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Day 1

Lesson 1 from: Yoga for Photographers: Part 1

Vanessa Joy

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Lesson Info

1. Day 1

Next Lesson: Day 2

Lesson Info

Day 1

so, basically, what it comes down to today is all of this. Photographers know that photography is brutal to your body. It's brutal. Whether you are on a shoe and you're hunched over holding, you know, 789 depending on what lens, maybe £12 of equipment in your hand or your hunched over a computer. Doing photography does damage to your body. And because most of us are so photographers, if we don't photograph if we're hurt or if we're not feeling good on a shoot, that affects our work. If we can't do our job physically, we don't put food on our tables. So what I have found is that when I do yoga, I am so much more pain free and stress free. And I'm really excited to share that with you guys today so that you can start to live that way as well. So we're going to talk a little bit about some myths of of yoga today before we get started. One of the first things I always like to cover is you do not have to be flexible to do yoga. Yes, during yoga ble enhance your flexibility and agility, but ...

really yoga is about learning where you are, knowing where your body is your limits and be able to understand your body, um, and its functions and being able to read how you're feeling. So when we do yoga today for all of you guys here and for everyone at home, make sure you're listening to your body. Make sure that you are in these poses and you're really not hurting yourself. You're not stressing yourself in a in a position that is too uncomfortable for you. Go where your body goes, and that is a key element. The second key element is breathing in any of the poses today. If you are unable to breathe deeply, you need to back off the pose a little bit more so very important. Breathing is a huge part of yoga, and that's what we're actually going to start off with today. So for my guys here, you'll see some of us have these little Mexican blankets. These are fantastic to use for a lot of different things in yoga. If you do not have one of these blankets, don't worry. Um, you can actually use your yoga mat if you are looking to get blankets like this or any of the other props that we have on the creative live blogged. There is a link. I have hooked you guys up with free shipping for a Yugo website online, so don't get off your yoga mat now, please. You need to do this with me now. But afterwards, check out the Creative Life log and you can grab some yoga gear if you like. So let's start off with the breathing. Um, for those of us who have are you Mexican blanket with us, we're just going to roll it Long way is really nice and tight. If you do not have the blanket with you, you're going to roll up your yoga mat nice and tightly, so go ahead and roll it up. You really want it to be as tight as possible ends. It's a long ways because we're going to put it in the big the middle over yoga mats, and we're going to lay on this. So while these guys are rolling up their maps, I'm just going to talk to a little bit about breathing Yoga. Breathing is very intentional, and it's very specific and you use it throughout the entire exercise. You are always breathing in and out of your nose, and when you breathe in, you want to breathe into your belly. So rather than breathing into your chest and pushing out your chest, you want to breathe into your belly and you have a much deeper breath. That way, when you breathe out through your nose, you want to make what I call Ah, sort of Darth Vader noise. Um, so when you breathe in and then breathe out, you should hear that noise. And it's kind of Ah, a Darth Vader sample. What it is is it's creating friction within your Sinuses and within your lungs, which creates heat in your body and helps you warm up. So we all have our rolled up Mexican blankets or yoga mats on. We're going to put them right in the middle. You can sit right in front of them, put the soles of your feet together, and then you're just going to easier back down and lay on the mat. Your head should come not be on your mat or your blanket, but should be off. And already I know you guys are like, Oh, my God, this is the best vision. Never. And I could lie here forever. We're not gonna lay here forever. You can put your right hand on your stomach and then your left hand over your heart and we're going to just practice some of those breathing techniques. So let's take a deep breath in through your nose. Feel your stomach rise, inhale and then exhale through your nose making that noise and with your right hand pushing out the air deep breath in breath out deep breath. Now just continue to take those deep breaths in and out. Noticed you're really right this time. Try to erase any thoughts that you're thinking of the things that you have to do later today or anything that already happened this morning. Just really focus on your breathing and what you will be doing today in yoga. Let's take one more deep breath in and out, and we're going to slowly roll over to the left side, and you can help yourself out back into criss cross legged position. If you used your yoga mat, you can roll it back out now so that you can sit on it and we're gonna sit in a crisscross position. If you were more experienced in yoga, you're more than welcome to do a lotus position or 1/2 lotus position. Whatever is comfortable for you and especially for your knees, you don't want your needs to feel stressed. If your knees feel stressed at any point, you can actually sit on any blanket, and that will help alleviate the stress off your knees and your back. So if that's more comfortable for you, go ahead and do that. So let's start with our left foot in front in a crisscross position. We're