Yoga-Given Agility

by Nina Rook

Portage by Marie Lossky (@Marie.Lossky on Instagram)

I balance the battered aluminum can of river water carefully on a tree root, grasp another root higher up the bank, step one foot onto a rock a couple of feet off the river bed, hoist myself up, recover the can and repeat. Then I dodge a fallen sapling, reach a flatter part of the slope, and scramble up the rest of the bank, can in hand and water still in can.

Tent camping came back into my life four years ago after a 35-year hiatus. I had lost access to a beloved weekend retreat, which had been part of my life for most of those years. I had felt a deep connection with that space, that ecosystem, that quiet. Now I felt that my life was more constrained, more domesticated. I would still take routine hikes with friends, but the long, out-and-back drives to the trail head seemed to dominate the experience. Then a good friend mentioned that she had a tent and was up for using it. A trip to the discount website later, I was equipped with tent, sleeping bag, and pad, and we were ready for new adventures.

On overnight or weekend trips, the same drives can lead to two or three separate hikes, and to long evenings of companionship or simple stillness. On recent trips, I have gazed at the Persiads, been mobbed by chipmunks, and watched river otters, ravens, and picas. But there are also cars to load, tents to put up and break down, firewood to secure, and, in the case of this weekend's primitive campsite, water to haul. And then the “comfort” of a 2-inch foam mat to sink down on. Without my confidence in my yoga-given agility, I doubt that I would have even considered such an activity at 67.

I found yoga at an emotional low point at the end of a long marriage when I felt the weight of sadness settling on my shoulders, in the form of a burgeoning dowager’s hump as well as in my psyche. It was a revelation to find that I could straighten out a bit, open up, become stronger, and gradually develop some flexibility and balance. As I continued my practice, I found that mental changes—both improved mental focus and comfort with uncertainty—accompanied the physical. While I realize that my yoga-enabled sense of self is available to me any time or place, I especially appreciate the wonderful range of “activities of daily living” that I still have access to—including tent camping.

I remember always being strong, and having good stamina and endurance, but while I could walk for miles, my shaky balance, inflexibility, and inattentiveness led to more than my share of sprains, strains, and injuries from torqued knees. The physical pastimes I chose before yoga all played to my strengths—hiking, inelegant but persistent swimming, jogging—and then injuries would cause me to step back. It was not until I had started a regular yoga practice that I realized other things were in my reach—literally the furthest plum on the branch I was trying to harvest as well as figuratively. For a while I was occasionally docking a boat singlehandedly against a fast-moving current, a task that requires judging distances and speeds, stilling the boat as much as possible, jumping out at the right second with cleat in one hand and line in the other, and quickly securing everything. For twelve years it included the practice of aikido, a martial art embodying flexibility, deflection and balance—about as far from my original, rigid and unbalanced roots as I could hope to be.

Today, my “activities of daily living” include working on my 1922 home, maintaining a 9-foot laurel hedge in its large, exuberant and challenging yard (if you have ever had an over-active laurel hedge, you know the mano a mano battle this involves), exploring Italy via public transport, growing and preserving a range of fruit and vegetables, and hoping to keep myself open and available to the needs of friends, family and others.

Success. Time to wash the dishes. 

Nina Rook was in the first graduating class of Yoga for Healthy Aging certified teachers in 2015. She has practiced yoga in the Iyengar tradition for over 20 years and taught for 15, with teacher training from Felicity Green and Joanne Hill. Nina has completed multiple workshops each with Judith Lasater (restorative), Elise Miller (back care), Donald Moyer (asana), and Doug Keller (yoga therapy), and has taken Julie Gudmestad’s week-long Yoga Anatomy workshop 2 1/2 times. She continues to study with Brooklyn-based Iyengar teacher Lara Warren, and with Karin Montali in Camerino, Italy. In addition to her ongoing classes in Tacoma, Washington she offers intensive workshops at several locations. You can find her on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/nina.rook.yoga/ or email her at nina.rook.yoga@gmail.com

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Staying Upright: About Our Postural Reflexes, Balance, and Yoga

by Baxter

Playing at Giants by Francisco Goya

In the course of researching agility and balance, I came upon the mention of “postural reflexes.” We humans have a lot of reflexes, so I was not exactly sure what these reflexes were. But I began to do some digging. 

