you will be wonderfully rewarded with
results. Each goal, however, has to be
another step on your fitness journey, and you can’t head down this path with
any sort of end goal or picture in your mind.
I kept thinking there would be a point at which I would say, “Yes. This is good.
I just want to stay exactly like this for the rest of my life and all I
have to do now is maintain it.” That point
is never going to come, and I don’t think I want it to. It’s not that I’m hypercritical of my body or
that I am always looking for flaws and nitpicking at things I want to
“fix”. It’s not that at all.
It’s that life is a work in
progress and you have to keep moving. I
will set strength goals or target certain groups of muscles that I want to
tone, or gradually work on a specific yoga pose. All of these are gradual goals that I will
have to build up to over time, and once I reach them I will find new
goals. I saw a great quote today that
said, “It’s your life, your big yoga class.”
I started thinking about how I could apply that to my entire life. How can I scale today’s vinyasa flow class,
for example, to the timeline of my life?
Today’s class was full of layered poses, meaning that each step in the
pose was a pose in itself and you could stop at any layer along the way. The last layer was extremely difficult and
everyone was encouraged to move as deep into the layers as possible, but you
could stop wherever you needed to along the way. I went as far as I could; I pushed myself,
but it came from within and not from comparing myself to the person on the mat
next to me. I moved at my own pace and
took pride in my own small victories. I
also surprised myself, going deeper than I thought I could in many of the
poses. The moment was right, the
environment was right, and the teacher guided me further than I would have
gotten on my own.
Many of the poses looked absolutely
impossible when she demonstrated them, but there was no judgment and I just
went for it, just to see how far I could go.
Most of the poses looked like I wouldn’t make it past the first or
second layer, but I was able to go pretty far on all of them except the last
one. The last pose, I did indeed only
get to the second layer, and I didn’t beat myself up over it. I pushed as far as I could go without pushing
myself over the edge into an injury or snapping something out of a socket. I acknowledged my own personal boundary and
respected that line and my own body.
Life can, indeed, be like one giant
yoga class. You can start your days with
an intention just like a yoga class. You
can learn to compete only with yourself and to respect your limits, while
challenging them at the same time. You
can surprise yourself. You can always
take life’s equivalent of savasana if you need it, be it a half hour break to
watch a television show, having a scoop of ice cream for dessert, or just going
to bed early one night because you need it.
And finally, if you dedicate yourself to working on something you really
want, eventually you will be able to contort yourself into that final,
impossible-looking layer of that pose.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
It Was Bound to Happen
My body
finally got mad at me for the crazy workouts.
It was bound to happen eventually.
A little less than a month ago I felt like I was hitting a plateau and
decided that the solution was to increase the length and intensity of my
workouts. I started doing an hour and a
half a day at the gym instead of an hour.
This put my cardio workouts at close to 1,000 calories and I added in
extra circuits to bring my strength training days to at least an hour and a
half, sometimes longer. I had been going
to yoga once a week but insisted on also doing an hour and a half at the gym on
those days. Rest days were absolutely
not a part of my vocabulary. I started
out without any real exit strategy, no plan for when to come back down.
It certainly brought me out of my
plateau; my weight stabilized and my muscles tightened and it did great things
for a couple weeks. I also didn't have
to worry about self control in the kitchen quite as much because when you're
burning close to a thousand calories doing cardio, a big bowl of pasta is
necessary fuel rather than a special treat.
But then I started to wonder if this wasn’t a little overkill. If this level of working out was what I had
to do just to maintain my body, not even lose weight but maintain things the
way they are, then perhaps I was doing something wrong. This thought popped up a couple times but I
continued anyway. I’m not so good with
moderation sometimes. I was going hard
and I loved it.
Fortunately, my body knew best and
my body did not love it so much after a month.
I started taking one rest day a week just because I was mentally and
physically exhausted by the end of the week.
This went well and I could feel how much stronger and healthier my
muscles were when I returned to the gym.
However, I still did not come down from the super-intense, hour and a
half workouts. Finally, my body
snapped. You name it, it was bothering
me or not working right. Everything from
my wrist to various organ systems were causing me trouble. It was nothing serious or life threatening by
any means, but everything was just a little off. My body was mad at me and was expressing it
by refusing to run smoothly.
Yesterday was Wednesday, and I had
just taken a rest day on Friday but my body was absolutely not having anything
to do with working out yesterday and I stayed home from the gym. Today was yoga day, and I decided that
perhaps the 90 minute vinyasa flow class would be enough of a workout on its
own without also going to the gym.
Tomorrow will be a cardio day, but I’ll only be doing an hour. It’s time to come back to reality and to an
actually sustainable exercise plan. Yoga
was amazing. It cleansed my body and
cleared my head and re-grounded me. It
was exactly what I needed.
Moral of the story: in working out
and in life, you can go really hard for a short period of time if you need to,
but it’s called going hard for a reason.
