The YMCA keeps getting better and better! My favorite classes are the ones that get my heart pumping and my skin sweating, but I like to give the other ones a chance. Last week I tried Yoga and it felt good but it was pretty slow and boring. Monday I decided to try a class called Yogalates which should be a mix between Yoga and Pilates. I have done Pilates videos before and they are pretty tough so while I was not expecting to sweat and have a high heart rate I was expecting my muscles to struggle. I was wrong.

We went into this small room with the lights off and yoga mats on the floor. To begin with the CD kept skipping so we did not have any music to listen to. Instead we got to listen to yelling kids, and loud adults pulling furniture around in the next room. Very relaxing for a yoga class.

So I went through the class (and my roommate was there with me) and it was even more boring than yoga. I felt pretty much nothing! It felt good to stretch and maybe I was doing it wrong but it was not hard at all. But the best part was the things the teacher kept saying.

I guess they like to use imagery to help you picture what position you should be putting your body in but some of hers were just silly and made me giggle when I thought about what they would really look like. And some just did not make sense. Here are a few examples:

  • She told us when we were breathing in to imagine balloons under our armpits. Now that is a funny image, but I do not know what she was going for.
  • She would tell us to push our navel to the ground and I never figured out if that meant to suck our stomachs in or flex our abs or what!
  • Oh! And one we had like a chocolate donut around our waists or something and we had to move within it and not touch it. Not sure what that meant either but it sure got me thinking about chocolate!
  • And the best one! We were laying on our backs with our feet on the ground and our knees bent. I think she wanted us to lift our butts/pelvis' into the air which is good for your back or something but can you imagine what she said instead? She told us to imagine we had a dragon tail coming from our tail bones and to tickle our noses with our dragon tail!!!!!!! How crazy is that! I seriously lost it. Roomie said she could not look at me because she knew she would loose it too! That is one interesting image to get us to lift our butts. Wow!
Another thing that was crazy was the breathing she had us do. I guess Yoga and Pilates have different breathing techniques and instead of sticking with one she had us switch back and forth depending on which move we were doing. That was hard to follow and I would get lost on which one we would do. And THEN she was always telling us to exhale and inhale with our moves but sometimes she would say exhale and then no inhale and then exhale again so I would breath out normally and then be like pushing all the air out of my stomach just to stay straight with what she was doing! That was probably the hardest part of the whole thing!

So, I will not be going to Yogalates again. I am sticking with cycling and step and cardio workouts. I even went to a boot camp one the other day. I am sore!!!