Yoga Info

Yoga is a journey. When we learn about yoga, we understand that yoga is about our mind, body, and soul. It's a part of our everyday lives. Letting go, not judging ourselves or others. Connecting our heart and mind. Hatha Yoga means "yoga for health." Hatha Yoga is physical yoga involving; stretching, strengthening, and balancing our body. The Vinyasa style of Hatha Yoga brings poses together in a flowing movement. It develops great flexibility and strength. It's great for our heart and other internal organs by keeping the oxygen and blood flowing to those organs. Using the breath, releasing the stress from your mind and body.

"Yoga is for EVERYONE." If you believe you have to be "flexible" to do yoga, this is a myth. Practicing yoga is what balances and strengthens your body, giving us flexibility. Yoga brings health to your muscles, joints, and spine. Men and women of all ages are practicing yoga and enjoying the benefits to their health, body, and mind. Letting go of expectations and knowing that there's no competition in yoga.  It’s what gives everyone the opportunity to enjoy the process.

Stars who love Yoga...

Madonna

"Yoga is a metaphor for life. You have to take it really slowly. You can't rush. You can't skip to the next position. You find yourself in very humiliating situations, but you can't judge yourself. You just have to breathe, and let go. It is a workout for your mind, your body and your soul."

Ricky Martin

"I'm learning yoga. It's fascinating. Once again, it's all about getting to know you’re "self." Connecting your heart and your mind in order for you to not make compulsive or obsessive decisions in life. Simplicity is the medicine."

Meg Ryan

"I started [yoga] about five years ago. I will say, definitely, it changed my life. It made me calmer. It puts you right in the place of witness — which is great."

Health Benefits of Yoga

From insomnia and hot flashes to the fear of flying and smoking habits — yoga can improve your health!

Relieving Hot Flashes

Dell, who is going through menopause, says when she wakes up in the middle of the night, the bridge pose helps her cool down.
Rodney says the bridge pose (demonstrated above) creates a calming, cooling effect for the nervous system by raising the pelvis above the head, creating openness to the heart and the lungs, while keeping the head close to the chest.

Building Firefighters' Stamina

"Our crew started practicing yoga a year ago. Now we have more stamina and strength, which allow us to perform better physically. We are much calmer in emergency situations and more centered as a team. Our work related injuries have decreased as well as our blood pressures."
— El Monte Firefighters of Los Altos Hills, CA

Curing Insomnia

"After my twin boys were born, I never slept more than three hours a day. Yoga gave me instant relief and helped me focus on myself. Now I get seven blissful hours of sleep."
— Kandice Hemsley

Conquering the Fear of Flying

"Just thinking about taking a trip stressed me out. I always suffered from motion sickness. Now I use the breathing techniques I learned from yoga and all my fears fly away."
— Liz Summers

Kicking the Smoking Habit

"I used to chain smoke like a fiend. When I began yoga classes I became more mindful of each breath I took. I turned my whole life around — I went from New York City party girl to New York City Marathon runner."
— Maria DiBenedetto

Stressed Mom Finds Energy Within

Scout O'Gara is a stay-at-home-mom who says she was a stressed out perfectionist with no energy for intimacy until she started doing yoga. It not only raised her energy level and taught her self-acceptance — yoga also rejuvenated her marriage! Scout says, "I strained body parts I didn't even know I had trying to bend and mold myself into the perfect yoga position. It became obvious that I had to accept that being the best I can be is enough. I learned to listen to myself again. I am powerful enough to make myself happy."

Live in the Moment, Not the Mirror

After her 30th diet failed, yoga helped Lucy end a lifetime of stress eating and lose 25 pounds without dieting a single day!
"I was living for the moment when I would be the perfect weight and the mirror reminded me I was never there." Lucy says, "The poses you do aren't ever going to make you thin or lose weight, but through the poses and breathing exercises you get inside yourself. You make a connection you don't have before. Yoga taught me whatever weight I am; I am the perfect weight in the moment. I immediately began losing weight because I started feeling better about myself."

Yoga Heals a Family's Spirit

"When I finish yoga I feel a clean, strong spirit has been locked in my body." — Deanna

Twelve-year-old Deanna was having problems at school and not getting along with her mother, Lisa. Yoga changed their relationship for the better.