going to concentrate on breathing, so the first thing I want to do is deep. Inhale arms up and on the exhale. We're going to put the right arm down and lean towards the right, and we're gonna stay here for a few breaths. With every inhale. I want you to think about lengthening your spine and with every exhale. Think about tilting slightly more over so deep breath in think lengthen deep without think, fold and you want to. Instead of having your your face and chest down, try to pull it up as much as possible and keep your left hip on the ground. So you're going to feel this stretch right here. Remember, go to where you can go. One more deep breath in and out, and on your next inhale. It's come up and we'll go to the other side's left arm down and tilted over and you'll notice around. The everyone is going to be in a different guys are actually pretty uniform. But you guys, him might be Onley here. Some of you guys might be able to really, really go over a little bit more. But this is a good place to listen to your body. Where can you go? So inhale? Think about lengthening, reaching, Exhale. Think about tilting one more breath in and out. Next, inhale. It's come up, and what we're going to do is we're going to twist our hips towards the right and slowly lean forward, and you can lean forward wherever you start to feel the stretch again. Inhale. Think about lengthening, exhale, think about folding and make sure that your left hip a state on the ground you don't want to come up. That's not gonna help your your stretch. If this feels good for you, stay here. If you're a beginner, this might be a great place for it. If you want to, you can lean a little bit further or a little bit towards the back, and you'll start to feel more of your lower back stretching or really working on the lower back here. So one more breath in sync, lengthen and out fold, and on your in hell it's come up and we're going to switch our right foot in front to go to the other side. So its twists towards the left and folds so inhale. Think about lengthening. Exhale. Think about folding deep breaths from everyone able to breathe really deeply into your stomach and exhale all the stale air out while you're twisting deep breath in and out, and on your next inhale it's come up and exhale. Hands down. We're going to put our left foot out to the side again. Wherever you're comfortable, you might be comfortable. Little wider, maybe comfortable. Little closer. Whatever works for you and your right knee is going to stay bent. We're gonna twist so that are left. Hand is touching, are right knee and we're slowly reaching up and over. All right, this engages a lot of core. So if you need to, you can put your elbow down to give yourself some support. Your left elbow down in front as you lean over so this might be where you are. Think inhale, lengthen and exhale. Fold, or, if you can, a deeper fold will be to really get your arm over, touch your toe or grab the outside of your foot and again. Don't let your chest full down. Try to keep it so deep breath in and deep breath out. Continue deep breath in and deep breath out. You should really feel this all down the side and your hips side. You're back and on your next inhale, it's come up slowly and will switch legs. So again, twist a little bit towards the left but your right hand on your left knee and slowly start to tilt down. You need extra support. You can put that right elbow down so it supports you a little bit. Otherwise, lift your left arm up and stop bringing it over, keeping your eyes towards the ceiling and go wherever you feel comfortable and you can breathe deeply. Deep breaths in and deep breath out We're really working on loosening up. You're spine, especially the lower back gets a lot, a lot of pressure, deep breath in and deep breath out and on your next inhale it's come up. So we've really worked on getting those side muscles lucents, and now we're going to do a little bit of twisting. So let's go ahead and turn a long ways on our maths and let's bring our left foot Bent and over are right knee. We're going to bring our left arm up and then place it close is you can behind your back. This is really gonna help you keep your back street as we twist. So you right hand comes up an elbow to knee and you're just going to slowly start to twist again wherever you feel comfortable and this is really important, you're depressed and think about getting taller and lengthening deep without twisting deep breath in deep breath out this particular style of you go. It's called begin yoga, so we're really just working on longer poses holding them. It's a slower moving class, but it really help loosen all those tight areas that you might be feeling and on your next inhale. It's come to center and switch legs, so right foot goes over the left knee, right arm goes up and back and down as close as you can get to your back To keep your back straight, use your elbow to keep your back street and then left me and twist every inhale thinking about strong, lengthening every exhale, maybe twisting just a little bit more and inhale and exhale one more breath in and exhale and inhale towards center. All right, this next posed is going to stretch a part of our hips that I will not be a surprise if many of you have never stretched before. I honestly have only stretches part of my hip. About two years ago, I didn't even know it existed before then. So what we're going to do is you can bend your right knee and with your left hand, grab the outside of your right foot and we're going to twist again towards the right, and we're going to start to straight in your right knee and do this really slowly. Um, you if you feel your hamstrings, you don't want to feel the Hampshire's. We want to feel the side of the hip, so straight like until you feel that side of the hip. If