Yoga: Yoga helps you become aware of your body’s posture, alignment, and movement. Yoga improves flexibility, breathing, and relaxation. Practicing yoga will help you feel fitter, be more energetic, and create a better connection between mind and body.
Yoga exercises are nonviolent and provide gentle stretching that serves to lubricate the joints, muscles, ligaments and tendons. Yoga tones the nervous system, relieves tension, increases flexibility, and improves circulation.
Central to yoga’s many benefits is deep breathing. Inhaling fully infuses the body with abundant oxygen, needed by every cell in the body for proper function. Exhaling fully rids the body of toxic pollutants.
Stretching: One of the keys to longevity and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is a comprehensive stretching routine. Stretching can prevent many routine and sports injuries. By learning how to stretch properly, the body can recuperate quickly from daily stresses.
If you want to improve your sports performance, prevent sports injury, alleviate back and other muscle pain or just increase your flexibility, a comprehensive stretching program may an appropriate addition to your training routine.
Instructor’s Background and Philosophy of Teaching:
Vicki Knight is a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) with the National Yoga Alliance, having completed a 200-hour yoga teacher-training course in 2003. She also has a Master’s degree in Education, a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, and worked for 21 years as an educator and counselor. After discovering yoga as a wonderful way to manage her own chronic back pain from scoliosis and the general pain of arthritis, she decided to change careers and devote her time to teaching others this magnificent art of bringing our bodies into better alignment and balance.
She teaches Hatha Yoga in Vinyassa (flow) style, which incorporates breath work with movement in a smooth continuum. This style is designed for ease in transition from one pose to the next, making it easy for all students to follow. Her classes are open ended for adult students of all levels from beginning, to intermediate and advanced. Anyone can join the class at any time. Everyone can do yoga!
Vicki provides a non threatening, non competitive, safe, and nurturing environment in which students feel free to ask questions and learn how to personalize their yoga practice to fit their specific body type, level of flexibility, and strength. In her classes students will learn that yoga is an art and a science developed to improve overall health and well being.
Students learn how to breathe more efficiently to decrease stress and improve energy levels, while learning movements and poses which will bring their bodies into better balance and alignment. Students will also develop flexibility, strength, and stamina as well as improved mental focus and balance.
Classes vary based on the needs and experience of students in each class. However, each class begins with a few minutes of breath work to prepare for the yoga practice. This is followed by a series of movements to bring warmth to the body including gentle stretches and spinal twists. The middle of the practice will include a series of forward folds, gentle backbends, hip openers, and core bodywork. Classes often include focus on one or more of the standing balancing poses such as the Warrior poses, Triangle, or Side Angle. Each class ends with a few minutes of total rest and relaxation.
Vicki’s goal is for students to feel a sense of tranquility and peace while at the same time, more confident, refreshed, and renewed at the end of each practice.
- Clothing and Equipment Required:
- Comfortable form fitting clothing
- Yoga “sticky” mat (available for purchase at Epiphany Health Studio)
- Yoga blocks and strap (optional)