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Post-Run Yoga Class

This class is designed to help athletes during training to 1) prevent injuries, and 2) prepare and recover quickly and effectively. David, a lifelong athlete, massage therapist and yoga teacher, teaches you how to release the most important muscle groups in an efficient and effective way, giving your body what it needs to stay healthy. The primary muscles that he focuses on include your hip flexors, hamstrings, glutes, piriformis and IT band.

Beginner II
Class David Procyshyn

Do You Have To Be Flexible To Do Yoga?

Recently, I invited a friend to join me at a yoga class, and their response was: “My hamstrings are tighter than my jeans after Thanksgiving. My body just doesn’t bend! What would I do there?”  To them, the thought of doing yoga was absolutely alien, which got me thinking about this widespread myth that you need to be flexible to do yoga. On a lot of social media, yoga has become almost synonymous with a young, athletic girl doing acrobatics on the edge of a cliff or something... But is yoga really a no-go for anyone born without the rubber-band gene? The answer is unequivocal: You do not need to be flexible to do yoga! However, I’m sure that you’ve heard this many times before, and yet, since you’re reading this, you probably still can’t shake off the feeling that yoga will not welcome your stiff ligaments with open arms. Allow me the opportunity to change your mind. I’m about to make the case that yoga may be even better for people who topple over trying to touch their toes. Are We Born Flexible or Do We Become Flexible? Both. Flexibility is about how much our joints and muscles can move. Some people have more elastic muscles, different joint structures, and connective tissue composition that allow them to move at a wider range of motion. But things like daily habits, exercise, and even injuries can also affect the connective tissue in the joints and muscle tension (stiffness), which improves or impairs flexibility. So – we can certainly become flexible even if we’re “born” stiff. If you’re less naturally flexible… Unfortunately, those of us who don’t possess the elastic properties of gummy bears think these bendy people are who yoga beckons to. That’s not true for three reasons. First, scientific research as well as anecdotal evidence consistently show that flexibility is not a fixed trait but a dynamic quality that can change throughout life. Whether it’s a senior citizen who regains mobility through regular yoga practice or an athlete who increases their range of motion for better performance, we see proof every day that flexibility is malleable. Second, it sounds as if we can’t do anything about our flexibility, which is not only untrue but also demoralizing. And third, and maybe most important, it reduces the holistic practice of yoga to only stretching. An authentic yoga class is so much more than how deep you can bend, incorporating physical health, mental well-being, and personal growth through different techniques and practices. If you’re too naturally flexible… But let’s get back to flexibility. The other extreme — the belief that anyone can become a Cirque Du Soleil contortionist — is equally problematic. Genetics are a big piece of our physiological puzzle, and they can make it harder or even impossible for us to reach certain levels of flexibility. For instance, most of us mortals will never be able to attain the near-superhuman abilities of yogis such as Kino MacGregor or Dylan Werner. Kino’s Gandha Bherundasana (Formidable Face pose) is a prime example of how hyper flexibility is sometimes – somewhat unfairly – represented as the poster child of yoga. But this is the exception, not the norm in yoga classes. Most yoga teachers and students alike are people who embrace imperfections and are set on a mission to learn and grow together, one pose and one inhale at a time. The Wiggle Room Flexibility is not only a genetic predisposition – it’s also a skill we can work on and improve. The best way to think about it is as a track going from zero to 100. Our starting point on this track is genetically predetermined — some people are naturally more flexible than others, so perhaps they