Four major barriers to a fulfilling yoga practice and a fully functional life are: 1) Knee, foot, and ankle instability, leading to painful knees in transitions and bent-knee poses. 2) Tight/weak hip muscles leading to lower back pain, limiting our backbends, forward folds and crossleged poses. 3) Weak deep core, manifesting in neck/back pain: Yoga poses like boat pose turn into back-splitting hurdles rather than power-boosters. 4) Tech-neck, office hunch posture leading to neck and shoulder stiffness, making Camel, Cobra & Co. give us a ‘crick in the neck’.
The 4-session workshop Series Empowered Yoga addresses all four barriers and helps you systematically open and stabilize YOUR body from head to toe, using the intuitive alignment system of Anusara® Yoga and techniques from neighboring movement sciences to help you remove the barriers in your personal yoga practice. You will emerge with greater strength, ease and aliveness for your daily journey.
This is Workshop 3, ‘Beyond the Sixpack - Back pain relief’, of the four part Empowered Yoga series. See ‘Empowered Yoga Bundle’ to purchase all four workshops (recordings available).
We all need abdominal strength for everyday activities like picking up the kids, carrying the groceries, moving furniture. If you want to counteract back strain and pain, strong deep-abdominal muscles are the ticket. This workshop will offer tips and tricks to move beyond our ‘sixpack abs’ in order to access the incredibly strong layers of our deep core muscles while building upper body strength along the way.
This upbeat, hands-on class will use physical therapy and breath work to unlock the healing potential of the core in classical yoga postures. We will move, breathe and sweat as we fire up the abdomen and flow into strength building asanas. We will also use this core work to stabilize the spine and SI joints in backbends and twists.
Goal: Dissolving the barrier of an inactive deep core and over-compensating back and ab muscles, manifesting in everything from neck pain to back pain to an inability to reach without losing our balance. This can make ‘greatest hits’ poses like boat pose and plank variations into back-splitting hurdles rather than power boosters.
What we will explore:
strategies to find and activate your deep core stabilizer muscles
applying your deep core in upright positions to maintain a neutral pelvis, preventing lower back pain
applying your core for greater ease in plank, navasana, twists and backbends
using your deep core along with your hip muscles to prevent your back muscles from over-working in forward fold transitions and backbends
chaturanga tutorial - using your deep core to take weight off your hands
short wrist stabilization tutorial for chaturanga and other hand-balancing poses
This practice-based workshop is for beginners, intermediate and advanced students and teachers, includes a warm-up, and applied anatomy throughout. This course counts for CE credits and can be applied toward the Anusara certification.
Cost: $36.50 USD for one workshop, $125.00 for Empowered Yoga Bundle (all 4 workshops).
Location: in person AND online. Online: individual attention and inclusion in the group. In person: Workshops 1,2,3 take place at Yogakula in Berkeley, Workshop 4 takes place at 354 Panoramic Way in Berkeley, and online. Recording will be available after the workshop for those who have registered.