I’m a 19 year old ballet student, and I find myself of normal flexibility for a dancer but my turnout is very poor. I know it depends a lot on my hip position, but I’m still hoping that there is something I can do about it. Can everyone get a perfect turnout?

Julija, I don’t know that much about dance. I know very little about dance. You are right in that people’s actual hip structure does have some limitation in their ability for lateral rotation and things like this. In terms of can somebody get a perfect turnout, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s really true.

I’ve heard full frog position can be harmful for my knees, is it true?

Frog position, I don’t know who originally started teaching it. I first learned it in a Baron Baptiste-style yoga class. Not from Baron Baptiste himself, so I’m not sure he started that or who started teaching it, but I personally don’t like the pose. I’ve never been able to get into it without, same thing, just having my knees feel like they’re smashing into the floor.

If you don’t know what a frog pose is, it’s like doing the side splits but with your knees bent, and so your legs are going out to the side and your butt’s in the air and you look kind of like a frog. I find it to be a really awkward pose and puts a lot of pressure on the knee, and I don’t really find it to be a good groin and hip stretch, the way that a full box splits is, so I’m not a big fan. I don’t ever practice it, and I don’t ever teach it.

That said, there are smart teachers and really experienced teachers out there that use it, and so maybe I just need to prop up and use towels or something, but again, I’m not a big fan of that pose so I would say skip it.

In terms of poses for your hips, the one we always teach is something called blaster, which is absolutely fantastic. A pose called butterfly and those are all really great hip poses. And the whole series, which are a series of asymmetrical forward bends and twists that are from the Ashtanga yoga series, those are great for your hips as well.

The key thing to understand about your hips, more than other areas, is that there are so many different muscles and connective tissues involved that it just takes a bit longer. So you’re working on your hamstrings, you have a few muscles that you’re working on. When you’re working on your hips you literally have over a dozen, so it could just take longer, you need to hold poses longer and you need to be a little more patient. But the good news is that the changes are quite lasting, and it’s really quite noticeable in terms of your range of motion.

I wish I had a more definitive answer for you, but I would definitely recommend you keep stretching. I always focus less on structural limitations and more on physical potential, because I find very few people kind of hit a wall, in terms of their structural limitations.

I have been doing hot yoga now for approximately two years as a student. Now I have noticed that my skin is very dry. Can you tell me if this can be as a result of being in a hot room for prolonged periods of time?

Hot yoga, heated yoga, is usually a room about 38 to 42 degrees Celsius, somewhere around 100, 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and you sweat a lot. You sweat abnormally a lot, and that can be really, really powerful for cleansing, but for sure some people have skin reactions to it.

There’s other things that can happen, too, Elaine, that people don’t talk about that much, but what happens when you sweat a lot is you detoxify quite quickly, because your skin is your biggest detoxifying organ of your body. Your liver is the one everybody thinks of, but your skin is actually bigger and it’s huge for detoxification. This is why, for example, a smoker or a drinker, you can smell it on their skin. If you put their arm up to your nose and smell it, you can smell the alcohol on their skin. You can smell the tobacco, the nicotine, on their skin as well. You sweat it out.

So when you start sweating more, you can sweat out more toxins if you have a toxic accumulation, which most of us do, and for some people that can give you a reaction and that’s why some people will get different sort of eczema and different skin conditions and things like that.

All that said, it might not necessarily be that at all. It might just be that your skin reacts to heat, which some people do. I lived in the tropics for years, and some people, specifically people of Northern European decent would come and they’d really, really suffer with skin rashes and flaky skin and all kinds of things, probably just because they either hadn’t been used to it in their life or genetically their skin just couldn’t really handle that much sun and that much heat and humidity.

In terms of trusting your instincts, it sounds like you know what’s going on. One thing that can be really helpful is, topical stuff of course is great but also supplementing internally with really healthy fats can be a really great thing to use. And for skin and hair, what a lot of people use is coconut oil, virgin, cold-pressed coconut oil, and a tablespoon a day, let’s say somewhere around seven grams or something like that, can be really fantastic for providing your body with some really healthy fats that can get into your skin and get into your hair as well.

How do I remedy nausea I’m experiencing from inverted poses hanging from the trapeze?

Nausea in yoga is an interesting thing. People will get nauseous doing deep backbends. They’ll get nauseous doing inverted poses, like headstands. Not usually in a handstand, for whatever reason, but in a headstand they might, and definitely on the yoga trapeze when people first start doing supported inversions on the yoga trapeze. Some people can feel nausea.

The thing I’ll tell you about nausea, it’s weird, it goes away. In the same way that if you go on a boat for the first time in a long time, you’ll get seasick, and in the same way if you go on a very windy drive in a car you’ll get car sick. The people who drive those roads every day or who go on those boats every day, they don’t get sick at all. Really what happens is, your body gets used to it.

Now all that said, in my experience, I’ve travelled a lot and been on lots of boats and lots of windy roads and it seems like for whatever reason, different people experience vertigo and nausea at different rates. I get sick very, very easily. I go on the simplest of circular motion, circus kind of fair ride, like literally horses going up and down in a circle and I get very, very sick. Other people, it seems like they can close their eyes and go on a rocking boat for three hours and wake up and just feel completely fine.

But everybody can acclimate, and so the key thing is if you’re feeling a little bit nauseous doing forward bends, deep back bends, doing inversions and yoga poses or using the yoga trapeze, just take it really slow and give yourself a couple of days to acclimate and most people will find that they’ll get used to it very easily. Coming in and out of poses very, very slowly helps, because obviously you’re going to have a blood rush.

Does it matter where you get the sun on your body? What particular parts of the body should be exposed to the sun? If I cover my face up and just expose my hands or feet, is that enough?

Ling’s asking this in reference to vitamin D deficiency, which a lot of people have right now, probably more so than ever in history just because we spend so much time indoors and because there’s people inhabiting parts of the world that probably they wouldn’t inhabit if we didn’t have such great artificial climate control.

In terms of getting sun, everybody’s got different recommendations. The real recommendation is go to the doctor, get a $50 blood test and see where your vitamin D levels are at, and if they’re low then figure out a way to try to get more sun. You can also supplement. There’s two different types of supplements. There’s vitamin D2, which comes from plants, and there’s vitamin D3, which comes from the animal world. It comes from a few different sources, but it’s usually a byproduct of the wool industry. It can be a byproduct of other industries. I don’t love that it comes from wool. I don’t love the wool industry at all. I don’t like any of these animal industries really, they’re all pretty, when you get down to it, a lot of them have some really bad practices.

But all that said, D3 is many times more effective than D2, in terms of increasing your vitamin D levels in your body, to the point where almost everything is switching over to vitamin D3 these days. For example, milk is commonly fortified with vitamin D2 and more and more it’s getting fortified with vitamin D3.

If your body’s covered up, is it enough to get it on your face? No, not really. For maximum exposure, you want to get your whole body exposed. And so ideally, people try to do some sun bathing, a real short period, like 15 minutes of sun depending on where you are. It really, really depends. If you live in the northern hemisphere, you might have to do 15 hours of sun bathing. If you live on the equator, when I’m in Thailand, literally I’ll go and lay out in the sun for seven minutes on my stomach, seven minutes on my back and I’m done, I’m literally done. And vitamin D levels, way up in the healthy level and this kind of thing without any supplementing.

But you’ll find most people, especially during winter times if you’re in a place where there’s winter season, a lot of people will get their vitamin D levels low, and vitamin D is very, very important for your absorption of calcium. A lot of people go crazy eating calcium-rich foods. The truth is, calcium is really abundant, and it’s all over the place. The problem usually isn’t you’re not eating enough calcium. Usually you’re lacking the other minerals calcium needs to be absorbed, like magnesium and like vitamin D in particular. So for bone density, for the strength of your bones, for a number of other things, vitamin D is actually not a vitamin, it’s a hormone, that’s a longer discussion, but it’s really, really crucial and important.

I live in San Jose, CA. So what time should I be in the sun to get enough Vitamin D and for how long?

San Jose and the entire California is actually very, very sunny, and so most people living in California actually have pretty good vitamin D levels. Now that’s not everybody. I was just recently talking to a relative in mine and his blood test, he was borderline low vitamin D, and he lives in Southern California where it’s almost impossible not to be in the sun every day. So it does depend on your work habits and when you’re outside.

But in a place like California, in San Jose obviously the sun isn’t quite as strong as in the South, but it’s still a pretty sunny place. There’s a lot, a lot of sunny days. But in a place like that, you might try 15 minutes a day laying out in your backyard and just see what happens. Again, the best thing to do is to get your blood tested, and depending on the pigment of your skin and your ethnic heritage, you’re going to absorb vitamin D at a much, much different rate than somebody else.

So there is no rule of thumb. You just need to check it out and see. Some people will never, ever have an issue. They tend to be active, they absorb vitamin D very well, but for a lot of people, more and more people, it is something that you need to take a look at. The good news is, it’s safe and easy to test for, and it’s safe and easy to supplement for.

Now, I do not recommend you go crazy with vitamin D supplements. I did this myself, specifically just to see what would happen. I do a lot of these weird experiments, just to see how these things affect my body. It’s kind of a weird obsession I have. But I took a lot, a lot of vitamin D, and I started getting weird responses, like night sweats and interrupted sleep and basically it was the indication that my hormones were getting out of whack, because vitamin D is a hormone.

And so you’ll see a lot of things on your internet recommending mega, mega, mega doses of vitamin D3. I don’t think that’s wise. A mega dose would be anything about 5,000 international units per day. Generally what people are talking about now is somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 IUs per day. None of that should really be done without testing, also, because these are fat-soluble vitamins. It has hormonal impacts, really.

And so you want to make sure you get tested, and again, it’s cheap, it’s simple, it’s easy and once you kind of get over that barrier of taking control of your own health, ordering your own blood test, once you get past that it’s pretty empowering and it’s pretty cool, just to check out your own blood test and supplement your nutrition based on what’s really going on, instead of based on what some crazy like me on the internet told you makes sense. Chia Seeds

My mother-in-law is undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. Is there any diet or simple asanas she can observe?

A lot of people are trying to or using yoga, in terms of therapeutic uses. I think, personally, it’s a little bit risky to assign specific poses and specific diets, just kind of wily nily. In terms of cancer diets, in terms of what people do, there’s a woman named Kris Carr, who has a website called Crazy Sexy Cancer, which is all about her natural treatment of her cancer, and that might be a good place to start.

As a general rule, people usually get really, really heavy on raw, plant-based foods, but again, everybody’s body is different and some people might tolerate that, some people might not. But as a general rule, if we were going to talk in terms of broad strokes and generally accepted approaches, a lot of people do a really high, raw approach, primarily due to the high antioxidants and really rich nutrients, that for a number of obvious reasons, can be really helpful.

In terms of yoga poses, the best yoga poses are ones that your mother-in-law can manage. So if she has a yoga practice already, keeping going with what she’s doing. If she doesn’t have one, I’d start with something really simple. Start with like a beginner’s hatha yoga class, a 60 or a 90-minute public drop in class, and just see how she goes.

Just make sure she’s working with her doctor. Make sure her doctor says it’s okay, based on whatever medications there are. There are certain medications that she may or may not be on that may be contraindicated for yoga, so just make sure that she’s checking with her doctor.

I am taking the YOGABODY Stretch (that’s our nutritional supplement for yoga students, one of our best sellers) 2 tabs in the morning and 2 capsules at 3 pm. I’ve been also practicing gravity yoga. Can you guide me regarding the stretching exercises?

Can I guide you? The best thing is it sounds like what you’re doing is right. Make sure you’re spending at least 15 minutes per day working through the series. Make sure you’re doing long-hold, progressive stretches. Make sure that you are timing your poses. You need to meet or beat your hold times in order to progress, and you should see results very quickly. If you don’t, chances are you’re doing something wrong. So check in with those factors. Make sure you’re doing everything right.

When doing yoga, we inhale through the nose and exhale through the nose or the mouth?

This is a fantastic question. Mouth breathing is associated with all of the frenetic energetic states of our lives. So if we are physically threatened, if we are panicked, if we are on the verge of death, all of the really, really negative emotions that we experience in life or negative, really high-intensity states, are associated with mouth breathing. It’s very much a fight or flight survival mechanism. You open your mouth and you [making heavy breathing sound] and when people are hyperventilating they’ll give them a bag.

So nose breathing has a psychological, but also a physiological difference in how it affects your brain waves, how it affects your brain chemistry, how it affects the biochemical reactions in your body. With almost every state of calm, collective, loving, peaceful, meditative whatever, we’re talking nose breathing.

And so when we do yoga and we breathe through the nose, it’s one of the things that makes it very different from something like jogging. It makes it very, very different from something like running on an elliptical trainer or treadmill. It makes it very different from lifting weights, primarily because we have that mind/body connection through the breath.

Nose breathing works in some other physical practices, like Pilates for example. Even some people do jog very, very slowly, breathing through their nose, specifically to get that mind/body connection. And obviously people will do nose breathing in things like qigong and tai chi and things like this. So the nose breathing is really, really essential.

Now the exhale, interestingly enough, is almost always through the nose as well, but there are Pranayama classic, Pranayama breathing exercises where you breathe out through your nose, and there are also instances where it’s helpful in yoga practice to breathe out through your nose. Now it does have a different affect on your body. We teach it in gravity yoga. It’s often taught in Pilates, mat classes as well, in through the nose, out through the mouth.

And what it does is it breaks up the pattern of your breath, it allows you to relax deeper into poses. There is no right or wrong, in terms of how this works. I’ve just found it to be really helpful, when we’re teaching deep stretching gravity yoga poses. In a normal Vinyasa class, in a hatha yoga public class, we’ll always do nose breathing only.

But in terms of what happens to your body, it’s very, very different when you breathe through your nose. So for example, people who have trouble sleeping through the night, almost always they’re mouth breathers. They’re breathing through their mouth. And one of the very first things that you do if you have trouble sleeping through the night, and I have a lot of experience with this, I’m a chronic bad sleeper, is you take a band-aid or a plaster and you tape your mouth closed so that you breathe only through your nose. And that, for most people, immediately improves the quality of their sleep.

Because again, whether you’re breathing through your nose or your mouth is associated on a psychological but also a physiological level, with different brain wave states. And so you should never, ever discredit the importance of breathing through your nose. It’s absolutely vital.

I’m holding all the poses for five minutes. Regardless, it feels as if I am not proceeding as well as I should. Should the movements be faster, should I flex my muscles when I’m moving from pose to pose in order to warm up better?

Antti, I would keep doing what you’re doing. In terms of flexing your muscles between poses, it seems like you have a pretty good body awareness. If that works for you, do that. I don’t think that’s going to make a big difference. If you’re already holding poses for five minutes and you’re not feeling challenged by it, it’s very possible that maybe you’re already quite open and maybe the flexibility gains that you get from the gravity yoga series are not as significant as other people. That’s pretty rare. Most people notice pretty big challenges in all those poses, but if that’s the case, you could for sure start to do advanced variations.

I do not do regular yoga, with the exception of gravity poses. Should I start doing some hot yoga classes to further the benefits?

That’s really up to you. If you don’t do regular yoga classes, you can certainly do gravity yoga poses, and a lot, a lot of our students do that. They’re runners or they’re office people or they’re mixed martial artists or whatever, and they’re using gravity yoga to supplement and to increase their flexibility for whatever other activity they’re into.

It really just depends on what kind of benefits you’re looking for. If you’re purely looking for flexibility benefits, long-hold, passive poses are going to give you the fastest and the most affective results. If you’re looking for the overall mind/body health effects of yoga, which I wholeheartedly promote and teach and practice, then for sure going to public classes are great. Hot yoga is a great entry point, but any style of yoga can be fantastic, everything from a Sivananda to a power yoga, to like you said a hot yoga class.

I wish to know about the yoga trapeze. Would I be able to do a shoulder stand at approximately 70 to 75 degree angles, supported by the yoga trapeze, without slipping out?

The answer to that, Herbert, is yeah, probably. I would not recommend that. Shoulder stand, for those of you who don’t know, is like doing a headstand but you do it on your shoulders. It’s one of the most awkward poses in yoga. No matter how long you do it, it’s still just kind of awkward. Your chin is against your chest, and you’re balancing on your shoulders.

I’m not an advocate of variations in shoulder stand. People do a lot of propping and a lot of different things. I think it’s a little bit dangerous. I’m guessing since you have this specific idea of 70 to 75 degree angle, I’m guessing you have something going on with your cervical spine and somebody recommended that to you. That might be good advice, I’m not sure.

I would not recommend doing any kind of supported shoulder stand. I never recommend supported headstands either. Supported handstands are fine, but supported headstands, meaning head’s on the floor, feet are up a wall, or supported shoulder stand, same thing, using a trapeze or a teacher or a wall, I never, ever recommend that. The reason being, is aside from just using muscular strength, like a handstand does, you have a fair amount of pressure on your spine and you can get yourself into trouble.

if you’re doing freestanding shoulder stands, away from the wall, away from a teacher, without any support, if you’re doing freestanding headstands, same deal. Away from the wall, without a teacher helping you get up. I’ve never had a single person have any kind of problems with their neck or pushing themselves too far, but I’ve seen many, many cases where people are using props or teachers or the wall to come up before they’re ready or to stay up too long. It’s a very easy way to create problems, specifically in your cervical spine.

So, Herbert, you probably can do that. That makes me nervous. It sounds like you know what you’re doing though, so I would say maybe.

I’ve been doing the butterfly for 30 years or more, 7 days a week, and I still can barely touch my fingertips to the ground. Am I just a freak of nature?

Okay, so butterfly pose, you’re sitting on the floor, bring the soles of your feet together in front of you, your knees out at the sides. Ray, if you’ve really been doing this every day for 30 years and you can barely touch your fingertips to the floor, you’re doing something wrong, for sure.

Now keep in mind that this pose in particular is really challenging. If you can barely touch your fingertips to the floor, then your hips are pretty tight. So you might just try doing a different pose, like focusing on the blaster pose, focusing on pigeon pose, it’s often called, you can do that passively.

I’d try doing some other poses, but for 30 years, for sure, you should be putting your chin or your chest down on the floor. And if you’re not, you’re either stretching too short or you’re doing something with your stretching that’s not quite right or you have some kind of nutritional or nervous system thing that’s causing a problem. But yeah, you should be getting better results. I’d take a look at your process and see if you can just follow the simple rules of eating right, meeting or beating your hold times, making sure you’re passive in your stretches when you’re trying to increase flexibility, meaning body completely relaxed, and hopefully within 30 days you can get more results than you’ve gotten in 30 years.

I can’t lift over 5 pounds using both hands. How could this yoga trapeze help me? I have degenerative discs in my neck. I am going to be 62.

So, Debbie, that’s a challenging question. First of all, 62 is still quite young, and if you’re having trouble lifting 5 pounds my advice would be to get whatever help you need to make sure that you can start to rebuild your strength. Even if you have degenerative discs in your neck, you definitely want to be able to lift at least 5 pounds. You probably should be able to lift 15 or 25 pounds quite easily, especially if you’re doing it with both hands.

In terms of how the yoga trapeze can help, so the yoga trapeze, we don’t talk about this much but people use the yoga trapeze a lot for TRX-style band training. That’s a big, long phrase, but basically what people will do is they’ll do things like supported push-ups and supported pull-ups using chairs, and they’ll also do static holds where you just literally hang and hold your body weight and these can be very, very gentle and very safe ways to start to build dynamic strength.

All that said, the yoga trapeze can be great for you, but if you’re in a position where you really don’t have the strength to lift 5 pounds, I would really recommend going to a gentle yoga class to start off with and perhaps working with a person trainer who can help you with some really, really light free weights, perhaps even 1 or 3-pound handheld dumbbells that you can start to build some strength with. Strength training is incredibly, incredibly important, not to the point where you’re a body builder, but to the point where you have functional strength, where you can lift weight above your head, where you can support your own body weight.

In terms of supporting your neck and helping to heal that injury, all of these things will help. Everything in your body is connected. It’s really one unit, when we start looking at connective tissue and the web of the way your body is connected. And so I wouldn’t be surprised if developing some really, really simple tone and strength in your upper body, like in your neck and your shoulders and your arms, through some very, very safe and guided resistance training might help to relieve the pain in your neck very, very simply.