It turns out that you have a couple of reflexes that automatically correct the orientation of your body when it shifts from being up upright. They kick into action when unexpected events throw you off balance so your body can prevent you from falling by quickly attempting to self-correct. Imagine turning and suddenly almost (or actually) bumping into someone, walking down a slick ramp and suddenly slipping a bit, or reaching that darn crack in the side walk that trips you up. They also kick into action during everyday balancing activities, such as when you are standing on a chair in the kitchen trying to reach into the upper shelf or when you are walking on the raised edge of a curb just for the fun of it. 

Our postural reflexes start to develop when we are infants starting to sit up, advance when we are toddlers learning to walk, and continue to be refined through adolescence into young adulthood. In the early days staying upright requires a lot of conscious effort, but with time and practice, our coordinated, muscular responses to being off balance or anticipating loss of balance become more subconscious and reflexive.

These postural responses that keep you upright (or try to!) are a result of information sent to your brain from your inner ears and eyes, the pressure sensors on your feet, and your proprioceptors (the nerves that tell you where you are space). As we age, our postural reflexes may slow down due to age-related changes in one or more of the components of this complex system.

However, in studies of older stroke victims who initially show a decrease in postural reflexes after their stroke there is evidence that practicing agility exercises helps them regain some of their lost function. So although there have been no specific studies of on yoga and postural reflexes, it’s likely that practicing a variety of yoga poses to improve strength, flexibility, balance, and agility would help you maintain and/or improve your postural reflexes. For maintaining postural reflexes, I would particularly recommend strength building practices, as well as balance and agility practices, both static and dynamic variations. 

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New Thoughts About Agility and Yoga

by Nina

The Football Players by Henri Rousseau

Yes, as Baxter and I continue to learn, our thoughts about some of the topics we've already written about continue to evolve. Sometimes we even realize that what we said before was incorrect. So even though we wrote about agility, aging, and yoga as recently as a year ago in our post Yoga for Agility: An Overview, it's time for a little update because we have some new things to say! First I'll say something about what agility is—and what contributes to your ability to be agile. Then we'll look at how yoga helps you maintain agility as you age.

About Agility

Agility is the ability to move easily through a series of positions while you stay balanced and in control. Some everyday situations that require agility are getting in and out of a car (especially the back seat of a two-door!) and getting up and down from the floor. Often speed is required as well as coordination, such as when you walk down a crowded city sidewalk (have you ever been to New York City?) or scoop up a ball that’s rolling along the ground. 

For those of you who play sports, such as tennis, basketball, and soccer, maintaining agility will enhance your performance. Maintaining agility also helps prevent falls, a serious—sometimes life-threatening—problem for older people.

Being agile and coordinated requires a combination of a number of physical and mental skills. First of all, to move with ease, you need all three of the other essential skills that you’re already working on: strength, flexibility, and balance. And, importantly, to stay upright as you move from one position to another, the same postural reflexes that help you balance upright in static poses also help you stay upright when you’re moving from one position to another. 

Exteroception and Proprioception. The ability to make coordinated, precise movements comes from combining the three essential physical skills with knowing where you are in space. As we discussed in How We Balance, exteroception, the ability to feel what is interacting with the exterior of your body, and proprioception, the ability to tell where one body part is in relation to another, both allow you to maintain your balance in a static position. These same senses allow you to maintain your balance and sense of where your body is in space as you move from one position to another, so both are as important for agility as they are for balance. 

Vision, Hearing, and Touch. Whether you are walking down a crowded sidewalk your during lunch hour, hiking a mountain path, or doing Sun Salutations in a crowded classroom, you also need your eyes, ears, and sense of touch to tell you where you are in space, and to provide you with information about possible obstacles and your relationship to them. Is that someone riding a skateboard behind me? Is that slippery rock in the middle of path over there? Should I step back a bit so I don’t hit that person next to me when I bring my arms out to the sides? Or—oops—did I already do it?

Focus. Unless you’re doing a series of movements that have become automatic, your ability to concentrate as you move from one position to another is a very important aspect of agility. Becoming distracted can throw you off balance or cause you to run into an obstacle. Let’s say you’re at a music festival weaving your way through the obstacle course of other people trying to find good spot, blankets, chairs, and coolers set up by people already dug in, and toddlers bolting off in random directions. If you stopped looking where you’re going or paying attention to where your feet were taking you, just imagine!

And even for a routine set of movements, such as Sun Salutations, some amount of mental focus is needed, as complete distraction causes you to lose track of where you are or suddenly find yourself doing the wrong thing (been there, done that).

