Made it to Mysore

Finally I made it to mysore! Every time I make it to mysore I feel like I climbed Mount Everest. Don't know why but I feel like I accomplished a feat. Hopefully it will get easier for me and a little less daunting the more I find my schedule groove and practice groove. Have I told you my nemesis is stamina and endurance. And ashtanga works that to my very core that weights and cardio do not. But I digress ...

Here's my proud notables:

• Felt smoother in my practice and I wee more stamina. Just a wee. Woohoo! I can now see how this could get stronger and less arduous AND more shall I say meditative for me.
• Totally missed out parshvakonasana and the twist! And that's such a fundamental posture in standing! Thought I was doing so well in my flow and only realized when I went to bed that I skipped it. Haha!
• Bhuja pidasana was nothing to write home about. Was able to wrap my legs and tilt a bit but nowhere near the ground yet. Still worried about my wrists. Then exit was a total disaster. Totally flubbed getting my legs into bakasana and then it was just a droop down from there.
• However, I redeemed myself in supta konasana which I did all by myself! It was rather kinda awesome even though I was so looking forward to S.'s assist because she likes and I LOVE when she folds my feet behind my head. I just LOVE it! I'm thinking freak is she really doing that and is my legs really letting her??? I always feel like WOW I have arrived! I NEVER in my wildest dreams thought I could do that. And also it's such a stereotypical yogic tied-up-in-knots-sorta-contortion-pose that I always felt unattainable to the lay innocent that it thrills me to no end that I'm halfway there! lol! But anyway she didn't do that famous assist and just let me do my thang. And I did! I was able to not only finger bind but wiggle my feet side-by-side and as I eye-balled it I felt that I could just somehow wiggle my right foot on top of my left and wouldn't ya know it with her verbal encouragement I caught that last wind to do just that and totally bound my feet! It was pretty satisfying I must say! And my exit was way better, was able to get both legs into bakasana and do an almost jump back into chatarunga. Not bad.
• Urdhva  dhanurasana was an eye opening experience. I totally flubbed the first try. Couldn't get up for the life of me and thought I was a goner for the next 2. And was hoping I could just slip by it. No chance! But for some inexplicable, what I can only say miraculous reason, I was able to push up with unusual super human strength the next two making very reasonable for me wheels. I was flabberghasted! Totally amazed where all this strength came from out of nowhere!
• By headstand I'm usually at my worst energy wise. But I once again surprised myself. Number one I was able to go up with floating straight legs. Yeah! I was too wankered the last time to do that. Number two, even though my teacher spotted she didn't have to touch me at all, I was able to balance on my own. But then I bailed when trying to do the 90º hold. So what does an amazing teacher do when she's trying to build your stamina. Get right back on that damn horse and do it again! And so I did with her wise encouragement to lower not to 90º but to as low as I can hold it for to build my strength and endurance.

This is why I LOVE mysore and keep on coming back to my personal Mount Everest!! So I can make my mountain a molehill!!

... practice and all is coming.

My Youth Infusing Anti-Aging Super Foods Green Smoothie Breakfast

Very refreshing and surprisingly filling in the morning. And it makes me feel like I'm starting my day out on the right foot and getting in a good quota of my veggies, fruits, anti-oxidants, vitamins, omega-3's and super foods. What a great way to start my day! 

Along with my veggies and berries — I only use berries to stay low glycemic since I have a severe sugar sensitivity, can't even use stevia(!), though in the pic above I cheated with a sliver of orange as I was wrestling with a cold trying to get it's grubby hands on me — here's a sampling of some of the superfoods I like to put in my green smoothie:

I like to add some chard grown straight from my organic windowbox garden on my balcony. How neat is that!

And here's the final product pulverized in my amazing NutriBullet. It got darker because I used some blueberries and dark berry powders. Depending on the fruit (i.e., light fruit) and greens (i.e., baby spinach) you can get a really beautiful bright green drink:

Don't let the looks fool you, it tastes absolutely divine and SO nutritious! Because the cell walls of the veggies and fruits are pulverized in the high powered blender it's literally like your giving yourself an intravenous shot of nutrition. Your body absorbs and assimilates it way better than chewing! Yet you still get the beneficial fiber which slows a bit of the rate of absorption so your not getting such a glycemic load on your system.

I used to think it was all a bit of hype the better absorption with blending than with chewing. But I found out quickly that though I can eat baby spinach salads, yet for the longest while (about 3 years) I couldn't drink blended baby spinach or chard even. The magnesium in them was WAY too bioavailable this way and I was getting way too vivid and trippy dreams from the magnesium overload. I'm very sensitive to magnesium can ya tell! Lol! Now that I've finally built up a tolerance I can blend them to my hearts content.