And so sometimes that’s counterintuitive, but in many cases strengthening the connective tissues around a weakened area can be very helpful. In any case, Debbie, I hope that’s useful for you. Please keep in touch, let us know how things are going.

I will do a Pranayama retreat for 9 days at my yoga university in Switzerland. I don’t like milk, and our teacher recommended us to drink milk. What do you think I should eat during the intensive pranayama?

Georg, I don’t like milk either. I think milk is just a really complicated food, for a number of reasons. I rail on milk a lot. The one thing that I will tell you is that everybody’s body is different. Some people do okay with it. If you’re looking at allergenic foods, foods that cause an allergic reaction in the body, milk, on most people’s list, is number one.

And what does that mean? Well, for some people that means they might get some gas and bloating. For other people it might mean they get some acne. For other people they might become constipated. For other people they might get brain fog and they might have signs of mood disorders and all kinds of other neurological stuff, if the inflammation is going from their gut all the way up into their brain, which does happen.

All this sounds kind of alarming. I’ll be talking more about this in the future, but I can’t tell you how many people feel much, much better if they reduce or eliminate dairy from their diet, specifically milk. Milk has the highest concentration of lactose, and casein in the protein in milk. Bovine protein, in general, is hugely problematic. We just don’t do well with it. Cows are these weird, freaked out animals. I really don’t think they’re a good source of nutrients.

So what should you do? So yes, yoga teachers always recommend milk. Yoga teachers love milk. They want you to drink kefir and curd and yogurts and milk all day long. It’s terrible for yoga practice. I’ll never stop talking about that, because it’s really terrible.

But what should you do? What I would do is make sure you bring some stuff with you. The stuff to bring would be some really nice nut butters, sesame seed butter, for example, one jar of that is a lot of nutrition and it’s really, really dense. So if you’re going away for 9 days, a 16-ounce jar of raw tahini of sesame butter is really fantastic. Almond butter is another great choice. Other things you might carry with you are nuts and seeds.

Most people, the biggest reason they think you should drink milk is because of the calcium. Ironically, the countries where there’s the most milk drinking, which is Scandinavian countries and in the United States, there’s also the highest level of osteoporosis. So it doesn’t seem like the calcium in milk is very useful. There’s actually some research suggesting the calcium in milk is harmful. Calcium is very, very abundant in all sorts of things in the plant kingdom and in the animal kingdom. I don’t think you should be getting it from milk.

The other thing that milk has, the best thing in terms of nutrition, is the fat. And most places now, they take the fat out. So they kind of take out the worst things and leave the most allergenic things, which are the proteins in milk. So you’ve got this really high protein, really hyper-allergenic food, and it’s just a disaster.

So anyway, I won’t go on more about that, but I suggest nuts and seeds. That works well for people. Of course people do have nut and seed allergies, but a much, much lower occurrence and tends to be related to molds and tends to be related to very specific nuts and seeds.

I am doing the gravity poses for 4 months and I’m wondering if I should change the exercise so that the body does not get used to it and continue to get results.

This is a great question, actually, and we haven’t had this before. The answer is yes, perhaps. So if you’re doing, for example, the butterfly pose, your knees are going all the way to the floor, your chin and perhaps even your chest is touching the floor, you can start to do different poses to challenge your body more.

Whenever you start to feel your yoga practice feeling easy or routine, it’s always good to start doing different variations. At some point we’ll release an advanced gravity yoga series, doing things like full splits, holds for five minutes, side splits, box splits, hold for five minutes, a pose I call the jackknife which is a really intense hip and psoas stretch, you can hold that for five minutes.

But if things are still working for you, if you’re feeling challenged by it, it’d say stick with it. If things are starting to feel easy, for sure you can start to mix it up.

we do this kind of exercise for all our life without building imbalances?

The correct answer to that is no. Almost everything you do in your life, whether it’s writing with a pencil or driving a car, is going to create a muscular imbalance. The beautiful thing about yoga is of all the things out there, yoga, dance, gymnastics, these are things that tend to move your body toward balance, and I would say yoga more so than the other activities, simply because in general it’s gentler and less extreme.

But that said, you’ll still probably develop imbalances your whole life. It’s just part of life. But for sure, yoga is, in terms of the longevity of your practice, there are people who have been practicing their entire life, for 60-plus years, 70-plus years, and it gets better and better with age, as opposed to worse and worse, like most activities. Somebody who’s been running for 30 years usually has very serious knee problems and who knows what else. That’s not to say anything’s bad about running. Running is fantastic, but the injury rate is so high, and that’s the same in many, many sports, from tennis to skiing to everything else. One of the most fantastic things about yoga is it can be lifelong and it can be really, really healing throughout your life. Quit Coffee

A friend of mine fell from a ladder and shattered bones in his foot. It’s been a couple of months, but his foot is still swollen. Is there anything that we can do?

So with injuries and with anything that keeps you from being mobile, any kind of medical professional is always going to recommend, as soon as you can, you start moving. So somebody has a surgery, somebody has a hurt limb, as soon as they can, anybody wants to get you to start moving, because things atrophy from lack of use.

So can yoga help with that? Maybe. You probably just want to start with real simple range of motion stuff, like walking, going up stairs, things like this. Whatever you’re going, definitely follow the advice of your doctor. It sounds like you have shattered bones. That could be real serious. So yoga might be helpful, but you just want to make sure it’s at the right time in your healing process.

I’m in a wheelchair, will walk again don’t know when yet. I’m doing physiotherapy, and I want to be more flexible. I can’t do all those yoga positions, and I need some help. Can YOGABODY supplements help me with yoga positions, too?

YOGABODY supplements, it depends on the supplement, but YOGABODY Stretch, which is kind of our flagship supplement, is really, really great for connective tissues, helping your body, the elasticity of your connective tissues in your body. So if you’re stretching it’s a really great nutritional compliment to a stretching routine. So yeah, for sure it could be helpful.

I stand at my standing table, which holds my knees at the bottom, but I don’t have the force in the back of my legs to hold my weight and stay standing without the bottom holding. Muscles are still too weak. What is your advice?

So this is really, really specific advice that sounds like your physio could probably answer a lot better than me, but it sounds like you’re doing a lot of great work to rehabilitate, and I wish you all the best with that.

I started attending hot yoga classes last September in 2012. Around March of this year, I started feeling pain on my right hamstring whenever I do a forward bend or any pose that would stretch the hamstring. My doctor said it could be a hamstring strain and advised me not to do yoga for now. Do I continue doing yoga classes but avoid the poses and stretches that stretch my hamstring? What can I do to recuperate faster? And what can I do to prevent this from happening again?

So almost every yoga student who’s serious about their practice, at some point hurts their hamstring, and it can be as simple as a sore hamstring from overstretching, it could be a strain or it could be a full hamstring pull. I’ve pulled both hamstrings on both my legs, I’ve strained them a number of times as well, and people get really shocked when they hear that. I definitely did mine quite badly for a number of reasons. I have a blog post about it you could read. Most people do it and they do it to a very minor extent. The real risk here, Jeanette, is that that small hamstring pain turns into a full hamstring pull, which can take 18 months to heal, which is a disaster. So you’ve got to really respect your body.

The one thing I will say, too, is if you have a hamstring pull, you want to do your forward bend stretches but way, way less than you normally would, maybe 60 or 80 percent maximum of your stretching capacity. I’d also be very careful in the heat. You said you’re doing hot yoga classes. Heat can mask pain. So if you have a sore hamstring, you go in a normal room you can feel your limits really easily. That heat sometimes will mask your pain and you’ll go way too far. So take it very, very seriously and take it carefully and you can heal quickly. If it does get worse, it can be a really long healing process, so do be weary of that.

I have hamstring problem, severe muscle pull, sometimes turning motions and sometimes while sleeping. Can you please suggest your remedy?

I think this is actually a muscle cramp. It sounds like it’s happening during sleeping. So there’s a number of different things that can be going on here, and it can be completely healthy and there can be nothing going on, but a common one that happens is people have a mineral deficiency. A mineral deficiency in magnesium is one in particular. Magnesium is also a natural muscle relaxant, and it can also make you go to sleep. So taking a magnesium supplement, say somewhere between 400 and 1,000 mgs every night before you go to bed could be helpful with that. But again, check with your doctor. Muscle cramps at night can be signs of other things as well, but magnesium deficiency is a relatively common one.

Have you heard of MSM (MSM is methylsulfonylmethane, it’s a really great nutritional supplement for yoga students) causing headaches? I have been plagued with a lot of headaches lately.

The truth is, everybody’s body reacts differently to different things. There’s people who can’t even tolerate vitamin C supplements, and so it really depends. So could it cause headaches? Yeah, it certainly could. If you’re taking any new supplement, make sure you drink a lot more water. Your body will, in some cases, need more water. With MSM and vitamin C, that’s certainly the case. There’s a slight diuretic affect, meaning your body will lose a little bit more water, so you need to drink extra water.

So it could be a dehydration headache, it could be certainly an allergic reaction as well. I would give it some time, make sure you’re drinking enough water and then make a decision later.

I am now 17 weeks pregnant and complications at the beginning of my pregnancy meant no exercise at all. Now I have been given the all clear to go back to exercise, and I want to know what your advice would be with regards to yoga poses which are safe to do.

So, Katie, if you can, I’d work with a local prenatal yoga teacher. We actually have a yoga for pregnancy program that’s coming out. Unfortunately, we probably won’t get it to you in time. You’ll probably be a mom by then, but the key thing is to find somebody who ideally, the best prenatal yoga teachers are people that have been pregnant before. There’s a lot of people out there with all the best of intentions, but if you haven’t been pregnant, for me it doesn’t make sense to be teaching prenatal yoga if you haven’t been pregnant, at least on a mass scale.

So try to find somebody who’s been pregnant before who can teach you, but there are certain poses you just want to be wary of, like forward bends with straight legs, for example, you’d want to avoid. Certain twists and certain supine poses on your belly obviously, but there’s lots of yoga that’s really safe. If you’re looking for a local class to join, I’d look for classes with names like Hatha yoga or beginner’s yoga or even a basic flow yoga class. But again, do make sure your teacher knows you’re pregnant and is not trying to push you.

There’s kind of this weird movement right now where, for whatever reason, pregnant yoga students really want to push themselves and try to do handstands and backbends, and while certainly all of that stuff can be done and 99 out of 100 times it’s going to be perfectly safe, I don’t really understand why people want to push it. For some reason people feel like they need to prove something, and I don’t know. I don’t want to cast a judgment, but I don’t think that’s something you should take a risk with. You’ve got nine months of your life, real short period of time, it seems to me that it should be a period where you’re really, really cautious and using yoga cautiously. So that’s the only other thing I would be weary of, is yoga teachers who tell you you can do everything you want to do, handstands, backbends, twists. You probably can, but it’s just that one time when something went wrong that it would be a disaster.

Can you tell me if I am supposed to be taking the supplements both before and after yoga practice? I’m wondering about more flexibility
in my poses.

So, Nicole, based on your body, it really depends, in terms of taking supplements before or after. Nothing we take is like performance enhancing, so it’s not like taking creatine or taking caffeine or something like this. It’s really just adding to your body’s nutritional stores. So whether you take it before or after practice is not that important. The key thing is if you take it before practice, just take it before enough that your stomach isn’t upset, and make sure you drink plenty of water.

I’m experiencing considerable discomfort in my neck. I have been doing Sun Salutations and gravity poses. Noodle is especially difficult for me because of my neck. Any suggestions what to do or not to do?

So, Joanne, you’ve got to be really, really careful with your neck. The first thing I’d recommend is going get checked out by somebody, an osteopath, a chiropractor who you’ve heard good things about. I would just make sure that you don’t have any preexisting conditions that you don’t know about, like an abnormal spinal curve, like a trigger point somewhere or some kind of muscular imbalance that’s really clear and obvious. You want to be very careful with your neck. It can be one of the more debilitating injuries.

If you’re finding aggravation in specific poses like Noodle pose, you might want to leave them out for a while. This is nothing something I could really give you a super intelligent answer to virtually here, but for sure take it seriously and take it slow. In general, you want to be really conservative and use kind of a four-point movement with your head, where it’s going front back, side to side and generally not mixing those movements. If you’re suffering from pain, that might aggravate it. But again, I would try to get some professional advice there.

I need to increase my lower back flexibility. Which gravity poses would you suggest?

We teach a pose called Lightning Bolt, which might not look like a backbend but it is. It’s a fantastic one. We teach a pose called Noodle, which is really, really great, and between the two of those you can really do great. In terms of non-gravity yoga poses that increase lower back flexibility, Urdhva Dhanuasana, which is an upward-facing bow pose, which in gymnastics they call a wheel or a bridge pose, is really fantastic. It’s really challenging for people, but if you can work up to three poses, 30 breaths in each pose, you’ll make progress really quickly there as well.

I don’t drink coffee or eat processed foods, but I’m struggling to lose an excess of 14 pounds of weight. I walk, dance twice a week, do strengthening exercises and yoga. I think I may have too much protein in my diet. Can you please give some examples of foods that are fats but not necessarily meats/high-protein foods, other than the obvious walnuts and avocados?

Too much protein, if you’re carrying extra weight, is almost never the problem, Hayley. There is exceptions to that, but it’s pretty rare. You probably have too many carbohydrates and probably too many simple carbohydrates. So the most lipogenic foods, the most fat-forming foods on the planet are sugars in different forms. And so if you’re looking to lose weight, the first thing you want to look at is reducing all of your simple sugars in your diet and then even some of the complex sugars. That’s going to be the simplest way.

I wouldn’t worry about your protein foods at all, and it sounds like you’re eating pretty good food so I wouldn’t worry about your fatty foods at all either. I would focus mostly on the carbohydrates in your diet. Most people get great results. This could be a couple of really simple tricks or tips. The first one is don’t drink any calories at all, meaning everything you drink should either be water or non-caffeinated tea or some kind of water with lemon juice in it, but don’t drink anything that has any kind of calories. And also don’t drink zero-calorie beverages, like diet sodas. They really screw up your fat storage hormones in your body.

And then the second thing is try to really reduce, if not eliminate, gluten, grains, specifically wheat. Just between those two things, a lot of people find that weight loss can happen really naturally. Again, you don’t have a whole bunch of weight you’re trying to lose. 14 pounds, I know it feels like a lot but it’s not that much. Usually with some small tweaks and a little bit of patience, it sounds like you’re doing a lot of great things for your health, you can lose some weight. So removing wheat, bread-based products and not drinking any calories whatsoever, might be just enough to really help you make some progress. And again, I don’t want to over simplify things because there might be more complex things going on, but hopefully that’s a starting point for you.

I’ve been practicing my flexibility for a couple months. I used to be really stiff but I’m getting somewhere. How would I not break but like loosen the joints in my groin area completely?

Okay, so this is kind of a complex question. So you certainly don’t want to break joints. So you have your pelvic bowl, and when people are talking about opening up their groin, maybe you’re talking about doing box splits, like the full splits to the side, like a side split, like a martial arts or gymnastic splits.

In terms of stretching up your joints, your joints are not, by nature, locked up unless you have calcification or atrophy of your joints. Most people have a pretty healthy joint range of motion naturally. It’s more common, when you’re feeling restricted motion, it’s the muscles and connective tissues holding that joint that are limiting its range of motion. Now there are exceptions and there are people who have genetic limitations and things.

So probably, when we talk about opening up our spine or loosening up our shoulders, what we’re really talking about is the muscles and connective tissues around those areas, and the best way to stretch, the best way to create flexibility progress is with your body completely relaxed and holding things for a long time. Now you do need to be careful that you don’t aggravate or inflame your joints, because that’s really, really dangerous in terms of long-term problems and can even lead to, for example, circus performers and acrobats and even gymnasts, they can get arthritic-type conditions in their joints from heavy use, overuse and things like this.

But basically what you want to do is long hold gravity poses, like we always teach, passive poses, relaxing your body completely into the pose and give yourself some time. You’ll feel progress really, really quickly, but it’s not going to happen overnight, and it does take some concentration and some patience.

It is impossible to fully empty the lungs nor is it advisable because it would make them collapse?

That’s an interesting question. I don’t think it is possible to fully empty the lungs. There’s always going to be some residual air in your lungs. I don’t think it’s a good idea either, like if you’re trying to use a vacuum or something. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. In most breathing exercises, or in yoga classes, when a yoga teacher or instructor tells you to empty your lungs, they’re generally talking about just exhaling completely, not forcing or having any kind of discomfort.

Does your product contain Soy? I am fully allergic. How soon will YOGABODY Stretch help me at age 48?

No, none of our products contain any soy. How soon will the products help you? It really depends on you. You’ve got to do your yoga practice, but if you’re practicing regularly and if you’re getting proper nutrition, you should see noticeable results in a month. And again, when I say regularly, I mean five days a week, at least 15 minutes per day of stretches and eating properly. Within a month, you should notice big results, and within a year, I always say if you keep at it your whole body will feel and look completely different.

In the Lightning Bolt pose – I couldn’t figure out how to turn my feet so they wouldn’t be in excruciating pain. I turned them out, kept them straight under my butt and turned them in. No matter what I did I could not sit in this pose (even though I put a pillow under me) and much less lean backwards. Would you have any suggestions?

It means your ankles are really tight, and the pose is going to be very, very helpful for you. Use more pillows. Use a couple of pillows and allow it to be uncomfortable. Excruciating pain is no good, but some discomfort is okay. The good news is, it’s a very targeted stretch to your ankles, and you’ll find that your ankles, the tops of your feet will open up very, very quickly. Within a couple of weeks, you should start to feel a breakthrough there.

I have a hamstring strain on my right leg – strained it 2 weeks ago. I’ve been massaging it daily with a tennis ball, and also have been using the hard body roller to massage the hamstring part. What other things would you suggest I should do?

Gloria, first of all, you want to make sure you’re eating anti-inflammatory foods, things like turmeric, things like methylsulfonylmethane, like in our YOGABODY Stretch, things like Omega-3 fatty acids. And then other than that, you just want to take it easy. Definitely use your hamstring, but very, very gently, very, very gently. At the most, 80 percent of your capacity, maybe even 60 percent of your capacity, meaning if you normally forward bend and you put your hands flat on the floor, instead put your hands like on your ankles. But for sure, use it.

In terms of massaging it, I don’t really have a strong opinion on that. I’ve done a whole bunch of things to my hamstrings. I never found that that stuff helped. The massage, the ultrasound, all that stuff I found that it just irritated the area. But it sounds like you know what you’re doing more than me. You’re doing some stuff that sounds really helpful. The key thing is, I just always found that functional body movements worked better than massage, so massage is external. I just found that actually using the leg and bringing it through range of motion were really helpful.

Now when you’re talking about hamstrings, this is really important for everybody, there’s a couple of things you should not do. Don’t run, first of all. Do not go jogging. Don’t run, don’t run, don’t do it. It will get worse. It will get really bad. Don’t take Ibuprofen, which is like Advil, depending on what country you’re in. Do not take any anti-inflammatory medicine and then do anything physical. It will cover up that strain, and you’ll hurt it more. Like I always say, most injuries are actually re-injuries. It was just a little strain that turned into a full pull.

The things that are really, really great is gentle cycling on a bicycle, really gentle cycling. Don’t do anything hardcore, but gentle cycling like on flat ground, and swimming is probably the best for healing a hamstring. It builds strength and is very, very gentle. It gives you some really healthy resistance. So ride a bike, go swimming, don’t run and take it easy, and eat anti-inflammatory foods and it takes a really long time. So do not think it’s healed, even if it feels okay six weeks from now. Be gentle with it for a full six months, if you’ve done some damage.

I am wondering about Himalaya Crystal salt. I’ve mostly been using it as a sole; sometimes drinking a glass first thing in the morning and also adding it in my drinking water during the day, when I feel dehydrated. I feel that it makes the body take up the water better. What’s your take on it?

So Himalayan crystal salt is a natural form of salt. It’s actually mined from the Himalayas in Northern India and Pakistan. And it’s usually pink in color, and I don’t know exactly what makes it pink in color, but because it comes from the ground there’s lots and lots of other minerals, not just sodium.

So were you to buy table salt, it’s usually sodium and then some iodine. You have iodized salt. A long time ago, people were having troubles with their thyroid from not eating seafood and sea plants, and so they started sticking iodine in salt to help people from getting goiter and thyroid problems. For whatever reason, they’re still sticking iodine in salt. It’s kind of gross.

