No Mere Posture, Yoga Is a Potent Fitness Tool

I have a secret weapon that I’ve used for years to help in all my fitness and aerobic training. In fact, I learned it back in the days when I was a dancer at the Dupree Dance Academy in Los Angeles, before I ever taught my first exercise class. My secret: yoga. But it’s actually not much of a secret anymore.

Twenty years ago, when I first took yoga, the school where I studied required at least five students present to hold a class. I often had to urge friends to attend with me to reach the minimum. Now, whether you take yoga at the Y, the gym or a yoga studio, you may have to arrive 15 minutes early just to get in.

The reason I started with yoga is the same reason I’ve stuck with it. As a dancer, it gave me the extra edge I needed to stay strong and flexible, and to avoid injury. In the competitive world of ballet, with its focus on the visual aspect of the performance, it’s easy to push yourself beyond your limits.

I liked yoga because it put things back into perspective for me. Also, many dance routines favor one side of the body. Yoga’s symmetrical postures helped get my body back in balance.

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Today, many people are drawn to yoga mainly for its spiritual and philosophical benefits. But it’s also OK to approach yoga as a physical endeavor that can help make us healthier and more fit. It’s like entering yoga through the back door. If you just concentrate on doing the postures properly, you’ll get stronger and more limber. Pretty soon the practice may improve your mental and psychological outlook as well. This, in turn, can help boost your physical health.

One immediate benefit of yoga is that it can condition our bodies for year-round activities such as golf, tennis or hiking, or winter sports such as skiing. Bending and twisting postures maintain agility in your back, while many of the standing postures increase endurance in thigh muscles and knee ligaments. Yoga can also improve joint mobility in your ankles. And all of you skiers and snowboarders know how crucial that is to your success on the slopes.

When you’re ready to venture into a yoga class for the first time, you’ll find that students share an unspoken protocol. Here are a few tips:

* Wear slip-on shoes because you’ll have to take them off before you enter the room; sneakers are a real hassle.

* Place your mat in a straight line on the floor because crooked mats don’t work. If you need to cross the room, never walk on somebody else’s mat; that’s a yoga no-no.

* After everyone’s settled, be ready to move your mat to fill in gaps and accommodate latecomers. In more crowded classes, you may also need to arrange your body on the mat so that your limbs don’t collide with those of your neighbors as you move through the postures.

If you stick with it, you may come to understand the most important lesson I’ve learned from yoga: I always try to put my body’s well-being before my ego. It can work for any of us. Instead of forcing you through exercises just to look good, the process of practicing yoga shows you what your natural limitations are, what you’re good at and what you’re not. When it feels right, you can gradually build from there.

Leslie Bogart, an instructor at Yoga Works in Santa Monica, reminds students to work at their own pace. “The focus should always be on comfortable, steady breathing in all the postures,” she says. “If you’re in a pose but unable to breathe smoothly, you’re not doing yoga anymore.”

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Less dramatic but equally important, many students say that practicing yoga means feeling good when they wake up and being calm and grounded when they go to sleep each night.

It’s tough to explain, but yoga makes you feel better from the inside out. One of my yoga teachers, Julie Kleinman, also at Yoga Works, described it this way: “Mars has a hard surface. The inside of it cannot penetrate the outside surface, so it is considered a ‘dead planet.’ Earth, on the other hand, is alive because the internal part of the planet interacts with the exterior, through hot springs, volcanoes and earthquakes. We should be more like Earth, so that what is inside of us naturally connects with what’s outside of us. This way we can be fully alive and enjoy a complete experience of well-being.”

A pretty powerful secret weapon, I’d say.

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New York-based freelance writer Michele Bender contributed to this column.

* Karen Voight is a Los Angeles-based fitness expert whose column appears twice monthly in Health. Her latest videos are “Ease Into Fitness” and “YogaSculpt.” You can contact her at kvoightla@aol.com.