Rapid Activation to Wellness:
Building a Pain-Free Body & an Injury-Free Practice
Call Pam at 512-743-3238 today to schedule your personal yoga session.
*Pam Lindsay is certified as an Advanced Teacher in R.A.W. Yoga through Sunstone Yoga.
Yoga Training That Travels to You
Rapid Activation to Wellness:
Yoga for Pain-Free Movement & Prevention of Injury
Can you even imagine?
Pain does not have to be a part of your daily activities
Whether you are new to yoga, an elite athlete in training, have lived with chronic pain, or are recovering from an injury that has caused mobility issues, RAW Yoga will quickly put you on the path to healing.
With RAW techniques, you will: Experience drastic increases in your range of motion; build active, strong muscles that support your spine and the other joints of your body; bring the body back into symmetry; alleviate pain and be able to prevent injuries.
A series of customized isometric and active stretching postures, with core strengthening postures, work to "turn on” dormant muscles, and focus on active symmetry. This translates into a pain-free yoga practice, and you can imagine what that can do for your daily activities such as walking and sitting!
Principles of RAW Yoga
- Pain is a sign of weakness. Never stretch into a painful posture; first correct the weakness then stretch.
- Any stretch, even a passive one, can be activated.
- Achieve active symmetry through all ranges of motion. Work to your limited, or weak, side to catch up. Once strengthened, practice the activation postures on both sides to stay balanced.
- The key components of RAW yoga in all postures are stability, mobility, strength, endurance and balance. These all need to be in place to achieve pain-free movement.
RAW yoga techniques are used with more traditional yoga techniques to fortify and complement those styles. When strengthened muscles function correctly and you are able to move with greater ease, you are more likely to stay injury free.
Allow me to share the experience of one of my students: Marilyn had fallen and injured her hip at the hospital where she worked. Her physician prescribed physical therapy. After several sessions, she felt like she was not making any noticable progress, and had pain in her hip all the time. She then began yoga sessions with me:
"After the first session, I noticed a difference, and within a few sessons, the hip sequence Pam designed for me had significantly reduced my pain and had increased my mobility. Additionally, I had more energy. I found I really enjoyed the sessions -- with her soothing voice and gentle encouragement, I found I could work beyond my own expectatations."
--Marilyn Arnold, Nursing supervisor
--Marilyn Arnold, Nursing supervisor | ||||
Strong Dog: Helps alleviate back pain
Muscles working: Rectus femoris, iliacus, psoas major & minor, external oblique, pyramidalis, internal oblique, rectus abdominis
How to:
Begin on your hands and knees, with knees directly under the hips and hands directly under the shoulders. Press up onto your toes into an easy Downward Facing Dog, with heels up.
Pull your hands and feet toward each other, as if you are folding in your body like a jackknife, but your hands and feet don't really move. Use just 20 % effort here, you should feel only a light activation of the lower abs. Hold for 6-8 seconds, back off, and repeat the sequence 6-8 times.
Variation: Begin as above, up on toes, but bring the heels together, and pull hands and feet toward each other.
What happens when we stretch
When you lift your knee up toward your chest, the muscles of the lower abs are working. The height you can lift the knee is your active range of motion. As soon as you grab the knee with your hands and pull it closer to your chest, you’ve moved into the passive range -- the area you don’t control -- in which injury is more likely to occur.
When we stretch, the central nervous system signals the muscle spindles to resist the stretch, and the muscle reflexively contracts, by design. However, if the stretch continues beyond 6 seconds, the muscle will relax or "shut down." This is a protective reflex mechanism. Under normal conditions, the muscle turns back "on" within a few moments. But over time, repeated passive stretching with no attention to proportional active stretching trains the muscles to stay shut down.
When this happens, reciprocating muscles move in to compensate, potentially leading to pain and tightness from overuse or incorrect use, creating an injury.
When any one muscle gets too tight, it may start torquing in the spinal column and in turn put pressure on nerves and create pain. Sciatica, back pain, hip pain, knee pain, piriformis syndrome, heel pain, shoulder pain, bad posture are just some of the symptoms associated with muscle imbalance.
The solution is to strengthen the muscles in an appropriate range of motion before taking deep stretches. Once strengthened, the deep stretch will feel more blissful because it is supported by strong and stable muscles -- without pain.
For those new to yoga
This innovative series of yoga postures directs you into your body to awaken your health, vitality and spirit. You will reduce stress, and improve flexibility as you build strength into that flexibility, balance the weight of your body, increase your energy and improve the quality of your life. Yoga works on the body, mind and emotions in positive, life-changing ways. You’ll feel better even after your first session!
If you are an experienced yogi or athlete who has suffered an injury, RAW Yoga will be an important component in your healing, and we will build on that foundation each week. Continued practice will help you stay pain free and injury free. I will design a practice that meets your aesthetic as well as physical needs -- gentle, healing rejuvenation or juicy dynamic flow -- and you will enjoy a new freedom in your body that you could not have imagined!
"For every effect, there is a cause."
-- Jamaican Proverb
