SALT - THE NEMESIS TO LOOKING THIN

I have a weakness when it comes to snacks. Basically, I can eat an entire bag of potato chips in less than an hour. This is especially bad for me because salty foods make my blood pressure go up, as it does with many people. Lately, salt and it's chemical name sodium, has been in the news alot. The 2010 report from the USDA on Dietary Guidelines (http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/DGAs2010-DGACReport.htm) shows that sodium intake is increasing for all Americans. It is especially high for young men, with an average of over 3,500mg per day. Considering the recommended amount is 1,500mg/day, we have a ways to go. Sodium is directly linked to increases in blood pressure and to cardiovascular disease, so don’t kid yourself, too much salt can kill you. But even if high blood pressure isn’t an issue for you, you could still be holding pounds of excess water weight due to high sodium consumption. Yes, I said pounds!!!

Now, I don’t really put much salt on my food – a pinch in the water when boiling grains or pasta. A little on my salad, and on meat, but I never use the salt shaker at meals. I even eat my egg whites sans salt. The truth is we don’t usually over salt our foods ourselves. The real culprits for our high sodium diet are packaged foods and sauces. Obviously, snacks are loaded with salt – chips, pretzels, crackers, even most dried nuts are also heavily loaded with sodium. It is also very prevalent in cereals. You think you’re being healthy by eating that high fiber cereal, but you’re consuming a ton of sodium in most of them. Grape Nuts for example has 290mg of sodium per half-cup serving. That is around 30% of the total recommended dietary daily allotment. Funny thing, on the website Livestrong.com, the so-called experts highly recommend Grape Nuts and falsely state that its sodium content is only 5% of total recommended amount. Even based on the old dietary value of 2,400mg of sodium per day, the nutrition label on the side of the cereal box says it is 12%, not Livestrong’s 5% of total dietary value. In any case, you have to read the labels and just know all those packaged ready to eat cereals have sodium added. One of my favorite morning meals is a bowl of Hodgson Mill MultiGrain cereal, which is high in fiber and also has flaxseed and soy. It is like quick oatmeal (ready in 5 minutes), only it taste a lot better and is even better for you. Oh, and its sodium content is ZERO.

The other main culprit in our salty diets is prepared sauces and soups. Look at the labels of any pasta sauces and you will see how high they are in sodium. And for you bean lovers, watch out for canned beans. I just looked at a can of black beans from Goya – 460mg sodium per serving. Soups are just as bad if not worse. For example; Progresso Light brand soups (endorsed by Weight Watchers and Livestrong) have huge amounts of sodium. The Progresso Light Chicken and Dumpling soup label says it has 690mg per serving. The sad thing is that people see the cover of these products and believe they are healthy. The actually believe the marketing hype and their mouthpieces in the media and that is why the overall health of our country is still getting worse.

The report by the USDA does acknowledge that changing our sodium intake will take time because of acquired tastes. They state that for the first couple of weeks, people on a restricted sodium diet craved salty foods. But, within a fairly short time, they no longer craved salty foods (8 weeks or less). I know from my own experience that if I eat salty foods one day, the next day I crave that flavor again. But, if I don’t eat salty foods, I not only don’t crave them, I find I start to taste more of the natural flavors in foods and appreciate the subtle flavors from other spices. Most cooks know that you can substitute lemon juice for salt in most foods and get the same taste bud effect. Although not recommended for children, adults would do well to “heat” up their food with cayenne pepper. The spice has been shown to help digestion, reduce inflammation and have anti-oxidant value. It is especially good to add to soups, eggs, and chicken dishes.

Lastly, I want to emphasize how much water your body can retain when you eat salty foods. I literally can gain 5 lbs in one day from eating salty foods and snacks, and it is all water retention in my cells. Sodium gets stored in your muscle and fat cells and sucks in water that ordinarily would be excreted out. I see many clients who look bloated after eating salty foods the night before. The only remedy for this is to drink water and do significant amounts of aerobic exercise (over 30 minutes) to get your cells flushed of the sodium as you sweat. Just sweating from heat exposure isn’t as good. Then, if you sharply restrict your sodium intake, within two or three workouts, your body should have lost the excess water weight.

For more nutritional information including my “7 Lifestyle Eating Principles”, please visit http://www.yogilates.com/ and click on Exercise and Tutorials. Best of luck to all of you and stay healthy!!!

Mobility for Living!

