Anti-gravity Yoga

Earlier this week, I took a class I've been wanting to take for a couple of months, but couldn't find the time -- anti-gravity yoga.  The yoga poses are performed with the assistance of a hammock that is 9ft wide.  If you want to take anti-gravity yoga, you have to be able to trust your body.  As long as you have the hammock wrapped correctly, you will fall or flip into the inversion poses without fail.  My favorite pose was the "bat" -- which was appropriately named.  We hung upside down like a bat and the hammock was wrapped the same way as a bat's wings.  


*I stole these pictures from Google since I didn't take any myself. :)

The class also included some strength training with the hammock (similar to TRX, but even harder).  My back and shoulders were yelling at me the next day (in a good way).

Toward the end of class, the instructor had us in a pose she coined "the strapless dress" for the girls and "the beach towel" for the guys, which was basically just lying on your stomach.  And, then she pushed us for no reason other than to just feel like a kid again swinging back and forth.  I LOVED it!


We ended with the "cocoon", which was basically doing corpse pose in the hammock.  Unfortunately, because we were swinging earlier, the hammock still had a lot of motion, I ended up getting seasick and had to wait it out for 30 minutes before I could drive home.  

This class is one of those where you feel like you need to be in better shape to take it, but you also need to take it more to get in better shape.  Even two weeks after IM, I was still a little tight in certain places and I felt the extra push you get in some of these poses helped open up some of those areas -- especially in my hip flexors.  I would take it again, but next time I'd take a Dramamine first.