Saturday, December 25, 2010

Strike a Yoga Pose: Locust B - FitSugar.com

Simple Salabhasana can be turned into fancy incarnations of the pose, like Inverted Locust, where you balance on your shoulders and chin, and the Locust Scorpion, when your feet touch your head, but plain ol' Locust pose is a yoga class staple. This pose strengthens the back, booty, and the hamstring, areas of the body weakened by hours hunched over a keyboard. Here's a variation known as Locust B, which I like to do immediately after Locust A with no break in between to really challenge my muscles. This variation may look relaxing, but you'll definitely feel Locust working, and it's a great complement to abdominal exercises helping you maintain a strong core all the way around.

Sanskrit Name: Salabhasana B
English Translation: Locust Pose

Learn the finer details of the pose when you read more.

Lie down on a mat on your belly, with your legs together. Place your hands on the floor on either side of your torso with your elbows bent.As you inhale, lift your legs, head, and upper body off the ground. Your hands remain on the floor for support.As you breathe, try to relax your shoulders and the muscles in your booty. Extend the crown of your head away from your toes, lengthening as much as you can through your spine. Stay for five breaths, and then release back to the mat.

When doing this pose directly after Locust A, keep the torso and legs lifted and just switch your hand position from A, with your hands on the ground by your sides, to B. If your back feels worked, follow this pose with a Child's Pose to gently stretch out your spine.


If you love to talk about all things yoga, then check out the Yoga Stretch and Tell group. Post questions, thoughts, or advice, or share photos of you doing poses.


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Paralyzed man gives disabled kids hope through yoga - Chicago Sun-Times

"My name is Matt. My legs are a little skinnier than many," admits Matthew Sanford, a complete stranger to the wide-eyed youngsters in wheelchairs and hospital beds assembled in the auditorium of Chicago's Shriners Hospitals for Children.


The young onlookers, all with disabilities, know nothing about the yoga this 45-year-old's about to teach them. What they know -- instantly -- is that Sanford is one of them because he's instructing from a wheelchair.


Affectionately calling his audience his "tribe," Sanford guides his wheelchair to each patient to thoughtfully inquire about his or her disability ("What's going on?" "What have you been told?").


Briefly -- and minus gory details -- Sanford explains that in 1978, at age 13, he was involved in a horrible automobile accident that claimed the lives of his 47-year-old father and 20-year-old sister and left him paralyzed from the chest down. He was told by doctors to forget his lower body because he would never again feel sensation there.


Sanford tells his audience that he believed that prognosis until 20 years ago when he discovered yoga and the healing power of the mind-body connection, a life-changing combination he now shares as an inspirational speaker crisscrossing the country and on his website, www.matthewsanford.com.


"Don't give up on your bodies," Sanford pleads, reminding them -- and himself -- that their bodies didn't ask for the circumstances that caused their disabilities. "Your body's doing the best it can."


Sanford, who contends that deepening the connection between mind and body is more than a personal health strategy -- that "when we deepen the quality of where and how our minds interact and intersect with our bodies, our consciousness shifts [and] we get more connected to our lives, to each other, and to the planet" -- uses a softer sell with his attentive class.


"What I mean by mind-body connection is simple: Sit back in your chair and let your legs splay out. Notice what you feel in your legs -- the dullness, the lack of crispness. Now sit up straight, press gently down through your butt and heels, and lift your chest. Notice the change in sensation -- in how, what, and where you feel within your body," Sanford instructs the assembled patients, caregivers, nurses, and doctors.


"Stretch your arms wide. Stretch more . . . I want more . . . dude, do more than that . . . broken bones . . . whatever . . . do more," he prods, mindful that some are physically unable to follow his commands. When some patients halt participation, Sanford scolds, "Just don't friggin' watch! I live paralyzed, too."


"What matters about what I'm doing is the experience," says the Minneapolis resident.


"For me, everything I do flows from my daily yoga practice -- the time I take to feel and refine the sensation of my existence," acknowledges Sanford, who teaches yoga to persons with disabilities as well as traditional students.