As I look toward my upcoming birthday in about a month, I am more personally aware of just how aging affects the body. Every morning when I get up, right away I feel the stiffness in my joints. It takes a full ten minutes in the hot shower to get my body feeling normal again. As I dry off, I use the time to stretch a little, and then again before I put my shoes on, I do more stretches before I feel ready to face the day. Even though I teach Pilates and yoga just about everyday, I still need to stretch and practice mobility exercises as a part of my daily living. Most people my age, even those who exercise regularly, have problems with stiffness and restrictions in range of motion. In addition to stiffness, mature people often exhibit physical and mental sluggishness due to poor blood circulation. After years of working with clients my age and older, I have come to realize that we really need focus on staying mobile or the quality of life can suffer.

You Got to Move It!
For mature people no matter what your occupation, there are some simple mobility exercises that I have found greatly help relieve stiffness and aid in getting the blood circulating and bringing alertness back. These 8 exercises only take 10-20 seconds each and can be done anywhere, anytime, especially to get the day started or as a mid-day pick-up.
1. Arm Breaths:
Stand in a neutral parallel stance and inhale as you lift your arms up from your sides. Exhale as you bring them back down. Repeat 4 times. Focus on inhaling and exhaling fully and feeling your arms long and loose.
2. Overhead Reaches:
Start standing with arms up, then reach one arm higher than the other for one second, then switch. Alternate these reaches 16 times. Focus on reaching through your whole side body as well as your arm, and spread your fingers as you reach to help stretch your hands.
3. Head Turns, Tilts and Half-Circles:
Standing with arms by your sides, turn your head from side to side in an easy, smooth rhythm. Repeat 10 times. Then tilt your head slightly to one side for one second, then repeat to other side. Repeat 3 times to each side using gentle force. Then tilt to one side and hold for 3 seconds, deepening into the stretch by exhaling and relaxing the jaw completely. Repeat 3 times to each side. Lastly, slowly circle your head from one side to the other, doing a half-circle in front, and repeat the other way. Avoid circling or dropping the head to the back. Repeat 2 times each way.
4. Shoulder Circles:
From standing or sitting, circle your shoulders 4 times to the back, and 4 times to the front. Leave your arms straight and loose and breathe normally.
5. Side Bends with Reaches:
Open your legs to a wide parallel stance with your knees bent. Reach up and over with your left arm to the right side, curving your torso over, and placing your right hand on your right thigh for support. Repeat reach up and over to the left. Alternate 4 reaches to each side.
6. Torso Twists:
Stand with feet a little wider than hip-width distance apart, knees bent. Holding arms in an easy bent position, twist torso from side to side while keeping hips and lower body absolutely still. Use an easy, smooth rhythm without using too much force. Repeat 5 times to each side.
7. Front Leg Swings:
Stand with your left side next to a wall (or a ballet bar). Lightly place your left hand on the wall or bar for support and swing your right leg up in front keeping the leg long, but not locked straight. Bring the leg back down and tap the toes in back. Repeat the leg swings 10 times, being mindful not to swing too hard or so high that you have to bend the standing leg or sense a collapse in the lower back because the hip is moving with the leg. Turn around and repeat the swings with the left leg.
8. Arm Circle Swings:
Stand in neutral parallel stance. Swing right arm up and around in as full a range of motion as feels comfortable. Let the arm feel pulled around by centrifugal force to really loosen up the shoulder socket. Repeat 8-10 times with one arm, then repeat with the other. Next, reverse the arms circle swings with each arm.

Corrective vs Postural Jargon Debate & 3 Postural Exercises for Everyday

In my never ending quest to deconstruct the latest rhetorical trends in fitness, one of the newest trends is the use of the word “corrective” in front of an exercise. In the past, therapists and fitness professionals would call an exercise a “postural exercise” when it was designed to stretch shortened muscles so that a person could achieve better alignment of the spine, pelvis, shoulders, or other area of the body. Another postural exercise would be one that strengthened over-stretched or weak postural muscles to give support to the spine. Nowadays, the lingo is “corrective exercise”. Whatever, I personally don’t like to think that people need correction, except in parochial schools. I think postural exercise sounds better in that it doesn’t have any negative connotation to it, and really it is about good posture that needs attention to always, rather than just fixing a mistake. For most people, bad posture is an ingrained habit. It comes from lack of awareness and poor mechanics. You can’t correct ingrained habits just from doing a particular exercise. Many therapeutic modalities have been created, such as Alexander, Feldenkreis, Hanna Somatics, etc., to help deal with the subconscious roots of poor posture and improper mechanics of how we move and hold ourselves. As in my Yogilates method, it begins with awareness and relaxing of unnecessary tensions. I can’t fully describe the methods that these different techniques utilize, but my point is that they all include the deepening of the mind/body connection and are much more than just exercises. I believe that they are also more integrative than “corrective” in that one is encouraged to listen to their body and is informed by how their own body responds. True integrative fitness is one that empowers the client to own their body and the condition it is in, and encourages them to visualize for themselves how to achieve release from bad habits and maintain good form, and to see themselves in a more positive and healthier light.

