Muscle Control Package, Learn to Feel Your Body

Muscle control is the primary way that you feel your body.

As an example, each time you focus on your breath, the "feeling" of your breath is created by muscles activating and relaxing.

When focusing on your breath you are actually focusing on feeling the muscles that you breath with activate and relax (unless you are concentrating on the feeling of air passing through your nasal passage or your throat or mouth).

Muscle activation and relaxation is what provides the different sensations of inhaling and exhaling.

Exploring Different Ways of Using Your Body

As a yoga teacher, I'm constantly exploring new exercises, new ways of doing yoga poses. Each new way isn't necessarily better. It is simply a different way of using the body.

There is no single "right way" of doing a yoga pose. Instead, there are options. And the better you are at "feeling" your body, the better you can get at choosing the right option for your body as it is now.

Taking the Time to Learn

Often in a yoga class you don't have the time or opportunity to actually learn your body. You are too busy moving from pose to pose, or you get so much information in a short period of time that its difficult to remember any of it, let alone all of it. And then in the next class you are learning something different and so it takes a long time (and a lot of classes) to actually learn anything.

As a teacher my goal is to help my students learn to feel and control their body. My goal is to help them learn. (Not just give them a good workout). As a result, we'll practice a technique over the course of several poses, or even throughout a practice.

The idea is to become good at using each technique to the point that it can be used in any pose, even those it hasn't been practiced in. And of course, the idea is that they actually learn the technique so that they can remember it easily.

And if that isn't the case, then what I focus on doing is giving students clear instructions. Often this can involve using a particular intent or focus within a pose with the result that doing the pose becomes easier, not because of some skill, but simply from a change in focus, a change in what they are "doing" within the pose.

Learning to Drive (your body)

The first approach is a little like learning to drive a car, or better yet, a motorcycle. You practice using the brakes so that you know how to use them. Then you learn how to steer. Only once you have learned a skill to the point that you can do it without thinking about how to do it do you move on to the next skill.

Note that the goal here isn't perfection. That comes with practice. Instead the idea is to be able to do a particular skill without having to think about how to do it, so that then you can practice it whenever the opportunity arises.

The second approach, that comes from learning how to teach effectively and is also based on a understanding how the body and mind can work well together.

And these are more or less the approaches taken in this collection of body awareness (proprioception) ebooks and videos. Some focus on a particular technique (or set of techniques) so that you can become proficient at the use of that technique. Some focus on giving you simple and clear instructions with the idea of teaching "basic principles" that you can apply in learning and doing any pose.

All of these books and videos include elements of "feel" and an element of "control". So you'll not just be learning techniques, instead, each technique is a means of helping you to learn to feel and control your body. And that means they can be applicable in anything, not just yoga!

Getting into the Flow

One of the interesting side effects of practicing muscle control is that you don't have to be constantly flowing from pose to pose in order to get into the flow. the simple act of feeling your muscles activate and relax helps get you there.

As a result, you may find that your yoga practices that where you focus on muscle control can leave you feeling refreshed and energized and not worn out.

With muscle control, the focus is on what is going on inside of your body. And the focus is on deliberately creating changes within your body. While there is some movement, the changes are smaller and more regular than simply doing vinyasas from one pose to the next.

Minimizing Effort and Maximizing Effect

An advantage of muscle control, particularly if you practice slow and smooth activations and relaxations (a point that is particularly evident in the videos) is that you can get better at feeling the minimum required effort to do a pose.

You'll still be working in your poses, there will still be muscular activation (since you need it to feel your body) however, the activation, the effort will be the minimum required.