Yoga for beginners

I have a yoga mat.  Little purple weights that are 2 pounds each, and 5  pounds each.  A purple squishy disc to hold while you sit up and stretch.  And a cool bag to put the mat in.  I have a yoga DVD and a friend from work gave me 3 video tapes of yoga.  And the last time I did any yoga was last fall.  For about a month or so I was doing really well - getting up at about 6:30am and going into the front room (with full sunshine), putting the dvd on and following the paces while a teeny tiny woman in Hawaii showed me how to be happy and peaceful.  I believe I mentioned in an earlier post how I felt about this tiny woman so I won't reiterate that.  Needless to say I had zero excuse to not do yoga.  And today I decided I was going to try it. 

So, I did the yoga for beginners this morning.  I didn't use the tapes or DVD, another section on the WW site is all about work outs, and Yoga for Beginners is a work out that is going to be good for me.  And it's going to be a chore.

The work out starts with my favorite of all poses - corpse pose.  Yes, you get to lay down and play dead!!  You lie on the mat with your arms out and your legs out and relaxed and do deep breathing  Yes, I LOVE this pose. 

Then there are a couple of poses that make me laugh - cat pose and cow pose.  You basically kneel on all 4s and then arch your back up.  The trick on these is to hold your abdominal muscles in while you're doing it (you know, instead of letting the stomach just hang...)

Exercise #4 is another favorite:  child pose.  You kneel and then stretch your arms out in front of you and put your forehead on the mat.  Yep, I like this one too.

Exercise #5 is plank pose.  This is almost like the beginning of a push up.  You get up on your toes and hold yourself up on your arms and hold your stomach in.  Good pose.

All through this you are supposed to do deep breathing which helps clear the head as well as works on the abdominal muscles.  (Breathing like a singer, from the stomach/abdomen not the shoulders.)

Exercise #6 makes me laugh, it's upward dog.  Basically you lie on your stomach with your feet apart and then push your torso (and tummy if you can) up with your arms and look up.  It's a fantastic stretch.

Exercise #7 was my brick wall.  It's called the bow and I think it will be a while until I can do this stretch - I very nearly gave myself a charliehorse in my thigh!  In this heartless pose you lie on your stomach (this part's easy) and then you reach back and grab your ankles and look up......  I can grab one of my ankles but I am here to tell you that second ankle was NOT going to be grabbed without turning my entire set of leg muscles into a pretzel.   This stretch SUCKS.  And will be good I'm sure.  But for now it sucks.

Thank GOD the next (and last) 2 poses are child pose and corpse pose.  So, that was my first yoga set.  15 minutes.  WW recommends doing it through twice, and I can see that it would be good to do.  It's going to take a while to assure my muscles that they can indeed push through the fat but I will keep doing it.

One day.  One pound.  One step at a time.
~N