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Feature - Yoga — the perfect workout?

Achieving strength and balance at the core

By Kara-Leah Grant

Whistler prides itself on its status as an active community, a place where people ski, mountain bike, rock climb and play golf – sometimes all on the same day.

But we pay the price for this lifestyle, supporting the physiotherapists and chiropractors with our bad knees, backs and shoulders. The very activities that make us feel fit, healthy and alive, those activities that work our muscles and make us strong and lean, also leave our bodies strained, torn and imbalanced. But, as more and more people in the valley are discovering each year, it is possible to pursue all our favourite activities with minimal damage to the body. The key is regular yoga practice.

Currently a favourite with the trendiest of the trendy, yoga is a 5,000 year-old tradition, fundamentally unchanged since it was first developed in India as a way to strengthen the body for long periods of meditation. It is also the very best way to correct the imbalances a one sided sport like golf creates, stretch out muscles tightened from activities like cycling, increase the capabilities of the respiratory system and cleanse the internal organs.

Yoga improves mental clarity and focus, heals old injuries, stabilizes moods and is recommended for treating everything from addiction and depression to insomnia and sciatica.

It achieves this through the practise of asanas, or postures, combined with awareness of breath and the simple act of being present in the moment.

"Yoga means union or yoke between body, mind and spirit," explains Kristin Campbell, co-owner of Bikram’s Neoalpine Studio located in Function Junction. "When I first started practising yoga I found a connectedness that nothing else had ever provided before. Because of the nature of the practice, the yoking happens without even trying."

Bikram’s is just one of five places to study yoga in Whistler. It offers an intense practice in a heated room with the teacher taking students through the same 26-posture series every class. Other classes on offer in Whistler include Hatha Yoga with Kashi Richardson, Classical Ashtanga Yoga with Van Powel and Roxanne Chappell, Mountain Yoga with Leslie Young and an Ashtanga yoga with Connie Oliwa, soon to open The Studio in Function Junction.

The variety on offer is testament to the increasing popularity of yoga in Whistler. All of the teachers say they have noticed a marked increase in the number of people taking their classes over the last three years. Van Powel, who has worked closely with sports teams including the Canadian National Freestyle team and the National Snowboard team, says one reason for the increasing popularity of yoga in Whistler is that it is the perfect compliment for athletes.

"I’ve been practising Ashtanga yoga four or five times a week for the past decade or so. When I started I had all sorts of chronic sports injuries and immediately it started to heal those injuries, which just blew me away," says Powel.

"I am a registered psychiatric nurse so I know my anatomy and my physiology and I wanted valid reasons for why this worked."

Powel, who first discovered Ashtanga Yoga on a beach in Hawaii in the late ’70s, has taught in Whistler with Chappell for the past seven years. The style of yoga they teach, Classical Ashtanga, is a series of postures practised in the same order every time. It includes linking moves that are designed to increase the heart rate and a unique breathing style, Ujjayi breathing, designed to internally warm up the body.

"Physiologically this system works because it gets fresh blood and nutrients into the cells and it gets toxins out of the cells and your body heals itself with that increased circulation," explains Powel.

"Your lymphatic system takes toxins out of the cells and it only operates three ways, by deep breathing, exercise or massage. Ashtanga yoga and Ujjayi breathing increase drainage exponentially and the major muscle contractions also stimulate the drainage."

Connie Oliwa also teaches Ashtanga yoga, but doesn’t necessarily teach the same postures every class.

"I’ve taken a lot of tradition out of the regular type of ashtanga – the style I teach is like a sport yoga. I focus on strength, joint stability, heat in the body and muscular balance," says Oliwa.

Oliwa is a personal trainer and has spent the last 10 years working in the fitness industry. She originally began yoga specifically to increase her flexibility.

"Yoga forces everybody to stretch out their body, which we all need to do and it brings every aspect of core strength and muscle balance into one program. It is everything people in Whistler need, it stretches them, it makes them stronger, increases their balance and gives their mind and body a little bit of union. Plus athletes love it – no one wants to stretch for an hour but put them into a class with yoga and they get that adrenaline rush out of it."

And that is exactly what first drew Kennedy Ryan to yoga. Ryan was a member of the Canadian Freestyle Ski Team for five years, a two-time Olympian and she attended two world championships. She is the epitome of an elite athlete. But after all those years in the gym training for her sport, she was ready for something different.

"When I first read the ad in the paper for Bikram's I had no idea what it was, but it just said drop in yoga, so I went," says Ryan.

