3 Ways Yoga Can Help You Taper
Yogi-In-Training Q&A
Q: I’m in training for a spring marathon. How can yoga help me taper?
A: Taper, peak, fade – whatever you call it, it’s that period when you’re supposed to be training less than you have before. You’ve logged the super long miles or sessions and the plan says it’s time to pull back, let the body catch up, recover. Sounds great, you can do that right?
Not so straight-forward. Why? Because it’s way, way too easy to fall into the human trap of thinking more is more. (You know you think that way – you’re a competitor. It goes with the territory.)
So you stop trusting the plan and maybe add on a few hours. Or you pull back and your mind starts flipping you out, the confidence you’ve worked hard to accumulate takes a dive and before you know it, your anxiety is through the roof and you don’t even have your old faithful sport to distract you.
The solution: Drop a few key yoga tools into your taper plan.
Yoga-In-Training: Introducing the journal
A list of the small stuff
Start where you are and keep going. It’s a great mantra for us all. Just get going and keep going.
So, that’s what this yogi-in-training is doing. Taking small steps, easy steps that feel good right away to move me a tad closer, any amount, to where I’m headed – a wildly successful yogi and business entrepreneur. (We can move small but there’s no reason to think small.)
Now, it’s hard to see how those little things add up, so I’m tracking them. I want to see how this all unfolds. What will be the long-term results of doing the work, showing up…?
Introducing the journal…. log it, blog it, just get it down on paper/screen and watch life change…
A list of the small stuff. Some of it, so far…
How to overcome making hard choices…
Part 1 …like starting a meditation practice.
Is the motivation to do what’s good for you hit and miss? You ate well all week, so tonight – what the heck, show me the ice cream…
Most of us know what’s good for us, but choosing right is hard. How so?
In Deepak Chopra’s and Rudolph Tanzi’s latest book, Super Genes, it throws up some answers.
According to my spiritual teacher, Deepak, and his genetic expert friend Tanzi, choice making it turns out is a skill. One we can cultivate and get better at to the point that eventually what we once thought was an impossibly hard choice (for us, but not necessarily everyone) becomes easy.
The secret?
Do less, achieve more.
Sound good? Here’s how.
If you’ve been spoon-fed on a menu of mantras like ‘no pain, no gain’, and ‘work hard, play hard’, you might be rolling your eyes around now at the idea of doing less and achieving more. Bear with me.
Nothing wrong with being driven, focused, consistent or passionate but stop sharpening those elbows for a second and ask yourself, how much are you forcing your way through life? And at what expense to your feelings of yumminess?
The perfect lesson at Perfect Health
Perfect Health Graduates February 2015 And probably not so perfect post…..oh well. Seems odd that during the last stretch of teacher training for Deepak’s Perfect Health programme, one lesson to really learn was – ‘don’t try to be so perfect’. Let me explain. It’s February 16, 2015 and I’m back in La La Chopra…
How little changes amount to big benefits
The Law of Least Effort has been at work. And that’s not even a sarcastic nod to the fact that I’ve not been blogging about what life’s been like ‘living with Deepak’. Just lately I’ve been too busy clapping along with Pharrell Williams…because I’m happy…. and yes, I do feel like a room without a…