The images at the top are for the following three postural exercises that I have found most of us can truly benefit from on a daily basis:
1. Wall Neck Lean:
Stand with your back against the wall. Place the back of your head against the wall making sure the top of your head and bottom of your chin are level. Keep you body in straight line and walk your legs away from the wall about a foot. Stay leaning in this position for 1 minute.
Benefit: Strengthens muscles in back of neck that get over-stretched and weakened from poor head position while working at computer. Helps mitigate forward head position.

2. Shoulder Blade Pinch:
Standing of sitting, clasp your hands behind your back and push your arms straight while you roll your shoulders back. You should feel your shoulder blades coming together and your thoracic spine push forward. Hold for two full breaths, then relax your shoulders back to neutral. Repeat and, if possible, reach the arms up for more stretch and hold 10 seconds.
Benefit: Stretches front shoulder and chest area and extends thoracic spine. This mitigates internal rotation of arms and hunched upper back.

3. Straight Leg Bridge on Box or Couch:
Lying on the ground, place your feet up on a 12 inch high box. You can also use the edge of your couch. Turn out your legs and keep the heels close together. Hold for 10 seconds, then roll the spine down. Repeat.
Benefit: Strengthens lower back and gluteal muscles which get over-stretched and weakened from poor posture while sitting for long periods.

Pilates for an Open Mind and Body

The other day, a Pilates instructor friend and I were discussing the future of Pilates and our own inclinations with regards to where we see ourselves evolving as teachers. I related how lately I was looking at how to use Pilates principles and techniques in breaking down and re-creating powerful core exercises that would benefit athletes. In the fitness world, I've noticed a lot of interest in high-intensity exercises and full-body movements, and feel Pilates has alot to contribute to sports training in general. However, what I have seen so far, both in the gym and online, are lot of training to tire you out but little if any awareness of how to position the body or maintain proper alignment in the execution of these exercises. On the other end of the spectrum, my friend was talking about how she was leaning more toward discovering a gentler form of Pilates training, one that breaks down our reflexive patterns of how we move and through somatic (sensory) detailed exploration helps people learn to move with more ease and amplitude. Many people are carrying around huge amounts of tension and dis(ease) in their bodies and are mentally blocked from dealing with the root causes. I too am interested in this approach and have trained in the somatic sciences of Alexander, Feldenkreis, and Laban Bartinieff, and of course yoga. The question is how to reconcile the two widely different focuses? As you know, I am always trying to bridge differing camps and believe in a kind of utopian ideal where everyone of all persuasion can get along healthily and respectfully. It stems from my passion to understand and to see and share all the ways to achieve a higher state of being.

Anyway, Pilates has certainly come a long way from when I first started to study it back in 1996. Back then, I pretty much got the classical approach, focusing on the execution and routines, and not so much on the mental aspects of the practice. I’m sure there were already teachers exploring this aspect, but Pilates was still a few years from going mainstream and the integration of sensory awareness and mindfulness into the technique was idiosyncratic. We still are working at it, but it is much more acceptable now to discuss things like the breath and relaxation and visualizations when teaching Pilates then it was ten years ago.

There is a related issue to this discussion which has to do with letting go of hard, fast rules when it comes to fitness and nutrition. I need a lot of carbs in my diet because I burn a lot of calories on most days. On the other hand, I try to make most of the grains I eat whole grains, which ups the fiber in my diet and keeps me from having sharp insulin drops. Some people eat little if any carbs and they believe it has made them healthier. For many people, cutting wheat products from their diet reduces bloating and improves energy. Someone who is gluten-intolerant has to avoid breads, cereals and pasta, but can still eat rice and quinoa and beans. I know someone like this and I’m sure she eats far fewer carbs than a normal diet, but her energy is better than it was before. The fact is that everyone is different and no one diet is best for everybody.