My Green Smoothie Recipe

Here's my base smoothie recipe. Note that I choose organic whenever possible. Since I'm ingesting this everyday, I need to be as organic as I can make it otherwise you're just defeating the purpose ingesting so much pesticides day in and day out. For liquids I usually use milk or unsweetened vanilla almond milk:

Veggies:

• Greens to rotate: kale – great for iron, chard, baby spinach, collards, romaine, arugula, watercress, go wild)

• Baby carrots

• Cucumber: sometimes, very refreshing, apparently great for hair

• A sliver of avocado: gives a lovely creaminess to the smoothy!

Fruits:

• Frozen organic berries: just a little for a touch of sweetness and flavour, it's low glycemic and sometimes safe for me to have, organic whenever possible

• Orange: 1/8th slice, if I have a cold

• Mango: when cheating, gives great flavour and a lovely creamy texture

Superfoods:

• Goji berries

• Maca powder

• Spirulina powder: I like Pure Hawaiian Spirulina by Nutrex, the freshest taste ever! High in protein and iron, fantastic blood builder, etc. I'll alternate this with barleygrass or wheatgrass.

• Sprouted ground flax with cranberries: for omega-3's, sometimes I just grind my own

• Vitamin C: Sodium Ascorbate powder: to absorb the iron in my kale, as I have low iron stores

• Whey Protein Powder: Great muscle, collagen, hair, skin and nails builder! My nails have never been so diamond hard and grow so fast in my life. And my muscles, holy cow, respond super-fast to weight work with it and maintain their shape longer. Amazing! I try to buy only cold-processed so it doesn't denature the proteins. And also I try to look for whey that's high in glutamine for gut repair and high in BCAA's for great muscle recovery. For strict vegetarians there's a great variety of non-animal based one's to choose from.

And there you have it my breakfast of champions!

Short & Sweet!

And no, I'm not talking about shorts this time. It's because I did nada! Nada thing! Because I had a super-duper wonderful weekend and then celebrated my awesome nephew's birthday last night. So there!

One's still gotta schedule in some fun now and then. Life's too short! No pun intended.

P.S. Maybe hitting Mysore tomorrow night. If I can muster my lazy sitbones back into gear after basking in the afterglow!

Sweat Was A-Flyin ...

Sweat was a-flyin! …

Well, I got my sweat on last night and it was a-flyin! Did my Cathe Friedrich step aerobics with her Athletic Step dvd and her oldie but goodie Step Works. 

 

For some reason her warmup in Step Works is so namby-pamby that I avoid it at all costs. Which is so out of character for her because almost always her workouts are amazing from start to finish. So I replaced it with a nice shortie-but-goodie warmup from her Athletic Step dvd. Plus added for good measure a nice flowy stretch from my fav Namaste Yoga’s season 1, Episode 11’s forward fold, low lunge, to splits flow. As I’m trying to open my hips and hamstrings for forward folds and front splits. I wanna do the front splits again! Is it wrong! 

 

 

I was able to do it for a short time in ballet as a kid but didn’t maintain it so I lost it fast. Now in my “old” age I want to do it again this time for keeps. So, it’s one of my practice research postures that I try to include twice a week along with hip openers such as baddha konasana, pidgeon pose, and double pidgeon pose (of which I’m attrocious at!) But my mysore teacher added it in to replace lotus as I can only do half lotus since my right hip is a work in progress. So lots of baddha and double pidgeon to work rotation in the hip for now. Methinks I’ll do a post on my research “workshop” practices in the evenings. More posts! Yeah!

But, I digress …

It was an awesome cardio practice. Very fun and I’m aiming to build my VO2 max and cardio lung capacity slowly but surely. Still got a ways to go, as 2 years ago I was doing Step Works with no stopping or little taking it down a notch. But as a result of my knees (bad adjustment in ashtanga which caused my patella problem to resurface) and achilles probs in the past 1.5 years I haven’t been able to put in too much cardio. Now that I just started back in the past 2 months, I find I’m ramping up rather quickly going from low impact, steady state to high impact with intensity blasts quite quickly. Which is awesome. Though I do notice the difference as I need to take it down a notch and pace more to build the VO2 max again. And I have to break to catch my breath! Woo! But’s it coming along faster than I expected! Yeah! And I see another post on VO2 Max itching to come out. So all in all it was a great session.

Then of course I always post practice ice my knees and achilles. As a result of my patella-femoral diagnosis years ago (brought on by an overzealous trainer having me do super-heavy squatting which popped my patella’s, life as I know it has never been the same! Oh well! As my nephews like to say, "That's life!") and achilles tendonitis more recently it’s just a given and a no-brainer-auto-pilot thing now.