you don't feel once totally straight, my feeling more flexible, bring your foot over. You are left leg a little bit more and keep twisting, so you really start to feel that. And it's an interesting muscle that I only discovered a little while, Leo. But it's a great one because, ah, lot of our pain from our knees that we get pain in our feet. It's actually radiated pain from your hips. And when you stretch your hips, you're going to start eliminating a lot of pain in your knees, your feet and your lower back. All right, we'll come back to center and we'll switch legs singing vendor left foot. Grab the outside of left foot with your right hand and slowly start to straighten out. And again, Make sure not hunched over this way. That's not gonna help you stretch you in to try to get a street as you can, every inhale thinking about lengthening every exhale, maybe twisting a little bit more deep breath in and out. Deep breath in and out, deep breath in and out. Give your foot. Just a little flecks. That last stretch. It's a little bit deeper there. Let's inhale and come to the center. Awesome. So we're going to come and flip around onto all fours. And when you're in this position, I want to make sure that your knees are directly below your hips and that your your risks are directly below your shoulders. So we're going to stretch out another part of the hip. What you want to think about. We're going to tilt to the right. First, you want to get your right hip close to your right hand, so get it as close as you can and twist on. Look over. Your left shoulder just really gets into the hip there. So again, deep within, deep breath out deep breath in deep breath out. One more breath in and out and let's come to the middle. We'll go to the other side, try to get your left hip close as you can to your right hand to get that stretch in the left hip and look over your shoulder, your right shoulder, deep breath in and deep breath out breath in really Philip, the belly and deep breath out. Push all that stale air. One more breath in and out. Let's come back to center. All right, so we've really listened up a lot of lower back and hips. We're going to start to loosen up the upper back and your shoulder blades. So what we're gonna do is you take your right hands is called thread the needle, and we're going to thread it underneath our left hand so your right hand goes underneath and you're gonna slowly slide it out as much as you can. And that might be here. You might come all the way down like this, and I really just stretch out your shoulder blades. I love this one. I do this one after it work. A wedding really, really helps. Loosen up those muscles and work so hard at the wedding. So deep breath in and deep breath out. Deep breath in and deep breath. One more inhale and exhale and inhale the center. We're gonna go to the other side. Is that one of fantastic one? I love how headed help with my shoulder blades. So take your left arm. We're gonna put underneath the right and just slowly start to slide the death, and you can really feel your shoulders separate. If you feel this here and you want to keep going, you can actually take your right arm back behind your back. And I come and grab on to my left leg here, and this just helps you twist even further. So deep breath in deep breath out and inhale and exhale. One more breath in and house. When you're in hell, it's come up to the center. We're gonna go into our pigeon posture against stretching out our hips, so we're going to bring our right knee up and across. Now, this is a posture you'll find a lot of people are gonna be in different areas. So your back leg is straight and you're lying on the top of it and your front leg, we're going to start leaning forward, so this might be a good position for you. If you really feel the stretch, you can bring your foot closer to your hip. But if you want to feel more of a stretch, you bring it out till it's almost out of right angle. So again, think straight back and then tilt forward. You might just come to your elbows right here again, thinking about a straight back or you can keep going. Really get deep into the stretch. So thinking about lengthening again and that inhale and exhale, folding over a little more, make sure that your hips are square. You want to make sure that both hips are down, as opposed to tilting towards the back leg or the front like keep them nice and even this one. We're going to stand for a couple more breaths because this really gets deep into your hip will help eliminate a lot of that. Lower back pain, knee pain and foot pain as well. Deep breath in lengthen and exhale. Folds deep breath in and exhale folds one more breath in and exhale slowly. Start to walk your arms back very slowly. Sometimes if you're in a really deep poses a little bit hard to get out of here, we're gonna pick our foot back up. So we're back on all fours and we're gonna switch legs. So bring your left. Need up this time and again police. Your left foot where it feels comfortable might be better if you're not. Loosen your hips to put your foot closer to your right hip, or you can bring it out and get a deeper stretch. So pick where you want to be, lengthen and then fold over. Try to keep your back flat as long as you can. And then, if you're low, go ahead and round over so deep breaths in and out really breathe into the hip. The flow of oxygen from breathing deeply will help you release those muscles and help them stretch. So inhale and exhale. Inhale and exhale. One more breath in and exhale it all out and slowly start to climb back up. All right, let's go ahead back to all fours and you're gonna separate your needs a little bit wider. We're just gonna go back into child's pose, and this is a great poems. You're just pushing her hips all the way back and lengthening your arms out in