Archive for the ‘exercise’ Tag
4 minutes static, dry
My experiment with static tables started yesterday.
general note: the increase should be 0’10” between each hold and that there should be 8 breath holds. I chose to use the first sessions to find my current max and where my training level should be.
I started with nadi shodan pranayama, Alternate Nostril Breath (16:64:32:32 ) , with emphasis on the exhale being longer than inhale. I did this for roughly 10 minutes and then I started the O2 table, increasing hold and fixed recovery time. Slightly longer recovery time were used :
- hold: 2’00”
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 2’10”
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 2’30”
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 2’30′
today I did the same nadi shodana 10 minutes warm up.
- hold: 2’00”
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 2’10”
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 3’00”
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 3’00′
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 2’40′
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 4’00”
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 3’00”
- recovery: approximately 3 minutes
- hold: 3’10′
I was happy to reach 4 minutes for the first time this year.
what is yoga ?
Filed under: diary, religion, teaching, yoga | Tags: exercise, running, sivananda yoga, yoga
Leave a Comment When I hear a teachers who talk about the importance of keeping up the yoga tradition I react with mixed emotions. First of all Yoga was mentioned the first time roughly 2500 years ago. In the Katha Upanishad it refers to a state where you gain control over the senses and the mental activity stops. This leads to a supreme state. In the old texts there is no reference on how this is done practically and this is where the confusion starts. A marathon runner can gain control over the senses and by that his mental activity stops. There are many roads leading to yoga. Yoga has come to describe the travel when in fact it was first used to describe the goal/final state. Ha-tha yoga describes union of polarities and this has come to mean a series of physical postures. There is no way with higher value than the other and that is where some “yoga traditions” get into problems. You see ha-tha yoga school who claim that they have secret initiations from the original tradition. In my opinion there is something suspicious about secrecy and I want to practice something that has been proved by scientists. There is nothing secret about ha-tha yoga and it is a tradition in constant change . When you see thin male yogis in India wearing a loincloth and a smiling women in leotards they both claim to follow the original tradition. 200 years ago practically no women did ha-tha yoga at all. Traditionally only men were initiated into this kind of training and Sivananda (roughly 100 years ago) described how he introduced ha-tha yoga to women in India, they had great difficulty doing it in their Sari and some other outfit had to be worn. In India ha-tha Yoga was only taught to a selected few in and this was controlled partly by the caste system. Yoga for women has developed through trial and error in the last 100 years. Here is where my concern about secrecy come to mind again. We must let doctors, physiotherapists and scientists look at Ha-tha Yoga and evaluate it and be open to their findings.
Since most of the ha-tha yoga tradition is based on an oral tradition and it was written down not so long time ago there is big room for change and adaptation.
Ha-tha Yoga spread out of the small circles and became a mainstream activity. Ha-tha Yoga became something that is available through CD, DVD, internet, training in group, personal training etc.
Diary: the Anatomy of Yoga
Filed under: TTC, ashram, diary, teaching, yoga | Tags: anatomy, asana, exercise, sivananda yoga, teacher training, yoga
Leave a Comment 
during lectures we sit in the traditional Indian way, without chairs. photo: Katalin Kurko
Harvard University did a classification of different body types and how they utilise their bodies. This technique was adopted by Swami Vishnudevananda who took it a step further with a more precise classification. We use a plumb line to look at our posture in profile. Both in the beginning and in the end of the course we take photographs of ourselves against a grid. My mother commented that my posture was very straight once I
Plumbline photo week 4.
came back from a 3-months yoga retreat in Sweden . This time it was really intersting to view people who are relatively new to yoga and how much 4 weeks affected them !
Today we discussed sitting postures and how important it is with flexibility in the hips if you are going to sit in a meditation posture, especially in full lotus and half lotus. If one have big strong thigh muscles there should be a big cushion under the buttocks so that the knees comes down to the ground WITHOUT STRAIN ! One has to be careful since in the beginning of a sitting your knees may touch the ground. Later on in the sitting you start to feel pain in the knees and then it is really a signal that your buttocks should be higher up on a cushion. There should never be any pain in the knees when doing meditation !
