So it begins....

Yoga Core Day 2 - 25/02/2013

Okay so after being introduced to Pilates the week before I was curious to see how my actual first day of Core Yoga would go. The city studio of Life & Balance is situated on Hunter St and it's good little location, as soon as I entered the studio you could just feel it was a completely different vibe than the Pilates class the week before. Immediately the instructor Sandy vibrantly introduced herself around and made a connection with everybody who was taking the class, she made an effort to learn everybody's name and build a little bit of rapport with everybody. I also noticed that since we were beginning the course during the 2nd week of it starting that she was asking everybody how they pulled up from the previous lesson before, to try and gauge the level of pain they felt for up 48 hours after the class, asking people for their individual pain and soreness level and rate it out of 10. Mostly everybody said they felt their pain level was at a 6 or 7 so I was thinking sweet I can probably  handle that but my outlook quickly changed as Sandy seemed disappointed that people weren't reaching a pain level of  9 or 10 so she wanted to up the anti for this session. (Good times ahead)

Entering the studio you could see there was a clear difference in environment from last weeks Pilates class, the Yoga studio had the oil burners firing with dimmed lights and had the ambient tunes going on in the background (sometimes sounding like a male trying to do his best impression of Orca Whale) it did help set the mood though and I did feel completely calm and relax. It was at this point that Sandy mentioned that somethings in today's class might seem funny or look and sound ridiculous but she stressed to try and stay with it and just focus on yourself.

We started with the warm up, which consisted of a lot of  wide stances and stretches that required you to hold angled positions for huge periods of time while trying to sync your breathing pattern to the exercise.  This is also where I had my first introduction to the Downward Facing Dog position... To begin with I struggled to maintain the position as I found it super hard to keep my back straight while making sure my heels were firmly placed on the mat, the good thing though was that Sandy quickly came to the rescue and helped me position myself correctly. Once I eventually got the positioning right the difficulty was then maintaining the hold for what what felt like an eternity (I could seriously feel the back of my calves and arms start to do the Harlem shake), Asa on the other hand found it easy to hold the position and seamlessly transitioned between Downward Facing Dog into Cobra.

Cobra

(On your stomach, Arching your upper body towards the ceiling by pushing off the ground with your hands)

Luckily for me there was a bit of repetition and going back and forth with familiar holds so I got a chance to cement some of the transitions between positions down.

The second part of the class was the balancing stage, which I was actually pleasantly surprised about as I thought I would be falling over myself as some people did but I managed to juuuuuust hold my balance for most part of the positions. It was interesting to note that the timing for the balance positions were triggered by breathing and Sandy was always stressing the point especially with me the breathing, as I was noticing in some positions I would strangely hold my breath???? We finished the class with this breathing exercise where we took one huge deep breath through the diaphragm and then expelled the air in short sharp bursts. The bursts last for about 20 seconds and by the end of 5 minutes of this exercise I was completely light headed. It was unusual because I have never had to focus so much on my breathing before but I did notice that my lung capacity had improved by the end of exercise which was cool :)

For my first actual Yoga class I thought I got through it somewhat okay, I really enjoyed it  much more than Pilates and even though I felt calm and relaxed I still felt like I was getting a good controlled and thorough work out. I was pretty exhausted after the class but I felt soooo much better for doing it, hopefully my body adjusts a bit for the next session and its not so much a shock to the system as the first class! loved it though!

Lessons Learned:

• Not holding my breathe at any stage as it disturbs the rhythm of the exercises.
• For whatever reason i'm better at holding positions on my right side than my left? 

Interesting Points:

• There was still only two guys in the class and I think we still struggling the most haha
• Sandy was a great instructor she knew her craft literally from back to front and communicated super clear to everybody.