Author: Thamin Abdul

It is incredible what yoga does for skiing. People can ski all day long and much better.

Conditioning before hitting the slopes can increase the safety and enjoyment of the sport. Most ski injuries occur early in the day when muscles are tight and enthusiasm is high, and late in the day when muscles are weakened and technique is poor.

A simple yoga exercise called the awkward pose, can increase your strength, balance and concentration which will make the ski season more rewarding.

It consists of three variations which are done sequentially.

To begin, stand with the feet apart, about shoulder width, an even distance (approximately six inches) between your heels and toes. Extend the arms out in front of you parallel to the floor with the shoulders pressed down and away from the head. Keep the upper body strong and firm in this position.

Bend your knees and shift the weight back into the heels, pushing the buttocks out behind you. When the top of the thighs are parallel to the floor and arms, hold your pose. The feet should be held parallel and the knees should only be shoulder width apart.

One good way to think of getting into this pose is to imagine that you are sitting in an invisible chair leaning back to bring the spine and shoulders against the back of the chair. The arm muscles are contracted, the abdomen is held tight and your breathing should be normal. Hold the pose for 20 seconds. Stand up.

The second part of this series is similar to the first. Keep the upper body the same as before and stand straight up onto the balls of the feet, standing as high as possible with the arches pressed forward. To keep the ankles strong and straight, press down with each big toe. Now, bend the knees again keeping the spine straight and stop when the quadriceps are parallel to the floor. Hold this pose for 20 seconds. Stand up. You will find this second pose a bit more difficult.

Third, assume the same basic pose with upper body firm and strong. Again, slowly bend the knees and this time sit all the way down lightly onto the heels. Now press the knees together and hold the body still. The quadriceps are again level with the floor and the spine is straight. Hold again for 20 seconds. Stand up out of the pose slowly, bring the heels down and relax. Don’t forget to do a second set of all three poses.

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Yoga has been practiced for 400 years and is a system of exercises which are very easy and effective at increasing a persons overall health ad well-being. Yoga instructors and students alike will often talk about phrases like “being in harmony with oneself and surroundings” and indeed this is a primary goal of Yoga, to achieve a unity of body, mind and spirit in a oneness with the world around us. Yoga will teach a person to stimulate internal organs including the likes of the prostate, which is practically never exercised by any other discipline. It will teach you to apply pressure upon glandular areas of the body and it will combine this with meditation and breathing techniques that will grant you the ability to turn your concentration inward to examine your feelings and thoughts.

There are a number of different aspects in Yoga, but one of the most appealing is that this is a set of exercises that anyone can enjoy and benefit from. It does not require any expensive equipment or a special setting, it can be practiced by anyone, man or women, rich or poor, young or old, healthy or ill. Perhaps it’s greatest appeal has always been that it is a set of beneficial exercises that anyone can do at any time and in any place. Yoga is even a safe form of exercise for pregnant women and prenatal Yoga classes are often recommended to expectant mothers. A specially tailored prenatal yoga class will help prepare a women, physically and mentally to become a mother. It gives her a number of useful tools for coping with labour and the strengthening of the body means that the recovery period after giving birth will be much shorter.

There is a preconception amongst many men that Yoga is a female pastime, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Yoga provides numerous benefits to men: decreasing stress, assisting in relaxation and increasing power, stamina and flexibility across the board.

Senior citizens can get a number of benefits from a yoga course and are often the first to praise the mental advantages such as an increased attention span and a better memory both long and short term.

Even young children will benefit from a Yoga regime by stronger bones, increased circulation and a better disposition resulting from breathing exercises and the relaxation of the exercise.

Regardless of the person Yoga has a number of lasting benefits and will aid in a wide variety of different health issues. Regular practitioners of yoga will live an overall enhanced lifestyle, are more likely to have a strong memory and better stamina combined with a stronger sense of balance. Even late starters can use Yoga to combat a range of health disorders from Blood pressure to arthritis to breathing orders.

