I have never made any secret of the fact that I hate yoga. Mostly because I have spent a lifetime doing sports that compact all my muscles and here comes this ancient exercise or meditation or whatever you want to call it that pulls everything out and forces me to stretch parts of me that don’t want to stretch and twist things that shouldn’t twist and have me assume positions that are just not natural. So when I recently saw an article in the New York Times saying that yoga might be bad for people my initial thought was “yeah, I was right all along.” The article said all that twisting and bending can be bad for you, it can strain muscles, rip tendons, pull your back out of shape.

But then I thought

Why am I doing this?

Wait a minute, any exercise can do that to you. If you haven’t played soccer in years then you can hurt yourself doing that. If you used to love ping pong as a kid and took it up again as an adult you can hurt yourself. And maybe yoga is a slightly exaggerated form of any exercise because it really works every single part of your body, but the basic premise is the same. If you do it properly and carefully and with good guidance it can be safe and really beneficial.

That’s not to mean I like it any more, but it does mean that it isn’t dangerous just because you do it wrong or have a crappy teacher who teaches you bad form or you try to get into a full lotus when you have spent the previous ten hours sitting in front of a computer screen and wonder why your tendons just don’t want to go there.

The point is, exercise in any form can be bad for you if you haven’t done it before – or for a long time – and you do it badly. You need to know what you are doing or work with someone who knows what they are doing and knows how to show you how to do it.

Good form is essential

The other day, the other month actually, I pulled the heck out of my calf muscle playing squash. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done a thousand times before. I wasn’t moving in a way I hadn’t done a thousand times before. And yet this time, for whatever reason, my calf went kablooey. Maybe I was just pushing it too hard, or my form was bad. All I know is that as soon as I hit a great cross court shot and was moving back into position in case my opponent – damn you Austin – got it back, my calf went bang and that was that. I’ve been slowly getting back in shape since then. But it takes time. And patience.

And that’s why when I read that article about yoga being bad for you, much as I wanted to jump on the blog and say “see, the NY Times agrees with me” my own experience taught me otherwise. Yes, of course yoga can be bad for you. Playing tiddlywinks can be bad for you if one of them jumps up and hits you in the eye. Anything, done badly, can be bad for you. But that’s no reason to dismiss the enormous potential health benefits of yoga.

Downward facing “you dawg you”

Don't try this at home folks

I once met an 83 year old man who had become a devotee of Bikram yoga. That’s the kind where they heat the room to 110 degrees so you sweat like crazy. It’s meant to warm up the muscles and tendons in your body so that they are more flexible. It’s also meant to replicate the conditions in India where yoga first was practiced. This gentleman had only taken up yoga when he was 80 and swore by Bikram, saying it gave him more energy, made him feel healthier and happier.

Frankly I think he just liked watching lots of young, cute women bend into positions that in his youth would have been unthinkable.

I still don’t like yoga. But I would never tell other people not to do it. For my 83 year old friend it’s the highlight of his day. And that’s reason enough to do any exercise isn’t it.

One of the hottest concepts in health in recent years has been the idea of ‘mind-body’ medicine. Usually it refers to the ability of the brain to influence the health of the body, tapping into the power of thoughts and emotions to influence our physical health. For instance studies have shown that meditation can help lower blood pressure, reduce the severity of irritable bowel syndrome, even lower the risk of cancer.

But there’s also an increasing body (pun intended) of evidence that shows that the mind-body connection can also work the other way, body-mind, that the physical activities of the body can influence how the brain feels and how healthy both the brain and the body is.

One of the more unusual, and fun, methods of body-mind medicine is laughter yoga where the simple act of pretending to laugh can boost the health of both the body and the brain. When you practice laughter yoga you mimic the physical act of laughing. It sounds silly I know, but practitioners say by pretending to laugh you often end up laughing long and hard, and even if you don’t the sheer physical act of ‘laughing’ has powerful physical, emotional and mental health benefits.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KIYhP-NisI

They say laughter boosts the immune system, which helps you fight disease, it also reduces how much cortisol is circulating through your body (cortisol is the so-called ‘fight or flight hormone produced when you are severely stressed such as being attacked by a pterodactyl - which doesn’t happen too often these days - or watching a Glenn Beck rant, which happens far too often for anyone’s health) and that in turn can reduce how much stress your body is subjected to on a daily basis.

