One Year of Yoga: Retrospective

Learning to appreciate stretching

If you know me at all, you know I hate stretching, but have to do it all the time anyway.

So, in the spirit of new beginnings, I started taking Vinyasa Yoga classes last year and have stayed relatively consistent since. I did spend a month in Asia filming a movie, so there was a little window of time where I was just doing my best to repeat the routines on my own.

all pros, no cons

Yeah, there was not a single downside to having done this, not even the typical ones. I took the class at one of the gyms I work at, so it was free, took a mid-morning class so I didn’t have to change my schedue, and didn’t need to buy any special clothing & equipment!

As for the benefits, I got more flexible, relieved some chronic pain, and became more balanced… as in I have better equilibirum, still crazy. I already had both front splits and a decent bridge before starting class, but now they feel a lot smoother and I can hold those positions without as much strain. My kicks also look way better now, both for Tricking and in stunt choreo, and that was something I didn’t expect because I didn’t fully understand the relationship between mobility and performance. (tie in FUNCTION)

Funny enough, I did know quite a bit about how yoga would affect my body’s chronic pain because as luck would have it, I used to work in a biomedical engineering lab that dealt with how yoga, taichi, qigong exercises, acupuncture, and topical ointments can work to mitigate aching bodyparts. If this had been the only upside to the year of yoga, this still would have been a net gain.

Inspiration

Watching not only my style and physicality evolve, but also how the state of my body at rest also improved, gave me the motivation to finally develop a mobility program. Well, that and my friend Johnny Nguyen, who is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, expressed interest on working with me on a fitness + wellness program. We made this geared towards people who are interested in improving their performance on a fundamental level, and for those who are just starting off, because you can’t go wrong with base level functional training. The only issue I had was that training mobility, flexibility, balance, and relative strength are all super boring, which is why we also flavored the workout library with exercises from dance, yoga, martial arts, physical therapy, and more!

If you’re interested in an unique style of training or just need that final push to get started with fitness in general, check out my program FUNCTION. The first lesson is on public preview, and when you decide to buy, take 10% off with code: BLOG10