Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: Make Right Angles to Strengthen Your Shoulders
Is there magic in right angles? Pythagoras isn’t the only one who thought so. When you bring your arms into right angle position and draw your elbows back, you wake up serratus anterior, a muscle that connects your shoulder blades into your ribcage. Once your serratus anterior is strong and intelligent, you’ll be able to […]
Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: find your inner monkey
The Five-Minute Yoga Challenge started as a response to two of Gretchen Rubin’s Rules for Adulthood: “What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE,” and “By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.” That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of My Five […]
Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: spend a week walking your dog
Place a penny between your index and middle finger moundsMy friend Terri told me recently that she’d had a pain in her foot that was given temporary relief whenever she did downward facing dog pose. So she found herself doing dog pose five or more times a day – whenever the pain-relieving effect wore off. […]
Five-minute yoga challenge: ease your shoulders in gomukhasana
When I’m not practicing or teaching, I’m often sitting at my laptop, writing, answering emails, doing everything that studio administration, blog posts and finishing the instruction manual for building a bear proof composter demands. So I’m well acquainted with the feeling of popping out of a period of concentration – really, that was an hour? […]
Stand tall by working your shoulder-blade stabilizers
I have fallen in love with Google Analytics. Every morning, it tells me how many people visited this blog the day before, how long they stayed on the site, what cities they live in – Vilnius! Abu Dhabi! Helsinki! Snellville! – and, if they came by Google search, what they searched for. That’s why I […]
Use a long strap to put your shoulders in their place
Typing, driving, cooking, gardening: almost everything we do encourages us to slide our shoulder blades up our backs and roll them forward. Over time, that can lead to stiff shoulders, sore upper backs and neck pain. You can reverse this action, and move your shoulders back and down, with the help of one eight-foot yoga […]