Natural salts are never pure white. They’re usually dirty in color. I have lots of different salts. I have black salts and red salts and grey salts. The most common would be a grey, dirty salt. It’s not that appetizing of a color, unless you realize that it’s natural, and then I actually find it’s a lot more appetizing. But for your standard consumer who’s used to eating white flour, white sugar and all these very, very artificial-looking things, it can look like dirt, kind of like dirty salt.

But Himalayan salt is kind of cool, because it’s pink. In terms of its medicinal properties, there’s great things about salts. A proper sea salt, Himalayan salt, is going to have 84 different minerals in it, and those are really great for you. In terms of drinking it with water, I’m not a huge fan of that. I find that just adding it to food seems to be a more natural way, but whatever works for you, and especially if you’re doing something very athletic where you’re sweating a lot, if you’re doing a power or a hot yoga class, if you’re running or doing anything where you’re losing a lot of fluids, to add a pinch of salt to your water can be very beneficial. In our YOGA Water-E Formula, our electrolyte formula, it contains natural sea salts, which exactly the same thing. It’s just liquid form, so it’s easier to dissolve, and that can be really great for rehydrating.

I just wouldn’t get obsessed with it. I know people who have a teaspoon of salt every morning. That could potentially lead to some complications. It doesn’t seem like you need to go to that extreme. Just using good salts on your food seems like a better approach, but that’s just me.

I’ve been using the sole for making my own after-hot-yoga-drink, mixing a teaspoon with a glass of juice and water. Does that sound like a good way of replacing some lost electrolytes or do you have a better recipe?

That sounds pretty good. A teaspoon is a lot. I don’t think you need a teaspoon. Just use a pinch, and that will work really, really well. There’s something else that I like, Frederik, which works really well, is to use a chunk of seaweed. For example, dulse or nori, and I don’t mean the processed nori, that’s in a flat sheet. It’s only lightly processed, but real nori is just the clumps of little, flaky bits of seaweed that’s quite delicate.

You can just take a lump of that and throw it in the bottle of your water bottle, and that will leech naturally sea salts, and also minerals from the seaweed itself. So I do like to do that. What you do sounds great. That just sounds like quite a bit of salt to me. I don’t think that’s necessary. I’d go with a pinch of salt, a little bit of vinegar. Lemon juice is helpful as well, but overall it sounds like some good ideas. Yoga Trapeze

Recently I came across a student who has a problem while tuning the hips inward rather than out. Rather than outer rotation, the hips are more an inward rotation. It’s a little painful. Which yoga practice can improve this condition?

There’s all kinds of things that can lead to this, but you probably have a slightly forward tilted pelvis in that student. In terms of can yoga help, for sure. It really depends on the age of the student. Younger students can have more success, in terms of correcting these kind of imbalances.

The truth is, all of us have a little bit of an imbalance. If you go to a chiropractor, every chiropractor will tell you one of your legs is longer than the other and you have an imbalance. The reason they tell you that is because it’s true. We’re all a little bit imbalanced. We tend to be a little bit here or there.

If somebody is getting painful issues from that, whether they’re having knock knees or bow legs or whatever it is, lots of yoga poses can help. The beautiful thing about yoga is that it’s very balancing. So were you to go to the gym and do 100 kettle bell squats or 15 pull ups, I can’t do 15, but if you were to do 15 pull ups, that would be really, really fantastic for you, but by nature it’s young in nature. So it’s building strength but not flexibility. The beauty of yoga is that it stabilizes and increases range of motion, at the same time builds strength, builds flexibility.

And so which poses are going to be beneficial? Well, a well-rounded practice that’s a regular practice is probably going to be the best. With all that said, you need to make sure that the condition is not such that the yoga is actually aggravating the situation. Something to think about is to maybe go meet with a trusted chiropractor or a physio and/or a yoga teacher privately to get some instruction. Work with that student, see if you can find some practices that will help. But a really well-rounded practice is probably going to be the best answer, because that is so balancing by nature.

I’d like to know how you kicked your sugar habit. Fat instead of sugar?

I have a pitta constitution, which is an Ayurvedic body type constitution. Very, very strong pitta, and we tend to have sugar cravings. I’ve had a sweet tooth my whole life. As I got into my 20s and 30s, sweet foods I still really, really like them, but they just make me feel like crap. I feel terrible, and I get these sugar crashes if I eat too much sugar. So I was always really, really a sugar head, even from a really young age. I love, love sweet stuff, and I still do love it but it just makes me feel like such crap and nobody needs more sugar in their life.

So how I kicked the sugar habit and really started eating less and less sugar is by increasing my fat intake. People get really, really scared about eating more fat. The first thing people get worried about is that fat will make them fat. It’s really important to remember that fat, dietary fat all by itself, is the least fattening food you could eat. I know that sounds like heresy, but it’s true. If you ate nothing but fat, you will lose weight faster – it will blow your mind. I don’t recommend that, but it will blow your mind.

The most lipogenic food on the planet is sugar. So if you had a big old blubby ball of fat or you had a big old pile of white crystal sugar, that sugar will turn into body fat 1,000 times more than the dietary fat will.

So the second thing people are very, very worried about is clogging their arteries and giving themselves a heart attack. Now in some cases, like if you have heart disease, if you have a history of heart disease, if you’re trying to reverse early onset heart disease, a high-fat diet might not be right for you. If you have a healthy body and you know you’re in good shape and your doctor signs off for it, a higher fat diet, meaning instead of the normal 30 percent of fat from your calories, maybe a 40 percent, maybe 50, or like I eat a 60 percent fat diet, it might work just great for you and your cholesterol will stay very, very low and healthy and you won’t have any problems with anything. It really depends on you, though.

So how do you kick the sugar habit? Well basically if you get rid of sugar, we have three macronutrients, three calorie-bearing nutrients. This is not rocket science, but most people forget about this. We’ve got proteins, carbs and fats. Those are the only things that we eat that have calories or give us energy. All the micronutrients, all the phytonutrients, microminerals, vitamins, enzymes, all this stuff are very, very important. And the truth is, we probably don’t even understand all the ways those work and are metabolized.

But on a very basic level, fat proteins and carbs give us energy. So the challenge is, someone decides, “I need to cut back on sugar, so, wham, I’m going to get rid of the sugary breakfast cereal, wham, I’m going to get rid of the Milky Way chocolate bar at lunch, wham, I’m going to get rid of the strawberry daiquiri cocktails,” whatever it is, and suddenly they just dropped 500, 700, 800 calories. They just removed that many calories from their diet, and they didn’t replace them with anything.

Well the real challenge here is, your body, sure, yes it’s having sugar cravings and your body does get addicted to sugar and sugar releases dopamine and all this stuff and that’s all very real, but it’s pretty short lived in terms of how long that’s going to impact you. It’s just like quitting coffee or something. It’s just a couple of days.

But the real challenge is, you have this caloric deficit. So let’s say your body is used to eating 800 calories a day or 2,800 calories a day and you just whack that off by like 20 percent, you’re hungry. So what people call sugar cravings and sugar addiction, that’s definitely real, but a big part of it is you’re just hungry and you need to eat some other form of nutrient that’s not going to feed that sugar addiction.

Here’s the real challenge. When people try to cut down on sugar in their diet, they do the obvious things, like they stop eating sugar cereals, they stop putting sugar in anything, they stop eating sweets like cookies and cakes. The real hidden danger here is your body knows how to get sugar in a lot of different ways, and simple starches are the fastest way. So a lot of people will quit eating processed sugar and their body will go, “I’m not getting sugar. Let’s crave bread, let’s crave pasta, let’s crave grains.” And so a lot of people will make up for the sugar they just tried to kick, accidentally, unconsciously, by eating whole grains and whole wheat bread and thinking they’re doing a great job and they’re really still feeding that sugar addiction.

So you really want to cut out grains as much as you can. There are certain grains that are less offensive than others, like a quinoa, which is kind of a pseudo-grain. Even like a long grain rice, people tend to not overeat it and it’s not nearly as addictive or as irritating to your system. It doesn’t have nearly as many health consequences as something like wheat.

But sugar in all its forms, and there’s so many different forms, the easiest way is if you try to crowd it out by eating other stuff. But it’s not just fat. You would say what about protein? Yes, protein is great, too. There’s just certain body types that react really, really well to protein and certain body types don’t. From my experience, which is limited but not short lived, most people don’t really respond very well to high protein long term.

High protein, that would mean 50 percent or more of your calories coming from protein. Most people, that puts them into a ketogenic state more than a higher fat diet, for whatever reason, and it just makes them feel rundown, gives them bad breath and body odor and things like this. And for a lot of people, for whatever reason, it’s just very, very hard to sustain.

Most people that I’ve worked with, again, my limited experience, take it with a grain of salt, is that fat is one of the most satiating foods, meaning you have a high-fat meal, healthy fats, uncooked fats, plant food fats, it tends to be the most satiating thing, extremely, extremely filling and sustained energy. A lot of people don’t realize this also, but fat actually lowers the glycemic index of anything you add it to. So if you have fruit on its own, it has a higher glycemic index than if you have fat with your fruit, like a handful of nuts or something like that. So it slow releases those sugars. So fat is really the perfect thing to combat that.

The other thing people don’t realize is that your body can turn protein into sugar as well. And it does, if you’re eating a high, high protein diet, it will spike your insulin level, store that as fat, it will turn that protein into sugar as well.

But all that said, for some people a high-protein diet really does work. So if that works for you, go for it. But whatever you do, if you’re kicking the sugar, you’ve got to replace those missing carbs with something else and do not replace it with whole wheat bread. That’s not the answer. It’s exactly the same thing, except that it also irritates the heck out of your digestive system, so be careful with that.

I am currently on a supervised diet to lose weight and taking a bunch of supplements. Should I wait to finish my weight loss program then start taking YOGABODY Stretch? Things I’m taking are mostly vitamins, like a multi-vitamin, omega fatty acids, fibers, B12, Calcium and Magnesium. Or is it the best to ask my physician?

For sure, Natsu, ask your physician. All the things you’re taking sound just fine. When you’re taking a lot of different supplements, the key thing to watch out for is your digestion. If you’re feeling gas and bloating and these kinds of things, you can play around with taking supplements at different times, you can play around with taking your supplements with or without food. When you start to take dozens of supplements, there’s a very good chance you’re going to get gas or bloating or diarrhea and that’s no good. So that’s really the key thing to look out for, but of course check with your doctor. It sounds like the things you’re taking would compliment rather than conflict with YOGABODY Stretch. But yeah, definitely check with your doctor.

Can I still practice Gravity yoga without taking supplements? Would it be safe?

Totally, yeah. Supplements are not required. Practice yoga, do your stretches. You’ll be glad you did.

At one time you made a recommendation for a good juicer. What would you recommend for super green, super wet juicing?

I have a post up on my site, it’s called Best Juices Best Blenders. I’ve used pretty much every juicer you could imagine. Because I used to work in commercial kitchens, we had all kinds of different juicers, and I’ve had them in my home as well. So for juicers, there’s two different categories. There’s a few different categories, but just two main categories. You have central fugal juicers, which is a spinning basket and you put stuff in there and it spins it really fast. Those are the ones you see in most juice shops and things like that.

Then you have what’s called a masticating juicer. The masticating juicers, mastico is a Latin word, just to drop that on you to show you my exciting Latin knowledge. Mastico means to chew. So what that is, is it basically chews up the produce instead of spinning it really fast.

The chewing up kind are the kind you want, masticating juicer, and they have this auger, and they’re usually horizontal although there’s a new vertical juicer which I’ll talk about in a moment, but they’re usually horizontal and they’re the ones you see people juicing wheat grass with. Those are masticating juicers. Now, a masticating juicer is the one you want.

They cost a lot, usually $250 to $500 and they can even cost more than that. The reason they cost a lot is because they’re very, very strong. The good news is they really last forever. I have broken them before, but only once and it was still covered under warranty and that was using it commercially, and I really, really juice heavily. So they last a long, long time. They’re well worth the money.

The spinning central fugal juicers are only good for making fruit juice, and fruit juice is only marginally beneficial. What you’re really getting excited about when you’re going for juices are green juices, low-glycemic dark green vegetable juices, sprout juices, wheatgrass juices, these kinds of things. So you want a masticating juicer.

I like Oscar. There’s basically this factory in Korea that makes them, and they come out under different brands in different countries. I’m not sure where you’re writing in from, Teresa. In the US, Samson juicer is the brand. In parts of Asia and Europe they call it an Oscar. And then there’s a new juicer, which is the same thing but it’s a vertical one, which is called a Hurom.

I got it a couple of months ago, and I like that one, too. It’s a little bit more expensive, it’s a little bit easier to clean, but if I had to go back I would still go back and get an Oscar, which I also have, an Oscar or a Samson, just because it’s more versatile, you can also do fruit sorbets and you can do nut butters and things, which you can’t really do very well in the Hurom. I have it, but it doesn’t really work.

I started taking YOGABODY Stretch, and I started to retain water. I stopped and the water retention went away. Is this something that will get better once my body adjusts to taking it, or should I not take it? The water retention inhibits my stretching so it seems counterproductive, or do I just have to get used to the water retention?

That’s interesting. Everybody’s body is different, and usually when you’re taking any kind of supplement you’ll notice some kind of reaction. It depends on the person. I’m what I call a reactor, so no matter what I take I feel it. If there’s the tiniest bit of caffeine in a cup of tea, I’ll feel it right away. If one of the side reactions of aspartame is it will give you depression, I’ll feel depressed, if somehow I get some aspartame in my food. And so it sounds like you may be a reactor as well.

The thing that I have found with most things like that, most reactions like that, water retention, is that they go away very quickly. Now nothing in YOGABODY Stretch should cause you to retain water, but that said everybody’s body is unique. So, Renee, if I were you I would give it a week or so, and I would be very, very surprised if that didn’t go away. But if it doesn’t, yeah perhaps you just have an aversion to it, which is completely possible.

I’m dealing with what I’m told is plantar fasciitis. Upon getting up in the morning, the first few steps on right foot are quite uncomfortable. The discomfort fades and returns during the day. Can you point me in the right direction to something regarding a posture or postures to remedy this pain in the heel?

So this is just a chronic problem that plagues specifically runners. It’s just this nagging foot pain. It’s very, very difficult in terms of what to do. I don’t have a great answer, Ric. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about this. The research that I’ve done so far hasn’t really revealed anything exciting. I do appreciate the question. What I’m going to do is I’m going to research this further. I’m going to see if we can get an expert on the call, maybe a podiatrist or something like that, to give us more information on possible treatments.

Again, I’ve been doing a bunch of research, just haven’t found anything too interesting. It’s like researching lupus or something. It’s really all over the place, in terms of what people are recommending. But it’s a common problem. I know people that have suffered from it. If you have pain in the heel, I’m wondering if that’s tendonitis. It sounds like you’ve been to a doctor though, it sounds like you know what that is.

But in any case, I’ll take a rain check on that one and do a little more research.

I would like to point out that high blood pressure and yoga, you said double your inhale to exhale and your example was if you inhale for 4, you exhale for 8? Please explain.

Part of yoga, the yoga system is Pranayama. Pranayama means life force extension, more practical translation is breath extension, so extending your breath. There’s all kinds of different very, very complex breathing patterns you can do in Pranayama breathing practices, but the basic premise of Pranayama, the basic premise of the entire thing is to extend your exhale.

When you extend your exhale, you kind of trick your biochemistry into calming down, and this is most clearly seen in the yoga system, but medical doctors know all kinds of different scientific studies have been done. If you want, you can just do a little scientific study on yourself. Take your heart rate and do this practice. You’ll watch your heart rate drop very quickly. It’s just a biofeedback mechanism that you can trick your body into slowing down.

The simplest ratio is a 1:2 ratio, so exactly like you said, Lyn. If you inhale for the count of 4, exhale to the count of 8, and that immediately have a calming effect on your sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic sounds like it’s nice, but it’s not. Your sympathetic nervous system is the one we don’t like, the one we want to calm down.

Do I have to warm up first before doing the Gravity yoga poses?

Weston, if you can warm up, do it. If you don’t have time or don’t have the inclination, don’t worry about it. Just get right into it.

I don’t feel my shoulders in Wide dog, am I doing it wrong?

It depends. If you’re feeling a big stretch somewhere, you’re doing it fine. If you’re not feeling a big stretch, then yeah, try doing something different. Try bringing your legs really, really wide and try to sink down into your shoulders. A lot of times people go too long with their stance. Make your stance very, very short, Weston.

I can’t touch my foot in Flamenco, is it okay to bend my leg?

Don’t bend the leg, Weston, use a strap. Use a strap so both your arm and leg are straight. If your leg’s bent, it’s not really going to work. You’ll be getting into your hip instead of your hamstrings.

I find if I don’t have a coffee in the morning I go through withdrawal and have a headache. What do you recommend to drink instead?

Joanne, if you’re a coffee drinker you will get a headache, you will get constipated and you’ll feel pretty bad. It goes away really fast, just a couple of days. If you’re looking to wean yourself off coffee, I don’t really see the point. I think you should just go for it, and even if you have to take an aspirin or something for your headache, it’s just one day. There’s worse things in the world.

But if you really want to wean yourself off, I usually recommend people do it with like a yerba mate or a green tea or whatever it is, to lessen the caffeine. So a cup of tea will usually have about half the caffeine as a cup of coffee, and you can kind of wean yourself off that way.

If you can develop a tea habit, a lot of people find it’s a lot easier to switch from a caffeinated tea to an herbal tea than it is to switch from coffee to a non-caffeinated tea. So I would give that a try, work on teas. The teas that I usually recommend to people are rooibos, which is a really strong, dark tea. Also like a peppermint tea is usually strong and people tend to like that. Neither of them have any caffeine, so that’s a nice thing to try.

I am 50 years old, and I’ve had an angioplasty. While doing pranayama (anulom-vilom) my neck and shoulders are in pain. Is my method incorrect or it is something else?

First of all, if you’d had an angioplasty, you need to make sure this is okay with your doctor. If you’re doing retention, which is called Kumbhaka when you’re doing pranayama, which is when you bring your chin to your chest in jalandhara mudra. Those are really big words, but basically if you take your chin to your chest when you’re holding your breath in a pranayama practice, you might want to leave that out.

Based on your medical condition and the fact you’re doing pranayama, I’d really recommend you try working with a teacher. It’s very likely that you’re going to want to do pranayama without doing jalandhara chin lock, when you’re doing those Kumbhaka retentions, just keeping your chin parallel with the floor. Whatever you do be careful, especially with your condition.

I have been trying to learn Nauli Kriya, but find it hard. I do Full Uddiyana Bandha, but I think the sucking up is not as clean yet, therefore Nauli stays tough. Do you have any tips for me?

Marilou, we have a video on YouTube. My YouTube channel is YouTube.com/LRockwood, and if you just look for Nauli belly twirling trick or something like that, I have a video there you’ll find. The key thing is to practice Uddiyana Bandha Kriya. In order to do that, you blow all the air out, put your hands on your knees and then suck your belly in with your breath held. Now, you’re holding your breath at the bottom of the breath, so your lungs are empty. This is different than you’ve probably held your breath before. And you want to hold that really, really strong and look at your bellybutton, so your body is kind of rolled up.

Once you get Uddiyana Bandha very strong, you can move towards Nauli. You should be able to learn this very quickly. A lot of people struggle for years with this, mostly because they don’t practice properly. Watch that video. It will show you how to do it. You should be able to start to learn this within 6 to 8 weeks. By 8 weeks, 10 weeks, you should be able to do it just fine. It’s something everyone can learn, but you do need to learn it properly.

The way I teach it, you kind of use pressure on your knees with your hands as a cheat. It’s very hard to describe on audio, but check out the video. It will be more clear.

I want to know your take on seltzer water. Is seltzer less effective at hydrating the body than regular tap or bottled water? Is Yoga Water-E as effective in seltzer as well?

Seltzer water, in general, is fake, carbonated water, like they’d have at a bar that you’d add to a drink. So that’s just normal water and they add carbonation and they usually add really crappy forms of salt. It’s not really that bad for you compared to other things. It does create carbonic acid, which is not really great for your digestion. It’s not the greatest thing.

Because there’s some salt in there, it might be more hydrating than regular water, but I think the negatives is that carbonic acid and the crappy form of salt they’re giving you is probably going to give you some water retention because of that. When I drink a lot of seltzer water I get really bloated, for example, which is pretty common.