front. You can put your head right down on your map. This is a great pose of any point today or any of the other yoga classes. If anything is a little bit too strenuous, you can always come back to this post. This child's pose kind of like your safety net. You can always come back here to try to get your hips down. A slows you can to your feet keep your knees a little wider and sometimes that helps. Good. From here, we're actually going to go into our first downward dog. So if you guys have not done down more dogs before, don't worry about it. It's not as intimidating as it sounds, but you're going to just push up from all fours, push up and back. So in your downward dog, we're going to stay here for a few breaths. But in your downward dog, you want to get your feet flat. You want to spread your fingers and your toes as much as possible, and you want the weight of your body to be evenly distributed through your hands and feet. So I'm just gonna come over here to Michelle. She has an awesome downward dog. Um, so one of things you want to do is you want to make sure that your your shoulders are back as much as you can. This really gets a great stretch through here and you want to try to keep your back flat, but not arched. You see Michelle has your feet flat on the floor. But if you don't have your feet flat on the floor, that's okay, too. So, look, Carly has her heels up a little bit. That's fine. You can also bend your knees as well. If you're feeling too much, strain in your hips or your hamstrings. So go ahead. Tried to distribute that weight nice and evenly. And then we're gonna just bend the right knee. Let your hips kind of go bend the left knee. Just kind of loosen up in here and get comfortable as you can be in your downward dog. You know, think again. Try to think about your hips going up, Really getting your hip bones up, getting her ears covered by your hands. This is your downward dog again. Deep breaths. Here we can loosen it up. You can go on your toes and go down. Really? Just get comfortable with the downward dogs. We didn't take our right foot up in between. Our hands on our left heel is going to go down. We're going to come up to our first warrior one now We're your one. If you haven't been here before, you want to make sure that your right knee does not go over. You were right toast. You want to make sure that stays over your ankle? Your back leg? Your foot is that 45 degree angle and your hips are forward. So they're not here. They're forward your arms. Just go straight up. Try to keep a nice straight back. Keep pushing your left hip forward and deep breath. Sin and out. Inhale and exhale. Good. We're going to open up to worry. You're too. So we're just going to fan are left arm back. And this warrior to your hips are open. And your arms a parallel with the floor. Shoulders down. You're looking towards your front hand again. Makes sure that your knee is not going over your toe. I want to keep it over your ankle. Nice. Deep breath in and deep without this really helps improve. Focus your core muscles, your legs, stability, lots of benefits to this post. We're gonna flip our right hand over palm and you're going to tilt back into reverse Warrior. You might just tell. Worried to hear? Do get your arm up. You don't have to go too far back. If you are leaning backwards, make sure that your hand is not on your knee. Don't want to add pressure to your knee, so either put your hand below on your calf or keep it above. But Justin put it on your knee. You're gonna be looking up deep breath in deeper thought makes your front knee is still bent about 90 degree angle. Deep breath in and deep breath out. Deep breath in and deep breath out on your next inhale, we're gonna come up. We're gonna flip the palm back direction, put a right elbow to our right knee and the left arm comes up. This is really great. Should stretch her inner thigh as well as your left side and again looking towards the ceiling. So if you're a beginner, you might be here. That's great. If you want to go a little bit further into this pose, you can put your hand down on the ground. If you want to go even further, you can take your left arm behind, and even further than that you can hold your hands. This is called a bind, and there's lots different binds in yoga, and it just keeps all the energy in your body and contained. So wherever you are, come here. You could be here wherever you are. Deep breaths. Make sure your back is straight and deep breath out. Deep breath in and deep breath out. One more breath in and out. Let's inhale and come up Nice, going polar hands onto the ground to go back to our downward dog place. Good. So deep breath in deep breath out and in your downward dog. Just try to push your armpits towards the floor. Yes, would be the best way to describe it to get your head in between your hands. Nice. Good. We're gonna take our left foot up between her hands, this time back foot down at a 45 degree angle and come into our warrior one on our left side. So make sure that your right hip it's forward. Make sure that your knee is over your ankle in front and you're back footed 45 degree angle. If you have any problems like I have, this might be a little bit strenuous on your back knee. What you can do, and if you're also having balance problems, is separate your feet. Your feet don't have to be in a straight line. You can bring your left foot out and your right foot out a little bit. So I think this camera get the best angle for that so you don't have to be in a straight line. You can come heel toe out and he'll toe out. Helps leave you a little bit more stability and takes a little bit of the pressure off your knee. If you feeling any several more deeper, thin and out. And let's open up to Warrior two. So open up your hips to the back wall. Here, make sure that your