Yoga for Better Balance

Transcript

hi I'm Judy bar yoga program manager for the Cleveland Clinic who wouldn't like to have more balance in their daily life I'm going to show you a few yoga moves that can help to strengthen your leg muscles that helps you to have better balance and also teach you to find a way to have more of a peaceful calm with life's daily challenges so here's a couple things that you can do very simply generally it's best to have your shoes off but if you prefer to do it with your shoes on you can the first is called rocking horse and what this does is helps to strengthen the knees and some of the lower leg muscles kind of warms up the feet the next Parts the more challenging part you come up to your tip toes and hold whoops see how I start to roll down come back and come up you really need to use your core a lot more when you're practicing your balance so down and then hold good another one to do it's called grandfather clock and the reason is is because we're swaying back and forth so as we go back and forth we're taking our body weight off the center I'm going to show you we're going to swoop up to come to tree POS now see how I'm kind of zigzagging here to try to stay upright that's actually the good thing we don't want to have a perfect balance what we want to do is kind of work through it so that our whole body has to get used to it from the brain and our muscles so we did one side now we're going to do the other and as we go side to side we're swooping up because what happens is when we fall our body weight is usually off our center of gravity so we're practicing being able to do that okay the next pose is just the plain tree pose where we're going to keep our weight straight head bring a foot up and it can start low we call this shrub and all the way up here to full tree pose and ideally standing here for about 30 seconds so if your mind wanders or you find yourself having a hard time balancing just bring it back to the single point that you're staring at at the wall it'll help calm the mind and it'll actually help you balance better remember in all yoga do both sides so to sum it up it's not about having a perfect balance it's what your mind and brain is learning along with your muscles in order to keep you balanced than it is to be perfectly balanced at that particular moment thank you