Speed. For those times when you need to respond quickly as well as with coordinated movement, your strength is particularly important. Because the fast-twitch muscle fibers in your muscles affect the speed and explosiveness of your muscle contractions, strong muscles provide you with both power and velocity. But moving with speed on a regular basis will also prepare you for those situations when being agile means responding rapidly. In addition, a healthy somatic nervous system—the part of your nervous system that provides you with voluntary control of your body movements—is important for quick, coordinated responses to your requests for movement (see section x for information). When you think, “step forward right foot,” you want fast results!

How Yoga Helps

A well-rounded yoga practice that cultivates strength, flexibility, and balance will also enhance your agility.  But yoga enables you to work directly on the coordination and speed aspects of agility with the following: 

Dynamic Poses and Flow Sequences. Moving dynamically in and out of poses with your breath or between linked poses in flow sequences allows you to practice quick, precise movements. This improves your overall coordination, and exercises the fast-twitch fibers that assist in quick movements. The wide range of dynamic poses and flow sequences that you can choose from (and the ability to make up new ones!) provides you with enough variability to address virtually all your muscles and to stay challenged. 

Static Poses. Moving in and out of static poses with precision helps improve coordination. And making subtle adjustments to your alignment while you’re in a pose refines your ability to sense where you are in space and improves fine motor control (as you start to use rarely used muscles). The large repertoire of yoga poses plus their many variations means you can use virtually all your muscles—in many different ways—throughout a given week, rather just doing the same basic movements over and over. 

To maintain your fast-twitch fibers, you can focus on strength-building practices in static poses, particularly standing poses and that mimic getting up and down. And practicing all types of balance poses, especially using the  challenge techniques we recommend, such as varying the surface you practice on and practicing standing poses with closed eyes, will also help maintain fast-twitch fibers as well as postural reflexes.

Floor Poses. Getting up and down from the floor on a regular basis helps you maintain agility (and it’s one of the things you need agility for!). So just the act of adding floor poses to your practice is beneficial, even if you have to use support to get up and down.

Mindfulness. For all poses, practicing mindfully engages and refines your senses. For vision, you use your eyes to verify your alignment. Are your feet evenly aligned on the floor or is your foot really turned out? For hearing, you use your ears to note how gracefully or awkwardly you make certain movements—when you step into a new position, are you coming down lightly or heavily? For your sense of touch, you can observe how evenly you are pressing into the floor or onto a prop, and notice when one part of your body is touching another (sometimes that means you’re doing the pose right and other times—oops!).

Nerve Health. To maintain speed, you can use your asana practice to support the health of your somatic nervous system. Practicing a wide variety of poses and movement patterns will activate all those nerves on a regular basis. Active poses will improve blood flow to your special sensory nerve receptors (the nerves that shuttle information back to the brain) and stretching poses will create space around your nerves. Finally, balancing poses and flow sequences will help keep your proprioceptors—the nerves that allow you to sense where you are in space—healthy. 

Mental Focus. Moving through flow sequences trains your mind as you return your focus again and again to making quick, precise movements while maintaining balance. You notice shifting sensations—the feeling of being on or off balance—and when extraneous thoughts take you away from your movements. In addition, breath practices and meditation can improve your mental focus in general, benefitting your balance both inside and outside the yoga room.

Cognitive Distraction. When you’re ready for more advanced challenges, you can prepare for real-world situations by adding cognitive distraction to your agility practices. Although you can’t toss a ball from hand to hand while practice a flow sequence, you can play music or talk radio, or have some pets or small children—watch out!—join you in the yoga room. 

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Cultivating Agility with Yoga

by Baxter and Nina

Nina's Great Aunt Isa, who danced with Nijinsky

Once when Nina was flying across the country and she was sitting in the middle seat, she reached that point when she really, really needed to go the restroom. The problem was, she was flying with her yoga teacher, and he was sitting in the aisle seat, deep in meditation. So rather than disturbing her teacher by asking him to stand up, she just quietly stepped over him using the two armrests. Later on, she told her teacher how two of the flight attendants had stopped her to talk to her about how she had climbed over a meditating yoga teacher. She said, “They seemed more fascinated by the fact that I climbed over you than by the fact that you were meditating.” He just nodded sagely and said, “Duh!” She thought for a moment and said, “Oh, you mean, they’re not used to seeing a woman my age being so agile.”

Agility means having the coordination and reflexes to respond quickly and nimbly to physical challenges in the real world. Whether this translates into being able to navigate through a crowd, dance the salsa with a partner, or dribble a soccer ball down a field, being agile allows you to move through all the activities of your life with grace and ease (not to mention preventing injuries).

