Weight-Resistance Yoga: Practicing Embodied Spirituality
Max Popov
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1594773904
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Transform strength training into a mindful, meditative practice
• Explains how to induce a calm, meditative state through the movements, breathing, and focus of strength-training exercises
• Contains illustrated instructions for 26 exercises to safely strengthen the neck, shoulders, arms, hips, knees, ankles, and torso
• Offers themed meditations on the embodied experience of the exercises to facilitate a mindful state during your session
• The perfect complement to a yoga flexibility practice
Applying the wisdom of hatha yoga to weight-lifting exercises, Weight-Resistance Yoga reveals how to transform a strength-training session into a mindful, calm, and meditative yoga practice. Through 26 fully illustrated weight-resistance exercises using machines, free weights, and the body itself--along with an emphasis on coordinated rhythmic breathing, stability, stillness, and full absorption in the body’s movements against resistance--fitness trainer Max Popov explains how to access the tranquility that dwells within each of us while safely, effectively, and efficiently strengthening your neck, shoulders, arms, torso, hips, knees, and ankles. To support the meditative state of this practice, the author includes 20 themed meditations on the embodied experience of the exercises.
The perfect complement to yoga flexibility practice, weight-resistance yoga allows you to fully inhabit your body, empty your mind of everyday preoccupations, and fill your soul with comprehensions of deeper realities, providing strength, calm, and spiritual illumination through your physical fitness work.
Pick Your Yoga Practice: Exploring and Understanding Different Styles of Yoga
Hatha Yoga Asanas: Pocket Guide for Personal Practice: More than 150 asanas!
Yin Yoga: Outline of a Quiet Practice (2nd Edition)
lives. A Six-Month Program The first six months of weight-resistance yoga practice constitutes a strength-training development period. Progression of Exercises For the first six months of practice, the novice weight-resistance yogin seeks not only to learn correct technique but also to increase muscular strength. This is accomplished by steadily applying more bodily exertion than usual in obedience to the principle of progressive overload: muscles only become stronger when exercise
left muscles in size and shape, but also, more importantly, of right and left bones in aligned positions. Around 1490 Leonardo da Vinci completed his famous pen-and-ink drawing of the naked, curly-headed, tender-looking figure with perfect proportions named Vitruvian Man. Vitruvian Man’s perfection is demonstrated by his ability to fit his body to the perfect geometric forms—a circle and a square—by opening his legs and raising his outstretched arms in a kind of jumping jack. In this image, in
performing manual work on some sort of material. We use them to knock, chop, cut, smooth, drill, measure, level, grip, pry open, twist, hold, raise, grind, and dig up the material. Using hand tools such as pliers or a mallet saves energy because these tools, in effect, amplify the force of our muscles in carrying out tasks. Some tasks, like dislodging a large rock, would be impossible to perform without having a hand tool (in this case, a crowbar) to increase the force exerted. As our ancestors
nothing about the way they strength train is compatible with their yoga practice. And they’re right. But there’s an entirely different way to perform weight-resistance exercises. Process: Making Slow and Controlled Movements with Full Concentration Weight-resistance yogins perform each exercise moderately slowly, with care and control—in other words, with full concentration. We perform approximately twelve to fifteen separate exercises, one time each per session. Over a week, we perform varied
repetitive activity; what makes repetition disagreeable is our grown-up attitude toward it. For, as young children know and adults forget, “repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical,” as Sigmund Freud understood, “is clearly in itself a source of pleasure.”1 Freud contrasted this pleasurable repetition, which provides comfort and satisfaction in the familiar, to both the restless quest for new experiences and the unconscious compulsion to repeat the events of childhood, which, with