|
Published:
March 2, 2015
Yoga All-in-One For Dummies
Overview
Everything you need to make yoga an integral part of your health and well-being
If you want to incorporate yoga into your daily routine or ramp up what you're already doing, Yoga All-In-One For Dummies is the perfect resource! This complete compendium of six separate titles features everything you need to improve your health and peace of mind with yoga, and includes additional information on, stretching, meditation, adding weights to your yoga workouts, and power yoga moves.
Yoga has been shown to have numerous health benefits, ranging from better flexibility and athletic performance to lowered blood pressure and weight loss. For those who want to take control of their health and overall fitness, yoga is the perfect practice. With Yoga
All-In-One For Dummies, you'll have everything you need to get started and become a master of even the toughest yoga poses and techniques.
- Find out how to incorporate yoga to foster health, happiness, and peace of mind
- Get a complete resource, featuring information from six titles that are packed with tips
- Use companion workout videos to help you master various yoga poses and techniques that are covered in the book
- Utilize tips in the book to increase balance, range of motion, flexibility, strength, and overall fitness
Take a deep breath and dive into Yoga All-In-One For Dummies to find out how you can improve your health and your happiness by incorporating yoga into your daily routine.
Read More
About The Author
Larry Payne and Georg Feuerstein are the authors of Yoga All-In-One For Dummies, published by Wiley.
Sample Chapters
yoga all-in-one for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Yoga itself is at least 5,000 years old, and yoga exercising — what you know as yoga postures, or asanas — emerged about 600 years ago. Even though yoga has evolved over the centuries as it traveled to new cultures, its principles are universal. Yoga is a practice of mind, body, breath, and spirit. The articles in the Cheat Sheet touch on the physical and mental benefits yoga offers, offer suggestions for how to enhance your yoga practice even when you’re on your own, and remind you why warming up is so important to any exercise routine — even one as “user-friendly” as yoga.
View Cheat Sheet
View Cheat Sheet
HAVE THIS BOOK?
View Book Companion Site
Access practice tests
Additional Book Resources
Articles from
the book
Stretching can help create a balance between strength and flexibility, between opposing muscle groups, between your left and right side, and between your mind and body (that’s what’s meant by “mind-body connection”). Stretching can also help solve many of the mechanical problems that create discomfort.
Pain is your body’s way of telling you there’s a problem that needs to be fixed.
The best way to understand a yoga routine or posture is to see someone practice it. These ten short videos introduce you to a variety of yoga postures and beginning-level routines. With these demonstrations at your fingertips, you can improve your yoga practice, regardless of your age or physical abilities. Check out these tried-and-true poses and routines at www.
Sometimes muscles that have been very tight for a long period of time can actually lose the ability to relax on their own, resulting in persistent muscle and skeletal imbalance, nerve impingement, and most likely, chronic pain. When that happens, the only thing that can really help the muscle let go is focused massage.
Power Yoga standing warm-ups are every bit as invigorating and useful as the floor-based models. Those explained here help limber up your body to give you more freedom of movement and stability. And these warm-ups also help heat up your body’s “engine” to keep it running strongly and smoothly.
Spinning with the windmill
In the windmill, you swing the upper part of your body, down, around, and up, moving in a circular motion like a windmill.
Yoga
A key part of yoga is being mindful, yet sometimes your practice environment can have a spectacular effect — for good or ill — on what you get out of it. Although you may not be able to sit in a beautiful forest every day, you can still create a calm and focused atmosphere in a corner of your home or yard. Doing so can mean the difference between successfully managing your health with mindful work and struggling to do so.
Your spine is meant to curve in one direction or another, to one degree or another, in different places along your back. Having more or less curve can mean that your spine doesn’t handle impact well, your vertebrae have more pressure put on them, or certain muscles and ligaments are pulled tighter or looser and can offer more or less support than you may need.
