Tag: Fitness

Yin yoga: relaxed maintenance

Most of lockdown wasn’t great for training – home kata is quite difficult unless you’ve got a particularly spacious living room – but there were some upsides. Online training meant we could stay connected and keep training together, and it meant I could make time for yoga again, because my teacher started running classes online.

Yoga is great for karateka: it can improve your strength, flexibility and balance, help you recover from injuries (check with your physio before starting!) and improve your focus. You can choose from lots of different yoga classes, depending on what you’re looking for. Many classes are very westernised, while some try to focus on the roots of the practice. 

Photo by LUNA ACTIVE FITNESS on Unsplash

In his book about yin yoga, Bernie Clark explains:

Most forms of yoga today are dynamic, active practices designed to work only half of our body, the muscular half, the “yang” tissues. Yin Yoga allows us to work the other half, the deeper “yin” tissues of our ligaments, joints, deep fascial networks and even our bones. All our tissues are important and need to be exercised so that we can achieve optimal health and vitality.”

We also need balance. When you do a lot of strength and cardio training, and you live with a lot of stress, you need proper relaxation that actively rejuvenates you – unfortunately not just wine and crisps in front of the telly. 

In a yin class, you get into the pose and find a gentle stetch. Then you use blocks, pillows and blankets to support yourself, so that you can focus completely on relaxing rather than trying to hold yourself in the right position. You then stay there for three minutes (it can be longer). Relaxing actually takes a lot of focus: I have to consciously let go of each part of my body, which has developed my awareness of just how much tension I’m accumulating in the week leading up to the class. The letting go isn’t just physical, it’s emotional, and the two aren’t separate: to let go physically we need to let go emotionally and vice versa. 

On a good day, you can gradually move further into the stretch, trying to keep yourself in the mild discomfort zone and work your edge. It’s familiar ground for Zen students: as with meditation, you appear to be still, but actually you’re sitting with your discomfort and your wish for the time to just hurry up, then working with how that preference for things to be different occupies your mind and tenses your body. 

If you’re a yin type and perpetual daydreamer like me, you’ll find the long poses suit you quite nicely, but that it’s far too easy to drift away and lose the benefit of the practice. Every time the minds skips off to think about say, a nice hot cup of tea, or starts scrolling through tomorrow’s to-do list, little tensions creep into the pose and you need to come back to being in your body so you can let them go again. If you’re more of a yang person, you might find the minutes pass more slowly than they do when you’re queuing for toilets or waiting for the London Underground. 

Once your three minutes are up, you move into shivansana for a minute, lying flat on the floor to let your body readjust, or ‘rebound’, before heading into the next pose. Again, you need to keep focusing on your body and not say, cake or taking the bins out. 

It’s great to do an evening yin class and go straight to bed. Doing it online, at home, makes that possible, though sometimes there can be interruptions to the relaxation. One session became more lively than intended when my cat spotted another class participant’s cat on the screen and followed his every move. 

By the end of the class, so much tension has left your body that you’re ready for a sleep. Yin yoga is particularly suited to online classes, since there’s the option to go straight to bed as soon as you log off and, actually, yoga gear can sometimes look really like pyjamas.

Read more

The Martial Artist’s Book of Yoga – Lily Chou

The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga – Bernie Clark

Try a class

https://toniwolfyoga.com

My hojo undo: barre

I got into barre reluctantly, by accident. I’ve got two different hip problems and have been through a variety of physio and rehab, and missed a lot of training. I’ve also had a shoulder injury and I’m crap at push ups.

Ballet dancers’ feet

Photo by Jess Zoerb on Unsplash

I was talking to the physio I went to see for my shoulder about strength generally. I’d tried a few different things by that stage: exercises from the physio (often effective, but targeted and don’t address the whole body), reformer pilates (small, expensive classes, scary device that looks a bit Middle Ages), individual pilates instruction (really properly expensive, incredibly fancy gym, inconvenient location, but effective), group pilates (highly effective, but a long journey and complicated parking). He mentioned barre in passing, and I thought it was worth a try.

I found a Barrecore studio near me. I joined a queue of beautifully sculpted and lycra’d barre devotees in the fragrant basement of Sweaty Betty in Wimbledon. I felt a bit under dressed in my ancient gasshuku t-shirt and cheap leggings.

The class was in a carpeted, mirrored studio, with purple mats and pink weights. Many of the movements were familiar from the Pilates classes I’d been to, but Barrecore adds more bodyweight exercises and many variations on a plank. A lot of the movements are tiny but demand fierce endurance, like lengthy squats on the balls of your feet, standing splits and the full-body ‘ice skater’. 

The instructors move from wince-inducing micro-moves to careful stretches with a ballet dancer’s flowing grace, which is a wonderful thing to aspire to while I lurch from failed plank to flailing side plank. They’re great at explaining why you’re doing what you’re doing and how the movements work, including – and karateka will appreciate this more than their core audience – why we’re spending an agonising amount of time in shicodachi (or ‘wide second position’). It’s essential to get your posture right and make sure you do exactly as the instructor says; there’s even a ‘form’ class, which helps you get used to the moves, before moving into their usual ‘signature’ class. There’s also an advanced class.

I went to a few classes until I felt I’d got a good idea of what to do, then switched to the on-demand classes. For only £25 a month, you can watch as many of their videos as you like. You can choose a short workout to focus on one area of the body, or do the whole thing – I found the short lower body classes really helpful for keeping my hip injury in check for the run-up to my last grading. It’s probably a good idea to go to an in-person class every so often, just to check you’re doing things right, though there are plenty of reminders in the videos. 

You need to do a few videos a week to see results, and I struggled to find the time, but once I’d seen the improvement to my hip, my balance and my core strength, I was hooked. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m good at barre yet, and I can’t see anyone describing it as fun – in fact it’s right up there with parking in the entertainment stakes – but if you’ve got to the stage where you’re thinking about buying shares in your local physio practice, it’s a bargain.