Scholastic Woes

"When I was doing badly in school, my one wish was to make my parents happy and to make me happy too. I didn't like myself." — Deanna

A Broken Bond

"We didn't know what to do. We had her tested for dyslexia, we though she may have ADD—that scared us. So I started giving her more attention, and she still rebelled. She didn't want to be close to me. That hurt." — Lisa

"There was no relationship between us. She was her own person, and I was my own person." — Deanna

Breathing Life into Learning

"The school started a pilot program, Yoga for Life. As Deanna was enjoying it, she brought home a test paper with a "B" on it. To prepare for that test, she said she did breathing exercises and imagined herself in Yoga class." — Lisa

"Sometimes when I'm in the middle of studying, I'll do some poses to get my mind going. I'll go back to studying, and I will get the questions right." — Deanna

Loving Participation

"We started doing Yoga as a family. It has strengthened my mind, my muscles and my spirit. The same has happened for Deanna. Yoga has brought us together — our bond is so much closer." — Lisa

Dr. Oz's Guide to Yoga

I learned yoga as a young doctor just entering the clinic. As we learned to stay up late into the evenings to care for critically ill patients, I began to use the practice as a tool for centering myself to cope with the reality of patients doing poorly and the fatigue of an academically rigorous program. At 3 a.m., when my patient was bleeding internally and the next transplant was in the holding area of the O.R., positions like down dog freed my mind to meditate on my body and rejuvenate me for the next case. It did not take long to figure out that a practice that benefits the healer might also work for the patient.

Most of us never take a deep breath all day long. The most fundamental practice in yoga is the deep, belly breath through the nose. The diaphragm is a large muscle located just below the lungs that ideally should pull down the lungs during inspiration. This is why young children push their stomach out when sleeping or exercising. Adults need to do the same. To properly exhale, suck your belly button toward your spine to push the diaphragm up and empty all the air from your lungs. This process also brings nitric oxide—not nitrous oxide—from the back of the nose into your lungs, which dilates arteries to bring more oxygen into your body.

Yoga helps clean blood of waste material (through lymphatic stimulation), and trains us to loosen muscles and joints that are ignored in our day-to-day lives. Routines like sun salutation get the blood flowing as we warm up and free our body to experience the new stresses we will face. The practice also gets us to handle the weight of our body more effectively, which builds bone and muscle strength so we are more resilient to the frailty that afflicts many. This is why power yoga practitioners have great bodies.

Finally, yoga gets us to focus our minds on remote parts of our body—like tight joints and muscles—as we gently but firmly deepen into our poses. For people like me, meditation proves difficult because our mind wonders. But if we can concentrate on the tension in our hips as we empty our mind, then we are well on the way.

The "YOU Docs"—Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen—say we're the fattest country in the world because of unhealthy diets and sedentary lifestyles. It doesn't have to be that way, though. They say you can get your health back on track in a mere 90 days with their lifestyle suggestions.

• Yoga According to Dr. Oz, yoga helps improve strength and flexibility and can also help control blood pressure and regulate breathing and heart rate.
• Walk Every Day Dr. Roizen says you absolutely must walk at least 30 minutes every day. "There's a hurricane? You walk 30 minutes a day," he says. "Earthquake—30 minutes a day. Tornado—30 minutes a day. Snowstorm—30 minutes a day."
• Diet As Dr. Roizen says, "Food is medicine." For example, a recipe for whole wheat pizza dough with tomato paste can help dramatically reduce your risk of cancer. Dr. Oz also says that salmon is rich in omega-3 fatty acids that can stabilize your heartbeat, lower blood pressure and help you to live longer.
• Exercise and Weight Training Stretching, weight-lifting and crunches should all be incorporated into your fitness routine. "A lot of folks think about how fast they run, but you've got to stay limber," Dr. Oz says. "You've got to do some weight training."
• According to Dr. Oz, the average 30-year-old woman should be able to do 45 bent-leg push-ups (and five fewer every following decade of her life), and the average 30-year-old man should be able to do 35 regular pushups (and five fewer every following decade of his life). "Those should be national benchmarks," Dr. Oz says.

Christy Turlington on Yoga

As a supermodel, businesswoman, mother and yoga instructor, Christy Turlington has several lifetimes' worth of experiences under her belt. She talks with Dr. Oz about the role yoga has played in her life, from her early days of modeling to the present.

Christy says she was introduced to yoga when she was about 18 years old, and she was attracted to the meditative aspect of the practice. While she says she wasn't as healthy as she could have been at the time—due to smoking and constant travel—she did yoga whenever she could and meditated to maintain a sense of calm. More recently, Christy says she used techniques honed through years of yoga practice to ease her pain during natural childbirth. "In terms of pain management, my breathing was the best thing I could do to manage pain on that level," she says.