Warming up before you work out makes sense because it prepares your body for the upcoming activity. Here’s what happens to your body when you warm up:
You get your blood pumping. Blood flow through your muscles increases, which enhances the delivery of oxygen from your blood, and the speed of your nerve impulses increases.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to exercise on your own, or if you can’t find yoga instructors where you live, you face additional challenges when doing yoga routines because you don’t have an instructor there to provide guidance or encouragement. Here are some tips to help you on your way:
Take your time.
Many mind-body programs are so gentle that nearly anyone can do them without fear. But to be on the safe side — and that’s always a smart thing when it comes to movement — take a few moments to assess your current fitness and health by asking yourself the following questions:
Are you currently not exercising regularly?
Yoga — and other types of mind-body fitness traditions — offer many benefits, both physical and mental. Some of these benefits have been documented by scientific research; some are purely anecdotal:
Reduces stress and anxiety: After several weeks, months, or even years of practicing one or more of these mind-body exercises, your stress may drop dramatically.
Yoga
How you live affects how you meditate, and how you meditate affects how you live. When your actions don’t jibe with your reasons for meditating — for example, when you’re meditating to reduce stress but your actions intensify conflict — your everyday life may be working at cross-purposes with the time you spend in meditation.
Yoga is well known for making people more flexible, supple, lithe, and limber. In fact, you’ve probably seen photographs of yogis or yoginis contorting themselves into different yoga postures. However, recent studies indicate that it’s a safe and effective option for relieving moderate low back pain.In a study funded by NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), participants suffering from chronic lower back pain were divided into three groups: one group took 12 weekly yoga classes, one group took 12 weekly stretching classes, and one group was given a self-care book and encouraged to exercise to relieve pain.
Meditation is simply the practice of focusing your attention on a particular object — generally something simple, like a word or phrase, a candle flame or geometrical figure, or the coming and going of your breath. In everyday life, your mind is constantly processing a barrage of sensations, visual impressions, emotions, and thoughts.
The best way to make a productive start on your way to becoming a post-50 Power Yoga practitioner is to work with a beginning-level routine. If you find that the routine is too difficult, don’t hesitate to use props and/or modifications. And you don’t need to work through the entire routine right off the bat. You can try practicing a half or a third of the routine, cutting down the number of recommended repetitions, and so on.
As a form of exercise, yoga has many benefits specific to seniors. Improved balance and flexibility reduce the risk for (and fear of) injury and increase mobility. Yoga also improves circulation and your ability to sleep, and adding even light weights to the postures increases bone density and lowers the risk of fracture.
“Can I really do this?” is a question many people ask themselves every day. Maybe you’re new to yoga, new to weight training, or new to an exercise program, or maybe you’ve been lifting weights regularly for years. In each of these cases, you may wonder whether you can engage in Yoga with Weights. The discussion that follows is for people who can’t quite decide whether Yoga with Weights is for them.
Yoga breathing techniques are designed to relax and energize you. You can practice breathing techniques by themselves or as you do your yoga routines and workouts. After experimenting for a while, you discover the breath that feels best to you while you’re working out.
No matter which breathing technique you undertake, follow these basic breathing guidelines:
Breathe through your nose unless told to breathe through your mouth.
Most people (at any age) aren’t in peak physical condition. Here are a few considerations if you’re thinking of trying Power Yoga. If you’ve reached middle age or beyond and you’re just beginning to think about getting in shape, you have a tougher road ahead than does someone who’s been working out and watching his or her diet forever.
Yoga
One of the important natural tools your body makes use of during Power Yoga practice is the bandha, or energy lock. You engage an energy lock by contracting certain muscles in your body; these contractions, or locks, direct through your body the flow of energy (the prana) that you create during Power Yoga exercises.
“Looking good” during Power Yoga isn’t about wearing the right clothes, having the right hairstyle, or sporting the right genetic background. Nope, it refers to the way you direct your gaze as you move into and hold each Power Yoga posture. The way you direct and hold your gaze during Power Yoga practice has an impact on your mental state, your posture, and your ability to remain focused and energized.
