A yogi on a bike out for a run

This past Wednesday, I taught my first official yoga class. Let me preface this post with saying yoga is by NO means my specialty or passion. Although, as previously mentioned, I recently obtained my YogaFit cert, nobody would ever classify me as a "yogi." How this all started was with my stability ball class. I was teaching the same class twice each week, to mostly the same group of women, and running out of ideas fast. You'll find there's only so much you can do with an exercise ball until you start just using it as a prop...i.e. now we're going to do lunges holding the ball! So, one day, I pulled out a deck of yoga cards, and each of my class participants pulled one from the stack, then we would collectively find a way to modify the pose using the ball. It was a hit! My class participants started asking to do yoga more frequently, so about a year ago we starting designating one class per month as "Ball Yoga", basically doing a full-fledged yoga-style class with mats, barefeet, dim lights, relaxing music...but all still utilizing the stability ball.

After a few months of this, I decided I probably needed a basic background of yoga knowledge so I could add to the library of poses I was comfortable teaching, and at the very least, know about safety techniques and contraindications. Just this past February, I did a 2-day workshop to get my YogaFit certification. It's helped a lot so far with class formatting, especially. I always had this picture in my head of what yoga instructors were like---earthy, hippy, weird. (The last conversation I had with a yogi ended with her telling me bras cause cancer and I should ditch mine--no thanks.) I found I could relate to YogaFit's style, because it was more Americanized and put an emphasis on all the physical aspects--more about the strength, balance, flexibility, breathing, and less on the chanting, chakras, and the human's third eye...again, weird.

Now here's where it got interesting for me. Part of the process of actually receiving your certificate of completion for the YogaFit course is that you accumulate 8 hours of teaching yoga to populations that wouldn't normally be exposed, i.e. children, underpriveleged. I had a couple friends who work at a center for autism who said their teaching staff does classes like these occasionally, so I was able to go there to knock out my first hour of community service. The oddest part of it all was presenting myself as a yoga instructor. Little did they all know, that on the totem pole of my exercise passions, yoga is pretty low towards the bottom. Teaching the entire class using only your body and not the ball definitely had a different feel.

I also find it challenging to speak in the "yoga voice." You all know what I'm talking about--the soothing, transformational language of floating your hands up to the sky while rooting your foot in the earth beneath you--that crap. Now some yoga instructors I've had make this sound very natural. Maybe the difference is, I'm used to teaching classes like boot camp and spinning where your voice has to be loud and authoritative and give your participants the sense of urgency that when I say sprint, I mean SPRINT! True yogis also have the verbal gift of being able to tell you exactly how your body should be moving without demonstrating themselves. Most yoga instructors wander around the room while still explaining exactly what Reverse Warrior is. I find that I'm very reliant on showing my participants what to do and then giving them cues after I've deomnstrated the motion.

Part of teaching any group fitness class is making it your own. I've never felt so strongly attached to any one exercise specialty, but rather a mixture of running, cycling, circuit-style classes, and now yoga, so I accept that I can't specilaize in instructing or coaching ALL of these things, because the styles are so dissimilar. What I can do is be educated on the discipline and know that I can teach a safe but challenging, Mechelle-style class.

I think back to when spinning and boot camps were out of my element or back to college when teaching any group fitness class made me a nervous. Now I don't bat an eye at yelling at a room full of strangers or rushing into a class last minute without a mapped out plan. So, there is hope for me yet to be a yogi--during Wednesday's class, I even caught myself using the word "floating." :)