It’s no wonder when you consider all the different benefits of Yoga how very popular it is, and the fact that it is a regime of exercise that is open to everyone is one more big advantage of it. It means that families can stay fit and healthy together and include everyone from the youngest child through to the oldest family members. The exercises can be performed at varying levels of difficulty and intensity, which means that two people at completely different levels of strength and flexibility can go through the same motions and both benefit.

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Four thousand years ago Yoga was practiced in India, today it is popular all over the world and in numerous different styles and forms. Not only is the popularity of this form of exercises remarkable, but so is the results and benefits that people are getting from Yoga every day. The benefits can be broadly split into three different groups – physical benefits, mental benefits and spiritual benefits. Which benefits are most important to an individual will vary based on their preconceptions and motivations, but anyone can experience beneficial results in all three areas from a prolonged use of Yoga.

Physical Benefits

The first types of benefits are those purely on a physical level. Yoga is at it’s core a group of exercises. Some disciplines will use these exercises to prepare the body for a deeper meditative process, but they will still experience physical benefits from performing them as exercises. The deep breathing exercise has immediate health benefits due to increasing the intake of oxygen into the system. This oxygen is transported by the blood to our organs and tissues, which will become sick without sufficient oxygen and nutrients. Frequently these tissues and organs are starved of nutrients due to a number of reasons including poor air intake or quality, bad circulation or disease within the body. Yoga increases the oxygen intake, removes blockages in the circulation to ensure it’s safe delivery and also stimulates the lymphatic system to aid in the removal of toxins from our system, leaving our bodies auto immune system more free to deal with invading disease or viruses.

Beyond this internal health which many people take for granted, Yoga will also greatly increase a persons balance, flexibility and muscle strength.

Mental Benefits.

Many people see this as the most import benefit that we can gain from Yoga. It will of course depend on what your priorities are but the mental benefits of Yoga are certainly impressive. The ability to focus on ones breathing has a natural consequence of allowing extraneous thoughts to melt away and a state of calmness to be introduced. This is not a feat to be taken lightly as it provides a valuable skill in the ability to remain calm amidst turmoil. A mother can use this when everything happens at once in the home, a businessperson can use it to focus on a single task despite everyone around him being panicked or a soldier can use it to block out the bullets and noise and focus on an important task.

Yoga also requires a high level of discipline from those practicing it – both the discipline required to perform the exercises themselves and the discipline needed to stick to a regular exercise regime. Again this is something that comes surprisingly easy to people once they have mastered the basis of the Yoga breathing exercises.

Spiritual Benefits

Generally newcomers to yoga will not understand these benefits for some time. There are a number of benefits that can fall into the ‘spiritual’ category. Yoga itself is built around a philosophy that includes it’s own set of ethics, but these are seldom taught as part of Western Yoga practise. Instead the spiritual benefits we talk about tend to be a persona acceptance of yourself and contentment with your place in life. For some people it goes beyond that but discussing spiritual feelings is always difficult to do so broadly. Overall the level of spiritual satisfaction you get is likely to depend on your own personal beliefs.

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There are actually several branches of yoga, including bhakti, the yoga of devotion, and jnana, the yoga of knowledge. The most widely practiced branch in the US, the one typically offered at gyms and exercise studios, is hatha yoga, which is physical yoga. But there also are different styles of hatha yoga, from the exercise-intense power yoga to the gentle chair poses used in svaroopa yoga.

Many of the instructors offer integral yoga, which involves stretching and bending into various positions called asanas, as well as breathing exercises and deep relaxation. By practicing and learning asanas, students can gain flexibility, strength, stamina and improved circulation.

Integral yoga is not religious, but it does offer an introspective, spiritual component that you won’t find in most exercise programs.

A typical adult class lasts 1 hour. First, the students center themselves through breathing, then come together as a group with a collective om. They do a quick series of cardiovascular movements, an hour of stretching and 20 minutes of relaxation while lying on their backs.

