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Yoga for Women: Before you Start
The following yoga poses can be done anytime, anywhere, or as part of another workout. Always warm up for a few minutes with some walking, marching or similar activity until your body and muscles feel loose and warm.
Breathe deeply and fully while holding the poses, breathing from your lower belly and diaphragm rather than holding your breath in your chest. In yoga a breath cycle is one inhale and one exhale.
Do the poses in a tranquil environment. Music, if used, should be tranquil and peaceful. Move to your own limits.
Yoga for Women: Basic Yoga Lessons for Women
If a woman wants a healthy way of life devoid of any strain and stress, she should start her day with yoga.
First things first, when you roll out of your bed, sit onto a mat on the floor and hug your knees to your chest. Then raise your legs in the air and stay bottoms up until your head clears. Next stand up and drop your forehead to your shins until you feel ready to tackle the toothbrush and get on with your day.
Waking up doesn’t have to consist of pouring coffee down your gullet to shock yourself alive.
Many women pile up an array of small violences against themselves from the moment they wake up – caffeine, cigarettes, abrasive exercises or no exercise at all. Lots of faddish fitness programs today have this violent approach – do 50 leg raises or pound your body jogging on the pavement or jump around to a rhythm not of your own making.
Your approach to fitness and well-being and to life in general should be nonviolent one – working smoothly with concentration and determination at your own pace without competing with anyone else. Don’t be ruthless with yourself and you won’t be ruthless with other people.
Your routine should ideally center on 28 postures drawn from the 5,000-year-old technique whose name comes from the Sanskrit for sun, moon and join together. The exercises should range from deep breathing to pretzel-like stretches.
Yoga is strenuous, but not painful, and it gives every inch of your body a terrific workout.
Yoga proves particularly helpful in strengthening a body plagued by injury.
Yoga helps you maintain flexibility, build strength and muscle definition and even. Try spending 60 to 90 minutes on your yoga routine, before breakfast, five to six days a week.
Follow the basics mentioned here to have a healthy and balanced life:
Avoid the big seduction to only go with your strong points – like weight-lifting if you’ve got great muscles. It’s the thing that’s hardest for you that you need to work on the most
Don’t space out during workouts. Use that time to have a private conversation with yourself: ‘How do I feel physically, mentally.’ ‘How is my balance and coordination today.’ ‘Is there something I should pay special attention to.’
Practice yoga in the early morning or early evening at least one hour after a light meal or three to four hours after a main meal. If you are hungry before practice, try tea, milk or fruit juice.
Yoga for Modern City Life: Yoga Helps Ease Modern Stress
For Gail Stuart, who is finishing a beginner’s series, yoga is an antidote to the stress of her job at the Medical University of South Carolina, where she works with psychiatric research. You just walk through the whole process, and you feel yourself slipping away. It’s a different workout, she says, a welcome alternative to aerobics or exercise machines, which remind her of a torture chamber.
Yoga is the most prominent form of the burgeoning mind-body health movement, which includes tai chi, qigong and other meditative forms of exercise.
The practice of yoga should integrate every aspect of human existence. While many of modern Western practitioners focus on the physical asanas, for others, yoga is an all-encompassing way of life and a path to bliss.
Considering yoga’s lofty goals, it’s delightfully simple and can be done anywhere, anytime. Taken to its extreme, yoga encompasses everything from a moral code and dietary practices to deep meditation. Most commonly, though, it’s a combination of asanas, pranayama (breathing exercises) and some meditation.
Yoga would be an effective and relatively cheap substitute for many anxious and stressed patients, although they would probably also need to be motivated to become physically fit.
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