Yoga, With New Poses to Strike
February 23, 2013 by admin
Filed under Yoga Articles
Melanie Fidler for The New York Times
Julie Ziff Sint leads a class of Hoop Vinyasa at Om Factory near Union Square.
THE first yoga class I took, over 20 years ago, was pretty straightforward. In those days yoga was typically a series of postures and stretches on a mat. But in recent years some new elements have been thrown into the mix. You can now find aerial, acrobatic, even laughter yoga.
Here are three recently developed forms that add twists to an ancient, evolving practice:
HOOP VINYASA With a yoga mat and a large hula hoop, I stood in a circle with three other students as the teacher, Julie Ziff Sint, showed us the basics. Her Hoop Vinyasa class started in the fall at Om Factory, near Union Square.
None of us had ever successfully used a hula hoop before. But after a few playful minutes with Ms. Sint, 32, who has a background in circus arts and yoga, all of us could keep the hoops moving with our hands and waists, prerequisites for the feat that came next: spinning them above our heads while we balanced ourselves in the tree pose, then stepping down into the warrior pose to spin the hoops around our waists.
We also used the hoop as a static prop to deepen stretches, for greater alignment and as a weight to hold up during certain poses.
Nicole Touzien, 29, a coordinator at a dance school, who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, said she welcomed the extra challenge. “It was a fun experiment,” she said, adding that managing the hoop required a higher degree of focus than traditional yoga.
(The program is offered for $20 on Thursdays at Om Factory in Manhattan; omfactorynyc.com.)
HIPRANA The next class I tried, HIPrana, at New York Health & Racquet Club on the Upper East Side, fused vinyasa yoga and belly dance.
To the rhythms of Middle Eastern music accompanied by a few jingling hip scarves, I joined a group of 14 women in following the teacher, Slavica Milosevska, 30, as she led us through an aerobic yoga that incorporated dance moves.
Rather than holding a yoga pose, like the bridge, tree or downward dog, Ms. Milosevska had us doing hip and chest lifts, drops and rotations to work on isolating upper- and lower-body movement. We also shimmied our shoulders and hips, adding wavy “snake arms” during transitions and sequences of poses.
After class, Ana Charalambides, 24, who lives nearby and attends weekly, said she had dabbled in yoga and belly dance but preferred the fusion “because yoga makes belly dancing easier to learn, and belly dancing makes yoga more fun.”
(HIPrana is offered for $25 on Monday evenings at the New York Health & Racquet Club on East 76th Street; nyhrc.com.)
TRAMPOLINE YOGA Last, I went to Shen Tao Studio in Gramercy Park for Trampoline Yoga, which calls for a mini-trampoline in place of a mat.
“The trampoline creates a forgiving quality as you weight shift that the floor does not,” said the teacher, William Hedberg. He said it also “communicates a message to the musculature — may you be as elastic as this spring.”
Mr. Hedberg, 53, whose background is in dance and martial arts, said his approach was more about “movement education” than about working out, though it’s that as well.
The idea, which became clear when he guided three of us through poses, was to become more acquainted with our bodies by exploring our range of motion within a pose through bouncing, rocking, swaying and doing circular movements. “Cultivating elasticity,” Mr. Hedberg said, trains the muscles to be springy at the end of their range.
Toward the end of the hour, I gripped the frame of the trampoline in a standing forward bend and pushed my legs into the elastic as my hamstrings stretched along with the springs. My muscles communicated a message to me: thanks, that really hits the spot.
(The classes cost $15 and are held Mondays and Fridays at Shen Tao Studio in Manhattan; shentaostudio.com.)
