Level 1-2 with Josh
The plan was to go and see ol’ Billy Clinton talk at ASU Gammage after youth soccer was done but I was running late and the rest of my party was way out of position, so I made yoga instead. I was excited about this anyway as I haven’t been going enough since my sister was in town all week. I have also been beating myself up a little with running and need to workout.
Josh is a new teacher and his style is very philosophical and meditative. I am pretty sure he has had a lot of Anusara training which is what they teach at Yoga Village, where I first got into Yoga. This style is less concerned with creating a Flow (that is akin to aerobics), and more about each pose and making sure you are in them fully. This means you are physically standing in that pose but also that your thoughts are in the pose as well.
Before class started I made sure to introduce myself to two strangers as a pseudo new rule of mine where I am trying to talk to as many people each day as I can. I met Nicole who wasn’t overly talkative but nice enough. Then I talked with Jackie who was much more comfortable and we talked about coaching youth teams. I mentioned the soccer league I was helping with and she talked about the Boys and Girls Club teams she worked with for basketball. She is also relatively new to Innervision and we talked about a few of the different classes we go to. I told her that Saturday morning at 730am is really good cause it gets you awake and productive for the rest of the day.
At the start of class Josh had each of us introduce who we are and something about ourselves. I mentioned that I just got done coaching soccer with 6 year olds and got a few comments. Everyone else seems pretty cool and we got started.
Josh likes to start his Level 1-2 classes lying on your back which is just a different way from most classes. We started by lifting the left leg straight up and then taking it out to the side and then bringing it back to center. The idea is to get familiar with how your hip joint rotates in the socket and to get that warmed up. Then we did the right leg in the same fashion for a few repetitions.
After that we started to move into the familiar sequence of Down Dog and Plank and Chaturanga, but Josh likes to throw all types of variation in and doesn’t let you fall into the repetitive Flow. This makes it more challenging because you lose sense of time and have to fight off the anxiety of not knowing how much longer the class is.
I am having some tightness in my right knee behind the kneecap which I guess is what they call Runner’s Knee. This is sucky as it gets really tight at various points in the session, enough to take me out of a few poses even when I have my right leg lifted off of the ground. From what I am reading it sounds like this is due to an Imbalance of my Quadriceps and I think its because my inner quads are slightly underdeveloped. I will work on a few quadriceps exercises to get things into shape, but it sounds like I need to take it easy on the running for a little while.
After class I ran into Reagan at the Sprouts right next door. We talked about going to Innervision a bit and how we are both quitting our regular gyms to just do yoga. Nice enough young woman.
Tags: yoga
