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The Yoga Minibook For LongevityScroll down this page to read more about The Yoga Minibook For Longevity, the Back Cover Description, Table of Contents, Excerpts and Yoga Poses. ABOUT THE YOGA MINIBOOK FOR LONGEVITYYou can find The Yoga Minibook For Longevity, and the rest of Elaine’s yoga minibooks series including The Yoga Minibook For Weight Loss, The Yoga Minibook For Energy and Strength, and The Yoga Minibook For Stress Relief (Fireside Simon & Schuster), in your local bookstores or simply order here! These personalized yoga books target specific health and wellness goals. Whether you’re looking to lose weight,find the fountain of youth, reduce stress or increase your vitality, there’s a Yoga Minibook for you! THE YOGA MINIBOOK FOR LONGEVITY: A Specialized Program for a Healthier, Vital You by Elaine Gavalas Publisher: Fireside Simon & Schuster, 2003 Tradepaper: 0-7432-2699-2 Offering a flexible exercise system, The Yoga Minibook for Longevity is the ultimate fitness guide for everyone who wants to live longer, keep fit, and improve the quality of his or her life. As millions of people are discovering, yoga is one of the few forms of exercise that can be practiced throughout a lifetime and is easily adapted to individual needs and situations. With The Yoga Minibook for Longevity, readers at every level of fitness will discover how yoga can help them feel younger and relieve the discomfort of arthritis, back pain, and other physical ailments. Paying special attention to the physical constraints that can make other forms of exercises impossible or dangerous, Elaine Gavalas explains how to design and benefit from an effective, individualized yoga routine. Based on age-old practices, The Yoga Minibook for Longevity includes: yoga postures for staying young; chair yoga for beginners and older adults; and yoga to relieve arthritis, back pain, osteoporosis, menopause, and much more. BACK COVER DESCRIPTIONAdd years to your life with this age-old approach to good health. For thousands of years people have turned to yoga to enhance their quality of life – for good reason. Regularly practicing yoga builds physical flexibility and strength, improves concentration, and relieves stress. With this unique yoga program, you'll discover just how easy it is to develop and maintain an active, healthy lifestyle, regardless of age or physical condition. Step-by-step instructions and detailed line drawings guide you through more than 80 gentle asanas (poses), specifically selected to help you: · KEEP YOUR BODY STRONG AND YOUTHFUL · MAINTAIN YOUR VITALITY · ALLEVIATE CHRONIC HEALTH PROBLEMS, RANGING FROM BACK PAIN TO ARTHRITIS Plus, a full chapter teaching modified yoga positions will allow you to begin your practice gently and set a pace that best suits your needs. TABLE OF CONTENTSChapter 1: Understanding Yoga Chapter 2: Before You Begin Chapter 3: Easy Yoga Chapter 4: Yoga Fountain of Youth Chapter 5: Yoga for a Youthful Back Chapter 6: Yoga to Relieve Aches and Pains Chapter 7: Yoga for Sex and Vitality EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1Wouldn’t you love to roll back the years and revive your youthful vigor and vitality? Perhaps your hope is to maintain your current fitness level for decades to come. Whether you’re twenty-five, forty-five or even sixty-five, you can turn to yoga for help. The anti-aging yoga program described in this book approaches lifelong wellness in a unique way that integrates your body, mind and spirit. Regardless of how young or old you are, you’ll find that practicing these poses for just a few minutes a day can turn back your biological clock and slow down most, if not all, of the declines associated with aging. Regular yoga practice is a wise investment in your physical and mental future from which you’ll reap benefits well into your golden years. The gentle stretching, strengthening and soothing poses in Yoga For Longevity are accessible to people of all ages and levels of fitness and flexibility. They’re integrated into a lifestyle modification program that promotes longevity, reduces the risk of age-related diseases, and helps ease back, arthritis aches and pains, menopause and prostate problems, and diminished sexual drive or impotence. You’re never too old or too out of shape to begin a yoga program. After you’ve learned a few basic moves in Chapter 2, the real progress begins with Chapter 3, “Easy Yoga”, designed for absolute beginners, older adults, and people who haven’t exercised in years. Don’t be intimidated by the challenge of pretzel-like yoga poses so often featured in the press. Easy Yoga’s simple postures will safely and gradually help you increase your workout intensity, whatever your starting point. Easy Yoga poses will also help improve and maintain your flexibility, aid in coordination and body control, increase your freedom of movement and ultimately improve your balance. From there you’ll move on to the core of my longevity program, the Yoga Fountain of Youth. The dynamic combination of yoga and aerobics laid out in Chapter 4 promotes cardiovascular health, lowers the risk of cancer, strengthens muscles and bones, boosts immune system functioning, manages weight and keep skin looking young. The chapter includes workouts at the Beginner, Intermediates and Maintenance levels, and all of these workouts combine Sun Salutation and inversion poses. You may be searching for a lasting fix to relieve nagging back pain, or you may want to prevent