The relaxation period gives students a chance to turn inward. Some people are making lists in their head. Some people are asleep. Some people are just in a really great space, where they’re conscious of what’s going on in the room, and yet at the same time, completely and unequivocally out.

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A rising number of business people are finding the mind-body connection.

Yoga, meditation, and other Eastern-born exercises are finding a growing audience among harried business people craving inner calm. Classes are offered at health clubs, company fitness centers, corporate retreats and spas.

Ideas that once were left-of-center are finding greater acceptance with the public support. Mind-body executive fitness is a hot topic right now.

Lynn Doody, owner of Zen Fitness wellness programs in Chicago, notes that, whereas in the past most of her clients pursued traditional cardiovascular and weight-training exercise, most now incorporate mind-body applications into the regimen.

There’s just a general awareness, and non-conventional health care is a little more available.

No need to convince Mark Frantz. The 40-year-old vice-president at Merrill Lynch & Co. had learned in 15 years of trading commodities to manage stress and anxiety. He ran a few times a week, worked out at the gym, and worked at reducing stress in other conventional ways.

But he still ground his teeth at night, massages were temporary Band-Aids, and even while running he’d tense his muscles. He wanted more. He sought ”a different quality of life.”

What he found was yoga and meditation. At home, on an airplane, or for 10 minutes behind closed doors at work, Mr. Frantz can shut out distractions with deep breathing, yoga poses, imagery and other relaxation techniques.

He still runs, but ‘(yoga and meditation) forces you to focus on what’s going on in the moment and to be aware of what your body is telling you. It relaxes you, brings your heart rate and your blood pressure down.

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Mr. La Forge (Yoga Trainer) suspects that because the mind-body exercises typically are easier to pursue, executives have a better chance of making a lifetime habit of them. To see if his hunch is correct, he launched a five-year study of 110 middle- and upper-level executives in companies in the US. He tracks their exercise habits and see if those incorporating mind-body techniques stick with the program longer.

Devotees say the mind-body exercise regimen has a payoff in the workplace, as well.

Barry Moltz, 36, founder and CEO of CHTech International., a mail-order distributor of computer hardware and software, started doing Yoga a year ago at the to balance the pressures of growing a business with starting a family. He still works out in a gym and commutes to work on his bicycle, but he also meditates in the half-lotus position for 15 or 20 minutes at night after his two young children have gone to sleep.

He says most of his friends, also in their mid-30s, have jumped on similar mind-body fitness tracks.

”I think the toughest part about running a company is that there are so many demands on your time. When I meditate, it really allows me to relax and focus all my energies in one place,” he says. ”Now when I’m involved in a meeting, I can be immersed in that meeting instead of thinking about 15 other things. And people really respond when you’re totally focused on just them.”

The pressures of the job say you shouldn’t be satisfied where you are today. You can never feel like you’ve achieved anything because it’s very elusive. Yoga and meditation allows you to be happier and more effective in what you’re doing now.

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There are many of us who feel we are not as bright as we would like to be; or that we lack the will power a friend or a colleague seems to have. What is not known widely – or taken with skepticism even when known – is that mental power can be enhanced by Yoga and meditation.

Don’t worry if your allopathic doctors dismiss this claim, or worse, laugh at it in contempt. Allopathic doctors tend to downplay such claims because allopathy has been brainwashed into a sort of negativism.

While the neuro-surgeon himself swears by the mantra which he recites every morning, believing it is instrumental in making divine energy flow through him, he feels that the beneficial effects of yoga on all professionals, particularly businessmen, have hardly been talked about.

Yoga or meditation is very beneficial to business executives because it makes decision-making much easier and quicker. It takes away vacillation and helps the brain to grasp the pros and cons quickly.

A surgeon needs to take a decision quickly on the operating table. Similarly, a businessman may not have more than five minutes to decide. Supposing he has a dollar 1 million business deal where a decision has to be made in five minutes, he needs a brain which is stimulated and in a trim state. In this state, decision-making becomes easy and anxiety level goes down.