That said, there are fizzy waters, as my daughter likes to call them, she loves fizzy waters, that are really great for you. The ones that are good for you are the natural mineral water. They come from the ground, and they’re very expensive. Natural mineral waters, depending on where you live, where I live here in Spain we can get really great natural mineral waters and they’re fantastic.

Yoga Water-E, does it work in seltzer water? Yeah, sure, but I’d prefer you put that in something more natural, like even tap water is going to be better.

I have trouble with balancing poses. My standing foot will cramp with me trying to keep myself upright. I also struggle in half moon pose, as my standing leg hip starts to cramp. Are there any tips to improve balance?

Yes, the short answer is yes. It’s also possible the other way around, that your balance issues are creating your postural issues. The one thing to keep in mind is that very few people have perfect posture, and very few people will ever get that way, to perfect posture. So some people have a real sway back, some people have a back that’s so flat they can’t get any natural curvature. Some peoples’ shoulders hunch too far forward, some peoples’ kind of go too far back and they puff their chest out.

We’re always just trying to move toward balance. Sometimes I find that people get overly obsessed with perfect posture, perfect poses in yoga, and it doesn’t sound like you’re doing that but I just mention it as something to keep in mind. Our bodies are unique and they are what they are, and you’ve got to kind of take what you got and do the best you can with it, because at the end of the day we never really find balance. We move toward balance, and that’s the practice of yoga, which is really, really key.

In terms of working on your posture, working in your yoga class, all the things you’re doing will be very, very helpful, even more helpful or at least just as helpful, is working on your posture throughout the day, specifically on your chair. If you’re sitting at a desk all day, making sure that you’re sitting on the edge of your chair, as opposed to leaning back most of the day, thinking about switching up your chairs during the day, perhaps sitting on an exercise ball instead of a chair, perhaps sitting on a stool instead of a chair, playing around with perhaps having a standing desk, these kinds of things.

I like to mix it up. I use chairs that have no arms on them, no arms so that I can do a full Lotus and sit on my chair with my legs crossed, because that’s a much, much more natural way to improve your posture. There’s lots of different things you can play around with. If you’re on your feet all day, if you have a job or if you have responsibilities like a bunch of kids that are keeping you on your feet all day, make sure you’re wearing good shoes. And by good shoes I mean simple shoes.

These ultra-supportive, arch support, crazy cushion, padded, air shoes often create more imbalances and more problems than they solve. The simplest shoes, like flats, like an old-school pair of Converse, like a pair of Nike Free’s, like a pair of even flip flops can do a lot more for your posture than all those crazy orthotics, which can lead to really bad imbalances and things like that. We’ve talked a lot about that in the past, so I won’t get into that too much, but take a look at the shoes you’re wearing around. Make sure you’re wearing something natural, close to nature, and take a look at your chair that you’re sitting in and your posture at those times and that can be helpful as well. Yoga Trapeze

I do the gravity poses, but I get tension headaches. My traps, neck, rhomboids on my left side are so tight I get an instant headache when I stretch them in the slightest way. I am afraid to do too much. How will this help? Should I go slower?

That’s really interesting. I’ve never heard of that kind of stress response. I don’t have a fixed answer for that, Nicole. All I can say is if stretching immediately gives you a headache, that’s probably a real good indication that you need to stretch more. How you can do that without getting a really strong headache, I’m not sure.

Whatever you do, do not stretch when you’re taking painkillers, and this goes for anybody. It’s a really common problem. People in yoga class will hurt their hamstring or their lower back and they’ll take something which they think is harmless, like a couple ibuprofen before they go to class, and these over-the-counter medicines seem like they’re no big deal but they’re really very, very strong. Something like ibuprofen can mask pain to a degree that’s just shocking.

And so I always say this, but most injuries are re-injuries. What I mean by that is you get a warning sign from your body, you ignore it or your mask it with painkillers and you keep going, and that’s usually when most injuries happen.

If you’re someone who gets headaches, specifically make sure you’re not on any kind of painkillers, even over-the-counter stuff when you’re stretching. I don’t have any solution in terms of what to do, except I would just say start slowly, try to ease your way into it, make sure you’re warmed up and keep in touch. I’d love to hear if you find a solution, if you find relief and if increasing your flexibility decreases those headaches. I’d love to hear the results of that.

I have been having difficulty with some of the poses because my circulation seems to get cut off after 1 or 2 minutes, and I get pins and needles, which is very uncomfortable. I especially get this in hangman pose. If I get pins and needles, should I back off the pose, wait for feeling to return and then stretch back into it? Or should I just live with the pins and needles and hold the stretch?

This is a great question, Evan. Whenever you’re doing long-hold poses, gravity yoga poses, or if you’re doing any kind of extended practice, like any kind of seated practice, meditation, pranayama, it’s totally natural and normal to get pins and needles. It’s not a big deal when you’re doing relatively short holds. So generally, we’re working in the 2 to 5-minute range. It’s not a big deal at all. Your best choice, Evan, is just to deal with it. You’ll find that not only do the pins and needles pass very quickly, but your tolerance for it increases to the point where it stops being such an irritant and it goes away.

If you’re doing longer holds, like for example if you’re doing seated meditation or pranayama practices for say 30 minutes-plus, pins and needles then can start to become a problem, in terms of nervous system health and things like that, when you start holding for really, really long periods of time with pins and needles. It can have some negative effects to your nervous system.

But when we’re talking about 2 to 5-minute holds, you can just bear with it, and you’ll find that it gets easier and easier and your tolerance for it, you stop even noticing it. You get up and you just shake your leg out and you’ll be fine.

I have weak knees from a running career. The lightning bolt pose hurts my knees when I try to sit back. When I back off and sit up, my knees don’t hurt, I don’t feel the stretch at all. Is there another pose or stretch I can do, even if it isn’t a gravity pose, to try and increase my pelvic rotation to improve my back bends?

The first thing is, it’s great that you’re being cautious. Don’t mess around with your knees. Lightning bolt pose is fantastic for your knees, but it can also be really aggressive for your knees and so you need to be careful with it and what you’re doing is correct. If you start to go back and you start to feel twinges of pain or radiating or electrifying pain, you need to back off right away. So you’re doing the right thing.

Is there another pose? Yes. Another pose that gets right into your psoas muscle, the top of your legs, is the full frontal splits. And you can do this in a gravity way, you just need to use something to support yourself. We have some videos, I believe, on our YouTube channel. The way to do it is you can get two blocks, two books, two pillows on either side so you can support your weight and make it so it’s not so intense, but full frontal splits on both sides is a good way to go.

I used to practice yoga and even Bikram himself. Due to a series of whiplash injuries, falls and stuff, I have not been able to practice for years and I long to do it again. I really injured my loin, the right side of my body and a slight fall moving the wrong way. Can I ever practice again?

Gretchen, a lot of people come to yoga with pre-existing injuries, previous injuries, that are looking to rehabilitate their body and to heal. Bikram yoga is a good way to heal. I often recommend people go to static forms of yoga when they’re looking to heal knees and backs and things like that.

The only thing you have to be careful of is the heat can sometimes mask pain, in the same way we talked about ibuprofen masking pain. Heat, in a lot of cases, can also mask pain. So your lower pain might be quite sore and you’ll go into a heated room, and with the heat the soreness might disappear but it hasn’t really disappeared. It’s just a cosmetic thing and you can really do some damage, so just be careful with that.

Can you ever practice again? I’m not sure. It depends on how big your issues are. Can you have some kind of practice? For sure you can. Bikram yoga is really pretty strong, hot yoga practices in general are pretty strong. You might want to start with something gentler, perhaps a Hatha yoga class, perhaps a more restorative yin-style class. Take it easy and see what your body can accommodate, but for sure you can practice yoga. You just need to find the right practice for you.

: I don’t have much time to practice physically, but when I do I notice my stability and balance is not as good as before when I was doing the course with you. I now totally believe it’s a loss of muscle. Can you please explain about the subject of muscles and balance? How do I go ahead? Do you suggest that I start some weight exercise, like body pump for example, to tone the muscles?

Body pump is a group fitness class. If you’ve ever been to a gym, group fitness classes, pretty comprehensive group fitness classes, I think they’re a pretty good series. Balance and strength, how are they related? For sure they’re related, especially when you’re talking about asymmetrical balance or if you’re talking about uncommon balance, so balancing on your hands, balancing on your forearms, balancing on your head, balancing on one leg at a time, balancing on one leg and one hand like a side plank or a Vasisthasana.

How can you get your balance back? The best way is really just to keep practicing. In terms of doing strength practices for your lower body, it’s interesting in yoga, yoga does a really, really great job of balancing, toning and strengthening the lower body if you practice it comprehensively. There’s very few yoga series that are very comprehensive for the upper body. Now there are fantastic series, for example the Ashtanga Primary Series is very well rounded for the upper body, but like a Bikram-style hot yoga class doesn’t have a whole lot of upper body balance. So sometimes people will do things like push-ups or static hold handstands at the wall, and that can be beneficial.

In terms of finding balance for your lower body, for your legs, I would just say do more yoga. I don’t know that you’re going to find doing weight-bearing stretches and body pump classes beneficial, but if you do, for sure do it. But I would think probably, more than likely, you’re going to get the most results just from practicing more yoga.

My husband suffers from high blood pressure. At the same time, he is skinny. He runs 2 miles every morning and does not smoke. He will not take medication, only homeopathic medicine. We are currently somewhat in an emergency situation. What are the yoga exercises he can do to help that? Do you have a specific video for high blood pressure?

High blood pressure can be very, very dangerous. It can be lethal. I wouldn’t mess around with this. I’ve always been counter-culture, anti, nonconformist, to the point of kind of neurosis, and there’s good and bad things about that and this is one of those situations where bad things can happen when you just refuse to do what the doctor says.

Blood pressure lower medications, I think it’s top three medications in the world so it’s really, really common. They’re definitely over-prescribed. I would definitely prefer not to take them, but you’ve got to be careful with your health. Homeopathic medicine is interesting in that it gets results. It’s even more interesting in that there’s very little, if any scientific basis to how any of these results happen.

Especially something like high blood pressure, I would certainly not mess around with homeopathic medicine, but that’s just me. I would look much, much, much more towards dietary changes and I would look towards breathing and progressive relaxation practices and things like this, and I would for sure work directly with a doctor. Again, whatever I say here, I would just say go straight to your doctor, and if your husband’s stance is, “Hey, I’ve got to go the natural route,” that’s a conversation you have with your doctor. What you say is, “Listen, I’m really opposed to medication. What can I do?” If he says, “Listen, there’s nothing you can do, you’ve got to take medication,” I think you need to listen to that advice. But a lot of doctors are really open to it, they just don’t know what their clients want and most clients want pills.

So there are some things you can do. So again, my first recommendation is go talk to your doctor, tell him what you’re doing because you don’t want to mess around with that, and homeopathic medicine, in this case, personally I don’t think it’s a smart choice.

In terms of things you can do to lower your blood pressure, the most effective things that people typically do are breathing practices and mindful meditation practices, pretty much any form of meditation has been shown to lower blood pressure. It doesn’t need to be overly complex. You don’t need tons of experience. Mantra meditation is one of the simplest ones that people get results with.

In terms of breathing practices, you’re looking at doubling your inhale to exhale ratio. So were you to inhale to the count of 4, you’d exhale to the count of 8. You can do that 10 rounds, 3 sets of that each day. It’s kind of an over-simplification, but honestly if all you did was follow those instructions you would probably see some significant benefits right away.

Again, I hesitate to give you any kind of advice because you want to go work with a doctor and you don’t want to mess around with this because it can be really, really serious, but there are some things, but work in conjunction with your doctor. I bet you’ll be surprised at how open you can find doctors are if you’re really clear about what your objectives are.

I have done some stretching, gym classes, but never was really flexible. Now I am just sick and tired of being so tight that I can barely put on socks, tie shoes and cut my toe nails. How should I start out? Please set me on a path to flexibility so that I won’t feel like I am double my age.

It’s interesting that you say this, Jay, because I remember before I started yoga I could never put on my shoes without sitting down. It was just one of these things. My hips were so tight and my hamstrings were so tight that I couldn’t lift my foot up to my hands to slip a shoe on. I had to always sit down. That was when I was in my early 20s, and it makes you feel like an old man, it really does. Youth and flexibility and mobility and agility, they go hand-in-hand. You just feel free in your body.

So what can you do? Where should you start? Just start. There’s no magic anything. You just need to start stretching. If you’re really looking for flexibility and that’s your main objective, I always tell people to start with gravity poses. Start with long hold, passive stretches that are targeted specifically for flexibility. There are all kinds of fantastic things in the world of yoga, but if you’re looking for flexibility, if you want to tie your shoes, start with gravity yoga because that’s what it’s designed to do.

So you’re dedicating at least 15 minutes a day and you’re holding poses for 2 to 5 minutes, you’re completely relaxed and you’re working on lengthening your body’s connective tissues. That’s what it is. You can change your body. It’s one of these things that you can have. Not everybody can be a millionaire, not everybody can look like a supermodel but everybody can become flexible. It’s accessible to you, but you do have to put in the work.

I’m always scared when I hear “Heart-opening pose” because my back is really not flexible. Lately, I noticed lots of hand touching behind the back poses were very hard on me. There is an incredible imbalance where on one side I can touch and on the other not even close. On the side where it is hard, it gave me a very sharp pain in the chest. Is there anything you can recommend to avoid the pain, gain flexibility and fix the imbalance?

In yoga classes, sometimes you’ll hear yoga teachers using things like “Open your heart” or a “Heart-opening pose.” These would generally be back bending poses. Back bending poses don’t actually stretch your back. They stretch the front side of your body. So where you’re doing a full back bend, it’s your shoulders, it’s your intercostal muscles, it’s your torso, it’s the tops of your legs. Heart-opening poses make people feel very vulnerable. If you imagine you are walking down a dark street at night and some person jumped out in the street and screamed at you, immediately, instinctually, your reaction is to cover your heart, scrunch your shoulders by your ears and protect your vital organs, your heart specifically. So that’s our fight or flight response.

So for us to do the opposite of that, which is to bring the shoulders together and down the back and to bulge your heart forward is literally to expose yourself physically to danger, and a lot of people have a visceral emotional reaction to that. People will sometimes in a yoga class, if they do a lot of backbends, sometimes they’ll cry even. And that sounds very foo-foo and it’s like, “What’s that all about?” but it really is a biological thing. We are hardwired to protect our vital organs.

In order to do a deep back bend, you really have to make yourself vulnerable. So there’s a serious, serious psychosomatic element to heart-opening poses or back bending poses. Jeff, in terms of what you can do is just keep practicing. There’s no real magic bullet. Just keep practicing, and also just acknowledging the fact that what you’re doing is sort of counter to your biology is helpful, because then you realize, “Okay, were I in nature’s situation, were a saber tooth tiger going to pounce on me, this is not what I would do but here I am safe in my bedroom or in a yoga studio, and I can do this.” It makes it a lot easier.

On the second part of the question in terms of muscular imbalances, everybody has this. So right side is tighter than the left side, right hamstring tighter than the left. There’s no real magic solution. The thing I always tell people is if you’re practicing on your own, never just practice one side. That will screw you up even more. I always practice both sides. So if you’re doing a stretch on the right, do it on the left, but hold the tighter side 50 percent longer.

Let’s say you’re doing the full splits on the right and left side. The full splits on the right is brutally tight, and the full splits on the left is making some progress. So you do a one and-a-half minute on the right side and one minute on the left side, and that way you start to come back to balance. But you’ll ever achieve balance, so don’t get frustrated by it. Just acknowledge that life is about imbalance and is about moving towards the center but you never quite hit it, unfortunately. That’s the depressing news.

I tried the half moon pose for the first time, but on each side I was getting a sensation that something was locking up around the outside of the hip/thigh. This isn’t the first time I felt like this, so I try to do lots of hip openers, but it just doesn’t seem to be working. Am I targeting the wrong muscles?

There are two types of half moon pose that are commonly taught. Ardha Chandrasana is the Sanskrit name of the pose. In hot yoga classes, they teach a standing pose with your hands interlaced above your head, and you kind of make your whole body look like a crescent half moon. In Vinyasa classes or Iyengar-style classes, they teach a different form of Ardha Chandrasana which doesn’t look anything like a moon, but it has the same name.

I’m not sure which one you’re referring to, but in terms of feeling like you’re locked up around your hips, I don’t really know what to say. A lot of times in a yoga pose, you’ll just feel like you’re hitting bone. You feel like you’re hitting bone-on-bone. You just feel like you’re totally blocked, you don’t know where the space is going to come from and sometimes it comes from funny places, like perhaps you get a little bit more rotation in your ankle, for example, or more rotation in your knees or you find more mobility in your middle or upper back, which are common places where people have really lost range of motion.

The key thing is, I wouldn’t get so obsessed about targeting the wrong muscles. I’d just get focused on practicing and doing a really good practice, and you’ll find that you’ll work through and find those openings naturally on their own.

I’m a runner (long distance) and I LOVE Ashtanga Yoga as well. Even though my body is getting stronger, I feel like my running is going backwards, in terms of speed. I was wondering if running and Ashtanga can be done together. Will I break down at some point if I keep up the intensity of both of them?

There’s no right and wrong answer to this, Seda. The truth is, if you’re trying to get really, really good at anything, whether it’s a certain style of yoga or running or Olympic dead lifting or whatever you’re trying to do, obviously if you focus mostly on one thing you tend to excel more, which is why professional athletes, they tend to focus just on one sport, even though they might be able to perform professionally at just one level. It doesn’t sound like you’re a professional athlete, but just to kind of put things in perspective.

So can you do them both together? Yeah, for sure. They are definitely yin and yang activities, in terms of balancing each other out, so it could be really great. But could your running slow down your yoga practice? Sure. Could your yoga slow down your running practice? It might, but I think the real question is, if you love them both maybe that’s more important than anything. And so anything that you love that’s physical, I always tell people never quit doing that, because there’s nothing that feels better than doing something that you love with your body.

My main problem being raw vegan is that I think I was eating way too much fruit instead of vegetables. My sugar levels were crazy, and I’d be starving an hour or so after eating, craving sugar and fat really badly, usually fruit and avocado/nuts. Are there any foods you suggest to balance a mostly fruit diet that would fill me up a little more and not get my sugar levels out of whack?

In the raw food world, there’s a bunch of different little cults within the raw food world, and one of them is the people who eat primarily fruit. It’s kind of led by a guy named Douglas Graham, and they have an 80/10/10 diet, where they’re eating 80 percent of their calories from carbohydrates in the form of fruit primarily, and then 10 percent fat and 10 percent protein.

The reality is when you’re eating that way, for very few people is that going to make you feel good. This kind of sugar cravings, constantly being hungry that you’re experiencing, this is really, really common. And so there are some people it works for, but most people it won’t. So if you’re eating a high raw or raw vegan diet, the question you need to ask yourself is, “Where am I getting my protein, and where am I getting my fat?” Primarily fat, because there’s not that much protein. There’s plenty of protein, so that’s not the concern, but you need to be asking yourself where are you getting it, so you have to focus on eating a high-fat diet.

The most successful, most intelligent way to approach mostly raw food, plant-based diet is a high-fat approach, and those are plant-based fats, things from nuts, seeds, avocados, fatty fruits like durian and coconuts. But if you do not do that, you have to eat a lot of sugar. If you’re eating a lot of sugar, your blood sugar levels will go up and down, up and down for most people, and they’ll feel exactly what you’re feeling. Cravings, energy changing, very moody, people get cranky and it can even lead to metabolic disorders long term. Now because it’s fruit, it’s much less likely to create metabolic disorders, but it still can happen.

So focus on eating a really healthy source of fat all the time and eating a lot more fat. If you want to do more reading about this, the guy to read is Dr. Gabriel Cousens. He was a medical doctor and he teaches raw food, and he’s been teaching a low-glycemic, high-fat raw food diet for 30 years.

I have a tummy which is not going down. Do you have any gravity poses for reducing it?

This is a common question. People want to do spot reduction, so they’ll say, “I’ve got cellulite on my thighs. Can I spot reduce that?” Or, “I’ve got this double chin. What can I do to get rid of that?” Spot reduction doesn’t really work, and what I mean by that is you can’t decide, “Okay, I have a little bit of belly fat, I’m going to do sit-ups and that’s going to burn away that fat because my stomach will get sore.”