The same is true with exercise. Some people believe they get all that they need from a fitness routine that doesn’t include any aerobic exercise. On a physiological level, I can’t find any basis for this type of fitness program. Nevertheless, I know a person who only does resistance training and she looks great. I also know some people who only do yoga or pilates for exercise, and who am I to say they need to change or add to their program. I am a firm believer in persuading others through example and not by lecture. One thing I've learned as I've matured, is that you cannot change someone’s mind just by arguing. Most people have too much invested in their own perceptions of their bodies to change their behavior just because someone tells them to. People will change when they are ready and when they have a compelling personal reason to do so.

All of the above being said, there does seem to be a consistent character trait with people who exhibit exclusionary behavior patterns (without medical reasons for it) like severe carbohydrate restriction or limit themselves to only one kind of exercise, and that is they tend to be less tolerant of others in general. Could it be that sub-consciously they feel deprived and this leads to intolerance toward people living more freely? Now, let me be clear that when I talk about exclusionary behavior, I am not talking about people who are just well disciplined. Discipline, as I talk about in my book on Yogilates, does not necessarily restrict freedom; rather it can give you more liberty by providing rational limits and motivations that make choices easier. If you have no limits you would have too many choices which can clutter the mind and stop you from progressing in life. Discipline is a good thing and means you still execute good decisions even when stressed, and you still work out even when you are tired or it is raining, etc. An exclusionary person, by contrast, bases their behavior on a belief rather than discipline, and that belief isn’t grounded in either scientific fact or personal experience. For example, a person thinks they don’t need to do any exercises for their feet even though they have back problems. They want to only do abdominal exercises thinking this will be enough. However, their reasoning is not backed by either science or by their personal experience, since they have never done footwork or know what the effect would be. That is an exclusionary mindset and is detrimental to the person's goals. In addition, this person has a very low tolerance for other people in general. They judge others quickly and unfairly and are openly prejudiced about many topics. These people are difficult to train and not nice to be around for much time at all. What a pleasure it is when a client walks in who is genuinely open to new ways of moving and feeling and understands and appreciates the different perspectives a mind/body approach brings to their way of being.
I recommend to everyone to try to do something new everyday. To resist from judging others or ideas too quickly. To practice seeing things from different point of views. We all could probably use a little more tolerance toward ourselves and to others. This will lead to more personal and universal peace. Hopefully!

Big Muscle Mystery - how does it happen?

You may have seen the person walking around with huge calve muscles or with large trapezius muscles on the shoulders. Or how about the middle age person on the bus with the extra huge hip muscles. You might assume (wrongly) that they overdeveloped the area by lifting heavy things at some time in their life. The reality is that even with huge muscles, they may not be any stronger than someone with normal size muscles. The weird thing about hypertrophy (the process of muscle cells getting bigger) is that it can happen just from overuse and not necessarily from resistance training. In fact, it is actually really hard to significantly increase muscle size just from lifting weights once in a while. A recent article in the New York Times Science section this week pretty much validates what I have been telling women for years, which is, that lifting heavier weights will help them to tone their muscles and trim their bodies, not build them.
After we reach adulthood, the size of our muscles is largely determined by our everyday activity. Generally, people become less active as they get older and muscles will atrophy (get smaller) from this disuse. If you remain active, then muscle size and strength will remain as you age. If you stress the muscles regularly through exercise, then they will increase in density as they become stronger. However, only if you stress them intensely, and eat lots of protein, will your muscles grow in size. This is what bodybuilders try to do. It is very hard to actually gain weight from just lifting weights however, because as your muscle fitness improves, your metabolism increases. This means you will burn more calories even at rest. So, someone who lifts weights as part of their exercise routine will burn more fat than someone who doesn’t and will get leaner. That is why the women in the study who used heavier weights actually lost weight compared to the women who did lighter weights for more repetitions. Which is not to say that lifting light weights doesn’t have any benefit. Everyone should start with light weights to establish good form first before progressing to heavier weights. In addition, certain benefits and purposes are only achieved when the weight is light enough to allow the deeper intrinsic muscles to work properly. This is especially true for many Pilates exercises and also in general for circular and rotational movements. Most, if not all, people who only lift heavy weights for strength exercise are lacking in functional strength because of the neglect of the intrinsic muscles.