start at 40. If you can barely touch your knees leaning down, you may be starting at zero. Even our hypothetical finish line (the highest flexibility limit we can attain) is influenced by genetics and physiological differences. What’s more, how fast we move on the track is a combination of genetics and dedication. For some people, it will be hard, while for others, it will be relatively easy to become more flexible quickly. However, the ability to move forward, to make progress along the track, and to become more flexible is fully in our control. Yoga is a tool that drives this progress. It’s the strategy that will get you to the finish line and even help you push the boundaries of your own body — if that’s something you aspire to do. It can also be your gentle friend that helps you improve and maintain mobility and range of motion as you navigate the hurdles of our modern lifestyle. The journey to flexibility is highly subjective and will feel different to everybody. Starting Yoga Without Flexibility Okay, so yoga improves flexibility, but can you start doing yoga if you feel like you’re at point zero on the track? Yes, because yoga is for everybody and every body. Yoga as a practice offers a holistic experience that transcends our physical limitations and aesthetics in movement. It doesn’t matter if we fall, shake, sweat, or struggle on the mat as long as we’re trying to be present in the moment and give our best. Yoga is about making you feel good, not just about making you look good. This is why it incorporates breathing techniques, meditations, and mindfulness practices that promote kindness and relaxation. Speaking of kindness and good vibes, you shouldn’t worry about how advanced everyone will be at your first yoga class. In yoga, more than any other discipline, it’s highly frowned upon to compare ourselves to others, judge someone else’s individual journey, and show off in terms of physical abilities. The real masters in yoga aren't showing off; they’re humble, dedicated, and adaptable. Forget social media – yoga in the real world is different. How Yoga Benefits Everybody I said that I would make the case that yoga may actually benefit less flexible students more. Based on everything that we covered so far, can you guess why that might be? People with hypermobility, a condition where some or all joints have an unusually wide range of motion, can move their limbs into positions that may be impossible for others. This means that they can do advanced yoga poses with ease — or so it would seem.  The condition can make hypermobile people prone to injuries because, in some cases, it makes the ligaments and joints loose and stretchy. Applying too much pressure on stretchy and loose joints is dangerous and can lead to dislocations. This usually happens when excited and impatient hypermobile students rush to try advanced yoga poses before their body is strong enough to support them. Flexibility, Balance, Strength Yoga poses incorporate three components: flexibility, balance, and strength. For instance, what’s considered to be the “hardest yoga pose” or asana by many, Taraksvasana (Handstand Scorpion Pose), is a pinnacle of mastery over all three components. In that sense, new students who patiently and gradually develop all three skills will reap the most benefits from yoga as a physical practice. Those who safely practice advanced poses are practitioners with years and years of experience — and their beginnings were no different than any of ours, we who tried recreating a yoga pose from a magazine cover and failed miserably. So, Do You Have to Be Flexible to Do Yoga? Absolutely not. And now you know why. Saying that you have to be flexible to do yoga is like saying you have to be Usain Bolt to go for a run. Yoga is a tool that drives progress when it comes to flexibility, which is a highly individual journey that everyone should take at their own pace. Being hyperflexible is not always an advantage. Only through patience and sweating on the mat consistently will you transform your body and improve flexibility.  Finding out what your body is truly capable of begins the moment you step outside your comfort zone. So join a yoga class and witness your body becoming more flexible!

