Yoga Warm UpYour Key To A Pain Free Practice.A yoga warm up is your key to a pain free practice. It will either help you or hurt you on your personal yoga-for-men quest. However, just what does a good yoga warm up entail? Let's take a look at the ultimate warm up for a pain free yoga practice. Recently I gave a yoga seminar and as always there were quite a few new faces in the crowd of attendees. At the beginning I told everyone that we would start with a brief warm up that focused on lubricating our joints and preparing us for the work that was to soon come. What I got was quite a few blank stares when we started doing it. However, after the two hour clinic a few of the participants mentioned that they really enjoyed the warm up and were surprised to find that it was nothing like the 'stretching' routine they used for their warm up. That's because we didn't really do any 'stretching' per say. We got Intu-Flow®. In my many years of studying yoga and attending classes I don't really recall a time where there was much of a warm up. Most of the teachers would use basic poses as a means to warm us up for the following poses. However, with my gymnastic background of always warming up before practice I had a hard time with the warm up as you go approach of most of my yoga classes. It wasn't until I had a major injury years ago that I came across a program that I consider to be the holy grail of a yoga warm up. This program was originally called Warrior Wellness however a few years ago it was updated and the name has changed to Intu-Flow®. This was the single biggest reason that I was drawn to what is called Circular Strength Training. As some of you already know I am now one of only five on the Faculty Head Coach Staff and I have released Warrior Wellness in Japanese under the name Joint Wellness. That is just how strongly I believe in this program. In theory, a proper yoga warm up should move your body through all three planes of the body hitting each joint and getting the blood flowing. Notice I wrote 'move your body'. Not 'stretch' your body. While there might be a lot of debate between static and dynamic stretching, studies have shown, and I firmly believe, that the time to 'stretch' is after you have warmed up. In other words, after you get your blood flowing. And the only way get your blood flowing and your joints primed for work like running, throwing, jumping, or yoga-ing is by moving your body throughout what we call the '6 Degrees Of Freedom'. The 6 Degrees of Freedom refers to an object moving through space using the following ; heaving (up/down) swaying (right/left) surging (back/front) pitching (tilting up/down) yawning (turning left/right) rolling (tilting side to side). Unfortunately, most people don't normally include these movements in a yoga warm up therefore robbing themselves of achieving full range of motion throughout their body. In other words, they aren't properly warming up! If we only 'stretch' ourselves in one way or another we will miss out on the opportunity to not only properly warm up but also strengthen and extend the life span of our joints. That of course leads to better performance on and off the yoga mat, playing field or court. Normally I would offer a short tutorial here. However, I feel that a brief video of the advanced version of the Intu-Flow® warm up program would better serve to illustrate the nature of this incredible program called Intu-Flow®. Demonstrating this yoga warm up is the creator of Intu-Flow®, Scott Sonnon. Enjoy! See you warming up on the mat!
Be sure to click here and order the Intu-Flow® 2 DVD set and get your warm ups flowing!
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