Meditation can help you deal with negative emotions. Many people believe they have a Pandora’s box of ugly, disgusting emotions like rage, jealousy, hatred, and terror hidden inside them, and they’re afraid that if they open it up, these demonic energies will overwhelm them and those they love.
Unacknowledged negative feelings can impede the flow of more positive feelings like love and joy.
There are a few ways to prepare your body for meditation. Meditation works best when you can keep your body relatively motionless and your back relatively straight. Here’s why:
When you’re constantly acting and reacting in response to thoughts and outside stimulation, you don’t have a chance to get to know how your mind works.
Yoga
Decide what kind of experience you want in the practice and choose your teacher accordingly. Because Aerial Yoga is a hybrid style of practice, teachers may come to it through backgrounds in Pilates, pole and other aerial forms of practice, or traditional yoga.
Unlike conventional yoga practiced on a mat with the teacher in clear view, you can’t always see what’s beyond the cloth when you’re in the hammock, which means the instructor, other students, and your own reflection (if you’re in a mirrored room) are out of view for some of the positions.
Yoga
As you explore your emotions, you may gradually discover that they’re not as overpowering or as endless as you feared. With mindful awareness, most emotions flow through your body and gradually release. For example, as you gently investigate your anger or fear, it may intensify at first, then break and disperse like a wave on the beach.
Yoga
Posture alignment refers to how your muscles are integrated and your bones are aligned to support your body for optimal movement during yoga or other exercise. The aim of good posture alignment is to establish a solid foundation with your body so you can support your limbs, back, and head while you exercise. You want your body to be safe, secure, and able to expand more fully and freely during each exercise.
Yoga
All forms of yoga breathing are similar, but they have subtle differences. If you’re a practitioner of traditional soft-form yoga, you need to note a few critical differences between the Power Yoga breathing techniques and those of your current yoga practice. With traditional yoga breathing, you use the complete yoga breathing technique, but in traditional yoga breathing, you expand the lower abdominal muscles on inhalations and contract those muscles on exhalation.
Yoga
Who can resist a nice shoulder and neck massage? Well, Power Yoga can help with that. All day, you build tension and stress in your neck and shoulders, and by the end of the day you need a massage in the worst way! The problem is that you also need a willing masseuse. Well, these two exercises let you give yourself a massage to roll the tension right out of those tight neck and shoulder muscles.
Yoga
The Power Yoga shoulder stand helps to create harmony and happiness throughout your entire body. In this inverted asana (pose), your heart and brain receive a healthy rush of blood; the pose stimulates your endocrine system and gives your thyroid and parathyroid glands a tune-up. The shoulder stand can even help reverse the effects of varicose veins!
Yoga
Try the following gentle Power Yoga exercise routine working from a chair, and see how energized you feel. This exercise helps relieve stress and tension in your shoulders, it expands your chest, and it helps to loosen up tight joints as it strengthens your arms and legs.
You need two sturdy, straight-back chairs for the last part of this exercise.
To boost your confidence in your ability to perform Power Yoga, try this asana. This asana requires you to pay special attention to balance. The extended foot one leg stand posture (utthita hasta padangusthasana) trains you to incorporate all your natural tools into your Power Yoga practice.
In Sanskrit, the word utthita means “extended,” hasta means “hand,” and padangustha loosely translates to “big toe.
Yoga
This is an easy adaptation of a traditional Power Yoga posture. The traditional extended side angle pose requires you to lunge deep on your right leg with your left leg extended behind you and, at the same time, rest your right hand on the floor.
That’s some pretty tricky stuff! If you’re getting up there in years or you aren’t in the greatest physical condition, you can do the same posture without lunging so deeply and with the benefit of some added support.
Use common sense when practicing Yoga with Weights. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Work at your own level of ability and never push yourself too far. Here are guidelines for making sure you practice Yoga with Weights safely. These guidelines can help you determine what’s safe, but practically speaking, it’s up to you to draw your own guidelines.
