Yoga For Beginners Guide

By Faye Martins When you decided to become a yoga instructor, did you think you would get so many different requests? Many women and men want to gain strength without gaining size. As we know, more size is stressful on the leg joints and the heart. As a yoga instructor your mission is to help people maintain a long and healthy life.

By Faye Martins When you teach yoga classes, how often do students ask about techniques to reduce back pain? Study after study shows that yogic exercise helps significantly with managing back pain in conjunction with medical treatment. Yoga strengthens and balances the body while it grants students more control of their minds. Each of these factors alone become huge benefits, when dealing with back pain, but together, they feel like a miracle. Participants of one study reported a decrease in pain, functional disability, and depression. Sixty-eight percent of the participants of that study assigned to practice yoga training also continued to practice the art after the study concluded. Even though chronic back pain can be one of the hardest common conditions to live with and treat, yogic exercise can significantly improve the quality of life of back pain sufferers.

By Sangeetha Saran Yoga is generally safe and beneficial for a wide range of health issues. However certain pre-existing medical conditions may not benefit from regular practice. Students should be mindful of how their health and yoga practice interact. The following tips are helpful for students with a pre-existing medical condition.

By Dr. Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500 Spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal column that puts pressure on the spinal cord, or narrowing of the openings where spinal nerves leave the spinal column. The condition typically occurs with age, as a person's spinal disks become drier and begin to shrink. Symptoms include numbness, cramping, or pain in the back, thighs, buttocks or calves, neck, shoulders, or arms.

By Kimaya Singh To understand the essence of yoga, it's vital for those who practice the art to know the importance of yoga posture sequences. In order to develop a sense of physical, mental, and spiritual well being, yoga postures must be done correctly in order to have a healthy mind and body. By using various breathing techniques as well as meditation, those who practice yoga are able to incorporate it into their daily lives, where it helps the person transcend the problems of everyday life and find a sense of enlightenment few others ever experience.

By Gopi Rao Chair Yoga Offers Several Benefits There are multiple benefits from chair yoga exercises, and you can engage in these poses all of the time or occasionally. For individuals with mobility issues that require the use of a wheelchair or someone who is aging and finds it difficult to get on the floor, chair yoga is probably the only wait to perform yoga movements.

By Faye Martins In this contemporary era, yoga has become an incredibly popular form of exercise to help promote physical and mental health. In order to ensure that one gets the most out of this physical activity, it is important to get some basic information regarding yoga student safety. With this idea in mind, there are four tips Yoga teachers can implement to ensure that students do not harm themselves while participating in activities at your Yoga studio. Feel free to use the list below as a handout for your students.

By: Virginia Iversen, M.Ed As more and more people continue to suffer from anxiety, depression and insomnia, researchers are finding that spending time outdoors in nature has a very soothing and balancing effect on the nervous system and on the mind. The body's ability to become entrained with the natural rhythms of the sun and the moon has been known for a millennium. As many us continue to spend the majority of our waking hours indoors and in front of an electric screen of some sort, the incidence of anxiety, depression and insomnia will continue to rise.

By Dr. Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500 Every teacher, or studio, eventually receives requests from experienced students for a challenge. How can we keep our classes safe and give students a challenge? As a Yoga instructor, you have many options - among them are Power, Vinyasa, Hot, and Hatha styles that hold asanas for minutes to build strength. If you are really sharp at adjustment and modifications, you can modify for beginners, while giving your veteran students a challenge in the same class.

By: Virginia Iversen, M.Ed As the coldness of winter begins to recede, you may be noticing that the pulsation of new life all around you is propelling you to dissolve and release stagnant energy. This stagnant energy is often located in the hips, shoulders and throughout the thoracic spinal area. You even find that there is quite a bit of stagnant energy in your home, after several months of spending your time indoors with the windows closed. In the same way that doing a deep spring cleaning of your home lightens up and energizes your living space, dissolving stagnant energy in your body will help to lift your spirits and revitalize your life force energy or prana.

