Cedar Crest	UPDATED: Friday, May 16, 2008
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Yoga builds strength and flexibility

Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008

By Joel Keller
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

“Challenge yourself! This is your workout!”

Instructor Julie Cilley stands on the edge of Cedar Crest’s indoor swimming pool, encouraging her class in the water below to hold themselves up with the support of colorful, buoyant foam bands. The students comply, lifting their feet off the pool’s floor like a gymnast on the parallel bars. They hold for a second and release. All the while, soothing New Age music plays in the background.

If this sounds like yoga to you, then you’d be correct. It’s just yoga with an aquatic twist. But that twist is one that’s most beneficial to the students.

Do more in the water
Cilley’s Yoga Afloat class, which meets every Wednesday at the retirement community’s aquatics center, has been the most popular of the yoga classes offered there, mainly because the students can accomplish more in the water than they can on dry land.

“The biggest piece is that these moves are ones that the older population may have trouble doing outside of the water,” says Cilley. The buoyancy of the water helps support the joints, allowing for greater range of movement. The water gives the students an added benefit, according to Cilley: “If they fall, they just fall into the water.”

Benefits of yoga
In or out of the water, yoga is benefi cial for a number of reasons. It combines breathing techniques with a series of low-impact postures, or “asanas” to create a sort of moving meditation. People who practice it on a regular basis report increased flexibility, strength, and balance. They also experience an overall more relaxed state of being, as resting heart rates, respiration rates, and blood pressure decrease in people who practice regularly.

For people over 50, yoga has the added benefi t of easing the symptoms of a number of conditions, from arthritis to high blood pressure.

Cilley eases her students into each pose, making sure that she doesn’t hold each one for too long. And she constantly checks that her students are focused and serene in each posture.

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“A lot of it is about relaxation,” says Cilley. “We focus on breath work during each of the asanas.” She feels the aquatics center, with its glass-enclosed swimming pool and assorted trees and plants, helps the students achieve the desired level of relaxation. “This environment is a beautiful place for yoga,” she says. “It’s peaceful and encourages relaxation— that inner peace.”

“Building up core strength is important for my back,” says Helen Johnson, one Cilley’s students. “My joints are more flexible.”

Relaxing body and mind
Some people just like the challenge of yoga. “I like (the class) because it’s hard for me to do,” says Polly Watts, another class member. “Every week it gets easier. You feel like a million dollars in nickels and dimes after you come (to the class). One week you can’t do something, and then it kind of clicks in how to use your muscles (in certain positions).”

Fellow student Maria Bienstock, who Watts lovingly called a “water nymph,” uses the swimming pool at Cedar Crest five days a week, mainly to do aqua aerobics. She had never practiced yoga before, but she has enjoyed Yoga Afl oat because it “relaxes my mind and my body. I feel more confi dent” after a session, she says.

Arthritis and other conditions have limited her movement on land, but she loves the water because “in the water, I’m perfect. I never have aches and pains. It keeps me alive.”