Fit and Youthful Life

Guest Author: anonymous


Which asanas, or Yoga postures, should you select? How long should you hold each Yoga posture? What is the benefit of holding a Yoga posture for minutes at a time?

Should you start or finish a Yoga class with meditation? How should you incorporate Pranayama within your Yoga class? These are some of the many questions that Yoga teachers must address and find solutions for.

Which asanas or Yoga postures should you select? Some Yoga posture sequencing is considered so important that a few Yoga teachers and Yoga Masters have gone through the trouble of patenting and copywriting them.

This is still a hot topic in some Yoga circles, but sequencing should ideally contain a mixture of standing, seated, table, kneeling, balancing, prone, and supine Yoga postures.

This may not always be possible, if you are teaching a specialized class, such as Chair Yoga or Prenatal Yoga, but a wide variety of Yoga postures will have a multitude of health benefits for mind, body, and spirit.

On the surface, we know that Yoga helps us live a better quality life – with improvements in pain relief, the immune system, circulation, removal of toxins, and a change to moderate dieting habits.

Therefore, any Yoga is better than no Yoga at all. This is why it is good to tell your students to add a small daily Yoga routine to their lives.

If they can practice Yoga longer, that’s fine; but new Yoga students may have trouble fitting Yoga into their lives for 15 minutes a day. This shows you how busy they are all day.

How long should a student hold each Yoga posture? If you are teaching a Restorative, or Iyengar style, Yoga class, the postures will be held for a while. The purpose is for the above-mentioned health benefits for developing strength.

Most people think of Yoga as a “stretch class,” but holding postures for more than 20 seconds starts to test the strength of your muscles. As the time gets longer, your muscles let you know they are being worked; and this is much less friction than joints are exposed to by many other exercise methods.

A Vinyasa style Yoga class will not hold postures for long, but Vinyasa classes are aerobic, while enhancing muscle tone and flexibility. Some Vinyasa Yoga enthusiasts insist Vinyasa is the ultimate cross training method.

To be honest, most of the Vinyasa students I teach are, on average, a generation younger than my Restorative Yoga students, and my Chair Yoga students are a generation older than my Restorative Yoga students. Therefore, the type of Yoga sequencing should address the health conditions of your students.

Copyright 2007 – Paul Jerard / Aura Publications



Banish Wrinkles Instantly

Guest Author: Alien


Let’s look into the history of yoga and the reasons behind people practicing yoga. Yoga could be the best choice for you, when you are fascinated in getting body fitness, decrease stress, or desire to move into your deeper, spiritual side. It is more essential for you to know the basics and history of yoga before practicing yoga techniques.

Getting an idea about yoga doesn’t need to know all the words or their meanings to practice yoga. It requires only having a little knowledge about the subject. The benefits of yoga can be achieved only when meditation and physical exercises are combined. The beauty of yoga is it can be carried out all in one exercise program.

Yoga – Art of Discipline

Yoga is an art of discipline. It offers a way to have a union between your mind, body, and spirit. Yoga is exactly in the middle between physical exercises and meditation. In tough physical exercises, the body is physically strained and is tuned up. It will not take a lot of thinking to undergo an exercise routine.

Meditation in contrast, the body will do nothing; every thing will be with calming and relaxing your mind and reaching your inner spirit. People in these days, with stressful society are seeking out a means of becoming fit physically and spiritually. Yoga is becoming popular as it binds the two, physical and mental aspects, jointly into a comfortable package in the middle.

Yoga is the physical discipline of sitting in one position for long periods and the mental discipline of quieting your mind and eliminating all the disturbances and tensions from the mind and brings you peacefulness that the regular physical exercises are unable to provide you.

A good practice of yoga can give you a spirit of calm and peacefulness that physical exercise can’t. It also provides you a healthy feeling because meditation on its own can’t offer you. Yoga being in the middle and maybe due to benefits of regular practice of yoga, it is becoming popular and a way to help you to enhance your physical well being and bring peacefulness to your world.

Origin of Yoga and Yoga Practices

Yoga is originated in India over 5,000 years ago. The strange words of yoga come from the sanskrit language. Nobody knows the originator of yoga. It’s one of the mysteries such as the inventor of the wheel. The only facts that come to know are that it developed into a tradition and was regularly practiced by the people around 500 B.C.

Hatha yoga is one of the styles of yoga that the westerners of today are practicing. It is a very good style of yoga to start on the path of yoga. When it is invented, all students were practicing yoga and searching for the divine inside of them. They were all practicing yoga and looking for the god and the divine meaning for their life.

The same is happening with students of yoga, today, searching for their spiritual inner self, and guidance from the divine. Most modern styles of yoga are traced back to the yoga sutras.

These yoga sutras were written by patanjali somewhere between 300 BC and 100 AD. Nobody knows exactly when they were designed and created, but the yoga sutras, yoga practices and philosophy are clearly explained and they are just as applicable today as they were then.