Learning a wide range of yoga poses helps you maintain and even increase agility because the subtle movements you make as you do them wake up the nerve endings in your joints and muscles (your proprioceptors) that send signals to your brain to let you know where you are in space, which direction you are heading and how fast you are going. This increased body awareness will aid you not only in mastering your yoga poses but also every other physical activity in which you engage.

And by learning new sequences of yoga postures—especially dynamic sequences, when you change poses after just few breaths—your coordination and response time is challenged and improved. Even making small changes in your flow sequences, such as Sun Salutations, will encourage you to stay attentive and nimble.

While you might not be climbing over meditating yoga teachers any time soon, there is a good chance you’ll want to get in and out of a kayak without tipping it over, walk down a steep, rocky path, or squeeze yourself and your suitcase into a crowded train. A regular yoga practice will keep you prepared for that—and more.

And with a good mix of held and dynamic yoga practices, you are cultivating better balance and reducing the chance of falls, which, as many of you may know, are a leading cause of morbidity (increased chance of disease) and mortality (death) in the elderly.

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Yoga for Agility

by Baxter

Agile Mugsy Pretending to be Baxter

This past weekend, Nina and I taught our first official “Yoga for Healthy Aging” workshop together in Castro Valley, CA, just a short 25 minute jaunt from Oakland.  As we were preparing for the session, we discussed some essential skills or benefits that regular asana, pranayama and meditation practice can lead to for those of us concerned with aging well. Some of the more obvious benefits include improved flexibility and mobility of muscles and joints, improved strength and improved balance. But another result that requires a combination of the previous three benefits is improved agility. And although I will be referring to mainly physical agility, experience also points to improved mental agility as a bi-product of regular practice as well.

If you search “agility” on Google, most of the first hits are about our favorite four-legged friends, dogs (down, you cat lovers!). It turns out there are actual courses you can enroll your dog in to improve his or her agility! In many ways, our yoga practice does the same for us two legged creatures! So get yourself enrolled soon if you are not already. 

So, what does “agility” entail? Well, in addition to flexibility, mobility, strength and balance, wikipedia expounds nicely on these and a few more components:

“Agility or nimbleness is the ability to change the body's position efficiently, and requires the integration of isolated movement skills using a combination of balance, coordination, speed, reflexes, strength and endurance. Agility is the ability to change the direction of the body in an efficient and effective manner and to achieve this you require a combination of: balance - the ability to maintain equilibrium when stationary or moving (i.e. not to fall over) through the coordinated actions of our sensory functions (eyes, ears and the proprioceptive organs in our joints); static balance - the ability to retain the centre of mass above the base of support in a stationary position; dynamic balance - the ability to maintain balance with body movement; speed - the ability to move all or part of the body quickly; strength - the ability of a muscle or muscle group to overcome a resistance; and lastly, co-ordination - the ability to control the movement of the body in co-operation with the body's sensory functions (e.g. catching a ball [ball, hand and eye co-ordination])”

What warms the cockles of my heart (what ever those are!) when I read this definition is how wonderfully a balanced yoga practice supports our ability to improve agility. We’ve referred to proprioceptors in past posts, and how mindful awareness of information coming from the joints to the brain allows us to master yoga postures, and improves our ability to know where we are in space and how fast we are moving. And with a good mix of held and dynamic yoga practices, we are cultivating balance and reducing the chance of falls, which, as many of you may know, are a leading cause of morbidity (increased chance of disease) and mortality (death) in the elderly. And by learning new sequences of postures, especially dynamic ones, as in vinyasa practices, your co-ordination is challenged and improved. I often like to make small changes in flow sequences like sun and moon salutes to continue to challenge students to be attentive and as a way of assessing the mental and physical nimbleness in making quick changes in a safe and effective way. And whether this translates into being able to quickly navigate a crowd or maintain your stationary balance on the crowded commuter train, agility means having one more beneficial tool to live a full life. And yoga delivers it! 

Ready to try? You might do the following:

1. Work daily on a few basic balancing poses, such as Tree, Half Moon, Warrior 3.
2. When doing Sun Salutations at home, change your foot placement an inch or so as you step forward and back, and try to be precise at landing on your new mark.
3. Look at your mix of static poses and dynamic sequences, and add in what is lacking of one or the other. 

Until next time, zip, zip, zip…I’m outa’ here! (By the way, turns out cockles are small, edible saltwater clams!  And allusion, no doubt, to the valves in our heart.)

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