I recently became certified to teach Yoga Tune Up®, a unique and highly specialized fitness program designed to increase flexibility and mobility based on exercises and movements drawn from yoga, physical therapy exercises, and massage techniques.
In Yoga Tune Up® classes, exercises are targeted to help you locate and better understand what we call “body blind spots” or the muscles and areas of your body that are underused, overused, or abused.
Once you locate body blind spots, you’re better able to further target your own fitness regimen to help you build more awareness and muscle, or alternatively stretch and massage out muscular adhesions (better known as knots).
Turn Your Poor Muscles Back On
While Yoga Tune Up® is very different from your standard flow yoga class, the exercises are still strangely exhausting and incredibly effective. It can appear like you’re not moving at all and yet you might find yourself dripping in sweat and working harder then you ever have in your life. That’s what it feels like when you locate and try to strengthen muscles that you didn’t know you have. That’s what it feels like when you try to maintain proper posture for extended periods of time.
Take for example the reality for many humans all over the world, especially Americans. The fact is, we sit a lot. When you sit, you don’t use your adductor muscles, or the muscles on the inside of your thighs. When you sit for hours a day, you also turn off your gluteus muscles (butt muscles). When you finally get up to go about your normal day, you’ll feel the effects of having weak glutes and adductors.
The adductors help you stabilize, balance, and center your body. Think of the action of adduction, or pulling in toward the center line of your body. If everything is hanging all loosey goosey and you’ve lost the ability to pull muscles in toward the center line of your body, you’ll feel off balance and off center. You’ll feel less stable in your lower body.
When your glutes are weak, you’ll have trouble squatting properly. When you’re unable to squat properly, the daily actions that require you to bend forward to pick things off the floor or reach for something below you will become much more difficult. You may find a way to avoid the squat all together, but then this compensation pattern will take a toll on other joints in your body and you may begin to experience a lot of knee pain or low back pain.
As I’ve said many times before, everything in you body is all interconnected.
Better Posture = Less Pain
Another great example of how Yoga Tune Up® can help you enhance the quality of your daily life is postural improvement. When you’re sitting all day long at a desk with your shoulders hunched forward staring at a computer screen, you’ll start to lose strength and mobility in your pectoral muscles of your chest. Your shoulders will hunch forward and, if you keep up this posture for long enough, your body will actually start to change on a cellular level to keep you in that position permanently!
If you work on putting your shoulder through its full ranges of motion, you’ll very quickly figure out where your tightness originates and what types of movements can counter all the poor posture positions. With this knowledge, you can slowly make small changes throughout your day to improve your posture gradually over time. With improved posture, you’ll notice the pain you might be feeling in your upper back and neck will suddenly disappear.
But wait, there’s more!
Increase flexibility and mobility with self-massage
Arguably the best part about Yoga Tune Up® are the therapy balls. In these sessions we use Yoga Tune Up® therapy balls to massage our tight muscles and knead out those knots.
It’s the best self-massage you’ll ever get and perhaps even better then the massage you get from your massage therapist. The therapy balls are able to penetrate into your deepest layers of fascia, you’re able to control the amount of pressure you apply through changing your body position and orientation to gravity, and targeted movements and exercises help you engage and disengage muscles to deepen your experience and precisely dissolve the tension you feel in your body.
How to experience Yoga Tune Up®
I’m so excited to begin offering Yoga Tune Up® to my private clients, and all of them have already felt immediate results and improved range of motion and mobility.
I’m also working on booking workshops at local yoga studios and will keep you posted when public workshops become available. (Make sure you sign up for my newsletter to get schedule updates!)
In the future, I’ll be offering retreats as well that will include some of this work.
I am the only person in Washington D.C. right now teaching this format and I can’t wait to show you how you can erase your pain through a combination of simple, targeted movement and self-massage.
If you suffer from chronic pain or tightness anywhere in your body, Yoga Tune Up® is a fabulous fitness format for you.
If you don’t like yoga or the idea of it, you’ll love Yoga Tune Up® (it’s endorsed by CrossFitters the world over).
And if you’re the least flexible person you know and that’s why you can’t do yoga in the first place, then I guarantee you CAN do Yoga Tune Up®.
Don’t be fooled by the word yoga. Once you experience this style of work, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’re able to change your body.
Let me know if you’re interested in setting up a private session to try it out! Send me an email or reach out to me through Facebook.
For more information about Yoga Tune Up and to check out some of their online products, visit yogatuneup.com.
