Learning Yoga Update #3: Practicing Vinyasa Flow

Photo by KoolShooters on Pexels.com

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my Learning Project blog, where I will once again update you on my progress towards learning how to practice yoga. At this point I have become much more comfortable with practicing yoga and decided to push myself by stepping up the difficulty level a bit! Moving on from simply holding a series of static poses, this week I started practicing something called Vinyasa Flow yoga, and it has been wonderful 🙂 . I have included a couple of pictures in a gallery within this post as well as a YouTube video (at the end of the post) to illustrate some of what I have learned this week. My eagle pose is super weak in the video! I didn’t realize this until I was editing. One of the images in the slideshow is from another video where I perform the pose correctly 🙂

Vinyasa Flow involves stringing a series of poses together and performing them in succession, seamlessly flowing from one pose to the next. Practicing in this way leaves little to no room for rest and results in the yoga session being significantly more physically demanding, which I have enjoyed. On top of the basic poses I have been practicing so far (ex. downward dog, tree pose, warrior 1 & 2), there are also a number of physically taxing poses mixed in that require effort and stability to maintain such as Chaturanga Pushups (demonstrated in video at the end of this post), various bridges, and a number of core engaging exercises. This leads Vinyasa Flow to feel much more like a workout than simply stretching, like what I was practicing for the past few weeks. I feel like practicing Vinyasa pushes me physically which leads me to feeling like I have accomplished something once I complete a session.

Below is a gallery showing some poses I learned this week: 1. Dancers Pose 2. Knee Lift (Open) 3. Eagle Pose

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The success I experienced this week in learning this new form of practicing yoga can be attributed to the new app for my Android device that I found. The app is call ‘Down Dog’ (here is a link to the app on the Google Play store) and it is top notch! You simply have to choose the type of yoga you want to practice (in my case it was Vinyasa Flow), select your experience level, and choose how long you want to devote to the session. After you make your choice, ‘Down Dog’ rapidly constructs a yoga session for you to perform at random. The sessions are guided with video and high quality voice-over by an instructor. The instructor leads you through the series of poses with just the right amount of encouragement, urging you to push yourself. I luckily found this app at the perfect time, since they are offering a free month without subscription! A subscription to ‘Down Dog’ is not cheap, running at ~$13.00/month, but it is definitely worth that much or more if you are dedicated to regular practice and would use the app frequently. I would recommend this app above any of the other resources I have used so far and have been telling anyone I know who practices yoga about it!

For this upcoming week I will be sticking to Vinyasa Flow for part of the time while increasing the difficulty level a bit. I also plan on supplimenting this with a more relaxing, meditative form of yoga. Though I have really enjoyed what I have been doing so far, I feel as though I am moving a bit too far away from the meditative side of yoga and am starting to employ a kind of ‘gym’ mentality, pushing my self to improve and viewing things as more of a workout than anything. I feel that mixing in some dedicated forms of meditative yoga will do me good and I look forward to trying it out!

I hope to see you back next week so I can tell you all about my improvements with Vinyasa as well as my experience with a more meditative form of yoga. I will end by saying thank you once again for visiting 🙂