Sanford believes that yoga increases strength, balance and flexibility (both mental and physical), spurs discovery of a subtle level of mind-body sensation not impeded by disability, improves the quality of breathing, provides a sense of lightness and freedom within the body, helps manage stress, and offers a deepened sense of wholeness and connection with others.


"The principles of yoga don't discriminate. I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without also becoming more compassionate.


"On the flip side, when we become more disconnected from our bodies, we become more self-destructive," Sanford notes in an interview before his class.


In his 2006 book, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, in which he sheds light on our inner capacity for survival, grace, acceptance and healing, Sanford writes that his mind-body relationship changed in an instant -- "the time for my back to break" -- but reminds that the changing relationship between mind and body is a defining feature of everyone's life. "We are all leaving our bodies. . . . Death cannot be avoided; neither can the inward silence that comes with the aging process."


Saying he now experiences a more subtle connection between mind and body, Sanford explains, "It does not require that I flex muscles. It does not dissipate in the presence of increasing inward silence. In fact, this connection depends on it. It does require, however, that I seek more profoundly within my own experience and do so with an open mind."


"Life is fragile and resilient simultaneously -- it's both," says Sanford, acknowledging both in his own life journey. While he and his wife, Jennifer, celebrated the birth of their son, Paul, now 10, they were grieving the death of his fraternal twin brother, William, who had died in her womb three weeks earlier.


"Life is here to be felt. We need to learn to simplify life -- to appreciate every morning more, to notice little things. We need to be paying attention to the taste of water, what sunlight feels like on your skin, the beauty of a sunset, the serenity of nature," advises Sanford.


"I can never change what happened to me, but I can live within the body I have."


Sandy Thorn Clark is a local free-lance writer.


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MS Patients Find Comfort, Flexibility In Yoga - NY1


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Experts say with the right supervision, exercise can help manage symptoms of multiple sclerosis, and a special Staten Island yoga program could be helping improve outcomes among MS patients. NY1's Health reporter Kafi Drexel filed the following report.

Larissa Nusser and Denise Danton-Nizarre met eight years ago when Nusser attended Danton-Nizarre's first ever yoga class as a student living with multiple sclerosis.


"One of the issues she was having was balancing. Throughout the class, I kept saying to her, 'You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.' And that sort of became our theme," says Danton-Nizzare.


Nusser credits yoga with a dramatic change in her health outlook. So when they co-founded the You Can Do It Yoga Center in Richmond Valley, Staten Island, it seemed a natural fit to offer a special class for students living with MS. They have even created supplemental DVDs.


"I was diagnosed 10 years ago. I was in a wheelchair, actually, when I was diagnosed and I started transforming right in the first yoga class I went to," says Nusser.


Multiple sclerosis or MS, attacks the nervous system. According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, about 400,000 Americans are living with the disease and 200 people are newly diagnosed each week. Symptoms can be moderate, with numbness in the limbs. More severe symptoms can include paralysis or vision loss.


The National MS Society highlights research that shows yoga helps improves outcomes.


Yoga participant Michael Weiss only has mild symptoms so far, and says yoga is just what he was looking for.


"Yoga has been great for me, because it is stretching and breathing and it gives me the ability to work on my flexibility, my balance and it also helps with my fatigue," says Weiss.


Don Loughran was diagnosed five years ago at age 40 with a more aggressive form of MS. He says yoga is one of the many approaches he's using to help slow the disease's progression.


"Multiple sclerosis has affected me mentally, spiritually and emotionally. For yoga, it helps me develop my mind, body and soul," says Loughran.


Most group exercise classes are designed to meet the needs of people with a wide range if abilities. MS progresses differently for everyone, and that is especially important here.


Sequences are modified for students whether they are they are seated or standing. And Nusser and Danton-Nizarre say those kind of adjustments fit into the variety of things yoga can do for their students.


"MS is not a one-lane highway. I'm not saying yoga is a cure for MS, I'm saying that yoga is one of the three things that I do every day. I think that everybody needs to find how many lanes their highway is and which highway they want to take," says Nusser. "For me, it is my daily injection, positive thinking and it is practicing yoga. It's really been working for me for the last 10 years. I've been relapse-free for 10 years."


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