30 Days of Yoga - Success

Well folks, I made it to 31 yoga classes in the last 31 days. Yeah, the challenge was only for 30 days, but why not make it a full month instead of just 30 days? Plus it turned out that the yoga studio I decided to go to had scheduled a 30 day challenge as well. Perfect timing/coincidence if you ask me. They had a chart on the wall where we got to track our attendance with gold stars. I guess those elementary school years of getting gold stars next to your name for being good stuck with me. And being the overachiever that I was, I got a lot of gold stars. Most of this past month I attended class at 6 a.m. throughout the week and then a mid-day or afternoon class on the weekend. As I had mentioned, the morning class I attended was called Wake Up and Salute the Sun. It's what I would refer to as slow flow, as intense as you'd like to make it. We had a core group of 5-6 of us that showed up on a daily basis. I could tell who was there when I first arrived just by their cars. One of the women drove a orange sedan, whereas the guy who had excellent and super consistent Ujjayi breath drove a silver SUV with a yoga studio sticker on the bottom left corner of the back windshield. Anyways, we bonded over waking up so early every morning and started to feel like the non-regulars were intruders. Our class doubled in size on the Thursday and Friday before Memorial Day weekend because everyone was trying to get their gold stars. When class dropped back down to its regular size, we kept talking about how we were so surprised when there was that many people that early in the morning. It's always nice to feel like you're a part of something, and that's one of the things I enjoyed about my 30 Days of Yoga.

Another good thing about this challenge was my mood. As I mentioned in my Paleo f(x) Recap, one of the big topics was stress and how to manage it. Stress is something that all of us experience and how we handle that stress makes all the difference. Daily yoga definitely helped me with my stress management. Not only did spending at least an hour every day trying to clear my mind and focus only on breathing (while struggling to balance) give me some peace of mind, but I also found myself making time to be calm and relaxed. I took more walks. I read a book. I went to the library for some quiet time to focus. I spent more time with my friends one-on-one, and I called some of my old friends to catch up on life. I felt happy more often and one of my coworkers even commented on how I was smiling more frequently. I don't know whether this was a result of just the yoga or the fact that I was making time every day to be physically active and get a good sweat on. I made physical activity a priority and I want to continue to do so. That may mean that I'm not quite as social with friends as I might like to be, but I can notice the difference between my health and mood now and what it was a month ago.

I do have to admit that not everything improved; my flexibility was one of those things. I swear that some of my muscles feel tighter now than they did a month ago. My hamstrings and calf muscles in particular feel like they got shortened somehow. And my previously very open hip flexors now feel sore and achey often. I don't know how that all happened, but I think that part of it was pushing my body harder that I've pushed it in a while. It may also be that my form improved thanks to daily practice. My instructor said that my form got better over the weeks, and she attributed my recently developed knee twinge to my improved hip placement in Warrior 1, and there's the fact that I'm a woman... with hips... and these yoga poses were originally designed for men, who don't have hips that put extra strain on the knee joints. The solution was easy though, I just modify the pose a bit so that my heels don't quite line up, and voila, no twinge. 

So all things considered, would I do it again? Definitely. Did you make it through the 30 days? How do you feel? Are you ready for another 30-day challenge? Good, because I'm doing a Whole 30 starting June 1st. So let's jump from one challenge to the next. Let's do it!