One way to mindfully and intelligently learn yoga is to learn your muscles.
Your muscles not only move your body, they help you to feel it.

An additional benefit of muscle activation is that muscles help keep your joints lubricated.

So if you want to keep your joints mobile and healthy and long lasting, one way is to focus on feeling and controlling your muscles.

Almost 20 Years of Experience

I've been teaching yoga for almost 20 years.
For the last ten years I've been working on reducing my own knee, hip and back pain.
The main thing that I've found helpful is learning to feel and control my muscles.

• Exercise was important, but muscle control allowed me to exercise more effectively.

• An unexpected bonus is that the same "muscle control" that helped me to deal with pain has also helped me to improve flexibility.

This course isn't specifically designed for pain relief or flexibility.
Instead it focuses on the specific building blocks necessary if you do want to work on pain relief or flexibility.

• It also provides basic building blocks for improving posture.

• And, it provides exercises for helping you to help keep your joints healthy.

  
  

Joints are Critical Structures

In terms of every day living, joints are critical structures.
While we need muscles to move our joints, muscles have some overlap.
If a muscle loses function, other muscles can cover for it.

However, with joints, if a joint goes, it's gone.
And joint replacement surgeries are not a pleasant experience. (My father recently had a hip replaced.)

Joint Capsules are Affected by Muscles

Understanding that muscles directly affect your joint capsules via ligaments and tendons, and that muscle activation is required to keep your joints lubricated (the more weight you are working against, the more strength that is required) one possible key to long term joint health is to simply exercise.

This course offers a slightly more focused approach.

A Focused Approach to Maintaining Joint Health

If you can feel your muscles, that means they are active.
If you can feel, for example your spine, spinal muscles are what give you that ability to feel your spine.

Having muscle control means that you can feel your muscles when they activate and when they relax.

This course teaches you basic muscle control so that you can better feel and control your body and help keep your joints healthy.

• First you learn how to feel parts in isolation.

• Then you learn how to integrate actions using multiple areas of your body.

The approach to learning muscle control is much like learning to drive a car (using a manual gearbox), but instead you learn to become a better driver of your body. (And actually, riding a motorcycle is a better analogy, since riding a motorcycle also requires balance.)

What You'll Learn

This is a beginners course.

• You'll learn how to feel (and control) your spine, your shoulders, your hips.

• And you'll also learn how to feel and control your feet and shins.
  Believe it or not, but good foot control can affect both your knees and your hips and it can also affect your ability to balance while standing.

• You'll also learn how to improve your balance on one foot (and how to compensate)

  
  

More About Me

I live and teach yoga in Taiwan.
My Mandarin is not that good, and yet I still manage to teach effectively. I do that by breaking things down and giving clear and simple instruction.

This course is taught in English, and it's taught in a way that makes it easy for you to begin learning to feel and control your body.

Self Adjusting Your Actions

In this course, there's also emphasis on adjusting how you do these exercises.
This isn't about blindly doing poses and exercises, but actually modulating how you do them for a better experience of your body.

If you've ever had to listen to an old fashioned radio, you had to tune in to the radio station. In the same way, you can get a better feel for your body by simply tuning or adjusting the way that you use it.

About the Course

The course is in video format. Each exercise is taught as a follow along. But each exercise is also instructed that you can easily do the exercises without the video.

Each routine is different but with some repeated exercises.
Each gives you a slightly different way to exercise your body. Initially I would suggest you do the routines in order since some of the exercises build up on each other.
However, once you've done all of the routines, and are comfortable with the exercises, the routines can be done in any order.

If you are Short on Time

Each routine is broken down into smaller mini-routines of varying length (the longest is no more than 20 minutes). If you are short on time you can focus on the mini-routines.

Some of the exercises can also be practiced anywhere you like. So if you have difficulty with a particular action, you can practice it whenever you have the time.