A practicing Catholic, Christy says that the principles of yoga can incorporate into any belief system. "It provides clarity and an understanding of what it is you want, as opposed to information coming from outside of yourself," she says. "Yoga has brought me to the part of religion I really like—the positive sides of religion, the parts we all share, rather than the things that create separation."

To find a place of calm and centeredness when you only have a few minutes, Christy says you can practice the butterfly, or half lotus pose: Sit with the soles of the feet touching and the knees open. Keeping the spine very straight, eyes closed or open, breathe in a pattern of inhalation, exhalation, pause.

Yoga and Pain Relief

With all the stresses of daily life, many people suffer from some sort of stiffness or pain in their bodies. Dr. Oz talks to yoga instructor Michael Gilbert about learning to open the body and breathe.

Michael is certified in Rolfing, a method of bodywork that looks at the body as a three-dimensional object in order to make it more pliable. He says it's not so much therapy as it is an idea of increasing the surface area of the body over time. "By teaching the body to open rather than close, you increase the surface area," Michael says. "The more joints that can move and change shape, the more surface area [you create]."

As a yoga instructor, Michael is a big believer in the practice's ability to relieve pain. While he advocates plenty of stretching, he feels that yoga is even better at opening up the body. "Yoga concentrates on the opening of the pelvis and the opening of the ribs," Michael says. "In gyms you usually see people working on the front of the body, making the muscles tense. Yoga focuses on hooking the arms and legs to the back of the body, creating extension and opening everything up."

Michael says everyone can incorporate some of his everyday yoga practices into their own routine:

• Before you even get out of bed, take a few minutes to focus on your breathing. Make the exhalation of breath more important than the inhalation.
• During the day, make time to sit down and recalibrate yourself—focus on calming down and watching your heart rate.
• If you have time, take a yoga or meditation class to help turn down the volume in your life.
• Before bed, take time to shift gears and once again focus on breathing.

Medical Benefits of Yoga

The practice of yoga is more than 5,000 years old, and it's more popular now than ever. People from all walks of life are discovering the physical, mental and spiritual benefits of stretching their muscles and breathing deeply. Dr. Oz talks with Dr. Sandra McClanahan, family physician and yoga practitioner, about some of the medical benefits of yoga.

Even five minutes of simple stretching can make a difference in your health, Dr. McClanahan says. Moving muscles slowly will relax and loosen them, allowing better blood and lymph flow to restore the body and renew energy. Lymph fluid is filled with white blood cells that go to areas of the body that need repair. Because the lymph doesn't have a dynamic pump behind it, like the heart for blood, we can assist the flow through deep breathing and stretching.

Sandra shares some simple exercises to help relax, refresh and restore your body, even when you only have a few minutes:

• Alternate nostril breathing stimulates the olfactory nerves and helps balance the right and left brain.
• With one finger, close off one nostril and breathe in.
• Switch to close off the other nostril and breathe out, then in.
• Switch again and repeat.
• Eye exercises calm and soothe the mind and help you get in touch with your center.
• Look side to side horizontally, moving very slowly to release tension in the eye muscles. Rest your eyes for a moment, then switch to looking up and down.
• Look side to side diagonally. Rest the eyes for a moment, then move the eyes in full circles.
• When finished, rub the hands together to create heat, then place your palms over your closed eyes to soothe and relax them. If you work at a computer all day, these exercises can help you feel fresh and focused.
• Deep breathing helps reduce stress and shifts the body back to a physiological balance.
• Fill your lungs like a pitcher, from bottom to top. Start by inhaling to fill the belly with air, then bringing it up to the lower chest and finishing with the upper chest.
• Exhale to pour out the pitcher—start by pushing the air out of the upper chest, then the lower chest, and ending by squeezing the belly to completely empty the pitcher so you're ready for the next breath.
• Cobra position is important for helping the flow of lymph around the heart.
• Lie flat on your abdomen, placing your hands alongside your chest.
• Pushing into the floor, lift your upper chest and head like a cobra.
• Breathe deeply and easily and don't strain—just open your chest to life.

Learning the basic tools of yoga and doing a little every day will change your life for the better, Dr. McClanahan says. Even if all you're doing is some deep breathing, you're connecting to your center and finding a moment of peace, she says. You can assist in the healing of your own body, because once you learn the techniques, you can use them for the rest of your life.