Keeping the muscles and tendons flexible throughout life can be done with yoga and that will slow down the aging process. Yoga can be a very gentle way to keep a good health and when I saw my grandfather doing the bridge position at an old age it made an imprint in my head that exercise will give you a long and healthy life.
yoga is to go with the body and accept limitations and to come back to a natural state of well being.
video: shoulder stand sequence
Filed under: diary, exercise, video, yoga | Tags: asana, exercise, learning, yoga
Leave a Comment this is part of my morning ritual and consists of the following asanas:
shavasana / corpse pose
sarvangasana /shoulder stand pose
halasana / plough pose
pashinee mudra / folded psychic attitude
pindasana ? / foetus in womb pose ?
kandharasana / shoulder pose
shavasana / corpse pose
video: ordinary headstand/sirshasana
Filed under: diary, video, yoga | Tags: asana, exercise, learning, yoga
Leave a Comment Me doing an ordinary sirshasana/headstand pose, the first asana in my morning program. This asana should be followed by tadasana/palm tree pose and I will record this in another video.
problem with transition from a standing position to the wheel pose ?
Filed under: kids, review, teaching, video, yoga | Tags: exercise, learning, yoga, yogi
Leave a Comment I felt a lot of fear for backbends. I was a bit surprised when I came across this video. It is a quite young girl who explains this in detail and she gives a lot of alternative ways on practising this !
I have started to practice this regularly and I will get back with some more feedback.
my first yoga instruction video
Filed under: teaching, video, yoga | Tags: asana, exercise, pranayama, satyananda
Leave a Comment
Most of us probably associate yoga with postures that takes years to master and you have to be born with a rubber body. Yoga is for everyone and this practice may look simple but it will take a long time to master. The most important thing is that you do it with awareness.
feedback is welcome
my way of teaching yoga
Filed under: diary, teaching, yoga | Tags: exercise, self help, teaching, yoga
Leave a Comment I have recently started to teach yoga and that made me think about my philosophy and who I am. I was in my twenties when I discovered yoga and I have been doing the asanas and pranayamas for 11 years now. In the beginning I was eating in Indian restaurants in Sweden and I went to Hare Krishna sometimes to take part in their dancing and singing as well as my daily asana program. I went to longer residential courses in Sweden were the teachers were dressing in orange and it felt like they were trying to recreate an Indian ashram in Sweden. The singing was in a language I did not understand and the whole thing about changing your name to an Indian one felt a bit strange. I think there was a reason why I was born in Sweden and in the yoga teaching seminar I participated in recently it all came clear to me. I should only teach the techniques I have a long experience with. So what I teach is pranayama and asanas since that is what I do pretty regularly and have had good experiences from.
For a period I did yoga only and I was a vegan. Now I am back to a state where I eat meat once in a while, I do training with weights in the gym and I run on the beach. I listen to trance music and dance spontaneously when I feel like it. I like to read about technology and science as well as yoga books. Nothing has to exclude the other. I have come to more accept the person I am and in the same way I hope I can accept my students. I want to teach asana and pranayama because I felt a great help from this in my life. I went through my last year of university study with the help of yoga. I think without it I would not have been able to handle all the situations that came up in my life during that time.
I have great respect for people who chant regularly and live as strict vegetarians and I understand why people wear orange clothes and change their name but at the same time I do not live like this and it would be fake from me to teach about it. If you want to go more in depth in one of this areas I am happy to provide you with addresses to ashrams who teach this for example.
When I teach I have my normal clothes on and that could be everything from a strict shirt to jumper of a random colour. For practical reasons I want the yoga room to be clean and have fresh air. I want my student to wear loose and not so tight fitting clothes so they can move with out problems when doing the asanas. Realistic goals from my students is to sleep better at night, to have a relief in their back-pain, to be able deal with their everyday with awareness and clarity. I would like to teach people in their homes or at their work place because I see yoga as a natural part of life. If a whole office department learn yoga techniques and do it together for 10 minutes before lunch that becomes something natural. At the same if you get the routine of doing yoga for a short period at home each day you will clearly have benefits but the risk of going for a long course far away from home is that you feel alienated when you get back home. If your husband/wife see you doing yoga a short time at home there is nothing strange about it. If one person in a relationship goes on a long course the other person maybe feels left out and have all kinds of strange ideas of what a yoga course is.
