Is there a real yoga in fitness centers? And how to distinguish a good yoga lesson from an ordinary sports lesson? Why are static asanas needed? – You will find answers to these and other questions in this article.

About yoga and sport

Due to the fact that periodically I encounter these issues, I want to explain my vision of all this.

What is sport? And is yoga sports?

Not! Yoga is not a sport in my deep sensation. The fact is that sport is always a trap of ambition. Yes, all the athletes will forgive me. But if you have no ambition, you have no place in sports. All these beautiful phrases “important participation, not victory” are just an attempt to reassure yourself. But the athlete who does not dream of becoming a champion is bad. The ambition, the thirst for victory, the thirst for being the best is what moves him, that makes him spend all his time on training and this is what makes him sacrifice his health for the sake of victory and experience overloads. To be an athlete, in addition to ambition, you still need two things: health and youth. Without any of these three components, it is impossible to achieve anything in sports.

Yoga is not a sport. Firstly, ambitious yogi is not yogi))), and secondly, you can and should not be engaged in yoga not for the sake of victory, but for the sake of your health, and especially when it is not enough for this very health, or when youth has long waved to you pen. Yoga is a much more subtle science. In yoga, you go from energies to the body. At first you learn to move your consciousness, listen to your breath, feel the movement of energies in the body, and only then you feel how these energies strengthen and stretch your body. If you got to the lesson of “Alya Yoga”, where you did not say a word about consciousness or energy, do not flatter yourself, you were not in yoga, you were in a sports lesson. If you are engaged in yoga in a fitness center, you are unlikely to do yoga, rather you simply schematically repeat the asana, not quite understanding their meaning. In fitness centers are most often taught by athletes who can and taught correctly, but they have very little understanding of what energy and consciousness and spirituality are, but they know well what the body and muscles are. And they take out from training what they understand – manipulations with the body. But this is not yoga. Do not confuse.

Once, one man came to me with the question why static asanas are needed. I carefully looked at him and decided not to tell, but to show. I told him: accept any pose that you know from yoga. He sat on the heels. I also sat on the heels opposite him. This is not my favorite pose, but I closed my eyes and plunged into my body. I felt that my priest was not relaxed, because she was not very comfortable to sit on the heels, and she holds herself a little in the air, so as not to fall on the heels with her whole body.And I inhaled and exhaled and said: relax your buttocks and let them with all the weight, the weight of the whole body, fall on your heels. I only had time to take three breaths in and out and repeat “Relax your buttocks” before this man jumped up and ran to the toilet. It turned out that he had problems with the stool. When relaxing the buttocks)))) they suddenly passed. I asked if he understood why static is needed? He still didn't understand.

And the meaning is simple. In statics, our task is to relax all the muscles, except for those involved in maintaining the posture. And an interesting thing: when you mentally begin to examine your body from the inside, it turns out that most of the muscles are generally tensed for no reason. That's why the shoulders and neck are tense, if they are not involved in any way? And we begin to exhale and relax them. And gradually we relax more and more, and our body begins to stretch and becomes softer, more alive. Meanwhile, energy circulates through our body, because each asana carries a certain meaning, supports certain meridians of the body, activates them, or vice versa.

In our Taoist Princess, the lion's share of the exercises is done in the fisherman position, where you need to stand with a straight back, leaning on half-bent knees. At first, everyone suffers, and they can stand in this position for several seconds, and then the legs “fall off” hurt. But gradually the channels are developed, and it becomes easy to stand in this position. Now I can stand relaxed in this position for as long as I like, I rest in this position. And when I do it in sync with the girls, they squeak and overcome themselves, and I rest. All my muscles are resting, my back is resting, only my legs are working. The channels are gradually developed, the muscles understand what they want from them, and you begin to relax your whole body, except for the necessary muscles. In my opinion, static is 99% of yoga, everything else is just cream roses)).

A good yoga teacher is not the one who can throw his leg over his ear, although this is impressive, no one argues. A good yoga teacher is one whose students relax in class. If you do not relax in yoga and do not expand your sensations, but only get tired and “driven”, this is not yoga, this is a sport. And your teacher is not a yogi, but an athlete.