By Faye Martins When we teach yoga classes, what are our students taking home with them? Do some students see it only as an exercise? Yoga has exploded into a popular fitness trend, around the world, for the past two decades. Well known for its relaxation and breathing techniques, yoga as a way of life has spread like fire through studios across the world and into gyms, fitness clubs, senior centers and even public schools. There are many different styles and techniques, with each style focusing on a specific emphasis that tends to characterize it. Ashtanga vinyasa yoga, for example, is a practice that highlights the physical challenges of yoga whereas Iyengar is a slower version of Hatha that allows practitioners to concentrate on pose mastery and yogic philosophy.

By Faye Martins Yoga is growing in popularity every single day as one of the best ways to get in great physical shape and rejuvenate the mind and body. However, due to the physical demands of yoga, it is important for every yoga instructor to emphasize yoga student safety in all yoga classes.

By Faye Martins Over the past decade, yoga has exploded in popularity. Some people use yoga as a way to stay in shape. Others use it as a method for relaxing and relieving stress. No matter where you live, there is a good chance there is a yoga class going on nearby. If you are a yoga instructor, there are many ways to go about passing on your knowledge to the people in your class. Let's take a look at some tips that deal with how to teach yoga students:

By Dr. Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500 Often practiced in gyms, Power Yoga is a general term used to refer to a practice that is more physically challenging than many other physical styles. In order to elevate heart rate, and encourage weight loss, this form of Yoga pushes through a fast-flowing series of postures. Sometimes, the postures are held for longer than is typical, in order to build strength and muscle. Deeper stretches and flexibility are encouraged through the synchronization of breath with movement. A variety of Yogic practices can be adapted to this faster-flowing, and physically-challenging form of Yoga; it is important that practitioners take certain precautions to avoid injury.

By Faye Martins The world has changed and women are experiencing more freedom. If you've attended classes, a yoga teacher training, boot camps, or workshops, you have no trouble finding women. Men who enter a class full of women are very comfortable in their own skin. This is a good thing, but how can we encourage more male participation in our yoga classes, studios, and workshops.

By Rachel Holmes No yoga teacher wants to deal with marketing. Most instructors still have trouble with asking for money for the classes they teach. The problem is that you won't be teaching long, if you do it for free. Unfortunately, all of us need money to live. Paul Jerard often compares teachers to authors. The point is: Writing a book is a lot of work, but marketing the book is also a full-time job and a completely different skill.

By Faye Martins Of all the ailments we cover in yoga instructor training, cardiovascular disease and cancer are two that most of us know a little about. In many families, one of those two ailments has claimed the lives of family members. You can't ignore the importance of preventative maintenance, when it comes down to your family medical history.

By Rachel Holmes I realize that many of our readers are certified yoga teachers with decades of experience and knowledge. The following information may be of more use as a handout for your students. Please feel free to share the following information with your students. I will point out three simple asanas that can be practiced for an anxiety flare up or a full blown attack. There are many additional asanas, mantras and pranayama techniques, but here are three easy asanas for your students to choose from.

By Rachel Holmes Teaching yoga is a great way to maintain your healthy body, and it also would be a great way to relieve stress by relaxing in certain body positions. Your dream may be to teach yogic methods, but you have to know how to choose a yoga teacher training course that matches your needs, and there are several to choose from. You may want to work with children, athletes, seniors, or you might want to be involved in teaching people who have ailments as a form of therapy.

By Faye Martins Practicing yoga is a well known method for releasing stress. Lowering chronically high levels of stress in your life will help you to speed up your metabolism, have more energy, increase the functioning of your immune system and sleep better. Cortisol is one of the main hormones found in the human body that revs the body up under internally or externally stressful situations. It is known as the flight-or-fight hormone. The release of cortisol can give you a quick burst of energy and enhanced mental ability.