The Bendy Beautiful Deceptive YOGA-
The Ever Present Yet Increasingly Popular Activity of Yoga
I really Love yoga. I don’t have a regular place to practice (yet) but I do try to stretch and try out poses at home. I subscribe to Yoga Journal, a great magazine that has wonderful descriptions of moves and anatomy and has really taught me so much foundation for yoga. Recently I’ve been watching all sorts of stretchy yogis on Instagram and they can do all sorts of cool and crazy things that they make look SO easy. And they look REALLY good doing it too.
These girls are all over Instagram (well mine at least) and I almost never see anyone that isn’t amazing. As yoga gets more popular throughout the world, these popular images are setting an example of what you think you should be doing.
Before Instagram
I had a relatively good thing going for me with my home yoga practice. I had a basic understanding of a flow routine and even followed some videos on YouTube. I read about poses and learned how they should be done safely. I stretched to feel good, not to look good. I did what I feel is “real” yoga and it was good to me. But these girls I’m following are so pretty, bendy and tanned they got me wanting more.
So guess what I started doing? Spending lots of time trying to make myself extra stretchy (I’ve never been flexible, ever) and looking at their pictures explaining how to get into poses (as if anyone can do it if you follow these steps) and trying to do these extreme poses. Now I know my limits and I haven’t tried anything too crazy but I realized I’m really in danger of hurting myself here. My body hurts in weird ways after I try to shove it into shapes it’s not ready for and more importantly I don’t really know if I’m getting ready for them properly. Mid pose I have felt some funny twinges and pains which made me realize that Yoga really needs to be used right and maybe I should talk about it.
Many of these women are acrobats I think, or professional dancers, or even professional Yogis. I cannot expect myself to do what they do as I have never been near pro on any level with any of these ladies. I will continue to follow these bendy Insta-Beauties and I will use them as inspirations to push my limits, but I need to remember they are not an example of what I should be doing.
Remember Foundation
There is a life style of Yoga and then there is doing yoga sometimes. Doing yoga sometimes is great for you and you will feel better for it but you wont have the strength, flexibility or body awareness to do extreme poses (like me).The Yoga as a lifestyle type means you do yoga everyday and build on the moves and create a foundation on which to lift yourself into yoga pretzel number five (yeah, I made that up).
“Yoga sometimes” can eventually become a foundations for more exciting stuff but it will take much longer and the really cool new poses you see online should probably be attempted with a teacher to guide you through prep poses and build you up to success without inviting injury. That magazine I mentioned, Yoga Journal, does do that a little. They focus on one pose each month and give you the stretches you should do to get yourself ready for it as well as the poses that help build the strength you will need. They give you tips on modifying if you aren’t able to do something and even show you what to avoid. It’s a great place to start but you have to remember to start at a starting point and not at the Bendy Beach Babe stage.
This Is Me
This picture wasn’t taken too long ago and I know that even though I’m not a Bendy Babe, I am way better than I was at the beginning. When I started yoga, my mother took me to a class in my home town. It was a really good class and I fell in love with it quickly but it was almost embarrassing how unable to bend I was. Older women looked at me and said “This will be easy for you” because I looked fit. But then they would look shocked and wonder why I couldn’t actually do something simple like a sitting split. You know sitting on the floor, legs in front of you but spread into the widest “V” you can manage. I couldn’t manage. Not at all. I split my legs a little further than hip width and then I started to fall over. I literally couldn’t split and sit. It was embarrassing but really it was frustrating. Today I’m splitting much better into a solid wide “V” without falling over. It’s nice but I am nowhere near splitting out a straight line.
The FLiP Side
But that was me at my starting point. Now I notice the more I stretch myself to my limits the more stable I become. One place I really noticed improvement was holding warrior three, especially on my right leg, because my hips were so tight and other imbalances through my legs developed from years of serving and years before that of walking with my toes turned out and probably from riding horses. I have spent more time practicing the intensive Yin Yoga style of sitting in a pose for a problem area for at least two minutes, relaxing and really encouraging the body to release and accept the new movement. In a matter of days I find that even though my stretching hasn’t gained me too much new length I have this amazing new stability I couldn’t find before. But I also notice that if I miss too many days of stretching after an intensive session everything gets extra stiff, reminding me to stretch out more regularly.
In addition I think it is important to train for strength in these areas to create balance. If you think about it, excessive stretching of something tends to weaken it. It gets all loose and without a support system it makes for wobbling. In addition to noticing a change in my stability I notices a weird rubbery looseness that made jogging feel weird. But as my body warmed up to the jog things seemed to come back together and I felt good by the end of it. Two forms of exercise making one better Babe *wink*
Through all this I learned you have to take it slow, you have to put in the time, you have to build it up.
How about you? Have you experience similar problems and improvements? Or are you one of those Bendy Babes and want to give us some more advise?
Let me know!