arms giver give yourself a little check. Look to the back. Are makes year your arms air nice and parallel to the floor. Shoulders back and down and you're looking over your left hand to make sure your front gnaeus still bent. Good. Just open those hips. Deep breath in Andy breath outs. Deep breath in and deep breath out. Let's flip that left palm up and slowly start to tilt back into reverse Warrior looking up at your left palm still and again, go to where you feel comfortable. It might just be here. It can go a little further wherever you're comfortable and make sure that front knee stays bent deep breath in and deep breath out deep breath in and deep breath and inhale what's come back Torrey or two. And we're going to come to our side angle. So left elbow toe left me leaning forward, trying to keep your hips open. A lot of our tendencies right now is to turn and put our chest towards the floor, but you really want to keep your hips open and try to get your chest opens that you can look up and it faces the back ball on up looking up at your right hand again. You might be comfortable here, or, if you'd like, you can put your hand on your fingertips, your palm down to the mat. It's really nice to do this because you can push your left knee open or going to 1/2 bind, putting your right hand behind or grab on. Just take a few breaths here. If you were really advanced, I'm just going to show this for anyone who's watching, really advanced, you can go into what's called a bird of paradise here and what that is is you walk your feet in together, I'll turn this way and you slowly start to come up. You might just come up with the bent knee, or you can come up and straighten your leg. So just depending on where you are, I always like to give options. If you were in a bird of paradise and come back down to your side angle and let's inhale come up did that while the rest of the class couldn't see me out to not not throw them off. It's one thing to look at, all right, so let's pinwheel down, going to go back to our downward dog. Let's just send ourselves here and take a few breaths for a moment. Seat wide finger spread, One more breath and exhale. Now we're slowly gonna walk or Hopper jump up to the front of your maps that your feet are between your hands and this is one of my absolute favorite poses. We're just gonna forward fold, so the first thing you're going to do is come up about halfway and flat on your back out for some of you guys, this might be it right here, and that is totally fine. But what we're going to do is we're gonna fold our bodies over and grab our elbows are kind of like hanging like a rag doll here. If this is putting a lot of strain on your hamstrings, you can absolutely bend your knees here because what you're trying to do here is really just separate. All the vertebrae is in your backbone, and this is for loosening. You're back. So if you're not folding over so much because your hamstrings can't take it, just bend your knees a little bit. Give her hamstrings a break. So you're grabbing onto your elbows and you can travel like, shake or sway a little bit. Sugar head. Yes. Figure had no really just loosened out. You're back in your neck and again, deep breaths. Here, every exhale you can think about just relaxing your neck a little bit more. I love doing this. I do this at weddings. Now if I've been walking around, we did a photo session and they just took him a cocktail hour in the reception hall before and who comes and I just put my back to all just forward fold and just loosen. How about these muscles have been working so hard all day. It's a great post to do on the job. One more deep breath in and out. And we're gonna slowly on the next inhale rule up vertebrae of every break. Until that we are standing in a normal position and one of want you were gonna come into mountain pose, and all it is is we're standing our feet or toes or spread, and we are making sure that we're all in alignment. So we're hands are coming by our sides and our palms are facing forward. And I just want you guys to close your eyes here for a second and really listen to your body kind of scan your body and monitor what's going on. Do you feel little tension in one part of your body? Do you feel like maybe misaligned a little bit to the writer to the left, or do you feel a lot better than you felt before we started yoga, Which is probably the case because we've really worked on aligning ourselves so Keeper has closed. You're nice and balance and just scan your body top to bottom bottom to top and deep breath in and deep breath out. And then we can open our eyes. We're gonna take a few steps back to the center of our mats. We're going to put our arms behind us now, depending on your shoulder flexibility or especially if you have any injuries to your shoulders, like a rotator cuff surgery or something along those lines is going to be where you can go with this post. But what we're going to do is we're going to put our arms behind us. You can grab your elbows. If that's too much, you can just grab your hands or you can go into a backwards prayer. But what we're really looking to Dio is we're looking to keep our Backstreet our shoulders down. You couldn't go wherever you feel comfortable with us. All right, make sure camera is going to see so your options you can just grab here, you can grab your wrists, or you can attempt to go into a backwards prayer, and we're going to keep our feet hip distance apart and just give yourself a little tilt forward. Seemed kind of feel like you're back started. Um, straighten out and then come back to center. We're going to just arch back a smidge when you arch back. Try to think lengthening is flooded dumping over the back and deep breaths. Here, this really opens up your long suit. You take great deep breath. So deep breath in and