• 3 Ways Yoga Improves Your Joint System and Skeletal Structure
    3 Ways Yoga Improves Your Joint System and Skeletal Structure

    Author Ken Stanfield

    Regular practice of yoga is commonly known to give you a mental serenity and level of fitness unlike any other form of exercise. Many practitioners do not even realize that there are even more benefits being explored underneath your muscles. Yoga is proving more and more to have a significant effect on healthy joint function as certain poses promote the release of fluids while strengthening the muscles supporting vital joint systems. Here are three ways yoga can help get the juices flowing in those joints and keep you walking smoothly into your elder years.
  • Take Care of Your Tools
    Take Care of Your Tools

    Author Sherry Zak Morris

    What is the most valuable tool that you use every day?  Nope, it is not a screwdriver or a wrench - it is your hands!  You couldn't type, knit, garden or fix your hair without them!  And just like every carpenter and handyman knows - you need to take good care of your tools so when you go to use them they are ready and reliable! 
  • Open Your Pelvis: Deep Straddle, Front Splits in Yoga
    Open Your Pelvis: Deep Straddle, Front Splits in Yoga

    Author Kino MacGregor

    I grew up in the 1980s in the U.S.A. and one of my first fitness memories was of the "Thigh Master". This invention was sold as toning the thighs and giving a sleek looking leg to the user. The exercise had the result of tightening the inner thigh muscles. Without much technical instruction the do-it-yourself home workout junkie would just squeeze the inner thighs muscles, including the Adductors, Gracilis and Pectineus. When I started practicing yoga the one area of serious tightness that I found on my body was my inner thighs. When your inner thighs are tight and over worked it can restrict healthy inward and outward rotation of the hip joint. In the yoga practice we rely on a healthy range of motion in the hip joint to practice most of the postures. Yoga practitioners who find their inner thighs a little tight need to take the time to understand how to soften and release this tender area in order to practice safely.
  • Liberate Your Fascia, Liberate Your Life
    Liberate Your Fascia, Liberate Your Life

    Author Dr. Divi Chandna

    I see patients every day with chronic pain. It is as if their whole body keeps reacting in pain. It usually starts in one area of the body and then quickly spreads to other parts. Treatments with massage, acupuncture and physiotherapy help but never seem to sustain pain relief. I can relate to this because I have been there.
  • The Principles of Tensegrity
    The Principles of Tensegrity

    Author Sarah Manwaring-Jones

    Tensegrity is a term that was first described by Buckminster Fuller as an architectural term.  It is defined as a balance of discontinuous compression elements, which are connected by continuous tension forces, which allow any system to exist in balance. Expressed in a living form, Dr. Stephen Levine defined it, biotensegrity.  In our case, as human beings, the fascial matrix and muscles form the system of tension and the bones float within the matrix creating relationships of discontinuous compression that connect through the whole system. 
  • Happy Knees In Warrior I
    Happy Knees In Warrior I

    Author Becca Kocher

    The knees are one of the most commonly injured joints. Even in yoga, which doesn’t cause a lot of impact, the knees can be very vulnerable to injury. Since the knees are a weight bearing joint (and a very important part of walking!), it’s important to keep them healthy and injury free.
  • Yoga for the Eyes
    Yoga for the Eyes

    Author Sarah Manwaring-Jones

    Have you ever explored the way that you use your eyes to control and surrender?  As the most dominant sensory organ, many of us are subconsciously using our eyes to solidify and harden the world around us.  Often our eyes are 10 steps in front of us as we walk down the street, practically jumping out of our heads.