"I was totally dressed inappropriately. I had way too many clothes on and I sweated like I’d never imagined. But I left there thinking, ‘my god, that was amazing.’ It was a really hard workout, and I had gone to relax and stretch a little bit!"

Ryan immediately started going three or four times a week, about the same amount of time she would have spent in the gym. It wasn’t until her first day on the hill last winter that she realized how yoga had changed her body.

"My first day of skiing this year was a full hard day with my sister, who is equally as competent as me. She wants to ski hard all day long and she wants to go to all the hardest places to be, so it wasn’t an easy first day," says Ryan.

"Normally after the first day of skiing I hurt, my calf muscles are in knots and everything is sore and you feel like your legs are burning after half an hour on the hill. That didn’t happen this year. No pain. No burning. Nothing – no pain the whole week and I skied every day. That amazed me. I thought it had to be yoga."

Ryan says she wishes she’d known about yoga when she was competing.

"I would have been very involved. But as an athlete you are following orders so you need your sports science people to believe in it too, because otherwise you don’t have time as you are following your program," she says.

But yoga is starting to trickle through to the athletic community; Ryan says she knows several competitive skiers who have begun incorporating yoga into their training routine.

"Veronica Brenner, who just won a silver medal (in freestyle aerials) at the Olympics, blew her knee the year before and started doing yoga as part of her rehab. She is totally convinced, she said it helped her get back to where she is."

Ryan is one of three Whistler locals who have just completed an intense three months of teacher training in California with Bikram himself. She is now teaching at the studio in Function, along with new teachers Jaime Lund and Tanya Harrington. During the course, the students took 11 90-minute yoga sessions every week.

"It was amazing how everyone transformed through the nine-week program. After leaving the program I had the feeling that I wanted to save the world," Lund says of her experience.

"I found I could think clearer, my mind started changing, I started handling situations differently, I started looking at things differently and every time there was an adverse event in my life it was water off my back. People started saying to me, ‘wow you look fabulous, you’re glowing.’ I’d always been athletic but yoga changes you from the inside out, internally, and then shows outwardly."

This is not accidental. While yoga appears to be working externally on muscles and joints, most of the exercises are designed to stimulate internal organs and glands. It’s the reason why yoga is recommended as a holistic treatment for ailments like anxiety, depression and addiction. Tanya Harrington says she initially began Bikram’s because she wanted to stop smoking and control her addictions.

"Yoga stimulates your different adrenal glands, your thyroid and your hormonal glands and seratonin levels. In all the other forms of exercise you do everything externally. Yoga is the only thing that builds from the inside out and combines the breath so closely with the body," says Harrington.

"Plus yoga is great for core strength. When your knee is solid from the inside out it is so much less likely to get hurt, or if your spine is strong from the inside out then you are that much less likely to herniate a disc. If you don’t have a strong core you are going to get a bad back by the time you are 30, and there are a lot of 30-year-olds in Whistler with bad backs and bad knees, so they have to do something."

And in increasing numbers, Whistler locals are turning to yoga to help heal injuries and prevent injury. Leslie Young started teaching yoga in Whistler in 1991, and back then she was the only one. Her yoga is inspired by Iyengar yoga, which focuses on proper alignment, and Ashtanga yoga.

"My clientele has slowly grown over the years from teaching one or two classes at home to teaching nine outside the home in the busy season," says Young.

"I would say over the last three or four years yoga has really increased in popularity. Yoga has something to benefit our whole being. On a physical level it increases strength and flexibility, provides better body awareness, alignment and posture plus it provides an overall sense of well being on an emotional and mental level, a feeling of a clear and relaxed mind."

Like all of the teachers, Young emphasizes that yoga is definitely for anybody but may not be for everybody.

"There are lots of different styles of yoga being offered in the valley now, so people should try a class with one teacher and if they feel it isn’t for them, they might connect with another teacher," says Young.

"Yoga is an excellent complement to all kinds of sports and to athletes of different traditions. Most of us need the increased flexibility and the body awareness and alignment and intelligence that yoga can bring to what we are doing."

The health benefits from regular yoga practise are too numerous to list but scientific studies show yoga has three major benefits: physiological, psychological and biochemical. Most people start yoga for the physiological benefits – to improve their flexibility, strength and endurance. They fall in love with yoga because of the psychological benefits – mental clarity, emotional strength and a sense of unity. But in the long-term, the benefit that may by worth the most is the biochemical – those changes in cholesterol, hemoglobin levels and white blood cell counts. It is these changes that prevent degenerative diseases and slow the aging process.

But, right now, what yoga offers most is a great workout for Whistler locals looking for something to complement and enhance their already active lifestyle.



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