you breath out deep breath in NZ, breath out. And this is another one that I do on weddings all the time because it stretches the muscles that I'm working. When I hold my camera, it stretches of shoulders, stretches out the back Great one to do on a wedding and one that you won't look too silly doing if anyone catches you. So it's come back to full standing and we're going to take our right leg back. We can keep our arms just like this, right? Like back just a little bit. Get a little hamstring stretch. So we're going to again, keeping just tilting at the hip, keeping your back straight. Just slowly tilt forward over your like and you might feel the hamstring stretch here. That's great to stay there or if you want to, you can go a little bit further wherever you start feeling the stretch. Stay there and deep breaths in keeping your back straight, Long gate and out till the little bit more So. Deep breaths in and out. Deep breath in and out, and one more deep breath in and out and on your inhale, you can rise up and we're going to switch legs. So right foot forward this time, left foot back. If you found that you were losing your bounce a little, don't worry about being one foot right in front of the other. You can separate your feet a little bit more if that helps you balance so deep breath in, lengthen deep without tilted the hip forward. Get into that right hamstring. So deep breath in and deep breath out and really listen to your body. Stay where you need to stay deep breath in and deep breath out. Deep breath in and on your next inhale. Let's come up. All right, we're going to turn towards the front of the room. We're going to do a quick balancing post. I find that balancing poses air really, really helpful, especially if you're in the middle of your work day during the week to just re center and refocus when you're going crazy and you're stressing out and you too much to do and you just seem like you're not get ever have those days like you're not getting any work done, but you're doing everything. This is a great way to kind of re center. So this was just a tree poses a very simple balance. So put your weight into your left leg. Spread your left toes to really give you some stability there. Don't walk your knee out, but definitely keep it straight and we're going to take our right foot. You can put it right to your ankle calf or up to your thigh. Whatever you do, do not put it on your knee. You don't want to give yourself that pressure on your knee, so wherever you feel comfortable angle, calf or thigh and the bring your hands into prayer in front and the key to bouncing poses to really focus on one particular thing. Non moving thing in front of you so might just be a spot on the floor. Maybe spot on the wall might be the person in front of you. We can stay here or on your next inhale you can come up. This is why it's tree pose. You really just spreading your ranches up, keeping a nice straight back, deep breath in and deep breath out, deep breath in and breath. I will come back the heart center and goes down. I reduced on the other side, so put your weight into your right foot, spread your toes and then you can come here to ankle calf or above the knee anywhere but the me and hands to hearts center. And you want to think about pushing your foot towards your inner thigh in your inner thigh towards your foot, and that will help engage your muscles and help you balance deep breath in and deep breath out and arms go up if you like, or you can stay there in prayer. Whatever works for you. Deep breath in deep breath out deep breath in and he breath out and come back to heart center and going to separate our legs a little bit. This is another one. We're going to just tilt forward at the hips, so go wherever you're comfortable. What we're going to do is we're going to do a twist. So what you want to do is to get your hand to the ground. You can do this in a lot of different ways. You can put your legs out a little bit more, and that might help reduce the stress on your hamstrings. Or you can bend your knees a little bit. I'm fine with a little bend in these because we're going to concentrate on is the twist. So get wherever works fuse that you can put a hand down and you want to put your right hand onto your right hip so that when we twist on Lee, the top of our bodies twist. You don't want the whole hip going and getting the whole hip to move one. Keep that straight, so twist towards the right, trying to keep your hips level and then your arm. Your right arm comes up and you want to try to look at your right arm. Try and keep your hips level. If you want to take this a little further, you can put your right arm behind her back. Put onto your left leg good deep breath in and deep breath out. This is a great twist. It's really engaging a lot of muscles. Your core, your legs back and come to center, and we'll switch to the other side. So take your left hand onto your left hip to remind yourself to keep it level and twist towards the left and left arm goes up. Taste very good. You can stay here or, if you'd like, you can put your left arm behind and get a deeper stretch. So again, remembering your breathing inhale. Think about straightening your back. Lengthening Exhale. Think about twisting just a little further. Deep breath in and out. One more deep breath in and out. Let's come back. Let's just give herself many little forward full of hair. It's coming. Go down, Let your head. Just relax. Shake your head. Yes, Sugar didn't know. Just loosen it up a little bit. It's great to do after twist and then the next inhale slowly roll up. Great. We're gonna come to the front of our mats. Actually, no, it Let's stay in the middle but will face towards the front of our math. We're gonna come down onto our knees now. If you have any problems, feel free to grab a