That’s not really the way your body works. Your body tends to gain and lose fat uniformly. Now your body doesn’t store fat uniformly, as you know. You might have no fat on your wrists but a lot of fat on your ankles, or you might have no fat on your back but a lot of fat on your belly. So your genetics and your eating habits determine where your body is going to store fat. In terms of getting rid of fat, it’s not that easy to do spot reduction.

Now that said, belly fat, lower abdominal fat in particular, can be triggered by a couple of different things. There are certain types of sugars which are metabolized in the liver, and they have a tendency to store abdominal fat. The most clear example of this would be alcohol sugars. So somebody who is an alcoholic, somebody who drinks a lot, will say they have a beer belly. I’m sure you know somebody who has a beer belly. Their body looks perfectly normal until you get to their belly, and they have this big, rotund ball right in their lower abdomen.

So there’s certain foods that do that. One of them is alcohol sugars. Another one is fructose, so if you’re eating a lot of high fructose corn syrup, such as in processed foods, or if you’re eating—it’s not going to happen from eating fruit, but if you were to eat piles and piles of fruit. It’s primarily from fructose, fructose that’s been extracted and used in processed foods. That can do it. Sweet, sugary drinks, soda pops, all these kinds of things.

But it’s also just possible that that’s where your body stores fat, and in order to lose tummy fat you need to reduce your total body fat. How can you do that? Well there’s a number of different ways. Exercise is one of the least effective ways. Diet is going to be responsible for about 80 percent of that, and focusing on low-glycemic, higher protein, mostly higher fat foods is what is going to put your body in a metabolic state, where it can burn its own fat as fuel, where you can balance your blood sugar and you’re not going to be craving sugars all the time. There’s a lot more complexity to that, but hopefully that gives you a place to start from.

Regarding staying bendy, I have developed an inflammatory condition which is making it difficult to flex my shoulders and arms and stiffens my knees and causes my plantar fasciitis not to heal. Do you have any advice you can give me?

An inflammatory condition, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know if that’s Lupus or if that’s some other autoimmune inflammatory condition, I’m guessing yes. Inflammatory conditions cause all kinds of joint problems throughout the body, systemic inflammation, which it sounds like you’re suffering from.

Without knowing more, I can’t really tell you much. All I can tell you is that this goes for everybody, but particularly for you, you need to really reduce inflammatory foods in your diet. One of the biggest offenders is wheat and wheat gluten. It’s very, very inflammatory. Wheat and wheat gluten has been linked, in some cases, to arthritis. In fact, people stop eating grains and sometimes their arthritis goes away altogether. I don’t know if that’s going to happen here for you, but for sure I would try to get rid of all the gluten in your diet and see if that helps.

Also focusing on anti-inflammatory foods, one of the top on the list are omega-3 fats. They’re very, very effective at reducing systemic inflammation, so make sure you’re eating them every day. Flaxseeds, chia seeds, if you eat animal products, small coldwater fish or fish oils of really good quality could be a good choice for you.

My husband suffers terrible motion sickness travelling on boats and most recently, swimming in the ocean from jetty to jetty across the natural flow of water. Is there a particular yoga practice or pose that could help balance the middle ear, or are there specific foods or vitamins that can be taken?

So motion sickness is something that you just get used to in general. So somebody will, let’s say they’re a deckhand on a boat, they’ll be puking their first couple of days, suddenly any storm comes and they never get sick. So it’s something you get accustomed to. For example, I spend very little time in cars. I can now get car sick very easily. Meanwhile, in my past life, I drove all the time, passenger all the time, never got car sick. So it’s something that you just get habituated to.

The one thing is, if you’re getting motion sickness when you’re swimming in the ocean, that’s uncommon because you’re sort of interacting with your environment. It’s the same as when you’re driving. You should never get motion sick because your eyes are following the road, which makes me wonder if perhaps there’s something going on in your inner ear, like a mucus block or like an infection or something like that.

I would for sure go get it checked out, because it certainly could be. People will get vertigo and they’ll get nausea when they have mucus blocks and things. That might not be the case, but that’s what I would go and take a look at.

Other than that, of course there’s motion sickness pills. Fresh ginger is said to be more powerful. It’s tested more powerful than any of the motion sickness pills. The challenge is you need to take quite a lot of it. So unless you’re juicing it or unless you’re eating like dehydrated ginger, it’s hard to get enough of it for it to be effective. But it is, in theory, more effective than any of the Dramamine or over-the-counter pills you would get.

I am 62 years old, I walk for an hour every day, I have been doing yoga for three years. Today I am cutting out dairy, but I am still drinking my one morning coffee, without milk. I am very interested in improving my flexibility. My only health issue is Glaucoma. It is controlled, but I have been told not to hold inverted poses due to the pressure. What is your experience with this? Holding the standing forward bend is tempting, however do you feel I should be cautious with this?

First of all, walking an hour a day, awesome. Probably nothing better you could do for your health, fantastic. Cutting out dairy, again, I think you’ll probably find that makes a huge difference. If you’re just drinking one coffee a day, I wouldn’t worry about it. There’s a lot worse things that you could do. If you’re controlling it to one, you’re not putting sugar and milk in there, don’t worry about it.

In terms of Glaucoma, yeah, if your doctor is telling you don’t go upside down, don’t do it. You can do the same thing, in terms of a passive forward bend, you can do it seated on the floor. You have to use maybe a prop underneath your bum, like a pillow, or a block or a book, and you want to bend your knees to soften it on your lower back, but you can certainly do that on the floor. So I wouldn’t push it. You don’t want to mess around with Glaucoma. Follow your doctor’s order, but try that pose seated on the floor.

I am curious to know your perspective on health about taking superfruit juices like acai, mangosteen, goji and Noni. Do you think they can help yoga students improve strength and flexibility?

What happens is, every year the nutritional supplement manufacturers, my colleagues, they go out looking for some new, weird fruit, it’s usually a fruit, some new fruit, berry, vegetable, herb, something that has crazy amounts of antioxidants and then they give it all these properties and make all these wild claims about it.

Acai is the most well-known example. For two years, everybody was selling acai as a weight loss supplement. Acai is a berry from South America. Acai, like blueberries, is really high in antioxidants. Mangosteen is really, really high in antioxidants. If you don’t know mangosteen, mangosteen is a delicious, sweet/sour fruit from Southeast Asia. We get them in Thailand all the time. It’s very, very difficult to store. Goji berries, gojis are red-looking raisins, and Noni is a barely edible tropical fruit that’s fermented before it’s eaten. So all of these foods are fantastic, acai, mangosteen, goji, Noni, they all taste great, they make you feel great.

The challenge is, whenever we’re talking about anything antioxidant, freshness is a huge factor. And acai, mangosteen, goji and Noni, almost nobody gets those fresh, unless you’re living in the tropics. When I lived in the tropics, I would buy mangosteens from the back of a truck on the side of the road, and I’d buy them by the kilo and that was very, very fresh. We’d also have fresh, local Noni that was fermented and live. Everything else, I’ve never had fresh acai, I’ve never had fresh goji.

And so what happens is, if you’re comparing apples to apples, or in this case berries to berries, a fresh blueberry is going to be better than a dried acai, and let’s say a fresh, wild plum is going to be better than a dried or freeze-dried or processed mangosteen. All their antioxidant properties that they’re so renowned for, they all really become inert when you have to package them.

So if you can get fresh acai, fresh mangosteen, fresh goji, fresh Noni, go for it. If you can’t, go buy whatever’s in your area. Buy the super foods, buy the super antioxidants, fruits and vegetables and herbs that you can find in your area. They’re going to be way, way more potent.

Are they going to make you more strong or more flexible? Not directly, but cleaning up free radicals in your body, adding to your nutrition, these things are all great.

Is it okay to practice gravity yoga poses every day?

Yes, Lauren, no problem at all. You just want to make sure that you’re not overdoing it. Overdoing it would be if you’re experiencing soreness all day long or if you’re limping around or this kind of thing. But yes, you can certainly stretch every day. Stretching, unlike strength training, is something you can do every day. It’s cumulative, and there isn’t the complexity that you get with resistance training.

Can you do the whole routine daily? Meaning, can I go through all the hamstring stretches, all the hip stretches, all of the shoulder stretches, etc? If I did 5 Sun Salutations A and then did 5 Sun Salutations B and then did the entire stretching routine, that would be a pretty good yoga practice in itself no?

Yes, that’s a great practice. We teach it in a class. It takes about 75 minutes and we call it gravity yoga, and you can certainly do everything in one go. Exactly what you said is a good way to do it, with some Sun Salutes to warm up and then get right into it.

To make the above routine even more complete, could I also introduce the Yoga Trapeze for inversions?

Yeah, if you did that you’re going to be feeling fantastic. That’s going to be probably the best day of your week.

I’ve tried stretching my hamstrings before and have hurt some muscles that affected my knee occasionally. Is this stretch safe to do? Should there be warms ups before these stretches?

Carol, you should be able to do a hamstring stretch cold, meaning just drop into it. What I’m going to tell you right now is very, very important if you’ve had knee twinges before. Every time you forward bend, I want you to micro-bend your knees, which means don’t lock them out. Don’t let your knee ride into the hip joint. Bend your knee slightly. It will cause a little bit of muscular engagement, but it’s going to really help you to protect those knees, and then listen to your body. But no, you don’t need to warm up. You should be able to go straight into a hamstring stretch. Just don’t bounce around, don’t wiggle around, don’t pull or yank or anything like that.

I have been practicing Bikram yoga on and off for 11 years, so I really don’t have any other experience with any other types of yoga. What do you think? In your professional opinion, do you think Bikram is the best one to practice?

It really depends. If you love Bikram yoga, keep doing Bikram yoga. Don’t worry about it. People get so worried that this practice is imbalanced here, imbalanced there. Listen, if you love it and it’s working for you, keep doing it. A lot of people are moving away from Bikram yoga for a number of reasons. One is the longevity of it, people do find that it lacks upper body work, it lacks core work. There’s some truth to that for sure, but like I said, what’s working for you is what’s working for you. Don’t get obsessed. One of the best things you can do for your health is go for a walk, and yet people buy these super-complicated fitness programs, they hire these crazy trainers and it’s like, “Well, I would just go for a walk and do a couple push-ups.” That’s a really, really fantastic thing for your health.

The one thing I will say about Bikram yoga, is Bikram comes from a guy named Bikram Choudhury, who’s an Indian-born, Los Angeles resident, who’s just kind of a bad person. There’s all kinds of lawsuits and all kinds of horrible things around the Bikram yoga scene, and a lot of people are moving away from Bikram yoga, just because they don’t want anything to do with this man, and that is a pretty fair assessment.

For a number of years, my colleagues really defended him and said, “Hey, he just kind of behaves bad,” but he’s not a good person. I don’t want to get into it, but not the kind of person you want to be associated with, so a lot of people just look for other organizations, just because they don’t want to support an organization with that kind of person as the leader. A lot of stuff that you would really not like to be associated with.

In any case, if it’s working for you, keep doing it. If you’ve got a good teacher at your local studio, you trust your teacher, and trust me, there are thousands of really, really great people teaching Bikram yoga. Just unfortunately the man himself is not a person you’d like to meet in a dark room, but that is what it is.

So much attention is given to using weight training to boost metabolism for weight loss by building muscle and preventing osteoporosis. Can the same goals be accomplished by using yoga as your primary source of weight training, since it is essentially body weight training?

This is a really great question, Debbie. There’s a lot of confusion around metabolism, and people are always talking about increasing their metabolism. Ironically, overweight people, in many cases, actually have a faster metabolic rate than thin people. They actually have to in order to sustain that body size. It’s not really all about metabolism.

If you look at somebody who has a very, very, very slow metabolism, would be like a monk in a monastery. They tend to have primarily sedentary lives, they tend to eat very infrequently and their metabolism is very slow and they’re still very thin. And so metabolism is kind of a confusing one. There are ways to increase your metabolism artificially, such as by taking stimulants, which is something common to weight loss pills, and those are just not effective. They just don’t work.

So rather than focusing on metabolism, I always like to tell people focusing on balancing your hormones, balancing your blood sugar, balancing your insulin levels, making your body more leptin sensitive, more insulin sensitive, because that’s really the key. So I wouldn’t get stuck on this metabolism thing, because then you start hearing about these metabolic tricks, like drinking lots of coffee or eating 10 meals a day or all these kinds of things.

If you’re a body builder or something like that, fair enough, but if you’re just trying to manage your weight, those can be counterproductive, confusing and overly complicated.

In terms of preventing osteoporosis, you’re right. Weight-bearing exercises are really important. The important thing to remember is that there are lots of different weight-bearing exercises. Somebody once told me one of the biggest mistakes people make in fitness is they try to get in shape and they start lifting weights, when they can’t even do a push-up. Or they start doing bench presses or leg presses when they can’t even do a squat.

For most everybody, your own body is enough weight and it’s a safer way to start training. So there’s big, big benefits to weight training. Resistance training is fantastic. But there’s a time and a place for it. For almost everybody in the world, they’re going to have more fun, it’s going to be safer and they’re going to get more benefits if they at least start the process with body weight training. That would be things like pushups, things like pull-ups, things like supported handstands, that would be things like planking, that would be things like squats. For most people, those are really, really hard. So why would you add weight until you need to?

So can yoga have enough impact, can it have enough weight-bearing things to prevent osteoporosis? There’s some interesting studies that suggest yes. They tested the bone density of some long-time yoga practitioners with people who were basically sedentary, and this is the only study I’ve ever seen. It showed that there was something like 38 percent improvement in terms of bone density and things like that.

What we tend to get into, is people try to put everything in a box and turn everything into a statistic. Any statistic is a little bit confusing. So people will tell you, “You have to work out 20 minutes a day, your heart has to be 120 or more and if you don’t do that you’ll get heart disease.” Those rules, in real life, never really play out. But what does play out is if you do not use it you’ll lose it, and with bone density it’s really, really true.

So can yoga be helpful for osteoporosis? I think so. Is there enough research to really say that conclusively? Probably not, but I think it’s a safe bet to say that it can, especially if you’re doing athletic styles of yoga and especially if you’re doing a well-balanced yoga practice where you’re using your hands and your feet dynamically, you’re doing dynamic Vinyasa movements. I think that’s fantastic for bone density, but again, there isn’t enough research to say. I think it’s a heck of a lot safer and more practical to be doing body weight training than to be picking up steel when 10 pushups is a challenge.

Does yoga build the type of muscle necessary to burn more calories and maintain healthy bone density?

This is another interesting thing people talk about. Sometimes people will say that yoga builds lean muscle and lifting weights builds short, bulky muscle. That’s not really the way muscle works. You do have fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are primarily genetic. They can be changed, but in terms of muscle, you build muscle or you don’t build muscle. It’s not a different type.

What happens is, there are certainly, like if you’re lifting weights for example, you will tend to be shortening your muscles in that they will get stronger without being lengthened. So it is true that the strength you build in yoga tends to go hand-in-hand with flexibility, which is really great. The type of muscle, it’s the same type of muscle. Does it burn more calories? Yeah, so a pound of muscle burns five times more calories than a pound of fat. Getting into calorie counting, again, is not something that’s productive, it’s not something that’s helpful. It’s proved ineffective in a gazillion studies. It just doesn’t work. It’s just a benchmark, just a reference for the energetic potential of food. It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with anything when it comes down to weight management. It’s really about, again, internal balance, metabolic balance, managing your blood sugar.

And so does yoga build the right type of muscle? I think it’s a great way to build strength and muscle, because it’s functional. A similar comparison would be things that they’re doing in the CrossFit movement, things that people do in gymnastics or any kind of acrobatics. All of that is functional strength. By functional strength, I mean never in your life will you do a dumbbell curl-style motion with anything. Imagine picking up a book or a pot or a pan or a computer and doing a dumbbell-style curl. You’ll never do that.

And so those types of weight training, fitness training, while it might make your arms look great, it’s completely useless muscle strength and it’s totally imbalanced, and that’s why it can lead to injury and things like that, whereas yoga and other functional movement, other skill-based movements tend to build functional balanced strength. So that’s why you’ll see these really skinny men and women who can do incredible, incredible arm balances and things, because they have this dynamic muscle balance. So I think it’s fantastic. Again, I don’t think there’s any definitive answer on that, though.

Can we rely on yoga for a cardiovascular workout? If so, how can you boost the heart rate? If not, what type and how often do you recommend cardio training to a yoga practice? Many yogas I know do yoga, no extra cardio or weight training, do you recommend this?

Cardio is an invented thing, this idea that you have to do 120 beats per minute for 20 minutes-plus, 3 times a week to strengthen your heart. Is there some merit to that? Yeah. Is that good for you? Yeah, maybe, but there are other ways. If you do any kind of study of the longest living people in the world, they are never, ever the athletes. It’s never the athletes.

Most of the people you’ll find, the thing they have in common is they do really simple things like walking, for example. I’ve studied a whole bunch of these people. I’ve never found anyone who had a 3-day a week, 120-plus beat per minute cardio routine, never, ever, ever. I don’t think that’s the secret. Can you strengthen your heart that way? Yeah, I think so. Is it really the secret to health and longevity? I don’t think that it is. More and more research is coming out showing that the effects of cardio can be counterproductive, especially when people overdo it.

That said, if you love it, like if you love running, if you love jogging, if you love cycling, anything that you love and you really, really enjoy and don’t have to force yourself to do, that’s a good sign that it’s working and jiving with your body’s chemistry, so for sure go for it. But if you hate going to the gym and you’re running on one of those stupid machines and trying to get your heart rate up and it’s just not working, I would get less focused on this math, which has really been superimposed upon movement practices, and I’d get more focused on how you feel, on your cravings, on how you’re sleeping, because all of those things, I think, are a much better indicator of your health.

Now, all that said, it is kind of fun to measure your heart rate. Your heart rate will vary greatly. So an advanced yoga practitioner, their heart rate might stay at around 70 to 90 beats per minute when they’re doing their full practice. That said, if they’re working at their edge, which means they’re doing a really challenging practice, most people will peak up to 160 at various times during their practice. The easiest way to do this is you strap a heart monitor on. They have these great new heart monitors, and they’ll map out your whole practice on the computer.

And so the truth is, there are some really, really beneficial cardiovascular benefits of yoga, depending on the style of yoga and depending on the practice, but especially if you’re working appropriate to your level, if you’re taking a class that really challenges you, to the point where you have to focus very, very strongly to maintain your breath. In a class like that, you’ll often find that you’re hitting 160 beats per second, which is a pretty strong heart rate for a yoga practice. And the great thing about it is it’s sporadic, which those sporadic high heart rates, high-intensity intervals pulsing like that, there’s more and more research to show that’s a really, really great way to strengthen your heart and also to balance your entire metabolism, your internal hormones.

So long answer, so in terms of do I think it’s a great cardiovascular workout, I do. I think it’s balanced, I think it has that intermittent intensity, but you’ve got to be going to the right type of class.

I’m 6 months pregnant and take a prenatal yoga class once a week. I do some at home as well, but I was wondering, could you suggest 3 important poses that I can practice?

Erica, people are always asking this. People say, “Okay, I play Ultimate Frisbee. I don’t have time for stretching. Give me just one pose, just one pose to do.” It just doesn’t really work like that, in terms of one pose that’s going to be magic. Yoga teachers will sometimes teach this, “Do this one pose and your libido will go through the roof,” or, “Do this one pose and you’ll sleep like a baby,” or, “Do this one pose and it’s like 20 minutes on a treadmill.” That’s kind of magic fantasy talk. It doesn’t really work like that.

The one thing I will say, Erica, is at six months pregnant it’s usually time to slow down, and so working on breathing practices, working on really, really gentle squats and things like this, and more than anything I’d start to work with a teacher. My wife was doing a lot of stuff, we have a yoga trapeze and she was hanging from that, doing hanging pelvic rotations and things like that.

But in terms of three magic poses, I don’t have three for you. The one thing I will say, Erica, is we have a new Yoga of Pregnancy video program that’s coming out. I don’t know if we’ll make it in time for your pregnancy, but hopefully we will, so stay tuned for that.

The pose where you stretch your hands up the wall, (that’s called Hangman) is it normal to get pins and needles after a minute or so?

For sure, Estelle, that is a really intense pose. You’ll feel your arms go completely numb.