What a cool idea eh! Just by laughing you are doing something good for your body, and your brain, because laughter yoga also helps reduce the likelihood of depression. It’s almost as if this idea is flipping science on its head and instead of thinking that we have to get the brain healthy for us to have a healthy body, we are going the opposite direction, saying to have a healthy brain we first need to get our body into healthy mode.

Think about it. Instead of going through years of talk therapy, psychotherapy, counseling and/or medication - or all of them - you could achieve the same by just laughing every day.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to see  your family doctor and at the end of the exam have them say ‘take two jokes and call me in the morning”. We might actually look forward to going to the doctor. Better still, we might not have to go at all.

Breathing is one of the most basic of human functions. In fact, it is the most basic. Stop breathing and everything else stops too – pretty quickly. We all do it, every single second of every minute of every day of our lives. But often we are not even aware of how we do it, or the fact that we are doing it wrong.

Breathing deeply

How can you breathe wrongly you are probably asking? Well, it’s easy. You do it without even being aware of it.

Next time you are standing in line at Starbucks or waiting for a bus or train, or in line at the supermarket take a look at all the people around you and try to notice how they are breathing. With some people it’s easy to see, or even hear, particularly with someone who is overweight – their breathing is often labored because every movement is more tiring, more taxing on their body. You can hear them breathe, you can see their chest rising and falling, as if everything is a real effort.

With other people it’s less obvious but if you watch closely (not too closely, you don’t want them calling security on you!) you can see them breathing too. It’s often quite short, shallow breaths.

Then notice how you breathe. You might be surprised to notice that you usually breathe in short, shallow breaths too. What that means is that you are not taking in as much oxygen as you could, or as you should. And over time that can have a profound impact on your physical and emotional health.

Every breath you take

One of the most important elements in yoga, perhaps the most important, is the breath, noticing the breath, focusing on it, trying to make it long and deep and smooth. Why? Because numerous studies have shown that deep, controlled breathing can:

• Ease muscle tension
• Help you feel more relaxed
• Lower heart rate and blood pressure
• Increase lung capacity
• Help people with respiratory diseases like asthma and emphysema breathe more easily and reduce need for medication
• Ease anxiety

Not bad for something we all do every day eh! The problem is most of us don’t really breathe in a way that can help us maximize the health benefits of it. So here is one way to do just that.

Learning to breathe

1) Start by observing the way you normally breathe. You should notice that as you breathe in your abdomen rises and then falls when you breathe out. Watch this for a few moments to really get a sense of the rhythm and flow of your breathing.

2) Begin to deepen your breathing and extend that movement. So, as you breathe in do so more slowly and longer than normal. Let your abdomen rise as much as is comfortable, then as you breathe out slowly let it fall.

3) Don’t try to use or expand your lungs and chest while you are doing this, use only your abdomen.

4) Do this for 20 breaths.

That’s it.

Simple, but amazingly effective.

There's a book for everything - even breathing

A fresh breath of air

So try it a few times a day at first, see how it feels. Try it particularly after a stressful event, focusing on the sound and feel of your breath, and see how quickly it helps you calm down.

Then, as you get used to it, try it more and more often. Try it standing in line at Starbucks, or waiting for the bus, or in line at the grocery store. The more you do it the better you’ll get at it and the more benefits you’ll get from it.  It could prolong your life!

We have a new yoga class on Tuesdays, it’s Ashtanga Yoga, which means “eight limbs” in Sanskrit, it’s a fast paced yoga challenging the student to move quickly and fluidly from pose to pose.  When you leave the class you are very aware that you have just experienced a fast paced, intense, physically demanding yoga practice.  They call it practice because it is composed of series of poses which will take you years to master.  I call it practice because I have to really concentrate and practice just holding the pose for a few breaths!