blanket and put it underneath your knees. I do. So I'm doing that. Um, whatever you do, just make sure you know you're listening to your body, so we're gonna come up on our knees, We're gonna go into camel pose. So the first thing you want to do is you can put your hands to your lower back, your hips, palms, fingertips facing down, and we're just gonna do many little back when you're just gonna push your hips forward a little bit and look up towards the sky. Just kind of gauging where you can go here. So deep breath in and deep breath out deep breath in and deep breath out you a little deeper if you feel like you can deep breath in and deep breath out. Okay, come back and we're actually gonna go right into child's pose. Whenever you're doing stretches, especially ones that are a little bit more intense. It's nice to do counter poses. So for arching her back, it's nice to round your back right afterwards. Let's come back up. Now, if that was good for you with your hands on your hips and just pushing back a little bit. Great. You can do that again. If you would like to go a little deeper, you can push your hips forward and then grab your your heels with your hands, and this is a little bit deeper for stretch. You can let your head just go back. So pick whatever works for you. Get your little back bend in if you want to go even deeper and kind of walk your hands towards the backs of your knees and really get into a deep back bend. I don't even get your head to the floor if you, like, ever works for you. Deep breath in and deep breath out, inhale and exhale. Next in hell, it's Come up and go into child's pose again. Just relax here. Forehead to the mat, deep breath in and breath out. Deep breath in and out. Okay, let's come up. We're gonna grab our blocks. This pose is one of my absolute favorites to do both before and after wedding really loosens up your lower back and your hips at the same time. If you do not have the yoga block like this, find something with a similar shape. Um, you can use a stack of books of the dictionary. Great use for the dictionary since a most of us go to dictionary dot com now and have no other use for a dictionary. This is a great use for it. So we're gonna grab our blocks. We're gonna come sit down. We're gonna put the block right behind us. She knew what might be better. Just weaken gauge. Let's go all the way onto our backs. We'll just keep our block right next to us. Now, you can use this block in a few different heights. You have flat down like this, you can tilt it up so it's a little taller or you can put it so it's at its tallest, but what we're going to do, So we're going to lift up our hips and put it right underneath the small of our backs. So this might be great for you right here. You can put the soles of your feet together. If you'd like to go for a little bit deeper, Miss Stretch. Or maybe you want to flip your block up a little bit more, make a little tolerable, deeper stretch or even taller. So just kind of figure out where you want to be and then just relax your hips here. So deep breath in, do you breath out? Just going to stay here for a few breaths, really? Opening up our hips again. This is a fantastic one to do both before and after a wedding. Really just massages back. And if you'd like to, you can kind of wiggle your hips side to side just a little bit and get a little bit kind of a back massage there and imposes like this. This is the time where our mind starts to wander. So if that's happening, just bring yourself back to your body. Bring yourself back to what you're doing here on the map and just let your mind be blank. Focus on your breath and we can put the the soles of our feet onto the ground. Lift your hips so you can take the block out and put your hips down on the ground so we just arch your backs and I were gonna counter, pose and round it, So bring your knees in towards your chest, grab hold of your knees and what I like to do, pushing these up just a little bit and just rock side to side on your lower back. You can do little circles with your knees. Really? Just helps massage that lower back just a couple times and then we can put our legs out in front of us. We're gonna come to see it. We're gonna really counter pose that. We're gonna put our legs straight out in front of us. Really tried that. Sit on your sit bones. So, um, get anything out from underneath so you can sit right on your hip bones back absolutely straight here so you can put your hands right next to your hips to get your back straight even. Kind of push up a little bit if you want to. Kind of loosens up your back here, go right on your hands. So back straight. Deep breath in and on your exhale tilt at the hip. Try to keep your back straight as possible and you might just go right here. And that's great. You can try to keep your feet flex for an extra calf stretch or you go a little further or you can grab onto your feet. You put your elbows down wherever you want to go in This pose ever works for you. Just remember deep breaths in lengthening and deep breath out, folding over deep breaths in lengthen and out and fold over. Keep your breathing. This is a great stretch for your hamstrings, your hips, your back and for me when my upper back it's really tight. All I have to do is this and just around my head over and it really, really gets my upper back. So try that. Charges dropping your head, rounding it, overtook in your chin to your chest in a little extra backstretch. There a couple more breaths and on your next inhale and come up. We're going to go into just a little bit of core strengthening here for we come to our Bosna, which is our last post. So what we're gonna do is we're going to bend your needs. We're gonna do a little balance. So the first bounce we can do you can just grab onto your feet can grab onto your big toes. If