As college students, it’s safe to say that we all know the mid-semester slump a little too well. Exam after exam, work piles up, and burnout starts to creep in. The weeks start to feel like stress on stress on stress! It’s easy to slip into overdrive, but there are plenty of ways to get you feeling refreshed again after a stressful week, like taking a yoga class at the Leach!
The Leach offers several types of group fitness classes throughout the week that you can register for using the myFSU mobile app. On the menu tab, scroll down to the FSU Recreation icon and select the Class Registration page. You can scroll through all the classes available or filter your selections in the drop-down menu to only show group fitness classes.
That’s exactly how I landed myself in my first-ever Vinyasa yoga class. Two of my friends invited me to try it out with them while I was in the middle of having a mid-semester type of bad week.
So, why not give yoga a shot to try and chill out a little?
But if you’re completely new to this type of exercise like I am, you’re probably wondering what Vinyasa means. What makes Vinyasa yoga special compared to regular yoga?
Vinyasa yoga connects the mind, body, and spirit by incorporating active breath work into each yoga pose. Rather than just starting and stopping the motions, Vinyasa yoga brings consciousness and purpose into the flow of movement.
I’ll admit, it was a little intimidating when the instructor asked if it was anybody’s first class, and I was the only one who raised my hand. But don’t let that discourage you! On the recreation website, it makes sure to let you know that this class is open to all fitness levels.
The class started exactly how you would expect a practice centered around breath and body to begin: sitting cross-legged, breathing, and taking a minute to set personal intentions for that hour of the day. Knowing I was about as flexible as a plank of wood, my only intention was to give each move my best attempt, regardless of what it looked like.
Of course, any yoga class is going to have a handful of the familiar poses that someone who’s never stepped foot onto a yoga mat before could recognize: mountain pose, child’s pose, and downward dog. A few I could start to figure out by name without actually knowing what they were beforehand, like chair pose.
But don’t let all that earlier talk about centered breathing and mindfulness fool you, Vinyasa yoga is tough! The poses start to ramp up in intensity pretty quickly. I definitely snuck a few glances around the room, and while it looked like everyone else was in their zen mind gardens, I was eyes wide open and honed in on the instructor’s every move.
I may be a yoga novice, but I’ve spent about 90 percent of my total time on campus in the Leach. I love to lift, I love to sweat, and I love Pilates. I love it all! That’s just to say I feel pretty qualified to tell you that if you’re someone who’s looking for intensity without rigor, Vinyasa yoga is absolutely for you.
If you’re just as new as me but still think it sounds like a fun challenge (or you’re just desperately looking for that mid-semester reset), I’m going to let you in on the secret that actually got me through the class: modifying poses with a yoga block.
It’s really hard to know you’re doing bad at something in a room full of people who know exactly what they’re doing, even if it’s the first time you’re doing it. We all want to be aces off the bat at any new hobby we pick up, but that’s just not how things go. Using the yoga block as an extension of your body during some poses and limiting how far you have to stretch during other poses is a total lifesaver.
Modifying with the yoga block actually helped me reach far enough and balance through my favorite pose of the whole class. After feeling the burn in the warrior two pose for a while, the instructor prompted us to shift all of our weight to our front foot, reach down to the floor with our front hand (I used the yoga block instead), mirror our other hand up in the air like a vertical T-pose, and lift our back leg parallel to the floor.
As I mentioned before, Vinyasa isn’t about starting one pose, stopping it, and just moving to another. It’s a conscious flow of movement from one pose through the next. Something we practiced a handful of times throughout the class was the “Vinyasa flow,” as dubbed by the instructor, which was a way of in and out of poses by cycling through other poses.
Starting with your stomach down on the mat, you can push yourself up into snake pose and lift your torso and legs off the ground. While in lifted snake, you tuck your feet under, then bring your butt up in the air to move into downward dog. From downward dog, you walk your hands back to your feet into a standing forward bend. In standing forward bend, you bring your hands to your knees, then lift your torso, and you’re up!
Just like that, you created conscious body movement through Vinyasa flow instead of just getting up on your hands and knees. This Vinyasa flow sequence was my biggest takeaway from the whole class!
I tried Vinyasa yoga at the Leach for the first time in the middle of what wound up to be the most stressful week of my semester thus far. Now, I’ve continued using that Vinyasa flow to end my personal post-gym stretching routine at least five times since.
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