Yoga Tune Up® /Mobility
Pain. Posture. Performance. How can you be free of pain, keep good posture as a daily practice, and improve your performance in your workouts or sport? All three are deeply intertwined when muscles, ligaments, and joints are overused, underused, misused and abused. Our body adapts to dysfunction for long periods of time, until one day it fails. I believe many athletes fall short of recognizing a holistic approach to training. It’s not always how hard and long you work out, but also how much attention you give to joint, muscle and tissue maintenance, and best movement practices that work for your body type. A decrease in range of motion, or loss of power, and over time pain and swelling ensues and we land up in a mess. Our bodies are healing machines if we just know how to let it heal, the “how” is simpler then you think. The mobility and Yoga Tune Up® work is dynamic and static and works with therapy balls and bands to pry apart adhesions, increase hydration, relieve pain and allow the muscles to “slide and glide over each other” (as mobility guru Kelly Starrett would say) to make lasting structural changes. .
All my sessions include a discussion on posture and how athletes can take measures to improve their lives outside the gym. I also look at their movement as they go through basic practices such as mid-line stabilization, squat and overhead techniques. I believe in keeping things manageable and uncomplicated, so that mobility becomes a built-in daily practice as opposed to something you work at only when you are in pain..
My mantra is play offense with your body not defense. We are now living in an age of fast cars, fast information, fast food, fast everything that makes our life a little more comfortable as technology drives us forward. However, modernity has wreaked mayhem on our bodies as we sit for hours, whether on long flights or at our desks. We then decide to pick up and start moving at 65 miles an hour at the gym or at whatever sport we choose. That’s not going to work in the long run. I believe in simple strategies to combat that --- and they work!