you want to just balance here, it's nice little balance. Take a few breaths. So really helping your core stability. You can put your feet down. We're gonna go to the next phase of that which is a little more difficult. We're going to come let go of our feet and keep our knees bent. Just gonna hold this for a little bit, trying not toe around, over and kind of dump to try to keep your chest up. Nice. Deep breath here. And I know some of you might be shaking and that's okay, but the breath really helps you work through this really strengthening your core muscles here. Very important, you'll learn to strengthen your core muscles and then use that to hold your camera instead of using your little muscles. And that's tens of your problem. So put her feet down, take a breath. We're gonna try that one more time. You can go right back to where we were with your feet bent. Or you can try to straighten your legs out. So go ahead back to your posts. And if you want to, you can street in your legs is definitely much harder. If you want even more, you can take your arms from me down and reaching them up. You really start to shake here, but deep breaths, and if you find that's too much and go right back to where you are good and come down for this last one. We're going to go into that pose, and then we're going to slowly, slowly come down to the backs of our mats, serving to go right back where we were. And then through the count of 10 we're gonna go down. So 10 nine, eight, seven, six, 54 three to one Uh, the last pose. This is a great pose, and it's meant to really relax your body in your mind. You keep your palms up and you're just gonna let your body lie wherever it lies. This is a great time to let your body absorb all it is that you just did. So for us photographers and business owners, being quiet in our minds and our bodies can be a little bit difficult. So why don't you do is to scan your body again and noticed any tense areas We're going to go through her body and track. Relax them. So first, I want you guys to clinch up your feet and clench up your your fists hands into fists as tight as you can clinch map and then released them. Move on to your calves tight in your calves and your knees as much as you possibly can. Squeeze and squeeze and squeeze him and then released and up into your thighs and hips and glutes. Just tighten them as much as possible and release them and your core in your back, taking everything up. Squeeze it. Squeeze every state and relax and your muscles, your forearms, biceps, triceps your arms. Tighten them up as much as possible and relax them and then your shoulders. Bring your shoulders all the way up to your ears, tighten your shoulders and then drop them down and relax. You can let your breathing go here. Just breathe normally, but the floor. Carry your weight, breathing deeply and just relaxing every part of your face also, So scrunch up your face like you're leaving something sour and then relax it. Take your tongue away from the roof of your mouth. Just relax every muscle, including your mind. Focus on your breath if you feel your thoughts wandering. Just a couple more breaths here. Completely relaxed mind and body and how we can start to wiggle our fingers and our toes start to wake her body back up bend your knees up and turned over to the right or the left side. Whatever works for you keeping your eyes closed and then helping yourself up to the seated position. Keep your eyes closed for a moment as you sitting across like it or seated position that's comfortable for you. Really? Just center your body. You have your hands on your knees just relaxing here. Still deep breath in and deep breath out. So deep breath in, pull your shoulders up. Really deep breath in and then let your shoulders go. Hendro Axe. We're going to do one more deep breath in counting to 10. So inhale one to 345 678 nine, 10. Hold it and exhale. 10 9876543 to one. Get all that air out. You mean open your eyes. Thank you so much for doing yoga with me this morning. I hope that you feel even just a little bit better. Maybe a little bit more lines, a little bit more relaxed. You certainly should by the end of this and that you will join me tomorrow when we get into a little bit more, um, calorie burning yoga. So thank you very much. No. Must a

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Yoga Poses for Photographers.pdf
Yoga Poses for Photographers.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Sherrie R
 

I really really enjoyed this! I love how Vanessa was great about telling you not to push your body more then it could go and to not only breath but how to breath this is so important! I've done a lot of Yoga video and classes too and the teacher never seem to mention (at least on the video) other ways to accomplish a pose! Great job Vanessa!! Thanks Creative Live for putting this type of course on the calendar keep them coming love all that you offer!! I'm so busy in my job/life that I need to remember to stop and take care of me!

Meg Rouje
 

Awesome! I like doing yoga at home, whenever suits me..Vanessa explains very well and do lot of different poses and gives tips on how to avoid or heal body pain on the field..Breathing exercises are clear too.. Her lessons can really teach anyone, from beginner to advanced: she always takes care to explain each pose for beginners and she will go all the way to advanced stretch..(wonderful to watch!) I got into yoga more seriously since I've started with her, she's really a good teacher!

a Creativelive Student
 

Love this class! I always wanted to learn yoga but never had the time to commit to a class. This lets me do it when I have time and is great at explaining how to do all the poses! Perfect for someone that wants to learn!

Student Work

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