The benefit of starting with a short program in your natural surrounding is that you gradually feel more aware and there is no risk of going to fast and getting very strong experiences when you are not ready for it.
I think there are some myths about yoga. I am not a doctor and I will always recommend people to see a doctor first if they have some serious illness. It has been proven that the immune system can become stronger with yoga and that can help in cure of cancer but I will never give the advice to trust yoga only. Yoga will not make you a superman and rather it will make you aware of your weakness as well as what your strength is and you will see reality for what it is.
The natural state of our life is relaxation and activity. yoga is focused on the relaxation part as I see it and I do not think I need to teach you how to stress and work more 
But like with yin and yang , black and white, good and evil. They all need each other to exist and in the same way it is essential with relaxation for your body to be able to handle the 100 hour work week as an investment banker. Sure you can work all the time for a limited time but the big risk is that the body will tell you to relax in a very abrupt way by presenting you with a total burn out where you can not work even if you need to. Please reply with questions if there is something you wonder about
The only way to success
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: exercise, gratitude, running, self help
Leave a Comment Are you like me and have a some scars from when you tried to master the art of skiing and skating when you where a kid. How did we finally manage to get down the slope in one piece ? We tried and fell and tried again. We saw some older guy who really could skate well and we wanted to be like him. Then we get older and we start to think like “I could never write a book “. But how did the now famous writers start their career ? More than one of them talk about how they sent their material to a publisher who politely said it was not good enough. Did they give up ? No they tried again. Like a child who learns to walk they tried and tried again. Every “mistake” is a step in the right direction. With every mistake we also get to learn a tiny bit more of how it is to actually walk successfully. We set out to run because we know it is healthy. It is raining outside and it is cold. We get a pain in a knee after 2 kilometers and we are really disappointed that we cannot run as fast as the guy we saw in the commercial for running shoes. We are also disappointed because we wanted to run for 5 kilometers. What about if we are grateful for the 2 kilometers we ran ? Will that not change the whole scenario ?
Exercise at home
Filed under: diary, exercise, yoga | Tags: exercise, jogging, running, thai boxing, yoga
Leave a Comment I started with 1 hours and 10 minutes of running . it is like an Obstacle course with all the people who are out walking and I tried to be as close to the beach as possible. Sometimes the sand is wet and at other times it is more dry. Sometimes I need to jump up on stones and almost all the time there is an inclination combined with small stones in random patterns. The fresh air from the sea and the sound of waves hitting the beach is really calming for the mind. In general jogging have a tendency to become a bit boring and there are some ways to avoid that. Challenge yourself ! jump up on that low concrete wall and try to get as much variation in as possible. For inspiration watch this video Strength training for Parkour .
After the run I tried to do my whole yoga routine in the bathroom just to challenge myself in the limited space there is in there. I find that when I do yoga in different places and with different people I do it differently and I remember poses I have not been doing for a long time.
I also did a few clap push ups today inspired from the book ” train a quarter of an hour a day” with Paulo Roberto. Even if you can find a lot of training videos on youtube and on podcasts for example I recommend one book that gives you some exercise patterns, how to eat and how to put together routines.
Earlier today I was watching “Scooby’s Home Workouts” and he have done a series of videos about training at home and I really recomend them. There is no advertisments on the page and if you like it you have the possibility to donate money. he gives a lot of useful information on how to use a back pack when you do pushups to intense the training for example.
In general I am amazed how many different training exercises you can find on youtube. Today I was watching a special variation of pushups that thai boxers do as well as some guy doing push ups with his whole body in the air.
At an early age I got interested in Buddhism and the prince who left his kingdom in the search for truth. How can I apply this story to my own life ? to be able to sit I took up the study of yoga. Is there a contradiction between yoga and science ? Sure we can get a theoretical understanding through books, but without the experience we are stuck. Why is it so hard to practice non-violence when the mosquito is landing on my neck ?