Getting back to the mystery of people who have large muscles, but not from lifting weights; the root cause is poor posture and inefficient movement. Let’s look at large trapezius muscles, which are the muscles on top of the shoulders going up the base of the neck from the back. These get overdeveloped when someone habitually lifts objects by first pulling up the shoulder. This habit becomes unconscious and even when lifting a pencil, the muscle firing sequence begins with the trapezius so that even when the weight is minimal, the muscle still gets contracted. Over time, the subject may even try to lift their body weight with the trapezius, e.g. when moving from sitting to standing, or when straightening up from a forward bend. The muscular imbalance is perpetuated by inefficient movement, excessive tension in the area, and is often combined with forward head posture and rounded shoulders. Learning to isolate and articulate the shoulders, and learning to release unnecessary tension through breathwork and stretching, are key to training the subject to bring more balance to this area of the body.

Another common area of overdevelopment of muscles is in the hip, primarily the medial gluteals, which are higher than the gluteus maximus and more toward the sides of the hips. The primary cause of this problem is a forward leaning posture usually stemming from an anterior tilted pelvis, and sometimes coupled with weak quadriceps. Leaning forward even a few degrees will shift weight bearing from the legs to the gluteals. Every time the subject stands or walks, they are holding the weight of their upper torso with the gluteals. This repetitive stress on the muscles will build them up, though without adding more strength. In fact, the strength of muscles held in constant tension is usually less than a normal muscle. For this person, corrective postural exercises for the pelvis, along with stretching and core work will hopefully bring down the hypertrophied area and lead to more efficient movement.

I hope this article was helpful and made you think a little. Please post your comments or thoughts.

Functional Forever

Lately, the fitness world has been swept up in the latest “terminology” trend, which is functional fitness. Just a few years ago, it was the term “core” that had everyone rushing to learn side plank and other new(not) exercises that work on stability. The latest trend again co-opts from Pilates the idea that practiced movement should be related to how we naturally move everyday. Joseph Pilates studied moving images of how animals and humans moved and incorporated this into his philosophy of Contrology. All Pilates movements involve awareness of alignment and moving from your center. Yogilates adds to this the awareness of using the breath to release unnecessary tension before, during, and after movements. The result is not just functional exercise, but a functional mindset; one that transcends regular exercise and ingrains into our minds and bodies an efficiency and accuracy the leads to longevity in everyday living. This integrative adaptation to training only comes from a process that begins first with learning how to relax the mind and body into an optimal state for training. The relaxation response (The Relaxation Response, by Herbert Benson, Miriam Z. Klipper) is easy to attain in a Yogilates class through focus on the breath and clearing the mind of distractions. From there, one begins isolated articulations to learn to move body parts individually and sense gravity’s effect on the body in supine position. The next steps are stabilization through oppositional force and controlled momentum. This involves learning how various muscles work in concert to maintain the integrity of optimal alignment in the spine and joints of the body. Progressing onward, one gets to performing movements focused on the quality of the movement and whole body integration, meaning being aware of all of the body and controlling the speed, the range, the stabilizing forces, and the breath all at the same time. The lesson then returns back to simple isolations, but now with the body in new positions (supine, quadraped, sitting, standing, etc.), and repeats the progressive learning steps.

Here is where we see the big mistake of the functional promoters who start right away teaching multi-planar movements because they are more functional than other exercises. Doing multi-planar movements, such as torso twists with one-leg lunges, should be done to help range of motion and coordination, but only with great attention to control and alignment considerations, which can only be maintained if the mind/body is prepared for it. The movement itself doesn’t necessarily imbue awareness to the practitioner. The mind of the practitioner needs to know what it is supposed to be feeling, and that doesn’t happen automatically. As Joseph said about breathing correctly, “-this all important function requires individual instruction, not only by precept, but by example.” That can be said for all elements of functional fitness. Sadly to say, most instructors just don’t have sufficient background in teaching awareness based movement to know how to begin teaching by example.

