Looking for the peanut butter to your jelly? Or the bacon to your eggs?  Or searching for a donut to dunk in your coffee?  Maybe even the perfect lime to your tequila?  Look no further, YOGA to the rescue.  Yoga can be the missing piece in the puzzle of life.  The second pea to your pod, if you will.

 

We all have that one go-to person in life, a best friend that you can call any time of day for any reason and they will be there.  Well, yoga can metaphorically be that person for you too, providing you unconditional support and love. I already know why & how I love yoga, after all I practice often and teach it for a living.  So how do I explain to other people how & why they should love yoga too?

 

Love can be a hard thing to explain, especially when you’re talking about the practice of yoga.  Yoga is a lot of things.  It’s much more than just the physical poses after all. Yoga is an expression. Yoga is a state of being.  Yoga is a way of life, a spiritual experience or even a religion to some.  There are literally hundreds of health benefits to practicing yoga like improved athletic performance, increased flexibility, better bone & joint health, increased energy, improved respiration, reduction in the risk of heart disease, boosted immunity and decreased blood pressure.  And that list is merely just the tip of the iceberg of health benefits. SO WHY DON’T MORE PEOPLE PRACTICE YOGA?

 

Yes, yoga is all of these great things but it can also be wildly intimidating. And it’s not just the balancing on your head or bending into weird contortions part that’s the most daunting.  It’s the mental and emotional part of yoga that can be overwhelming.  It’s the silence, the practice of sitting with yourself and the obstacle of discovering yourself deeper that is the scariest part. But just like a best friend would never dare judge you, neither does yoga.  Yoga gives you the gift of acceptance— acceptance of who you are right now, at this exact moment, not who you’re striving to be but who you actually are right now.

 

Yoga can make you laugh, make you cry, make you smile, make you think and make you not think all at the same time.  Yoga can take you from dark places to lighter ones. It is a journey that changes with each time you practice.  Yoga is a beautiful gift that you can give to yourself.  I don’t want this to become some sort of love sonnet to yoga. Because yoga itself is not what’s actually so great about yoga, but it’s the people that do it.  It’s about who you become after you practice yoga.  Yoga will love you when you forget to love yourself. It is a path to a greater you, offering you support and guidance through each step.  And just like a best friend, yoga will see you at your worst and still think you’re the best!

 

Come find your next best friend with us here at Union Fitness!

 

Monday: Vinyasa Flow @ 6pm

Wednesday: Yoga Foundations @ 6:45am & Slow Flow Recovery @ 6pm

Thursday: Vinyasa Flow @ 6:45am

Friday: Happy Hour Yoga @ 5:30pm

Saturday: Community Yoga @ 10am

We hear a familiar story from a lot of members that are having trouble reaching their fitness or body composition goals: “I do great during the week, but once the weekend hits, all bets are off.” Logging 5 “perfect” days – hard daily workouts, healthy eating in appropriate portions, regular sleep – is all well and good, but it’s really easy to throw that all off if you drop your routine completely from 5pm on Friday to 10pm on Sunday!

 

The number one most important aspect to succeeding in anything – weight loss, strength gains, lifestyle change – is consistency. Unfortunately, it’s just not enough to be super strict during the work week; you need to keep your goals in mind and continue with your healthy habits (most of the time, see below) on the weekends too. There are a ton of ways to make this easier, so here are just a few:

 

• Don’t over-extend during the week

It can be really tempting to drastically restrict your food, or do hours and hours of cardio during the week to “make up for” the weekends. That then turns into a cyclical pattern of restricting and then binge eating on the weekends, partially because you “earned it,” partially because you’re actually really hungry! If you’ve found yourself in this pattern, consistency across the entire week is the solution. Choose a food goal that you can reasonably meet every single day. That probably means letting yourself eat foods you actually like during the week, and that’s okay. You can build heartier meals and fun snacks into every day life by choosing lighter foods other times of day. When the next weekend comes around, you likely won’t feel as desperate to go nuts on sweets!

 

• Keep your habits consistent

I would bet you’ve heard that catching up on sleep on the weekends isn’t actually a good thing. Try to apply that idea to every part of your lifestyle. Like I said in the previous point, staying consistent all week long is the way to go, both for eating and for everything else! Try to go to bed and wake up around the same times each day, and strive to get some movement in daily as well!

 

• Take advantage of weekend fitness opportunities

This is where we can really help! Pittsburgh is full of weekend fitness opportunities. Here at UF, we offer a free community yoga class every Saturday at 10am to get your weekend started. We also now have a Sunday run group that meets at the gym on Sundays at 10am. But don’t stop there – get outside! Enjoy the end of summer in our beautiful parks and on the rivers. Hiking opportunities in and around the city are abundant. Kayaking here is also an amazing experience. Our run group will be heading out for some kayaking on the river this Sunday, August 27 at 11am. We encourage everyone, runner or not, to come give it a try

When it comes to lifestyle change, it’s common to want to take an extreme approach and have an all or nothing mentality. No matter what kind of big feat you hope to accomplish in life, any drastic change from your daily norm can be overwhelming and at times scary, so of course it seems better to rip the band aid off and cut to the chase, right? Well, maybe not so much.

 

A complete lifestyle overhaul can be a great way to kickstart forming new habits, but if you want lasting change and are transitioning from a state of low motivation to high motivation and excitement, you may want to consider slowing your roll and making sure you’re being realistic and seeing the full scope of how your changes will affect your life.

 

 

Whether your goal is to lower your cholesterol or feel and look better, it’s best to have a plan and know exactly what you want in the long term. Getting in the right frame of mind, being prepared for things to take longer than you may expect, and finding ways to enjoy the process of change rather than having a fixed mindset of how things “should be” will be hugely important in staying the course even when challenges arise.

 

 

When setting goals and forming habits, it’s important to have both outcome goals (I want to be able to run an 8 minute mile by October 1st) and behavior goals (I will commit to running X number of miles at a pace of X from now until October 1st). Doing so will provide a plan. When there is a plan, there is less likely of a chance that you will deviate because the small steps are far less daunting than the end result. Can you imagine stepping to the start line for a marathon you committed to running 3 months ago but didn’t follow the plan and work up to the necessary mileage over time? That marathon would be uncomfortable, to say the least.

 

 

If you want to successfully accomplish a goal, do yourself a favor and take the time to put it down in writing. The goal(s) should:

 

• Be specific and measurable
• Have a specific timeline
• Be realistic
• Have significance

 

 

Now that you have your goals written down, list them in order of priority.

 

1. Focus on one or two habits per month, whatever you think will have the biggest impact on your life and make it your primary focus.
2. Write down your plan- specifically state what your goal will be each day, when you’ll do it, what your limiting factor(s) will be, and who you will report to.
3. Post your goal publicly or tell as many people as possible that you are trying to form a new habit. If that sounds completely awful, try an online forum or email it to coworkers, friends, and family.
4. Report on your progress daily whether it’s privately written in a journal, or you’re telling the same group of people- note or say whether or not you succeeded at that goal.

 

 

If you’re having trouble thinking of ideas, here are a few to consider, remember: start small!

 

1. Going to the gym one day more than you do currently
2. Trying a new exercise
3. Going on a walk where you might spend an hour watching TV
4. Incorporating a new vegetable in your diet you’ve never tried
5. Replacing one meal a week where you would eat out with one cooked at home