YOGAnna Love It!

Okay, okay, I'll admit it, that title was a bit of a stretch. Hah, hah, get it?

Do I get an award for using two puns? I'll accept cookies and ice cream.

But I digress, after hearing my mom rave about how good yoga is for you all weekend (I hope you all had a great time with your families!), I decided I might as well add a second edition to my basic white girl fitness class streak. So, following my pretty rough Monday, I made my way over to the White building to go to the Fitness Yoga class at 8.

As I walked toward Room 6, I immediately noticed the dim lighting and the classical piano music playing in the background. There were already a couple of students stretching on their yoga mats. It looked like a scene straight out of a magazine. The instructor introduced herself as Rachel, and briefly explained the difference between the three yoga classes offered at PSU. Hatha Yoga is the least rigorous, and focuses on breathing while Vinyasa Yoga is more rigorous, and Fitness Yoga is a hybrid between the two. After this explanation she started the class.

We began sitting criss-cross apple sauce on our mats, and taking deep breaths, moving our arms up toward the ceiling as we inhaled and bringing them back down to the ground as we exhaled. We repeated this three times. Then we were instructed to reach forward as we still sat criss-cross apple sauce and press our chest and foreheads towards the mat, stretching out our inner thighs. Afterwards, Rachel instructed us to begin to hold a plank. After holding the plank for a little, she told us to begin shifting our weight forwards over our shoulders, and then back into our heels, working our abs even harder. Then Rachel told us to "hover" our bodies down so that our chest was only a little bit off the ground in a push up position and then enter the upward facing dog pose. I'm gonna be honest, with barely enough upper body strength to scoop an acceptable amount of ice cream in the dining halls, "hovering" down gracefully was physically impossible. I'd call what I did more of "plopping" down. After holding upward facing dog, we followed Katie as she raised her body and entered downward facing dog. Then we extended our arms out to the side and raised our bodies so that our chest was parallel to the floor. Rachel then told everyone to bend their knees and raise our arms as we inhaled and entered the chair pose. From the chair pose we kept our arms toward the sky and stepped our right leg back into a lunge, and then brought it back to the chair pose, and stepped our left leg back into the lunge. When we had lunged with both legs, we returned to the chair pose. We then returned to the plank position and repeated the sequence completely a couple more times.

After holding a plank and finishing our final run through the sequence, Rachel told us to drop our knees and then hold the child's pose, giving our bodies a break. She gave us a reminder that we had the option to return to this pose at any point throughout the class, if we felt the need to take a break. For the rest of class we went through a bunch of typical yoga poses including tree, the upward bow, boat, thread the needle, sumo wrestler, happy baby, etc.

My favorite part of the class would have to be when Rachel slowly led us up the the climax of the class, the crow pose. I'm sure you guys have all seen this yoga pose before, and let me tell you, it's just about a thousand times harder than it looks. After realizing I couldn't even lift one foot off the ground without almost falling over and dying, I gracefully gave up. However,the veterans of the class who have been slowly building up their experience went for it and the thuds that followed sounded a lot like a chorus of polar bears falling off their yoga balls.

We then continued with a couple stretches (rotation pose, twists, and knee press). Afterwards, we stayed in the corpse pose with our eyes closed, which was basically just a nice relaxing nap. We finished off our class with the inhale and exhale breaths we took at the beginning of class.

I can't put into words how much I loved this class. Rachel had the perfect soothing and soft voice for the class. She talked a lot about absorbing others' positivity and releasing negativity, and other hardcore yoga spirit things. I'm not sure how much of that I believe, but I do know that by the end of the class, I had completely forgotten about my terrible Monday. My whole body felt relaxed and I felt like I could go straight to bed and sleep like a log. I'll definitely be fitting this class into my schedule every Monday night, and you guys should too!

Gif Creds
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