yoga Archives - Page 4 of 11 - Preppy Runner

Today I got in two very different, but very awesome workouts.

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I’m starting to get so over cold-weather running. It wasn’t even that cold today, but I just didn’t feel like running the sort-of-cold weather, so I took my workout to the treadmill in my building. Jess had me doing 5 miles at an 8:30-8:40 pace. Five miles on a treadmill is still a little longer than my idea 3-4 miles on a treadmill, so I knew I’d have to mix things up a bit. According to my treadmill, a 6.9 pace was an 8:42 and a 7.1 pace was an 8:27, so the average pace was somewhere in between. I didn’t feel much difference between these different paces, but it was enough to keep me mentally engaged, knowing I’d get to mix up the pace each mile.

*Edited to add: you can, of course, change these speeds to reflect your own speed.*

[photo via Ashley]

Tonight I’d planned on my regular yoga class (hi, who am I that I now have a regular yoga class?!) at 8:30 with Annie, but Ashley talked me into an earlier class, the Lotus Flow 1 with Justin.

The class with Annie usually has 8-10 people, as it’s a later class, or, an undiscovered secret, as I like to think of it. I walked into this class, and there were 8 people in just the first two rows of a small room. I walked in a little anxious that this tightly-packed class wouldn’t be that relaxing but vowed, in the spirit of it being a yoga class, to try to be present in the moment and not think about how packed the class was.

Sure enough, it was a good class. The best takeaway, from the instructor, was to just let go. So many of us – especially crazy New Yorkers – set such high standards and just keep pushing and pushing and pushing until we get the results we want. In yoga, that can lead to injury. Justin urged us to take this feeling off the mat, too. Well, we’ll see, but it was still a nice lesson, especially for a class that I was looking to be a bit more restorative in comparison to the run I’d pushed in the morning.

Overall, the class was good, though Justin didn’t come around and adjust nearly as much as Annie does. Her adjustments are great, and help you get so much deeper into poses. We ran into her in the stairwell on the way out, and I apologized for cheating on her class.

What are your favorite workouts to balance each other out? Do you like tough yoga classes or more chill ones? (Team chill all the way here.)

Last week, I saw Juliette post a photo on Facebook of her at an aerial yoga class.

I’ve been wanting to try one for awhile, and we’d been trying to get together, so I asked if I could go to a class with her. Even if she said no, I was going to show up, so…she obliged and we went today to the Om Factory‘s Union Square location. I used to live down the street from their Fashion District location but only ever went to Beatles Yoga there.

Oh, don’t mind me. Just hanging out.

The studio was gorgeous and well-lit.

I appreciated all the flying references…and was also terrified when I saw all this silk hanging from the ceiling.

It was a lot of fun, but also a lot to get used to. For example, once you start leaning back into poses like the instructor’s doing in this photo, the silk can kind of dig into you. In some poses, this was completely uncomfortable; in others, it was tolerable. For those poses where the silk was at our hips and we were bending over it (i.e. downward dog), I put a blanket over my hips because they were kind of tender.

The class started off with some basic heart openers and standing postures without the hammock to get us to focus before turning that focus to the hammock. The first time we did a swing, I looked at Juliette and just started giggling. We were just going to swing? From this thing hanging from the ceiling? Well, okay…

But it was so much fun. The swinging was completely freeing and relaxing. We also did several inversions, which reminded me a bit of my trapeze experience in a much lower-risk situation.

The class ended with savasana all stretched out in the hammock. Let me repeat SAVASANA IN A HAMMOCK. I don’t know if I have ever been that relaxed.

Overall, I loved the class, but I will say that the pressure of the silk holding your body can sometimes be uncomfortable; in the inversions, all the blood rushing to my face was also a bit uncomfortable.

The class was $20, which is not at all unreasonable for NYC, and for such a fun class. i doubt I’d do it regularly because I wouldn’t want to ruin the novelty factor, but it seems like a really fun class to do every once in a while when you really want to mix thing up.

What’s the craziest fitness/yoga class you’ve ever taken?

Two side notes:

1. A huge congrats to my buddy Anne for launching her nutrition business today! I’ve been reading her blog since she began this whole process years ago, and I’m proud to call her a real-life good friend of mine now, so I couldn’t be more happy for her! If you are considering nutrition counseling, consider her!

2. Happy 35th anniversary to my parents! They’ve certainly had their ups and downs, like any other couple, but I hope for a strong marriage like theirs one day.