It’s not sustainable in the long term.
When something is too intense, it is not sustainable in the long term. Work, relationships, your own body and mind,
all of these things can only sustain so much.
When they start to break down, you’ve gone too far. The goal is to avoid reaching that point in
the first place, but if things are already breaking down then it’s time to make
a change. I let myself wallow in the
lack of functioning for a couple days and now I’m ready to pick myself back up
and keep moving forward.
Friday, February 28, 2014
My Relationship with Yoga (and the Gym)
When I was in middle school and
early high school I had a regular yoga practice at a studio in Miami. I started going to Basic level classes and
gradually worked my way up to Intermediate/Advanced, meeting a few really
inspiring yoga teachers along the way. I
felt like I was getting serious about yoga and even toyed with the idea of
working for my teaching certification.
My grandparents bought me a really nice yoga mat as a Chanukah gift one
year and I still have it. As high school
pressed on, I got busier and 90 minute yoga classes plus travel time each way
just did not fit into my packed schedule (read: four year plan to go Ivy if it
killed me). I stopped going to yoga but
I kept in touch with the receptionist, who I had become friends with, and a couple
of the teachers. One of them, notable
for his use of reverberating sound bowls during his classes, went on to start a
yoga and wellness movement on South Beach and I still receive his email
updates. Another teacher was my absolute
favorite because I loved that at the ends of her classes she would give each
student a mini forehead massage with chakra oil during savasana. I still have a little bottle of that oil and
it still has a certain comfort to it.
She moved to Puerto Rico where she is happily married with an adorable
son and we keep in touch on Facebook.
When I
started college I sought out a yoga studio to try here in Boston. I knew I did not like gym yoga because it
felt too exercise-y and not spiritual enough.
I liked starting class chanting Om’s and feeling that my practice had a
meaning to it beyond exercise. I went to
one class at the studio I found but I quickly became wrapped up in classes and
extracurriculars and adjusting to the fact that the weather outside was very,
very different from what I was used to in sunny South Florida. I went to the gym sometimes but it wasn’t
really a big part of my life. I had
brought the nice yoga mat with me and it sat in the corner of my tiny dorm room
the entire year except for the one excursion to a class. Yoga was one of those things I always really
earnestly meant to do, but it somehow always fell by the wayside.
Part way
through this past summer at home in Miami, I started working out a lot and
lifting weights. It was mostly as a
healthy outlet to combat stress. In the
fall I came back to Boston for classes and at that point I was going to the gym
nearly every day. I was benching and I
could lift more than my body weight with my quads. I was really, really excited about that. I also did not quite understand two things
that tie together: slowly lifting heavy weights does not actually burn that
many calories, and it will make you bulk up even if you’re eating healthy. Which I was not exactly doing, because in my
mind I was going to the gym every day and that easily justified eating whatever
I pleased. Certain articles of clothing
stopped fitting me and I started bringing cardio days back into the mix but it
didn’t quite work.
At home in
Miami again for a few weeks for Winter Break, I worked with a trainer who
taught me some important fundamentals.
The biggest thing was that our bodies do not know that we live in modern
times, and will interpret anything we do physically in evolutionary terms. If you lift heavy weights slowly, your body
will think you need to move boulders on a daily basis in order to survive and
it will store extra body fat to make sure you will have the bulk and strength
to do that. If, on the other hand, you
exhaust your muscles by lifting lighter weights more quickly and with more
repetition, your body will think you need to run away from predators to survive
and it will get more lean. The food
component is based on the same primal responses: if you eat every three hours
you are telling your body that there is an abundance of food and it does not
need to store any extra body fat, but wait four hours between meals and your
body will think you are having trouble finding food and will store fat to make
sure you don’t die. It’s quite considerate
of it, really, but if you don’t understand these mechanisms it can be very easy
to accidentally put on weight. When
you’re only five foot two like me, extra weight is very noticeable. And it’s not about being skinny, it’s about
being healthy (looking and feeling).
My trainer
started me on a circuit training regimen with weights and sent me back to
Boston for the spring semester with exercise routines in hand. I alternate strength training circuit days
with cardio days, as the cardio is just as important for your heart and for fat
burning. It’s been a few months of this
now and it’s been going really, really well.
I feel healthy and strong. A few
weeks ago while doing a drop set on the shoulder press machine, I felt
something hurt in the back of my right shoulder. It seemed to be one of those tiny muscles
really deep in there that I couldn’t reach to stretch. I wouldn’t call it an injury but it was
certainly a strain, and moving my arm the wrong way was painful. A (knowledgeable) friend took a look at it
for me and recommended that I go easy on my shoulder for a while and avoid
moving my arm above my horizontal shoulder line.