future backaches. From a yoga point of view, overall wellness and longevity begins with a healthy spine. Practicing yoga poses from Chapter 5, “Yoga For A Youthful Back”, just a few minutes a day is excellent insurance against back pain. With yoga-strengthened back muscles you’ll be youthfully active for as long as you live. If you’re one of the millions of people who suffer from pain in their joints, Chapter 6, “Yoga To Relieve Aches And Pains”, offers a soothing yoga practice to help ease and prevent such pain. Doing these yoga poses will help keep your joints and muscles supple, allowing you to move more easily. Yoga practice has been proven one of the most effective ways to restore joint health, relieve muscular tension, and improve strength. The yoga poses offered in Chapter 7, “Yoga For Sex And Vitality”, can help those experiencing unwanted symptoms of perimenopause, menopause, osteoporosis, prostate problems, impotence or a reduced sex drive. Many detrimental midlife changes, such as diminishing hormone levels, weight gain or loss of libido, can - at least in part, be alleviated by following this yoga program. In addition, the chapter includes a tantric yoga practice that can help you to enhance your sexuality. I’ve found that combining yoga with self-massage and body-work techniques can be a powerful way to help restore the body’s natural balance, increase well-being and relieve chronic pain. In the chapters that follow you’ll find yoga poses joined with self-massage techniques, such as do-in and self-acupressure. Together they will help to relieve and prevent tension and tightness, make you muscles more flexible, and increase blood circulation. Practiced together, yoga and self-massage are a dynamic healing duo. Do-In and acupressure are Asian self-massage healing techniques which have been practiced for thousands of years. Both employ touching, tapping, rubbing, pressure and stretching to move the vital life forces, called ch’i (or, in the yoga tradition, prana), to clear energy blockages, increase circulation and harmonize the body. Self-massage balances ch’i vital energy with pressure and stretching of the acupressure points along meridian pathways through which ch’i flows. For many reasons, such as aging, illness, stress, and trauma, tension accumulates around the acupressure points, thereby obstructing the proper flow of ch’i through the body. Self-massage helps release this tension so that your ch’i can circulate freely, optimizing your body’s self-healing powers. Another excellent way to complement and strengthen your yoga practice is to join it with body-mind disciplines. Yoga For Longevity features yoga combined with the Western somatic body-mind disciplines Ideokinesis and Pilates. These are therapeutic practices that retrain and integrate mind and body to improve movement efficiency. Ideokinesis is a system of movement education and therapy based on the use of visualization and imagery. In Chapter 5, you’ll learn how to use Ideokinesis imagery as you practice specific yoga poses to reeducate and integrate the body’s movement patterns. The Pilates method is a system of body conditioning and strengthening exercises focused on the abdominal, pelvic and back muscles - the ‘power center’, or ‘core’, of the body. Also in Chapter 5, specialized Pilates movements are incorporated into yoga poses to help you build ‘core’ strength (without building bulk) and improve your alignment and flexibility. Over the years, I’ve studied and practiced many hatha yoga styles such as Integral, Iyengar, ashtanga vinyasa, kundalini, mantra, raja and tantra, and have been especially interested in yoga’s therapeutic applications. I have observed individuals and groups practicing yoga, and have seen its power to help them lose weight and relieve stress while they increase their energy, strength and longevity. I’ve written my yoga book series - the first four being, Yoga For Weight Loss, Yoga For Longevity, Yoga For Stress Relief and Yoga For Energy and Strength - as self-help guides in response to people’s many fitness, diet and wellness problems, questions and concerns. I’ve had an opportunity to apply yoga techniques to help people achieve their wellness goals, and I’ve seen spectacular results. My greatest wish is to share with you the many wonderful benefits yoga practice has given to me and the individuals I’ve assisted over the years. Whether you’re looking to lose weight, boost your energy, relieve stress or find the fountain of youth, I’ve created a yoga book for you. YOGA POSESPOSE FROM CHAPTER 2 - COMPLETE BREATH(PRANAYAMA) What it does: Research indicates that breathing slowly and deeply sends a message to the body and mind that all is well, thereby interrupting the stress cycle. Deep, diaphragmatic breathing requires all of the abdominal muscles to compress and expel the air from the lungs completely. How To Do It: 1. Sit comfortably in a chair, or on the floor in a cross-legged position. Keep your back straight and your neck and head aligned with your spinal column. 2. Breathe in slowly through your nose (mouth closed!) to the count of 4. Allow your diaphragm to descend, expanding the middle rib cage, then expanding the base of the lungs. Hold for a moment. 3. Breathe out through your nose, releasing the air slowly to the count of 8. Exhale from the upper part of the lungs, then the middle rib cage. Slightly contract your abdominal muscles and squeeze all the air out. 4. Repeat 6 times. |
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