Our teacher, Matt, encourages us with historical insights to the poses and uses beautiful terminology like, “find the opening in your chest and breath into it to stretch just a few centimeters more”,  to guide us into the correct form.

So I decided to look up the correct poses, because I do a version that is not “flowing”.  My poses are jagged and off balance but then,  I’m still practicing!

Friends, check out how these poses are really supposed to look:

We Are Talking Flexibility!

Discouraging?  No, I’m not discouraged, but I think it helps to be in India!  Besides learning about flexibility in yoga, I found out you can learn a lot about flexibility just watching The World Cup, because I’ve learned to be flexible about who you root for.  First it was the USA, then England, then Mexico, then Brazil, then Uruguay, and Now Espana!  Now THAT’S Flexible!

For years I’ve been reluctantly  dragging my sorry bottom to yoga every once in a while. I knew it was good for me, all that stretching and breathing and stuff, but I just never liked it. I did it almost as a form of penance – good ex-Catholic that I am – for all the fun I’d had doing other sports like football (soccer) and squash where you compress all your muscles. Yoga loosened those muscles up. But it was always a real effort to get through the class, even though it was usually filled with lithe young women in leotards bending into mathematically implausible shapes. Not that I ever looked. Honest Shirley!!

But then I took a Matt class. Not as in put your mat on the floor. As in Matt the yoga teacher at SF Bay Club. His class was a whole different experience.

Now it may not even have been that Matt was so brilliant, it may simply have been that he was teaching the style of yoga called Ashtanga. Previously I’d done a different style called Iyengar. Iyengar is a slower, more meditative form that focuses on body alignment. Ashtanga (which means “Eight Limbs” in Sanskrit – see  you did learn something useful here) is a faster paced method that flows quickly from one pose to another.

Ashtanga and Iyengar yoga are completely different yoga experiences!

It wasn’t that the moves were any easier – they were pretty much the same. It wasn’t that my body was somehow more pliable. No, it was simply that the whole thing moved along at a faster pace. That meant I didn’t have to focus on clearing my mind, I was just struggling to keep up. I didn’t have to focus on “being there” or “being in the moment”, there was no way I had time to be anywhere else or think about anything else other than what I was doing.

The class flew by and at the end I was sweating lightly, and feeling great. My muscles and tendons felt lengthened, my limbs longer, my body lighter. It was amazing.

What was even more amazing was that at the end my first thought wasn’t “thank God that’s over” but “Wow, I’m coming back next week”.

So, if you were like me and thought you didn’t like yoga, think again. It may not be yoga that you don’t like. It may simply be the form of yoga that you are doing that you don’t like. For me, all I needed to do was find one that was more like exercise and less like meditation.

There’s loads of choices out there. Keep trying them till you find one you do really like.

And if at the end of it all you still haven’t found a form of yoga that works for you. At least you’ll still be a lot more limber and lithe than you were before!

Last week we took care of Emma Danger, she’s 10 months old now and just beginning to stand, but she has the yoga “happy baby”  pose down. In fact, Emma can suck her toes and sit for long periods of time in a sling on her mother’s chest. She is one flexible little gal.

Emma was who I was thinking about when we were at our yoga class on Tuesday night.  I was wishing that my joints were as flexible and loose as Emma’s. They are NOT.  But I get a lot out of yoga – breathing, concentration, calming and general well being.  Yoga is not only a good form of exercise, it can be an essential element in relieving stress.

It got me to thinking about the benefits yoga can bring to children.  After all, if Emma does yoga and she’s only 10 months (granted she doesn’t even know she’s doing it) then children may be completely comfortable learning yoga techniques and gain the same benefits that we adults do from this practice.

So I did a little research and guess what.  Yoga not only helps children concentrate, breathe, calm themselves, but there are studies that find  it can do a heck of a lot more as the child grows.  In fact, just by introducing yoga, kids can gain a life long benefits.