One of the beautiful things about yoga is its great variety in ways to practice. Hot Yoga, though definitely on the mat, is an out-of-the-box variation that is many practitioners swear by. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s the variety some folks want to brew every time.
Despite its popular image, Hot Yoga practitioners come in all sizes and ages.
Anti-gravity, or Aerial, Yoga is a way of stretching, extending, folding, twisting, and inverting with the support of a 10-foot-wide silk hammock suspended from the ceiling. Strikingly new and New World, it was conceived in 1991 by gymnast and dancer Christopher Harrison, who later launched it in 2007. It combines yoga with dance and gymnastics, resulting in a novel hybrid that engages the mind and the body in challenging and delightful ways.
Seniors get many benefits, such as reduced prices at restaurants and hotels, and (usually) a prime seat on a crowded bus! But Power Yoga brings you better benefits: the benefits of mental and physical health. If you’ve been active all your life, you may not notice some of the typical changes of an aging body: Muscles get tighter, reaction times slow, and breathing can become shallower, limiting endurance.
If you’re on the senior side of the life curve and you’re considering taking up yoga, you’re not alone. A 2012 Yoga Journal study reported that approximately a third of the 20.4 million adults in America who practice yoga are older than age 45.
Midlife, as the word suggests, refers to the middle of life. It’s not, as some people think, “The End,” but rather a new beginning.
Although the earliest scientific studies of yogic meditation date back to the 1930s and 1940s, research into the psychophysiological effects of meditation took off in the 1970s, fueled by a burgeoning interest in Transcendental Meditation (TM), Zen, and other Eastern meditation techniques. Since then, thousands of studies have been published, with an exponential increase in research in the past 10 to 15 years as brain-imaging technology has become increasingly sophisticated.
Yoga
Walking is the most natural of all exercises and can be a great warm-up for Yoga with Weights workouts. It can also be one of the most — if not the most — enjoyable exercises. Walking doesn’t require any particular expertise, either; it gives everyone the chance to be physically active.
If you have the time, make walking a prelude to every Yoga with Weights workout.
In Wall Yoga, the wall is your friend — one you can always turn to when you need a little extra support or a confidence boost — and one that doesn’t shy away from giving you some honest and direct feedback. The wall can give you some welcome benefits:
Provides safety and stability
Supports your balance
Gives you feedback on your alignment
Adds variety to reinvigorate your practice
When you embrace the wall as a prop, you open up a world of possibilities for practice.
Yoga
SUP is short for stand up paddleboarding. Not surprisingly, this form of yoga began in Hawaii as an offshoot of surfing. Initially used as a way to get farther out into the ocean to catch the waves, it’s now practiced on bodies of water of all sorts, including lakes, rivers, and canals, and in the ocean, parallel to the shore on the other side of the breakers.
Yoga itself is at least 5,000 years old, and yoga exercising — what you know as yoga postures, or asanas — emerged about 600 years ago. Even though yoga has evolved over the centuries as it traveled to new cultures, its principles are universal. Yoga is a practice of mind, body, breath, and spirit. The articles in the Cheat Sheet touch on the physical and mental benefits yoga offers, offer suggestions for how to enhance your yoga practice even when you’re on your own, and remind you why warming up is so important to any exercise routine — even one as “user-friendly” as yoga.
To get started with Yoga with Weights, you need a little willpower, an open mind, and a sense of adventure; at least, those are the only intangibles you need. Taking the first step in any new activity is usually the hardest part. As for the tangibles, you need some equipment to get going.At minimum, you need a quiet and comfortable place to exercise, hand weights, and ankle weights.
Load More Articles
Related Books
0:00
0:00
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6630d85d73068bc09c7c436c/69195ee32d5c606051d9f433_4.%20All%20For%20You.mp3
Frequently Asked Questions
No items found.