I really enjoy the pretzel arm pose, but I’m not sure I’m doing it right. Is the aim to get your arms as straight as possible? Also, my chin is resting on top of my overlapping arms.

Correct, Estelle. Arms as straight as possible, relax completely, chin and the weight of your head resting on your overlapping arms. That’s correct.

I have scoliosis and had surgery when I was younger, had two steel rods fused to my spine, so obviously I have limited mobility in my back. I have to be careful when I walk, because if I accidentally trip, chances are that I won’t be able to keep myself from falling down. So whenever I do exercises, yoga, stretching, et cetera, I just do what I can and listen to my body. Besides being careful, do you have any words of wisdom to help me with Yoga?

That’s a great question, John. I can’t give any better advice than what you just said. Listen to your body, doing what you can, taking it slowly. I would also just make sure that your teacher knows. Make sure they know that you have those steel rods also, because a lot of people have scoliosis, but very few people have those steel rods, and that’s a very, very different situation than somebody with mild scoliosis. So for sure mention that to your teacher.

I need yoga for Arthritis pain. Any recommendations, please?

First of all, Pamela, if you have arthritis there’s a lot of new research about inflammation arthritis, particularly dietary stuff. This is kind of controversial, but if you’re having arthritis pain I would first of all look at giving up grains, and wheat in particular, anything with gluten. I know this is going to sound weird and it’s going to sound extreme, but people get tremendous benefits from giving up inflammatory foods. The gluten in wheat tends to be the biggest offender. So if you’re eating bread on a regular basis, give that a try.

MSM, Methylsulfonylmethane, which is one of the key ingredients in our YOGABODY Stretch formula, there is tons and tons of documented research on its anti-inflammatory benefits for arthritic patients. It has fantastic results. A huge percentage of our users have minor arthritis, and they’re getting tremendous benefits. Not just cosmetic benefits, but they’re actually helping to heal and reduce that inflammation.

So I would look at dietary and I would look at supplementation with something like Methylsulfonylmethane, and then also make sure you’re eating lots of anti-inflammatory foods, things like turmeric, things like ginger, things like Omega-3 fats, which can be found in chia seeds, flaxseeds, and then in the animal kingdom, in cold water small fish or high-quality fish oils.

I have been practicing gravity yoga for one year. Recently, I have started to practice janusirshasana and paschimottanasana. (That’s a one-legged forward bend and a two-legged seated forward bend.) I notice that my hamstrings and back are still very tight, and although I can put my head on the knees, I am unable to flatten my torso on the legs. I would be thankful to you if you could give me some remedy for this situation.

Sanjay, great question. Okay, so there are two different ways to practice. When we’re practicing just for flexibility, we’ll often practice completely passively, meaning you’ll let your body relax completely. If what you’re doing right now is paschimottanasana, janusirshasana is what we’d call an asymmetrical stretch, and paschimottanasana is symmetrical. There are benefits to both, and you’ll find deeper in different stretches, in different circumstances.

What I would recommend is either of those poses can be done pretty safely, as long as you bend your knees a little bit, as a gravity pose, meaning hold them for a good long time, like three to five minutes-plus and just relax completely. When you’re practicing them dynamically, like in a class and you’re holding them for just a few seconds or up to 30 seconds, instead of letting your back curl and round, look towards your toes and imagine your chest coming towards your big toe. Imagine your chest lengthening out over that big toe. Hope that’s helpful. Let me know how that goes.

I am a 13 years old girl and I’m very inflexible. I can barely touch my toes, but I’d really love to do a back bend and the splits. I can’t seem to do a cartwheel. I was just wondering if I hold each pose for a longer amount of time or stretch twice daily, would I be able to double my flexibility in only a week or 2 instead of 4?

The answer is no. Four weeks is really a minimum to get started, and usually at four weeks’ time, that’s when people get really excited and they continue on. I always tell people, within a month you should notice massive results, like doubling your flexibility. And within a year, if you really stick with it, you can really, really transform your body. Don’t be in that much of a hurry though, Gloria, there’s no reason to want to go that fast. You’re going to hurt yourself.

My doctor recommends stretches for tight hamstrings. It would be nice to get some feedback and extra help and tips from you.

What doctors and sports physiologists and runners and all these people recommend, when they talk about stretching, what they’re usually talking about is warming up. Like if you see somebody about to take a run, you’ll see that they bend over and they just kind of hang there for about 10 seconds and then they come back up. That’s called warming up. That’s not really a stretch, in that it’s not going to make you anymore flexible. The way that you’re going to improve your flexibility is by doing long-hold gravity poses, and that means bending your knees a little bit and hanging there for a really long time.

And so while the advice of your doctor or a traditional stretching coach, whether it’s a sports person or something is not bad, it’s not going to increase your flexibility. It’s going to maintain your current level of flexibility and warm you up to prevent injury. These are beneficial, but it’s not going to help you.

So yes, you want to hold the poses for a long amount of time. Don’t be in too much of a rush, Gloria. In two weeks, I wouldn’t expect a revolution. Give yourself at least four weeks, and use the momentum and the excitement from your progress there to carry you forward.

What do you think of the Paleo diet and is it healthy?

For those of you who don’t know, the Paleo diet is also referred to the Paleolithic or the caveman diet. It’s become very, very popular in the past 10 years, particularly, I would say, in the past 3 or 4 years. The CrossFit community has also grown really, really quickly, and all the CrossFit people are very much into the Paleo diet.

For me, of all the diet movements that have happened in the past 5 years, the Paleo diet is the smartest and the most interesting of anything that’s happened, really since raw food became really popular. And so a lot of people think the Paleo diet is completely opposite to what I teach. The truth is, it’s very, very close. The only difference is a lot of people I work with move away from animal foods, and the Paleo diet is very heavy on animal protein.

The truth is, what I call the Paleo diet is something I’ve been calling reverse vegetarianism, for about 7 years. And reverse vegetarianism is when someone, instead of giving up meat and eating dairy, they give up dairy and they eat meat. Now, my vegetarians colleagues give me a lot of flack about this, calling it even vegetarianism, a lot of the vegetarians hate the Paleo people and they think they are doing terrible things.

I think it’s just the opposite. In fact, many people following a Paleo diet are actually more vegetarian, in my opinion, than a lot of vegetarians. From a health and nutrition standpoint, giving up dairy and eating animal proteins, especially if they’re from good sources, is much, much more healthy than giving up meat and relying on dairy for your fat and your protein. Dairy has lots of problems for adults. Depending on your ethnicity, it might have huge problems. For other ethnicities, it might be okay.

In any case, what a Paleo diet is, is essentially trying to eat like our Paleolithic ancestors. About 10,000 years ago, we started eating a lot of grains. Grains are seeds of grasses, things like rice, things like wheat, things like barley, millet, all those kinds of things. There are some that are particularly problematic, wheat being the biggest offender. It’s addictive, it’s inflammatory, it has lots of anti-nutrients, and it’s the basis of most Western diets. When I say the basis, anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of the diet, in some cases 80 percent-plus of your caloric intake is coming from wheat, which is a huge, huge problem.

Now, meat has a ton of problems as well. If we’re just talking about the environment in particular, if we’re talking about moral and ethical reasons, there’s all kinds of problems. But meat raised for consumption, as opposed to meat raised for dairy, the animals live a shorter life, they tend to live a better life. Dairy cows are treated the worst of any animals. So from a moral and ethical standpoint, eating animals rather than eating the milk of animals, in my opinion, from my research, from what I’ve seen environmentally, morally and ethically, it’s a better choice.

Nutritionally, there’s no question it’s a better choice. Dairy is inflammatory, dairy causes mucus, dairy causes digestive problems and all kinds of other issues. And aside from that, it tends to come from this industry that’s really a disaster.

The problem with the Paleo movement is it’s very, very hard to maintain and it’s very, very expensive. The tenets of eating a Paleo diet are fantastic. The idea of eating straight from the land, eating whole foods, natural foods, focusing on low-glycemic vegetables and fruits, nuts and seeds to a smaller extent and lean, wild meats. The reality is, lean, wild meats are very, very hard to find. They’re almost nonexistent.

And so you’ll meet Paleo people who say they’re always eating grass-fed beef or they only eat wild fowl or these kinds of things, but it’s very, very rare. When somebody says they’re eating grass-fed animals only, I would say that probably means they’re eating about 10 percent grass-fed animals. Almost all of the animals all over the world are fed grains, and when we’re talking about grains we’re mostly talking about corn and they’re fed soy and they’re fed other things that are just not great.

So what you’re really talking about, when you’re talking about most meats, is second-generation grains. So predominately corn and other cereal grains that are fed to these animals, and that’s why they get so fat. So were you to compare, for example, a wild duck with a commercial duck, they look like two completely different animals. Were you to compare the meat of a wild rabbit with that of a domestic rabbit that’s eating predominately grains, you’ll be shocked at how different their meat looks, the color, the texture, everything about it, and the fat content is really shocking.

Now, fat gets blamed for a lot of the health problems in the world. It’s just not true, but bad fat is a big problem, and bad fat also includes improperly ratioed fat. So naturally, most of the animals that are commonly eaten, chicken, pigs and cows, they are very, very lean animals, naturally. Pigs would be fattier of the bunch, but still, when you look at a wild boar compared to a domestic pig, the fat content is just shockingly, shockingly lower.

And the reason is, because they’re fed the same foods that are fattening up our general population, which is grains, which really quickly turn into sugar, which is really quickly turned into body fat. So you’ve got fat animals feeding people, and it’s a big problem.

So back to the Paleo diet. Every diet has good things, every diet has bad things. The Paleo diet has many, many, many more good things than bad things. The biggest challenge about it is trying to maintain it financially, and it’s just not that feasible. But that doesn’t discredit any of the tenets that go along with it. There’s a whole lot right with it, and the Paleo movement, for me, just goes right off the back of the raw food movement, and you’ve got to figure out what balance works for you.

It’s also very unsustainable, a Paleo approach, for people who are highly athletic, for people who are younger and need a higher caloric intake, it’s very challenging. There’s also this over-emphasis on protein, which from my research and from my experience, that works for some people, people doing a lot of resistance training. For people who aren’t, they need to focus more on getting healthy fats.

But anyway, the biggest takeaway is if you’re looking at the Paleolithic diet, is to take a look at low-glycemic foods, and this is the emphasis of every important book that’s come out in the past 5 years, focusing on getting your sugar intake down. There is almost nothing more important than that in your dietary approach right now, as getting your sugars down. The simplest way to do that is to reduce or even eliminate the amount of grains, particularly breads, pastas, all this wheat-based stuff. That’s really the biggest takeaway.

The other takeaway is to make sure that you’re eating whole, natural foods, which kind of goes along with any diet. Anyway, it’s something worth checking out. There’s two books that I recommend, one is called Primal Blueprint, and that’s by Mark Sisson, and another book that’s called The Paleo Diet, which is by a guy named Robb Wolf, who’s a big pioneer of the Paleo diet.

Again, I don’t eat a Paleo diet, I don’t follow it, but a lot of my clients do, my kids do, and they do really, really well, in terms of their health. Everybody has to find what works for them. In terms of the science behind the approach, the logic, the research and the results, it’s really hard to beat a Paleo approach, raw food approach. There are lots of different things that work, but in terms of working long term, it’s a pretty interesting to take a look at.

The front of my chest and along the shoulders are still very tight from years of bench pressing. Is there a good isolated stretch to help release those muscles, something I could hold it for long periods, like your gravity stretches?

Yes, Amy, what you want to do is Hangman Pose. Hangman Pose is really simple. It will really get in there. I’ll give you a quick audio explanation. It’s going to sound confusing, but close your eyes and do it with me.

Get on the floor, get on your belly, and slide all the way until your head touches the wall. So your arms are at your sides, head is touching the wall, you’re on your belly face down. Now bring your hands up the wall, straighten your arms, don’t move your body forward or backward. Keep it right where it is. Bring your hands up the wall, spread your fingers, now let your head drop and hang. This is called Hangman Pose.

You want to hold it initially for about 1 or 2 minutes, working up to 5-minute-plus holds, and this posture will really, really open you up.

I have a hairline fracture in my humerus bone near the elbow joint. It has been 7 months now since the initial pain, and my doctor just did a bone density scan and said I have Osteopenia. Besides taking your YOGABODY Stretch and Calcium with D, nutritionally speaking, can you please tell me the best foods to be eating to help build my bone density back?

This is a complex question, because there’s lots of things that we do that can decrease bone density. There’s lots of things we can do to increase bone density. In your case, you want to be doing both, and you want to be working very, very closely with your doctor.

For example, there’s a lot of evidence to show that carbonated beverages and drinking sodas your whole life can remove calcium from your bones. Eating overly acidic, like we talked about before, eating an excessively high protein diet can potentially remove calcium from your bones. It’s a bit controversial, but some interesting research there.

And then there’s things that can help strengthen your bones, one of which is resistance training. It sounds like you’ve done some resistance training, so perhaps that’s not the issue, but putting some weight on your bones is what brings strength to them. And also, yes, getting calcium and Vitamin D into your bones. Calcium, we’ve been taught by the diary industry that calcium is something that we need to have tons and tons and tons of. The truth is, calcium is really, really abundant in most peoples’ diets. What isn’t abundant often, are the cofactors that help calcium become absorbed. Things like magnesium, things like Vitamin D.

It sounds like you’re taking Vitamin D already, but you want to look at all your dietary intake and make sure that you’re eating an alkaline-based diet, which you don’t need to get overly obsessed with that, but just making sure basically you’re eating a lot of vegetables with every meal, and Vitamin D is also proven for bone density. Vitamin D2 is the vegetarian form of Vitamin D. It’s not so effective for supplementation, especially if you’re in a situation where you’re having some problems.

Vitamin D3 is the non-vegetarian source. It comes from lanolin. Lanolin, we don’t really know where it’s coming from. It might be coming from the wool industry, it might be coming also from the meat industry. So some vegetarians feel comfortable with it, others don’t. I don’t know whether you’re a vegetarian or not, but I just wanted to bring that up.

It’s a pretty disgusting supplement, to think of kind of having the oil from a sheep’s skin, but for any number of reasons, it might be necessary and might be very, very helpful for you. Vitamin D recommendations are generally too low, in terms of what the RDA and other governmental organizations recommend. Most alternative health practitioners talk about a supplemental phase, where you’re taking 5,000-plus international units per day. Most supplements will come in about 1,000 international units per day maximum, and so you’d have to take 5 of those pills or get stronger ones.

With all of these cases, Vitamin D is actually a hormone. You do want to make sure you’re getting a Vitamin D test. It’s possible to take too much. There’s a lot of people right now taking too much. It can screw up your hormones, can give you night sweats and other weird hormonal reactions. So I don’t think it’s a great idea to take tons and tons of Vitamin D, unless you’re working with somebody, getting your blood tested. It’s cheap to get your blood tested, so I would recommend doing that.

Other than that, I would just say take a look at everything you’re doing. Make sure you’re working with your doctor on that, but it sounds like you’re really on top of these things.

I currently live in Korea and I constantly have problems with sitting cross-legged, which is required not only for meditation but also needed for sitting in many restaurants. The pain is not from the knees but from the hips, psoas, lower back and hamstrings. Any recommendations for this?

Carl, first of all, yes there are some recommendations. The whole hip series in the Gravity Yoga Series that we teach is very effective. Blaster Pose, Butterfly Pose and Lightning Bolt, which is taught as a backbend but will be helpful as well. These are all really useful.

The truth is, what you’re doing, just sitting and being uncomfortable, is also very helpful. And so the practice of sitting, I lived in Asia for a number of years and I’m still there. I’m still in Thailand a couple months out of the year, so I’m very, very familiar with the situations that you’re encountering. As soon as you spend any time in most parts of Asia, you end up sitting on the floor a lot.

People think of Asians as naturally flexible. That’s not really the case. Asians living in Western countries are no more flexible than the Westerners living there. It’s just a lifestyle. So you grow up, and if you’re used to sitting on the floor without a chair, if you’re used to sitting in restaurants like you mentioned, if you’re used to going to temple or any number of things where there are no chairs, you learn to sit on the floor and it’s a way to open up your hips.

So I would suggest, Carl, do some stretches and also just be okay with being a little uncomfortable when you’re sitting in restaurants, and you’ll find that your legs will open up quickly. I know lots and lots of Westerners living in Asia who are really, really stiff all over their body, but they have opened up their hips and they can sit comfortably on the floor after living abroad for years, just because it becomes a necessity. So just doing it is effective as well, but take a look at Blaster Pose, take a look at Butterfly Pose and think about doing those two every evening.

I have been doing bikram yoga since 2012. At the beginning, I was going four to five days a week. After the holidays, I’ve only been going three to four days a week. I have been noticing tightness in my hamstrings that I’ve never had before. Is this because I have more muscle there now than before I practiced? What can I do to stop painful tightness?

Christine, whenever you’re new to a practice, you’ll get sore, and sometimes when you get sore you’ll feel tight. And so if you practice a lot and really strongly, you’ll feel really, really sore in your muscles, and that can feel like tightness as well. I wouldn’t be overly concerned about it. It sounds like three or four days a week is a pretty reasonable practice pattern.

It sounds like you’re doing the right thing. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d just give it some time. It is normal to get a little bit of tightness from building muscle strength, but if you’re doing a regular yoga practice, your flexibility should be improving. I always suggest people supplement an athletic practice like bikram yoga with gravity yoga, just because it’s a really good compliment, even if it’s just 15 minutes a day.

I bought the YOGABODY Stretch capsules, and I only weigh 100 pounds. I take 2 caps, 30 minutes before my practice. If I have to take 4 a day, when do I take the other 2?

Okay, so people get really caught up in when to take nutritional supplements. For certain things, it’s important. For YOGABODY Stretch in particular, don’t take it right before bed, and in general I suggest taking it at least 30 minutes before any physical practice, like a yoga practice. The easiest thing is if you just take 2 caps in the morning with breakfast, 2 caps in the afternoon with lunch and you’re good to go. People usually take anywhere from 4 to 6 capsules per day.

I am new to yoga. I am 59 years old. When practicing the breathing and the movement, I most often run out of breath on the inhale before the movement is complete. What is the best way to improve this?

Joanne, this is a great question. One thing that makes yoga very, very unique compared to any other movement practice, whether we’re talking about jogging, whether we’re talking about step aerobics, whether we’re talking about even something like Pilates, it’s really the mind and body integration. And that mind and body integration happens specifically through the breath.

There’s lots of different techniques you can use to try to control your mind or calm or focus your mind, but the one tool that we have that immediately intrinsically connects your body and your mind is your breath, and that’s why it’s so powerful and so important for yoga. So if you’re doing a posture and you’re running out of breath on the inhale, meaning you’re not able to get the full breath in, it’s a clear sign that you’re going just a little bit too far in a pose. Likewise, on the exhale, if you find yourself just kind of vomiting out the breath, you just have to get it, again, you’re probably pushing just a little bit too far.

In an ideal pose, when you’re right where you need to be, it takes all your concentration to keep your breath steady, both on the inhale and on the exhale. What I mean by that is, when you’re doing a pose correctly, when you’re doing an advanced practice, if you don’t concentrate, you’ll lose the breath, just like you’re talking about here, Joan. But if you do concentrate and you’re right at your edge, you’ll find it very, very challenging to maintain your breath, but you’ll be able to maintain it.

If you ever get to a point where you’re losing the breath on the inhale and you have to stop, or chocking on the exhale or anything like that, it’s a clear sign that you’ve gone too far. It’s very, very common. It’s the best way to have an indication of how you’re doing in your practice.

The mistake that people make is they stop breathing through their nose and they start just letting their breath happen freely, as though they would when they’re jogging. Yoga’s a very different practice than jogging. You want to always control the breath, both on the inhale and on the exhale.

So in terms of tips, what I could say for you, Joanne, is back off a little bit on your practice. The other thing I might suggest is working on your breathing practice outside of class. What I mean by that is taking some time to work on deep inhales and exhales. When we’re working with our breath, I usually suggest a one-to-one ratio to start. So let’s say you were sitting down or you were lying on your back. Either one is fine when you’re first starting. You would want to do an inhale to the count of four and exhale to the count of four and do 10 or 12 rounds like that.

And then as soon as you feel comfortable, it might be today, it might be in a few days, you want to work up to a one-to-two ratio, where you’re inhaling to the count of 4 and exhaling to the count of 8. Inhaling to the count of 4, exhaling to the count of 8. That kind of breathing pattern, it stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system, which calms your body down, soothes your nervous system, slows your respiration, slows your heart rate and it’s also just really good training for mind/body control.