I adapted my workouts to make sure I wasn’t neglecting my
upper body but was still taking care of my shoulder so as not to turn a twinge
into a full on injury. It was then, as I
added in a lot more stretching post-workouts, that yoga popped into my
mind. It’s funny but a lot of people
turn to yoga as a result of an injury and I gravitated to it as well. I went back to the studio I had tried
freshman year; it had changed locations to a beautiful, new space and I went on
a Sunday night to try it. I brought the
yoga mat with me; it had been sitting in the corner of my dorm room yet again. The studio had that familiar yoga studio feel
and smell to it. It felt like home. Most yoga studios do, I have found. The teacher and the class were great and I
really stretched into my shoulder.
The next
week I felt like I was ready to get back on my shoulder and I slowly eased back
into my exercises. Thankfully all went
well and my shoulder seems to be fine. I
still pay a little extra attention to it.
As for yoga, I have continued to practice. A friend introduced me to a different studio
here that offers $5 community classes on weekday afternoons. At that price (as opposed to the usual $15 a
pop) going once a week is no problem.
The Thursday afternoon class is taught by one of the best teachers in
Boston and I have gone twice so far.
This studio too feels like home and I feel at home on my mat. I’ve come full circle and feel much more
balanced now that I have reincorporated yoga in my fitness routine. I’ve added some yoga into my post-workout
stretches and I’ll even flow through a vinyasa or two in the morning or at
night before I go to sleep. I’m learning
to use the physiological effects of specific poses to my advantage and also
deepen into my muscles. Yoga is also a
much different experience now that I have muscle strength from working out, as
opposed to six years ago when yoga was the only athletic activity I did at
all. I’m glad that I have found a place
for it in my life again.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Finding Strength in Child's Pose
I was in quite possibly the most
intense yoga class I have ever taken. It
was an arm balancing class and I don’t have much experience with those types of
poses in the first place. At one point
in the class, the teacher gave us the option to stay in downward dog or take
child’s pose. When she noticed that most
of the class had stayed in downward facing dog she said, “And for those of you
not taking child’s pose right now because you want to look or feel strong,
remember that child’s pose is a strong pose.”
This can be explored in two
different directions- not taking child’s pose in order to look strong, and not
taking child’s pose in order to feel strong.
They aren’t two mutually exclusive directions, as the line between the
two is admittedly blurry. The part about
trying to look strong resonated a little.
When I’m in a yoga class I tell myself I’m practicing for no one but
myself but I inevitably slip into trying to take the hardest variations; it’s
mostly to challenge myself and feel strong but sometimes it’s a little bit
motivated by trying not to look like the weak one in the class. We all know that feeling. However, the direction of trying to feel
strong really hit the nail on the head for me.
I was still in downward dog because taking child’s pose felt like I
would be giving up, unable to hold my pose any longer, and sinking to the
floor. When she pointed out that child’s
pose is a strong pose, I started to see it that way for the first time. I started to bring strength into my practice
of child’s pose, feeling the stretch in my back and the strength in my
arms. Since I returned to practicing
yoga (more on that soon) I also have incorporated it into my stretching after
my daily workouts at the gym.
Coming out of an invigoratingly
strong child’s pose at the gym a couple days later I began to think about how
to apply lessons learned on the mat to life off the mat, a principle that a
past yoga teacher in Miami had always emphasized. I realized that you have to find your own
source of strength from somewhere inside you, your source of strength to
restore your own balance. Because you
can’t be breaking down all the time. I
can’t be breaking down all the time. I
have things to do, goals to accomplish, and work to do to get me there in every
aspect of my life. So when I start to
spiral into a bad mood that is going to ruin the rest of my day, it is my
responsibility to catch myself and stop it.
It is no one else’s job to do that.
It is mine and mine alone to be attentive to and aware of my physical
and mental state. If I start to spiral,
I need to identify the root cause immediately and address it. If I can’t identify it, then I must proceed
straight to catching myself before I spiral to the point of no return. I need to find my internal strength and
restore my own balance.
For me, my internal mental strength
comes from physiological strength. If I
take a minute in child’s pose, or hero’s pose, or just do a couple of vinyasas
and completely focus on the pose or the flow, I can restore my balance all by
myself. Not in a place that I can drop
to the floor and do yoga? No
problem. That’s why yoga is valuable on
and off the mat- if I mimic the focus, calmness, and feeling of strength that I
find in the poses just in my mind, I can use that to restore my balance and
find my stability. I used to dislike
stability because I found it boring. But
I’ve learned that stability is a good thing, a state to relish. It reminds you that at the end of the day you
are in control of yourself and that feels good.
There will be moments of the day that you are purely, uninhibitedly
enjoying what you’re doing. Strive to
have as many of those moments as possible.
There will be moments that you don’t enjoy quite as much. But try not to let yourself stray too far
from the middle because that will throw you off balance.
Labels:
balance,
child's pose,
off the mat,
strength,
yoga
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