Happy New Year, everyone! I am back from the break and brimming with new ideas and plans for the next year. My Liberated Yoga method has been evolving over the past year and thought I'd go through some of the concepts that I will be working on with my students going forward.

  • Dynamic stability is the new mobility. I have been moving away from static stretching and holding of the poses towards controlled movements in small-to-mid range of motion. I feel that holding a static stretch does not really change the muscles or movements they control, and the new science on stretching has been supporting that. Instead, I am much more interested in stimulating the brain and the nervous system with multifaceted movement - it is like food for your brain. We'll still do a little of the static stretching now and then, because it feels good sometimes, but less than you might experience with other teachers.
  • Building resilience and health of the nervous system through complex sequences that require you to pay attention and stay present.
  • Including more isometric work for minimum stress on the joints and maximum benefit for the muscles. Generally, I want to be more kind to the joints with the types of poses that I teach and practice. I feel that it would really round out the "nutrition" of the movements we do in class.
  • Adding more "pulling," "pushing," "pulsing," and "reaching," in order to fill in the gaps in movement type and variety that we do every day. Out lifestyles, unfortunately, do not offer nearly as much variety of movement as our ancestors used to have.
  • I plan to continue using the resistance bands and the wobble boards, as those have proven to be wonderfully effective tools over the past year! I have really loved the results and the feedback from my students, and I look forward to more of that.

I hope you are excited for 2018, I wish you vibrant health and joy in all of your endeavors, please join me at the Sun and Moon Studio on Sundays at 10:45am and Mondays at 11am, and at my home studio in Vienna on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, all at 10am. Thank you for your support and enthusiastic participation in my Yoga classes, I am so glad you are on this journey with me!

Namaste,

Anna M.