Entries Tagged 'yoga / pilates' ↓

FUNNY post from Scott Bird on Straight to the Bar.

Team YogaSlackers at work.

Slackline Yoga. Very, very strange.
- Wall Street Journal

Related posts:

Yoga is better than nothing

extreme fitness – Yoga

by Rick McCharles

A fitness guru named Ryan Lee knows a lot about how to generate traffic on his website. And, clearly, not much about Yoga and Pilates. (Or how to increase resistance using your own body weight.)

It’s an old strategy, one I try to resist on this site. Post something with an inflammatory, sensational title. For example: The TRUTH About Yoga and Pilates

Rant emotionally:

For all you zealots out there trying to help me train my athletes, I actually have done OK without you. Just for the record, there are many folks like me who have been training athletes for decades who have drawn much of their warm-up and flexibility work from yoga but don’t feel the need to dedicate two of their eight hours a week to this relatively small area. I need to work on strength, power, speed, and conditioning — all in eight hours a week. I need to do that with a proper warm-up and attention to flexibility. Can’t you just see the yoga guy or girl jumping up and down saying, “I know, I know, yoga does all that.”

The truth is yoga does not do all that.

Yoga develops strength to a point and then simply works primarily on muscle endurance. …

The TRUTH About Yoga and Pilates by Mike Boyle | Ryan Lee

Then sit back as many industry websites link to your post. To refute it.

The comments on that post are entertaining.

Ryan Lee is all about the money, it looks to me.

That’s a bit of a shame. Because Ryan Lee has a good point under the bluster.

Yoga and Pilates are over-praised. Practitioners are oft too evangelical. I see both as supplemental to the main fitness training program.

That TRUTH will be lost in the heat of the argument, I fear.

By the way, Ryan. Send any of your clients to adult recreational gymnastics conditioning. We’ll get them more fit than you can. And we won’t need a weight room to do it.

… Lets see if I can generate some internet buzz of my own.

Thanks for the tip on this, George.

Related: posts on Yoga / Pilates

Every year I see increasingly fit Yoga practitioners.

A non-gymnast friend, Andy, recently told me he learned straddle L-sit press to handstand (in middle age) though Yoga training. That’s impressive considering he was primarily a wrestler in his youth.

This is NOT Andy.

photographer Josef Vital – original on flickr

Thanks to Curt Gibbs for a book recommendation.

The author, GuruPrem Singh Khalsa, was a USC scholarship gymnast.

It’s a book on how to do postures in Yoga correctly, or for that matter how to move correctly.

Divine Alignment - official website

I have friends whose dream vacation is spiritual, doing yoga for hours every day on the beach.

Historically we in the gymnastics community have been suspicious of Yoga. If you asked me to locate a fraud, I would look first in ashrams.

I am embarrassed by my lack of knowledge mastery of the musculoskeletal system. (I have no memory syndrome.) Still, my understanding is better than 90% of Yoga teachers. Their explanations are not as science-based as I would like. Where are the chakras? Exactly?

But my Tulum beach yoga teacher Sarah swayed me. I really enjoyed her sessions.

Joe Laughlin convinced me too. Joe is a professional dancer and a former National tumbling champion. A serious athlete.

Joe retired at age 37. Then made a comeback a couple of years later. He said that by doing only Pilates (something of a Germanic evolution from Yoga) he was restored to the best shape of his life. Many serious athletes I know have embraced pilates. It works.

I now, finally concede that yoga can improve fitness and is not simply trendy posturing. Not just an excuse for sipping latte with your yoga-mat-toting friends.