And so I’d suggest giving that a try. Anybody who hasn’t worked with your breath, it’s very, very powerful. It’s one of the fastest links we have to connect our body and our mind. The Flexibility Kit

Can you tell me the key differences and similarities between yoga and pilates? I’ve taken both classes and they actually seem a lot alike. I’m entertaining the thought of becoming certified to teach one or the other. Can you recommend any quality training programs for a beginning instructor?

The difference between yoga and pilates, and these are just stereotypes and so take them with a grain of salt, but yoga is typically thought of as a more mind/body oriented practice, whereas pilates is much more fitness-based, physiologically, anatomically based practice.

Now that said, there are some pilates teachers who are very much teaching what I would consider a yoga class. So again, take that with a grain of salt, but the way pilates started is pilates was a big, crazy contraption machine that you do all kinds of very, very much therapeutic strength, balance, fitness-oriented exercises on. So in that way, it had a lot more similarities with gym workouts than it did with yoga class.

Now, over the years, mat pilates and stott pilates or reformer pilates has really become popular, and those classes start to look a lot like yoga classes. What I’m guessing you’ve taken, Gena, is a pilates mat class, where there’s no big machine, no gizmos. You’re just on your mat doing core work, and you’re right, that’s very similar to a yoga practice.

So the similarities and differences, well a traditional pilates, one-on-one session on a machine is not going to look or feel anything like a yoga class, but they’re very much both working towards bringing your body back to balance, rebalancing muscle imbalances, integrating breath and body, so they’re really very, very complimentary and it depends on what you like.

Pilates teachers, just to be quite honest, have a lot more anatomy training, a lot more physiology training. They’re a lot more educated in terms of the body than most of us yoga teachers. Their trainings tend to be more rigorous and more in detail, and a lot of pilates teachers tend to be chiros and physios and they have kind of a professional background. Now that’s changed in recent years, but in the past, pilates teachers really, really were undergoing pretty stringent trainings.

In terms of pilates trainings, it really depends on what you want to teach. Like I said, traditional pilates machines, they would go through the original pilates organization, reformer, there’s stott pilates, there’s absolute pilates and then mat pilates. There’s all kinds of different training programs.

I don’t know much about pilates. I’ve never personally connected with it. I’ve done a number of pilates sessions of all the different forms, mat pilates, reformer and then traditional pilates, and I liked it but I just never got hooked on it. I never got the buzz from it. So I’m not the best person to ask about it, but there’s certainly a lot out there.

In terms of yoga, there’s lots and lots of yoga trainings. It really depends, again, what style of yoga you want to teach. We have a bunch of training programs, which of course I think very highly of. You can check out our courses at AbsoluteYogaSamui.com. You can see our courses. But again, it really comes back to what style do you want to teach, what organization do you want to be associated with, and from there you can start to make some decisions. So that was kind of ambiguous, but I hope that was helpful.

I was a gymnast many years ago. I was able to do forward and side splits. However, somewhere along the line I noticed every time I tried to do side splits, my left side hamstring between my knee and crotch is much more tight than my right side. Any suggestions on why this may be and how I should practice?

Mark, everybody has the same thing. We all have one side that’s tighter than the other and one side that’s stronger than the other. The tighter side tends to be the stronger side, but that’s not necessarily the case. In very deep poses, like a side splits, front splits, full pigeon poses, these kinds of things, you’ll notice your imbalances very, very acutely.

The only thing you can do is really work towards balance. I always say if you’re doing splits and you’re noticing that left side is tighter than the other, try to spend some more time working on that left side, and I usually recommend never to just stretch one side, but to stretch the weaker side 50 percent longer than the looser side.

There’s nothing you can do. Unfortunately, we’re creatures of habit. We usually have right-hand dominance, right-leg dominance, right-eye dominance and it leads to imbalances. And so, a lot of what we’re doing in yoga is really moving back towards balance, but we never quite get there. I hope that’s not depressing. I hope that’s helpful.

Three weeks ago, I watched a pilates video on YouTube with a strong fitness trainer training male athletes. It resulted in my straining my mid-back muscles doing core crisscross crunches. I put more vitamin B6 and B12 in my diet with fresh fruits, veggies, with some lean meats for healing. How much time do you think it will take before I can do my regular yoga routine that I’ve developed over the years, and do at home? I’m struggling with the 2 or 3 sun salutations that used to be so easy.

Okay, again, pilates traditionally was taught on a very complex machine, one-on-one. It’s changed over the years, and people are teaching all kinds of things and they’re calling it pilates. Stuff you’ll find on YouTube, people do ab cruncher X, 90-minute power ab, all these crazy ab routines. There’s some real benefit to those. With pretty much every ab routine that’s not proper pilates, I find them to be really, really risky, in terms of hurting your back. Mostly, you just end up wagging your back around, wagging your neck around, and injuries are really, really common, even from crunches.

Crisscross crunches, totally common to get injured, just because it’s repetitive stress, it’s an area that tends to be weak and undeveloped and also tight, and the combination of it makes it not the best core strength training practice. The people you meet with the strongest cores, they never do any crunches. They always do functional fitness exercises, things like pushups, things like side planks, things like, believe it or not, pull ups and things like this. So I’d always be careful with those hardcore core crunch routines. I’ve done them, they’re fun to do, I like to do them. They’re just not super safe.

In terms of how long will it take you to recover, I’m not sure. Be careful, though. Take it easy, take your time. You don’t want to mess around with your back. Mid and upper back is usually a place that heals pretty quickly and doesn’t tend to get damaged as badly, but whatever you’re doing, take it easy, make sure you’re feeling okay before you get back to it.

My question is about the balance between static and dynamic postures. Static poses are good for stretches but don’t help in cleansing the body. I tend to do a dynamic warm up and then intersperse dynamic movements between postures. What do you feel is a good balance?

For everybody listening, if we look at yoga poses, we could break them down into static and dynamic poses. Static pose is you do a pose and you stick it, you hold it. This is taught in like a Bikram-style, a gravity yoga, like we teach and a yin yoga style and a lot of classic Hatha yoga styles. You take a pose and you stick it, often for one minute, 30 seconds or even like with long-hold gravity poses, 5 minutes-plus sometimes. Static poses are fantastic for training your nervous system and for developing flexibility. Now in some circumstances, like a hot yoga class, static poses are also fantastic for strength building. It’s a very, very safe way to build strength.

Dynamic postures are flowing postures, like are taught in an ashtanga vinyasa flow power yoga class, where you move much more quickly, usually holding poses for less than 30 seconds, some poses just for a breath or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5. And so this idea that static poses don’t cleanse the body, it’s not really accurate.

What happens in yoga is yoga teachers kind of overstate the benefits of yoga poses. So you’ll be in some yoga pose and the teacher will tell you that this pose increases your testosterone and the next pose cleanses your gall bladder. The body doesn’t really work like that. You can’t just take a pose and suddenly have these really complex biochemical reactions happening in your body.

In terms of cleansing, so what is cleansing? Well, cleansing is when our body removes toxins. Your body is cleansing all the time, and it’s removing natural toxins, as well as petrochemical toxins, things from our environment. And your body removes toxins three main ways: Through your skin, which is your largest detoxifying organ in the body, so through sweating. So if you’re doing static poses and you’re not sweating, fair enough, Stephen, that’s true you’re not cleansing your body as much, but you’re still breathing. So breath is the second way. And the third way are through your organs of elimination, your feces and your urine, pretty obvious.

In terms of thinking about which is better in terms of cleansing, I wouldn’t get too caught up in that. In terms of your practice itself, you just have to find what works for you. One of the reasons that hot yoga is so incredibly popular and so incredibly effective is because people start with static poses, and the beauty of static poses is that they’re not intimidating, they go slow, you feel safe, risk of injury is very, very low. And so in some ways, a static practice, when you’re doing strong, static, athletic poses as opposed to gravity poses, can be a really great place for people to start.

And then other people who are more athletically inclined, they might feel very bored or they might feel claustrophobic or stuck doing static poses and they prefer something that’s more dynamic. So just figure out what’s good for you. I find that a lot of people mix it up. So they’ll do a dynamic practice as their primary practice, their fitness-oriented, athletic practice, and then they’ll do static gravity poses to counterbalance that, and that’s kind of what we recommend, but that’s not necessarily the best for you. Just find whatever works for you, but I wouldn’t get stuck on that idea of cleansing or not cleansing.

In Noodle pose, is it normal for me to feel more like a lower back stretching than a front stretching?

In any back bend, it’s normal to feel it in your lower back. Any time you take a back bend, your hinge point is right at L4, L5, S1, the base of your spine. Your goal in every back bend, every time, any time, is to get out of your lower back, to take the pressure off of that joint and try to take more of the arc, more of the curve, more of the backbend into your middle, your upper back, into your shoulders, into your legs, whatever you’re doing.

Now in Noodle pose, that’s a passive pose, so you’re not trying to do anything. But what I would like you to do, Etienne, is adjust yourself until you feel the stretch less in your lower back and more equally distributed throughout your entire back. You can do that by using more pillows, you can stack lots and lots of pillows, or playing with the angle at which your back is resting on those pillows.

Do you have any yoga moves for scoliosis? What are the best poses to combat and correct scoliosis?

Scoliosis is very complex in that in many cases, the scoliosis is created by muscles and not structurally. So in other words, in some but not all cases of scoliosis, were there to be no musculature, you could just straighten out the spine. And so in some cases, scoliosis can be the quintessential extreme example of muscular imbalance. So almost all of us who get injured, we get injured and we hurt ourselves because we have imbalances in our body. You can think of scoliosis, in many cases not all, as an extreme case of muscular imbalance.

In this way, yoga can be very helpful sometimes, for some people with scoliosis, because it can help to restore balance. Now it just depends on how serious your scoliosis is. Some people have scoliosis and they don’t even know. In those cases, those people will often find yoga makes their back feel fantastic. For people with extreme scoliosis, sometimes yoga can be aggravating and can just make things worse. That’s the truth. So there’s no one answer to this. Scoliosis can be very, very minor, to the point where you never need to see a doctor, or your scoliosis could be so serious that your doctors might be recommending surgery and things.

So whatever you’re doing, check with your doctor. Speak very, very clearly and articulately to your teacher, so you make sure they know what’s going on, they don’t push you into certain poses. And then from there, really listen to your body. But it’s very likely yoga can help. You just have to find the right practice and the right teacher, who’s going to work with you. Yoga Trapeze

I have the yoga body handbook and things are going well, but I’m still pretty sore. Should I still stretch or give my body a rest?

Here’s my very non-scientific approach to soreness. It’s normal to wake up in the morning and feel sore if you’re doing anything, any kind of physical training, whether it’s running or resistance training or yoga or whatever it is. Very often, you’re going to wake up in the morning and feel a little sore. That’s normal.

If the soreness doesn’t go away when you start moving around, and specifically if it doesn’t go away when you’re about 10 minutes into your yoga practice, my unscientific method is then you need to take a break. Take a couple days off, give your body a rest.

If you’re soreness goes away when you get up and start moving around, in my experience, I think it’s just find to go right back to stretching, especially if you’re being careful, always following your breath and being respectful of your body. So I’d use that as a rough guide. If you’re so sore that when you start moving around you’re still sore, give yourself a break.

Am I supposed to be on the back knee when tensing my front thigh and balancing myself without the support of my arms, or should I be using my arms and holding myself in the air for the 20-second hold? (Shannon is talking about the splits here.) Should I be doing these PNF stretches even if I’m sore?

If you’re really sore, no, don’t do PNF stretching. PNF stretching is proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation. Big long word, we’ve talked about it before. Basically, you tense up a certain muscle group and then relax it. It encourages your body to relax. It kind of goes counter to the stretching reflex, which is where your body seizes up, instead of releasing. It’s a really simple technique, but it can make you really, really sore because you’re using those muscular contractions. Sometimes that soreness from stretching, a lot of times, is soreness from really engaging that muscle so strongly.

In terms of what are you doing when you’re doing this, I think you’re talking about the frontal splits here, Shannon. You want to use your arms to hold yourself above in the air, for sure. You might need to use a pillow or a block or a book to get yourself nice and safe and engage just the front leg. Don’t worry so much about that back leg. Engage your front quads really, really strong and then release.

Flamenco: (Flamenco is a pose where you lay on your back and you do hamstring and hip-related stretches.) Should I be doing the Rag Doll a couple of times in a row to achieve results, as long as I can’t yet do the Flamenco? Maybe it would cause too much blood going to the brain or something?

Caroline, Rag Doll is a pose where you’re just doing a real passive forward standing bend, with your knees bent. Caroline’s having trouble with Flamenco, so wondering if she should do Rag Doll more often. The answer is no, Caroline. It’s good to have a little bit of mix, a little bit of variety. It will access to your body in different ways. Anyone can do Flamenco Pose. Grab a strap or a belt. You can do it.

Wide Dog: Do you have a good exercise to loosen up and stretch the calf muscles so that I can prepare myself for Wide Dog?

Yes, I have a great pose. It’s called Wide Dog. Do that one. It’s really, really good. You can do One-Legged Dogs, which work even more intensely to stretch your calves. I have very, very tight calves, I always have, and you can stretch your calves by doing that One-Legged Dog, where you put one foot behind the other ankle.

Lightning Bolt: (This is a pose where your knees are together and you’re sitting on your knees. Some people call it Japanese-style seated position, like you would do in a Dojo. You bring your feet apart and sit your bum down on the floor) I can manage sitting on a cushion with my legs to the side, but the place where I feel the stretch is the top of my feet that are being stretched on the floor. Should I keep doing this until that foot stretch gets lets painful and then try to remove the pillow? Also, is this exercise bad for people with weak knees?

If you’re feeling it in your feet, that’s perfectly fine. You need to stretch out the tops of your feet. You need that rotation in your feet. You’ll find it really, really beneficial. You’ll also find your feet open up really quickly. If you have weak knees, this pose can potentially be dangerous. It can also be a revolution for you. Like a lot of things, the same things that heal us can hurt us, if we do them too much. It’s just like if you went to the doctor and they give you a medication and the medication would save your life if you took the right dose and if you took too much it would kill you.

The same with a lot of these yoga poses. Luckily they won’t kill you, but if you do too much, push it too far, you could certainly hurt yourself. So be very, very careful if you have weak knees, for sure. It’s a great question, Caroline.

Pins ‘n Needles: I’m not sure if I fully understood this one. The guy in the image is clearly sitting on his toes, but the guidelines say that we have to sit down on our heels.

You put your bum on your heels, but your toes are curled under. So your toes are on the floor, but your bum is on your heels. So sit back with your bum onto your heels.

How long would it take an average inflexible person like myself, to get to full flexibility? A year, a couple of years?

Caroline, everyone has a different definition of full flexibility. I’m a pretty flexible guy. I still consider myself stiff in a lot of places, but most people would think that’s ridiculous, so it just depends on your goals. Within a year, most people can get their hands all the way flat to the floor, in a Forward Bend. Most people can push all the way up to a Full Wheel Pose in a backbend. Most people can comfortably do a bound twisting pose. Those are some real simple poses that I use to gauge range of motion, and almost everybody can do that in a year. A lot of people can do that in a month or two. But for sure within a year, if you’re stretching daily, you’ll be pretty happy with the way your body changes.

I am a total beginner. Would you recommend that I first do a few months of this stretching before I also take up Yoga?

No, I would not. Get right into it. Start going to classes, if you like classes. Start practicing at home, even better. Do both of them, that’s the best.

Are any of these gravity poses classical, existing yoga poses? And if yes, what are their names?

Yes and no. Some of the poses, like a Butterfly Pose, is a baddha konasana, The Rag Doll is a variation of a classic forward bend. Many of them have classic Sanskrit names, some of them don’t. I just use English names. I like English names better. But some of them do have classical names. I find that people can’t remember them, and they don’t mean anything to most people and so they just make it harder for them to remember. But yeah, some of them do have classic names.

I had a painful massage session to try to loosen up some muscles in my neck and head and I have regular discussions about how much pain is beneficial. On the yoga side, what might be helpful?

I’m not into painful massages at all. People get really masochistic and weird and they want massages to hurt like hell. I’ve seen people with bruises, with literally black and blue marks all over their back, people who are limping after massages. That’s weird. To me, that’s not massage, that’s S&M, it’s weird stuff. It’s really, really weird. I don’t know why, but people love it. I have lots and lots of clients and students, and they go to a massage therapist and they literally want to be hurt. It’s weird. That’s all I can say about it.

Injury is injury. People call it opening or breaking through or breaking up – people talk about breaking up scar tissue or whatever it is. If you’re walking away from a massage session and you have bruises or you’re in pain, in my opinion, that’s not a good massage therapist. People will get mad at me and you can go ahead and post comments down below, I’m happy to discuss this, but that’s not a good thing.

When you get sore from yoga, that’s a very different thing, you’re talking about micro-tears and stretching and strengthening. Even that can go too far, of course, but painful massage, you’re getting elbows dug into your back and you’re taking your breath away and you have black and blue marks, that’s not going to help you with your flexibility, with the structural integrity of the body. That’s weird. That’s all I’ve got to say.

I’ve been diagnosed with major depression. I practice bikram yoga twice a week, I struggle with diet. I juice a lot. I take omega 3 multivitamins and probiotics and Zoloft, but I still can’t lose weight. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Here’s the challenge, Brenda. Antidepressants, something like a Zoloft, can lead to weight gain, very, very, very common. Why does that happen? The truth is, these SSRIs and other antidepressants, they don’t know exactly how they work, but for the most part they mess with serotonin uptake, so they might increase, decrease, regulate. It’s a bit of a mystery. Everything in neuroscience is still kind of up for grabs.

In terms of how a lot of these neurological medications work is really a lot of a mystery. The one thing I can tell you is it sounds like you’re doing a lot of good things, doing yoga, juicing, omega-3s, multivitamins, probiotics, all those things are fantastic. It could very well be that that medication is screwing up your hunger. Some people lose weight on antidepressants. Some people lose weight initially and then they gain weight later, that’s also very common.

But I would definitely talk to your doctor about ways that you might be able to switch. And that might mean more, that might mean less, that might mean changing your medication, but for sure have a chat with your doctor, don’t ever do anything without talking to your doctor. But for whatever reason, doctors don’t talk about this so much, but it’s very, very common.

The one thing people don’t realize also is that a whole ton of our neurotransmitters are in our gut, in our stomach. So anytime you mess with your neurotransmitters, with your neural health, you are by definition messing with your gut health, and it can have a really big impact.

Have you noticed tighter hamstrings in people with knock knees? (This is when people have their knees pointing in, inward slope of their legs.) I look at other people similar to my body build, their legs, and I notice them struggling in the same asanas.

Will, tighter hamstrings, yeah maybe, but for sure problems. Everybody has different problems though, so I wouldn’t get too hung up on it. Meaning, if you have a really long torso, if you have a really short torso, if you’re really long, if you’re short, if you’re overweight, there’s challenges that come with every body type. In terms of tight hamstrings, I personally haven’t noticed that, but for sure hip challenges are something that’s relatively common.

Whatever it is that you’re dealing with, I always encourage people not to get so stuck on your limitations, but just think about what you can do and move yourself back toward balance. The more you get into it, almost everybody has some pretty serious imbalance going on.

I can only hold Noodle pose about ten seconds before experiencing back pain. Should I keep trying to extend the time?

No, Carol, don’t extend the time. What I would suggest you do in Noodle Pose is add more cushions to the chair. So lots and lots of pillows, so the backbend is very, very gentle slope to the back, you should be able to hold it longer than with no pain at all.

I have been a vegetarian since 2004, by 2007 also gave up fish and eggs, the problem I have now is that my body muscle has depleted and I am feeling movement in the bones as there may be more fat. Looks like my body is using up the muscle. I also do yoga and meditation. Any thoughts or suggestions?

In terms of movement in the bones, I’m not sure what that means but that doesn’t sound good. Bill, the biggest challenge with the vegetarian diet, the number one, biggest, biggest challenge is not where do you get your protein. It’s how do you keep your blood sugar stable, because as soon as you remove protein, you tend to remove fat. As soon as you lower fat and protein, you tend to increase carbs. As soon as you increase carbs, most people tend to increase grains, and grains being bread, pasta, wheat, rice, all these kinds of things. It can really wreak havoc on your blood sugar. It can also have autoimmune responses, where you have chronic inflammation and joint pain and all this kind of stuff, digestive problems and these sorts of things.