In such a state not only is the brain able to think clearly, but the other systems of the body which suffer due to stress or tensions, are also spared.

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Suresh Nigam, chairman of MetJet, one of the leading trainers of computer hardware engineers in India, not only practices yoga but preaches it at his 35 centers.

So what is it and how does it work.

At the heart of it is something which translates as the stoppage of mind modification. For example when we hear music we get distracted. We must stay aware and conscious but not get distracted from our goal.

How then does yoga, an ancient, essentially private activity, help in the work environment.

Suresh believes that the collective is an entity just as much as an individual is. If individuals are happy, calm and alert then the collective consciousness is harmonious and dynamic and will produce better results. If people are tense and unhappy it will reflect in their productivity.

At MetJet all managers and employees are sent to the Yoga Institute at Santa Cruz (in Mumbai) which was founded in 1989. There people are shown a path, how to control your mind and not to run after sensual pleasures. You learn not to run away from your responsibilities.

The root cause of these afflictions is ignorance. That leads to a grandiose sense of self-importance and misunderstanding. We love and hate in extremes. By getting up and finding out what is happening, we reduce stress. Once you are aware of what is going on you have won half the battle.

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When Trace Bonner launched Holy Cow in West Ashley’s South Windermere Shopping Center last summer, she didn’t know what to expect. Now she’s teaching 16 classes a week and adding another instructor. And while she credits the center’s success in part to its cute cow logo and convenient location, there’s no question that there’s a revived interest in yoga across America.

The ancient Indian practice of yoga first arrived in the US at the beginning of the 20th century, but didn’t really catch on until 1969 with chants at Woodstock. Now, after being overshadowed by the aerobics craze in the ’80s and early ’90s, yoga is once again attracting followers, with many looking for relief from ailments and injuries or from the stress of daily life.

Baby boomers, worn out from years of jogging and bouncy workouts, are back on board. But interest is growing with other age groups, too, from college students to senior citizens to celebrities.

The surge in interest is being fueled partly by doctors’ growing acceptance of yoga’s healing potential. Mainstream medicine has adopted yoga as a gentle therapeutic method for treating a number of illnesses, so more and more doctors are referring their patients to yoga. Initial trials have shown yoga can help people with arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, asthma and cardiac risk factors.

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Stand with your back against the wall. Place your feet two or three feet apart. Keeping feet firmly on the floor, and weight balanced on heels and toes, stretch your body up, pressing shoulders back and allowing arms to hang at your sides (Fig. 1). Inhale.

Exhale and slowly bend from waist, sliding your right hand down the right side as far as it will go. Shoulders should press back and hips should remain level, pointing forward. Head should be turned to the side, so that it’s at a right angle to the body. Hold posture for 10 slow counts, inhale and come up to starting position. Exhale and repeat on left. Inhale and come up to starting position.

Exhale and rest a moment. Inhale and slowly raise arms to shoulder level, palms down. At the same time, point the right foot to the right at a 90-degree angle while keeping the left foot turned in slightly. Exhale and bend to the right, sliding hand down to ankle or foot. If possible, touch the ground behind foot. Pull hip square against wall with left hand and turn head to look up.

Inhale and raise left arm straight up over head so that arms are in a straight line. Keep hips and torso against the wall as both arms stretch, one down and one up, touching the wall. Hold posture with smooth, even breathing for a slow count of 10. Inhale, come up and repeat on left.

Benefits: Trikonasana helps produce excellent spinal flexibility. It stretches the legs, back and neck and helps to loosen up the hips and make them strong and flexible. It is also, to some extent, a balance posture; in yoga, it is believed that the skill developed in physical balance has a profound effect on the mind, quieting unruly emotions and creating calm. It is one of the best postures for slimming the waist, hips, arms and legs. Remember to breathe deeply in when stretching up and breathe deeply out when bending the body downward.

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