Molly Kenny, MS-CCC of the Samarya Center, studies and uses yoga as therapy for everything from toddlers to hospice patients.  She has found that just the physical act of balancing seems improve self-esteem, concentration, a connection to the body.  Children who practice simple yoga techniques may not only be more able to calm themselves  but may be better able to regulate their emotions and manage stress.

Studies done by SYTAR, the first Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research, suggest that children who do yoga,  may also choose better foods to eat and they might even begin a life long habit that includes more physical activity than children who do not practice yoga.

And you can find all kinds of yoga classes on YouTube if you search yoga for kids, it’s free and you don’t need equipment for the most part!

So here are a few things you can do with your little ones right now.

My first meditation: Have your children join you in a comfortable spot,  everyone close your eyes and take 3 slow, deep breaths – inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth.  Repeat this two or three times before the children slowly open their eyes. – This breaks the cycle of constant activity and creates a quiet time where they are still and present in the moment.

Get your baby to giggle – This is a fun activity, make faces, tell a joke, do a silly dance.  Emma Danger loves it when we do head banging…tossing our hair around.  For some reason she thinks that’s hysterical… So what?  Well, laughter creates endorphins, decrease stress hormones, lowers blood pressure, elevates moods and becomes a natural pain killer in the body.

Get out the clay!  When children have a creative outlet they concentrate and the creativity of working with clay has a soothing effect.  It’s a good way to unwind and relieve stress.

So put your child on a path to less stress and better health.  You can be your own kid’s Yogi!

When I was a kid growing up in London one of my favorite places to visit was the Tower of London, that started out as the home of the King of England but ended up as his or her prison of choice. One of my favorite places in the Tower was St. Catherine’s Tower. Now that’s not because of any religious attachment I had to St. Catherine. No, it’s because that’s where they kept all the torture equipment.

Hey, I was a boy, what do you expect, enlightenment!

Anyway, I was fascinated by all the things they used to torture people. There was the “Bride’s scold”, an iron mask with a bit to put in the person’s mouth. There was the “Iron Maiden” (notice how women seem to be a recurring theme here!) which was a kind of metal body-shaped frame that you could lock someone in; and as you closed the door, spikes on the inside of the frame were pushed into the prisoner’s body. A medieval form of acupuncture, without the therapeutic benefits if you like!

You could see how all that would seem fascinating to a kid. OK, well, maybe you can’t, but I thought it was cool.

However,  my favorite was the “Rack”. I was always intrigued by how huge and elaborate a device it seemed, and wondered how it would feel to be pulled and stretched to the point where you felt you were going to be ripped apart.

I just found out. I took a yoga class.

This wasn’t your standard yoga class. This one focused on specific exercises and kept working you deeper and deeper into the pose until you could do it. Or in my case until you fell over backwards, sideways, or whichever way my body decided offered the line of least resistance.

It was bloody awful. My arms were like rubber, my thighs burned, at one point my ribs and chest seemed to get locked in a spasm as if to say “enough with this.”

But here’s the really weird thing. Afterwards I felt great. I felt as if I had elongated stuff that had been squished. That my muscles and tendons and ligaments were looser and more limber than they had been after months of exercises that compressed them.

In short, to quote James Brown, “I feel good”   But then, I knew that I would.

And it made me appreciate once again just how important flexibility is to a balanced exercise program. You can do aerobics until your resting heart rate is lower than Glenn Beck’s IQ. You can lift weights until your ears have muscles. But unless you add in some stretching and flexibility, it’s not really a fully balanced program.

Yoga is great on so many levels – mental as well as physical – but it’s not for everyone. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t find other ways to stretch. There are many different stretches you can do that don’t come with names like “Downward Facing dog” or “Assanupadowna” (OK I made that last one up but it sounds legitimate doesn’t it) and they all do basically the same thing, they get your body in balance.

But in case you aren’t sure how to stretch or, more importantly, how to stretch safely, here’s some tips on a few great ways to really help release your muscles.

You probably won’t thank me for this (and believe me, I don’t thank me for this) but you might be grateful for it.