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Please Welcome Angela And Dean To The DYWM Team

Dear DYWM community, We are excited to announce the addition of two wonderful humans to our team: Dean Edwards and Angela Lazova!  They are both fantastic, experienced writers, with strong backgrounds in yoga and wellness, who are curious about life, and have the voice, character, and values that align with us. Together, we plan to expand on our blog’s library with informative, fun articles that will make you laugh, connect with your heart, help you through challenging times and guide you in your yoga journey.  Please help us welcome them by commenting below. And to get to know them better, check out their bios on our Core Team page and/or read their answers to some fun questions below.   1. What do you like to do in your free time? Dean I like practicing martial arts and do that two or three times a week. I’m also into meditating. I watched kung fu movies as a kid, so I’ve always done both. Never quite got the hang of flying though. In an ideal world, I also like making music. I have some talent with drums, according to my teacher, and I love music, but I can’t really play an instrument, like as part of a live band. I make compositions using my laptop and try to turn mistakes into art. I love reading, going for walks with the dog, and sleeping. But as I say, these are all ideal world scenarios.  And then, of course, there’s writing. While that’s work, I also write in my free time. That boundary is so blurred it might not exist anymore, which was my goal when I first started writing “seriously”. These days, I have a lot of fun keeping a dream journal and turning the dreams into stories.   Angela I’m really into yoga (Ashtanga vinyasa) and running—they keep me active and balanced in every sense of the word. In fact, I found out I’m happiest when I move, whether I’m hiking, swimming, or cycling. Actually, cycling through Berlin has become my latest obsession, as I discovered it’s such a cool way to discover the city. I’m also a bit of a travel junkie; experiencing new cultures is something I can never get enough of. Although, I often gravitate back to my hometown. There, I volunteer at the local animal rights organization that I co-founded. Keeping animals off the streets and nursing them back to health is the biggest reward for my soul. And yeah, I’m pretty much always reading, but mostly academic stuff. I’m a psychologist and a neuroscientist, so learning is a lifelong journey for me. When it gets too much, I like to unwind by spending quality time with friends.   2. What topics do you particularly enjoy writing about? Dean  I like writing about things that help people. If I can imagine a reader taking something on board and then going away and applying it, that makes me happy. I enjoy content writing most when I can easily imagine an individual rather than a business. (Though I know businesses are made up of people). I developed experience writing about digital marketing (mostly writing about how to write blog posts and email newsletters) and I also ended up writing a lot about cybersecurity and enjoyed that. Again, helping people protect their machines and thus themselves. My educational background is in writing, business, and IT, so that converged quite nicely. I could spend all day writing about how to set a strong password.  Angela Oh, I love writing about anything that lets me share a bit of what I know! I’ve spent my life exploring the power of words and how they can really help people, so I’m all about spreading that knowledge. Anything related to the brain and mind is my jam—how we make decisions, overcome difficulties, or become better versions of ourselves, be it through yoga, therapy, or journaling, you name it! But I also enjoy diving deep into the science of health. I want to break it down and make it accessible, showing people that learning about physiology and anatomy isn’t just informative—it’s a compelling and empowering story about oneself. It’s all about making these topics relatable and showing how understanding our bodies and minds can be a real game-changer!   3. What are your top 5 favorite books? Dean Hmm.  I’ll try reading anything, but my favorite books are a bit dark. I write a lot of scary stories. As well as watching kung fu movies, I liked the Twilight Zone and horror movies. In no order of preference, because that changes all the time: Imajica by Clive Barker — (Spoiler) so in this fantasy novel, the earth is just one of five “dominions.” They used to be connected, but the world as we know it today was separated from the others. A group called Tabula Rasa made sure that anything “magical” was discredited and made to look unreal or ridiculous so that the dominions stayed separate. The Tabula Rasa think magic is pretty dangerous and want to keep it for themselves. The protagonist of this book is a magician who once tried to reconcile the five dominions, joining our world to the four others. It went so badly that he had himself brainwashed and destroyed all his materials. However, bit by bit, he starts to remember and people encourage him to try again.  The Beach by Alex Garland — I love the main character of this book. He’s a kid who wants adventure, gets in over his head, makes stupid mistakes and generally behaves like a human. Better than the film (Sorry, Danny Boyle). The best character in the book (Jed) isn’t even in the film. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis — I got some funny looks reading this. It’s a satire on 80s greed. There are funny bits. Lightning by Dean Koontz —- at school, a friend bought this book for me for Christmas because it said “Dean” on the cover and he knew I wanted to be a writer. It was the first thriller/horror novel I’d ever read and it changed my life. I don’t know if it’s even that “good” a book. I’ve read the same copy several times and love it. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers — I thought it would be nice to add a non-fiction book. I liked its blunt honesty. Instead of saying that you could overcome fear, it said that fear is normal, and probably always will be a part of your life, just don’t let it stop you. I did not want to hear that advice, but reading the book did help me get stuff done. I should read it again. Angela Most of my reading these past years has been academic stuff, like Modeling Neural Circuits with Python (my current read), but I don’t think many people would ever want to read that, haha. So…instead, here’s a list of popular science books designed for the masses that I personally recommend because of how impactful and helpful they are: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker Gut: The Inside Story by Giulia Enders The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk Oh, while writing these, I remembered White Nights, a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I can’t really explain what it was that drew me to it, but it’s my absolute favorite non-academic read.    4. What are your top 5 favorite shows? Dean Lost - I loved the formula of each episode where you’d get flashbacks that would reveal the history of a character and how their background affected their role and challenges on the island. The formula was always the same if I remember correctly, and yet it worked (for me) every time. Just genius. Despite critics saying they made it up as they went along, I think every season was intricate and meticulously planned. But it did feel like they were making it up. It descended into some pretty farcical scenarios. But I still think it’s brilliant. Maniac — Emma Stone, Jonah Hill, and some brilliant writing. About friendship. Moving and exceptional in my opinion. Game of Thrones — Lord of the Rings for adults. Sorry, LotR fans. My wife was watching this scene where Tyrion the dwarf was imprisoned and his captor agreed to allow him to fight a knight in order to win his freedom. At the end of the episode, I said: “we’ve got to go back and watch it together from the beginning.” Don’t think I’ve ever been so hooked by a TV show.  Dungeons and Dragons - when I was a kid, I’d watch this animated series about some kids that went on a fairground ride and ended up in a magical world where they solve puzzles, help the locals, and fight off dragons and evil beings while trying to find a portal home. As usual there’s an almost all-powerful being who guides them … but doesn’t quite help them enough to get home. The series was never finished, but I found some episodes I’ve not seen, online, and recently learned that a script of the final episode was discovered. Ridiculously excited to read it.  Twin Peaks — I didn’t get it first time round. As an adult, however, I couldn’t get enough of this. So it was good that David Lynch made a bunch of films, too. Ozark deserves an honorable mention. It was great. Very compelling and clever, but I don’t know if I’d really want to watch it again, as I would the others. Likewise Better Call Saul.  Angela I wish I had some more unique shows to share with you guys, but my favorites are some of the most popular TV shows out there, haha. Friends: My feel-good, nostalgia show. Seinfeld: My laugh-out-loud show. Criminal Minds: My “Oh, I wish I was a behavioral analyst” show. The Walking Dead: My “I don’t know why I love this so much” show. Mentalist: My favorite written character ever.   5. When did you start writing and why? Dean A teacher at school (I was 10) saw that I was good at English class and story writing and said that I could make a living out of writing stories. He said that people spend years writing books.  When I finished laughing, he said: “No, really.” That’s when I knew that writing was for me. Getting paid to write stories? Angela  I guess you could say ink runs in my family—my granddad was a writer, and my sister’s always been nabbing awards in school for her writing! But for me, it all started as a way to make some extra cash while I was studying. I wanted to be financially independent and had a writing opportunity that allowed me all that, plus the flexibility and freedom while working. So, I took it! I never expected to fall in love with it, really! It just came so naturally to me, and I was hooked before I knew it. More than five years of daily writing later, it’s become my outlet, my go-to way of expressing myself.   6. When was your first paid gig and what was it?  Dean  The first time I got paid for writing was while working for a company that made case studies for universities and colleges. It was a part-time writing, editing, and admin job while I was studying at university, so I was about 20. The first marketing case studies I wrote were about Benetton, Penguin Publishing, and the (lack of) ethics in tobacco industry marketing.  My first fiction cheque was for about £50 in around 2000 for a 25-word story in an online publication called “The Phone Book” (for stories to be read on mobile phones years before iPhones and long before people were doing much aside from making crackly calls) created by digital artist and technoevangelist Fee Plumley. Angela  That would be Writer&Co, where I’m still writing today. Me and the agency started and grew together. I had some other freelance writing gigs over the years, but my first paycheck for writing came from Writer&Co.   7. What has been your favorite writing project so far? Dean With regards to content writing, I helped a life coach write a book on emotional intelligence. I learned a lot, helped her express her ideas, and hope to help a lot of people. It was a great collaboration of her expertise and my writing experience. Because she had a lot of new perspectives, she could point me toward research that was similar, but we had to create completely original material. Fiction-wise, I’m working on a fantasy story based on martial arts and dreams. It’s exciting. Angela  Hmm.. Picking a favorite is tough, but I’d probably say it was the project on early childhood development and education. I was writing for teachers and parents, and it felt so rewarding to share insights that could really make a difference. It was all about helping them understand the little ones better and providing tools to foster a nurturing learning environment. Knowing that my words could potentially have a positive impact on both the educators and the kids—that’s the kind of stuff that makes writing so fulfilling for me!   8. What drew you to writing for DYWM? Dean I was very excited to write for DYWM, because it aligns with my experiences performing massages and meditating. Having some yoga experience helps and working with four yoga instructors could also be helpful. I like the flexibility of yoga and that it can help you achieve various health aims, good for the body and the mind.  I’m delighted to be writing content that helps people. Whether it helps them avoid injury, or to focus better, or become physically stronger, or deal with stress and anxiety, it’s all great to me. And I love the fact that the mission is to make yoga accessible with free videos. The range of instructors and class types is fantastic. And the production values are really high.  I’m delighted to be involved. Angela Well, I’m a yoga instructor, daily yoga practitioner, psychologist, and writer who wants to help people with her words. Being able to write for DYWM (professionally!) was like hitting a jackpot. I get to share my knowledge and help people while being part of a community whose values align perfectly with everything I believe in —accessibility, generosity, kindness —It really doesn’t get better than this.

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