Becoming truly functional in movement has to include this progression of learning, as it is the mind that must achieve awareness before the body is directed. Just putting the body into a position without first educating the person on how to maintain ideal alignment with optimal balance is pointless. So really, there are no such things as functional exercises without a functional learning process that precedes the movement. Another way of looking at it is that any movement can be made functional if one taps into the deep awareness of whole body integration when doing it. In Yogilates training, it is all about developing awareness and learning to use your senses to teach yourself beyond the examples of movement done in class and apply the process to everyday living. Take a moment each day to circle your arms, your shoulders, your hands, feet, hips. Feel reaching around in space and also the space inside your body, your joints and torso. Breathe deeply and notice how the ribs expand and release. Stand or sit tall and feel flexible in the spine and naturally supported from your core. This is all functional fitness, and it should feel right in your body and mind.

Intuitive vs Reactive - A New Learning Paradigm

One thing that I think most people in this field will agree on is that you can continue to learn completely new ways of seeing, feeling, and moving no matter what age or experience you are. Lately, I have discovered in myself a newfound sense of equilibrium that oddly enough came from beginning rigorous strength training. Like many people, I had hit a plateau in my training and was feeling frustrated. In addition, I was experiencing pain and aches in my joints which I first attributed to aging, but my gut intuition was telling me I needed to change my routine. Stretching and core strength was great, but I needed to get stronger in an athletic way. When I do resistance training, I still bring all my awareness of correct alignment and centering to the workout. I listen to my body and constantly adapt the positioning and motion of exercises to maintain optimal form and control. Nevertheless, it gets pretty intense and I have had to push myself harder than I thought. Long story short, it may seem inconsistent for a Pilates and yoga instructor to use strength training to solve a training issue, but it actually made physiological sense. The ligaments and cartilage in my joints had been getting overstretched from years of doing my practice, and I needed the muscles to get stronger to support the joints. I'm sure that there are many people who have similar experiences, but it is not always easy to know when you are listening to your gut in an intuitive way, and when you are just reacting in reflexive manner.

By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have developed core beliefs about ourselves and our bodies and these ideas affect the way we move and hold ourselves daily. Often, we have ideas or beliefs about our bodies that influence our neuromuscular patterns, which are the way we unconsciously initiate movement and react to instructions. These ingrained reflexes can block the mind/body from connecting and may create inefficient movement and eventually lead to imbalanced development. This is almost impossible to recognize on your own and, even with the help of a trained professional, it can take months to relearn how to initiate movement in a different way. Even then, the changes won’t stick unless you can begin to let go of old beliefs and start to see yourself differently. In my years of training clients, I have often found that the people who have chronic back or joint problems are also the people who have the most ingrained negative movement patterns and have the most difficulty following basic functional awareness exercises. This observation has been proven in scientific experiments where they took two groups of people: one with a history of common back ailments, and the other without, and they gave each of them simple instructions on how to lift objects safely. The group without a history of back pain was able to follow the instructions correctly, where as the problem group totally failed to follow instructions. The conclusion of the study was that people with chronic back pain need training in basic motor skills (mind/body awareness) before therapeutic treatment. In my own teaching practice, I have found that some people have no connection to some parts of their bodies and have exactly the wrong instincts when it comes to moving efficiently. They push the abdominals out, they bend when they are asked to straighten, they hunch their shoulders, they hold their breath, etc. Again, these are the same people that have chronic lower back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, etc. So, we can't say that it is always wise to follow your instincts when it comes to training as, for some, it could mean following negative patterning coming from a deep lack of awareness.

Intuitive learning actually means to be open for different ways of feeling things and seeing things and at the same time reflecting on what your body is telling you and what you have learned from past experiences. It means letting go of pre-conceived notions or expectations and taking your time to experience something new. That being said, the first time you try something, you need to also listen to your intuition with regards to what someone is telling you to do. Try to take into account the whole setting of where you are and whether you feel the instructor is acting on automatic or is connecting to you and the rest of the class. Many times I have seen instructors who think they are there to challenge the class to meet them on their terms. That can be ok if you are aware of this negative energy and stay within yourself. You might not have expected it, but sometimes staying within yourself can be the intuitive way to go. I highly recommend that everyone practice on their own. Not only does this develop independence, it allows you to fully connect with your intuitive guide. The more experienced you are, the greater the benefits from these solo workouts. During these times you can practice doing a different warm-up, one where you fine-tune into your body. You can do similar exercises you have done before but change qualitative focus, such as performing some things a lot slower or leaving the arms relaxed in standing poses. You will be certain to discover something new about your body and this could take you in a direction you might never have thought about before.

Next time, I'll talk about the reality that how you move determines the shape of your body.