Onwards and upwards …

Last night I got my fold on ...

Like this, like a yoga teacher!

And finally, finally, I actually looked almost like it! Awesome! ...

I always wanted to fold over my legs like my many favorite yoga teachers, Kino, Kathryn Budig, Dice Iida-Klein, with a FLAT back, no space and with my face at my shins. Well, last night it was so warm and I just felt like doing some practice postures to get my flex on and by my third fold and press I kept going down and down and down and lengthening and lengthening! I thought shoot man this feels like IT! So I went to my trusty mirror (see my "Through the Looking Glass" post if anybody's watching) and low and behold I was pretty much there! Man that was SWEET! Really, really SWEET!

But never to be satisfied! This is my next Mount Olympus so that I can do Titti's!!

What a screach! Never to be outdone!! Lol!

... and all is coming.

ASANA WORKSHOP: Jump Back Practice ... Oh Yah!

I thought I'd share some tips for creating your own jump back to chatarunga home practice session to build strength and coordination. I try to do this once or twice a week when my wrists allow. Unfortunately, I don't do a 5-6 day a week ashtanga practice to build strength and lift only in that way as the lovely teacher in the "Finding Your Lift" workshop did. I find without that dedicated 6-day practice, and probably even if I did, I must do extra homework in order to make the impossible possible for me. Definitely gotta get more consistent with this, cause I WANNA DO IT! I'm an ashtanga crim! Yowza!:

Here's a great vid of the wonderful Maria showing a breakdown of the motions for the full jump back in slow-mo. It's her version of slow-mo! She's slowing it down herself NOT the video. SNAP!

To Practice Cultivating This Type of Strength I:

 

Practice HOLDING for a number of reps and breathes:
1. Sitting in a tight tuck with shins crossed hold knees as tight as you can to chest and feet as tight as you can to sitbones. Without using arms of course. The arms should be extended in front like the beginning position of the top video. In fact your working towards holding a delicious tuck like that beginning position. Hold, hold, hold! Shewf!
2. Lolasana holds: blocks are your BF here. But notice I didn't add the extra F as eventually ya just gotta to let them GOoooo!:
    • with both feet on floor
    • with one foot off floor
    • with BOTH feet off floor — Oooh yah, I said that right! Here's a great example of a pseudo-lolasana hold for core, lats, deltoid, hip flexor and leg strengthener from the divine, omnipresently giving, Kino:

    • then the pièce de résistance: with both arms bent and feet off floor! SNAP!

P.S. I got all this info from my many youtube sightings, blog readings, the wonderful workshop and from Maria herself. The lovely Maria Villella has an awesome practice video for this and more. Which I have and covet! Check it out at www.yogiclife.com/store and you can visit her at www.mariavillella.com.

Practice and all is a-coming!

My Lazy Week 2 Schedule and Post-Mortem

Well I followed my Friends Week 1 Schedule with some few tweaks. Here's the original schedule:

If Out With Friends:

SAT: Gym Legs & Back work (See how my wrists handle the weights. Got a bit of wrist issues)
SUN: Home Practice
MON: Step (Cathe Friedrich: 4 Day Split Higher Intensity Step)
TUES: Mysore
WED: rest
THURS: Out with Friends
FRI: Home Practice
SAT: Gym Legs

Here's what I ended up doing. Still got my goals in there though I had to flipflop: 

Post-Mortem:

SAT: Gym Legs & Back work (my wrists handled the weights with flying colours!)
SUN: Step (Cathe Friedrich: 4 Day Split Higher Intensity Step + Namaste Yoga Season 1, Ep11, forward fold to lunge to standing splits sequence. That's such a nice flowy stretch sequence, perfect for post cardio. And my hips and hamstrings were nice and opened after jumping around. Felt amazing!)
MON: rest
TUES: The Rocket DVD (couldn't make it to Mysore, had to work late)
WED: Friend reunion. Totally fun!
THURS: Mysore (totally awesome, had the teacher all to myself at the end. Nice!)
FRI: Too.Much.Grocery.Shopping.Yikes!
SAT: rest
SUN: The fun and fab Finding Your Lift Workshop

Here's My Lazy Flexibility Reigns Week 2 Schedule:

MON: nada!
TUES: Gym Legs and Back
WED: nada!
THURS: Mysore
FRI: hmmm ... will see
SAT: hmmm ... be flexible
SUN: hmmm ... flexibility reigns supreme

Lol! Gotta have some lazy flexible weeks where you do what you feel. I may wake up and feel like yoga or I may wake up and feel like jumping around. And that could even change as the day wears on. Who knows my hmmm days may turn out to be VERY active AND flexible.  ; )