The one thing I would do is it sounds like you’re pretty in touch with what happened in the past. If you were looking at the period from 2004 to 2007, when you were still eating fish and eggs, how was your health then? Maybe for someone like you, maybe it’s better to include fish and eggs. If you’re totally opposed to that, which I can understand, I would just take a real close look at your diet and start working with a nutritionist and take a look at your blood sugar in particular.

If you’re losing muscle mass, that’s really a big risk. Your lean muscle is really the core, the powerhouse of your metabolic health, and it’s really the fountain of youth as well, for hormone balance and everything else. Lean muscle is very, very important. You don’t need big slabs of it like a bodybuilder, but you need to have lean muscle for your health. So for sure, take a close look at that, get your fasting blood glucose levels tested. You can do it at home if you want, we’ll talk more about this in the future, but for any vegetarian, I learned this from Dr. John Dyer, really, really great advice. Get your fasting blood glucose tested. Make sure that you’re not running really high blood sugar levels. That will cause all of the problems you’ve talked about and many, many more.

I am currently taking your Liquid Energy-B once a day, and I am having a sluggish day, for instance having to come down with a cold or feeling run down. Is it safe to take another B12 drop to make me stay alert?

For those of you who don’t know, Liquid Energy-B is our all-natural B12 nutritional supplement. B12 can be a natural mood and energy elevator. In terms of taking it more than once a day, Mima, there’s not really any point. It’s quite a high dose of B12, it’s water soluble, it’s very, very safe, but there’s no real point in taking it more than once a day. So I would recommend no.

I have your book, which is very helpful. My problem is, I’m on pose overload, so many positions to choose from. Which ones complement each other? Can you recommend a series that would provide a good workout with variety or where I can locate them?

Jack, in terms of pose overload, there’s certainly a lot of yoga poses. There’s definitely hundreds, some people would say thousands. Lots of them become variations, but the core poses, there’s not all that many, but there’s a good, solid 50 poses that are really commonly taught in Hatha yoga classes.

If you’re talking about something for a good workout, if you’re talking about something athletic, the two places that I often recommend people are towards hot yoga series, we teach one called absolute yoga, there’s also Bikram obviously and Moksha yoga is great and Barkan method. And the other one I recommend is an Ashtanga yoga primary series, and from Ashatanga yoga, lots of different derivative practices have come. Power Vinyasa flow practices, all of which can be really good.

It can be a little overwhelming at first. If you can, if you’re looking for something athletic, a good workout, I’d encourage you to try to check into a local studio for a while. Spend at least a month or two as a regular member, get yourself well established, it will be a lot easier for you to have a home practice. Home practice is, of course, the best, and the goal I think for everybody, but you’ve really got to get a foundation somewhere, especially if you’re looking at doing a full athletic style of Hatha yoga at home.

I took a yoga course and apparently injured my inner left thigh. I cannot even put my left ankle on my right knee to put a sock on my foot. I have tried stretching, relaxing, acupuncture, chiropractic, essential oils, all to no avail. It has been 6 months since the injury, and I’m now very depressed. This muscle has not come back to its former flexibility. Any suggestions?

If you’re getting that kind of pain six months after an injury, there’s probably something really, really serious going on. Your inner thigh is a strange place to feel that. It could be any number of things. Inner thigh, sometimes people will be referring to one of their hamstring muscles or could even be one of the quads or it might not be something muscular. In any case, six months is way too long. You need to go get that checked out right away.

It sounds like you’ve done the alternative thing, you’ve gone to an acupuncturist and a chiro. I would suggest going to a mainstream allopathic sports physiologist, somebody who deals with injuries but who has an M.D., a medical doctor. They might need to do an MRI or see what’s happening in there. That sounds serious. Let us know how it goes, let us know what you find out. Take it easy and be gentle on yourself.

I really want to order your yoga trapeze. My husband says if I do, he cannot use it as he gets dizzy hanging upside down. Is there a cure for this condition?

Yeah, it’s interesting, Tanya. A lot of people get dizzy hanging upside down. But interestingly, for whatever reason, it tends to go away. I don’t know why, I guess it’s just practice. When people start doing inversions in yoga, like headstand and handstand, they’ll often get dizzy initially as well, and your body just get’s accustomed to it. The only cure that I know of is just practice, in the same way that somebody who lives on a very windy road, the first time they drive they might get car sick. Very, very quickly, their body gets accustomed with everything that is vertigo-related, it tends to be just conditioning.

How long do you warm up before stretching? I don’t know how long is enough. Do you usually start with simpler stretches?

If you have time, it’s good to do a nice, long warm-up. If you don’t have that much time, shorter is okay, too. All of the gravity yoga deep stretches that we teach are safe to do even if you do them cold. If you do warm up, you’ll find you get deeper in your stretches. I often recommend people do gravity yoga poses after any kind of athletic workout, a run, after going to the gym, after doing an athletic yoga class.

Alternatively, just at the end of the day, you’re pretty warmed up. You’re relatively loose, much more so than in the morning. In the morning, you might find you need more warm up. So, do you have to warm up? No. If you want to warm up, there’s lots of good options.

I like to do some sun salutations. You can find links to that on our site. Sun salutations, I like to do what I call moon squats, which I think work really well. I also like to do push ups, and I like to do long-hold handstands, so a handstand at the wall, hold it for about three to five minutes. That will get you warmed up really quickly.

In terms of starting with smaller stretches, just start carefully and move slowly, take your time. If you’re less warmed up, you’ll find it’s a little bit harder to get into your practice, but you’ll get into it. It’ll just be a little bit tougher going.

Any advice for neuralgia? My husband suffers from it, and we try to avoid taking pharmaceuticals.

Corinne, that’s potentially a really serious condition, and for sure not something I would turn to a yoga teacher for, myself included. With anything neurological, nervous system, I’d for sure get a couple of different opinions, but you know, there’s a time for pharmaceuticals and there’s a time to avoid them. With a condition like this, if it’s really debilitating, I would for sure go see a good neurologist or two and get a couple of opinions.

I have a question regarding the healthy diet plan and cutting out dairy products. My breakfast and dinner are usually based on dairy. Can you give me other options of no dairy breakfast or dinner that I can start having a healthy diet plan?

Yeah so dairy, if you ask people why they eat dairy, almost everybody will say they’re eating dairy for calcium. The dairy marketing materials, dairy board, has convinced us that we all need gobs and gobs and gobs of calcium all day long, and milk is the best place to get it. There is a lot of calcium in milk. Calcium deficiency is really not that common, more common is an inability to absorb calcium. Calcium is one of the most abundant minerals in our diets, it’s all over the place, relatively easy to get from all kinds of foods. Absorbing it is another matter. That’s why they’ll stick Vitamin D in milk. It’ll be enriched milk to help you absorb that calcium.

The other challenge with dairy, the main challenge, is that it’s difficult to digest. And depending on where you’re from, it might be easier, it might be more difficult. So, people in Northern Europe, in Holland, in Scandinavian countries, they digest milk very, very well. People in Asia and Africa, they digest milk very poorly, and everybody else falls somewhere in between and all of this gets worse with age.

And so what does it mean to not be able to digest it? Well it can mean anything from having a slight upset stomach, to having acne, to having chronic inflammation, to having all kinds of degenerative digestive disorders, to having mood problems, to having all kinds of things. And in different countries, there is a huge, huge deal in the United States, for example, cheese and milk and yogurts are in all kinds of things, specifically breakfast.

So what can you do? It sounds like I’m guessing that you’re eating vegetarian, and if you are, the challenge with vegetarian is most people become breaditarians or they become milkitarians, and all of their lost calories form meat gets put into dairy and wheat. And if we’re comparing the three, meat, dairy and wheat, meat is like sent from god, in terms of its nutritional value. There’s all kinds of problems, in terms of consuming it, in terms of the environment and ethical and moral concerns and these kinds of things, but nutritionally meat is vastly superior to anything bread-based, anything dairy-based. Most meats tend to be hypo-allergenic, meaning even though they digest slowly, they don’t cause inflammation, they don’t cause digestive problems, they don’t cause allergenic reactions and things like this.

So, in terms of what to do, the key here is to try to get rid of the dairy, and you’ve got to replace it with something. So what’s really nice about dairy, is it’s got a ton of fat, and potentially that’s really good fat. Now most of the time, by the time you get the dairy, it’s been cooked and it’s been homogenized and it’s been packaged and preserved and processed, at least a couple of times, if not four or five times depending on what form your dairy is in.

So that fat isn’t as good as when it started, but the best thing about dairy is its fat. It’s a very, very great source of saturated fat, potentially. Most of the fat coming from the dairy industry right now is just kind of a toxic waste dump, something you want to avoid.

In any case, if you want to remove dairy, you need to find a good source of fat and a good source of protein. The problem will be if you start swapping out those dairy calories, that fat and the protein that you’re getting from your milks or your yogurts. If you start swapping that out for wheat, like breads and pastas and rices, any kind of grain-based stuff, that’s going to really screw up your blood sugar, increase your hunger, decrease your energy, increase your body fat.

So you’ve really got to try to find low-glycemic options. The best thing to eat for breakfast is the same thing you should eat for lunch and dinner, which is just balanced, whole foods. That means eating nice, healthy fats all the time, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables. That means incorporating salads into every meal, if you can. If you’re eating animal-based protein, eating lightly or minimally cooked animals from a source that you trust, ideally something that’s wild caught or raised as close to wild as possible.

But for sure, your risk here is grains. So if you’re trying to remove dairy, naturally most people are going to eat more bread and they’re going to eat more pasta and rice. You need to try to reduce those, because those are going to get you into trouble. We can talk more about that, but hopefully that gives you some ideas to get started.

I don’t know how to eventually do frontal splits. Do you know how can I practice it at home to quickly get some results? How long and how often should I stretch every day, and should I do this before I get my legs down on the floor?

Here’s what you want to do, is if you’re really trying to get the frontal splits, practice it every day, unless you get really, really sore, but otherwise practice it every day, and work up to a five-minute hold on each side.

Now, you’ve got to use a clock. I always tell people this, and they don’t use a clock. They just get down there in the splits and moan and groan while they’re watching television. You’ve got to use a clock. Use a clock, work up to five minutes on both sides. Do that every day. You’ll see big, big results very quickly. Don’t push yourself too hard, too fast. If you’re at one minute right now or two or five minutes, wherever you’re at, just work up to a five-minute hold, and then you’ll be golden.

Now the key thing is here, when you’re not all the way down, you need to support yourself. So this is a deep, heavy stretch, you need to put blocks on either side of you, or books or pillows underneath you, something to support you so that you’re not overly leveraging your front and back leg.

How often do I have to use GI Cleanse and Liquid Energy-B?

For those of you who don’t know, GI Cleanse is a fiber supplement that we sell. It’s made from pure psyllium husk. Psyllium is unique in that it expands to about 50 times its size with water. So it’s a bulking agent, and it helps to increase bowel movements.

In terms of how often you should use it, it’s quite safe. It’s not a laxative stimulant, so it’s not going to create any kind of imbalances, but ideally you want to be getting most of your fiber from food.

That said, if you’re on a cleanse, like if you’re on a juice cleanse and you’re not eating much fiber, if you’re just backed up or blocked and you’re not having regular bowel movements, taking GI Cleanse irregularly, as needed, to get you regular, is a good idea. I like to take it right before bed, and usually you wake up in the morning and you’ll have a bowel movement.

If you’re finding yourself reliant on fiber supplements for more than a month, you need to seriously reevaluate your diet, because you should be getting that fiber from your diet. That said, almost everybody gets in a situation, on a pretty regular basis, where for a number of reasons they’re dehydrated, they haven’t been eating balanced, they’ve been traveling, whatever it is, they’re not having regular bowel movements and GI Cleanse can be very effective for that.

Liquid Energy-B is a B vitamin supplement that we sell, predominately vitamin B12. It comes in a really easy to absorb form, the same form that’s available in your brain. How often should you use it? Most people feel more benefits from Liquid Energy-B with irregular use. That means let’s say four or five days a week, six days a week, take a day off.

This is something you might use for two months, six months, a year, and then you might take a break from it for a while. The best way to judge is if you need it right now is how you feel after you take it. It’s one of these things that when people have B12 deficiencies, which lots and lots of people do, both vegetarians and non-vegetarians. As soon as they take it, they’re just blown away by how good they feel, how clear they feel in their head. There’s a natural lift in energy and mood, and as long as you start to feel those benefits, there’s a good chance that you should keep taking it.

You can, of course, go get your B12 levels tested, which is a great idea. It’s inexpensive. Any blood lab can do that for you. But it’s a fair guess that many people are lacking in B vitamins, and so I recommend taking it irregularly. I just have a bottle sitting next to my desk, and I probably take it four or five times a week. And there are also times when I take it seven days a week, and there are times when I go a week without it. You just try to gauge your own vitamin needs, your own supplement needs, and of course I do get blood tests every year as well, which is helpful. But with all these things, you just want to figure out what works for you, and you don’t want to create a dependency on supplements. You just want to use supplements as a supplement, to supplement your diet.

I have a big problem with both my shoulders. I over stretched my shoulder ligaments through martial arts exercises, and I’m in deep pain because the bones are rubbing on each other. I am trying to exercise and do some stretches, but every time I feel a lot of pain on my shoulders. Do you have some easy exercises I should do to avoid pain and the bone movement and build muscles?

Okay, so this is a really, really serious question, and I want you to take it really seriously. If you don’t, you could have problems forever. I just had the first shoulder rotator cuff problem of my life recently. Don’t really know why. I think it was actually something unrelated to any kind of exercise. I was opening a jar, believe it or not, just kind of tweaked my shoulder blade. It was really bad. It took about six weeks to heal, and now it’s fully back and it’s really back in shape. But for a while there, I couldn’t really support my weight in a push up position, and it happened all at once. It didn’t build up over time, it just tweaked.

I don’t know what’s happening here, but this sounds like a rotator cuff thing to me. I don’t think your bones are rubbing together. I think you’re feeling an irritation in that rotator cuff. In any case, get this checked out and take it really seriously, because you want to make sure you heal quickly as possible and you heal strong and you don’t further exacerbate this problem.

The key pose here that really will save the day is called a forearm stand. A forearm stand is kind of a challenging pose, unfortunately, so it’s not something that everybody can do. But I was doing forearm stands, every day I would do about 10 of them for 30 seconds each, and it really, really immediately relieved the pain. It also built strength and helped to support that shoulder joint really, really well.

If you’re unable to do forearm stand, which might be the case, you can do the same thing at the wall, where you put your hands on the wall as though you were doing a shoulder stand, but support your weight with your feet. We’ll make a video about this soon. It was really remarkable how helpful that was. And this variation, this wall version of forearm stand, is something that’s taught by lots and lots of people, including sports medicine therapists and physios and all kinds of people, specifically for rotator cuff, because it’s been found to be so effective.

I have a third degree ligament tear in my knee. What yoga can I do to help and what should I avoid?

I don’t know which type of ligament tear you have, an ACL, which is anterior cruciate ligament, that’s the most common one. There’s also three other types of relatively common ligament tears.

What happens is, the ligaments that cross the knee there, connecting your femur bone to your shin bone, so ligaments connect bone to bone. It’s really, really common, about 120,000 just in the U.S. each year have it, more women than men for some reason, and it can be really, really serious.

If you have a third degree tear, that’s a really, really serious one, and you want to be very careful, because they do not heal and they’re not repairable very well. There are things that can be done to get better and better all the time, but you’ve got to be really, really careful.

What yoga should you do? What should you avoid? Whatever you’re doing, make sure you’re working very, very closely with your doctor, your health practitioner. Work with somebody in person, because you want to be careful. For sure, you don’t want it to feel inflamed or worse. It wants to be feeling better and better.

In order to do that, you’re going to have to be really, really cautious. With almost everything, you do want to stretch, you do want to use it, but you want to be very, very careful. For all these types of things, standing yoga poses are very, very effective. The standing poses of any hot yoga sequence can generally be quite safe and quite effective. There’s a few exceptions, a few poses to stay away from, primarily ones where your knee is bent and laterally rotated. You’ll probably not want to be in the heat, though.

In any case, this is pretty serious, so make sure you’re working with somebody, and I’d actually consider working privately with a local yoga teacher, if you can. Maybe one or two sessions, just to develop a routine that’s safe and appropriate for you.

If you don’t take the recommended dose of YOGABODY Stretch, 4 capsules per day, will it be not as effective? I feel I’m not as naturally flexible as some other people. I’ve been stretching for what seems like forever, and I still can’t easily get into the splits. Any recommendations?

Devyn, there’s multiple things that happen when you’re trying to get more flexible. Nutrition is one of the things, the other thing is stretching and how you’re stretching. We talk about this all the time. Make sure you’re meeting or beating your hold times, especially if you’re doing the splits. You need to do really long holds. You need to work up to five-minute holds, as quickly as you can. If you’re working on the side splits, that’s five minutes straight. If you’re doing frontal splits, five minutes each side.

In terms of getting into it easily, that can take a while. You might be able to get into the splits this year, but it might be three more years before you can get into it without a warm-up. So it really depends on the person. It depends on what you’re doing. Make sure you meet or beat your hold times. Focus on plant-based nutrition, lots of water-based foods, and you should do really, really well.

Can I perform my PNF stretches for the front and side splits after or before my gravity poses? Also, can I perform PNF stretching every day?

PNF stretching is proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation. Those are some five-dollar words in there, bigger words than I’m usually used to using. Basically, what it is, is when you’re in a pose, you engage the muscles fully, really, really hard so they tremble and then you release and relax completely so you can go deeper into the pose.

It’s been studied and it works. It doesn’t work in everything. People get overly excited about it. It works very, very, very well in the splits. I love to teach it in the splits. You can incorporate it and do it with gravity poses, either before or after either one. You can do PNF stretching every day. It’s fairly safe. You’ve just got to be careful not to overdo it. You can really burn out your muscles as well. We have some videos about it as well, if you search my YouTube channel, I think the name of it is Ninja Stretching PNF Split Secrets. We’ll put a link in the show notes here.

I have a structural congenital anomaly in my right hip, femoral ante version. I have gone to a physical therapist who told me there’s nothing that can be done. I’m trying to relax in hip openers, but I’m not sure what to do.

Femoral ante version is like when you see kids whose feet are turned in 9 times out of 10, that’s what’s going on. A lot of times it corrects with age. Many times it doesn’t. People have different degrees of this. It’s very common for people to have structural imbalances. Sometimes people won’t even know about them until they try to do something, like a yoga practice, which might be more demanding in terms of range of motion than they’ve done before.

In terms of what you can and can’t do, that’s not something that I could tell you or diagnose over the phone. It’s not really within my expertise anyway. What I would consider doing is trying to work one-on-one with a yoga teacher, who can take a look at you and maybe take a look at working with a physio, a structural integration therapist, somebody who really understands the body and yoga, who can take a look at the imbalances in your body that may have developed from this condition and help you to work on a series of poses that might be helpful for you.

With one to two sessions with someone like that, they can probably give you some really great insight that can help you practice pain-free for a long time.

Everybody in Canada is talking about green coffee for weight loss. Dr. Oz is telling people to use it to lose weight. What is your opinion on that?

Blanche, Dr. Oz, I don’t know what’s happened to him, but he has sold out completely. Every day he’s flogging something new. First it was acai berry and then it was raspberry ketones and now it’s this green coffee stuff.

What happens is, every year in the weight loss industry, people go out and they try to find something that’s really, really high in antioxidants and they start selling it as weight loss. It’s not weight loss. Grapes are really, really high in antioxidants. You can eat all the grapes you want, they’re not going to cause you to lose weight by themselves.

The same with acai berry. Acai is amazing. It’s got tons of antioxidants, very powerful, amazing berry, but what does that have to do with weight loss? Nothing.

Green coffee, is there some interesting antioxidant properties? Yeah, for sure. What does that have to do with weight loss? Nothing. I don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t know why this is legal. I don’t know why Dr. Oz is doing this. Don’t pay any attention. The green coffee won’t help.

Can I read when I’m doing 5-minute yoga gravity poses to avoid boredom?

The answer is yes. Liron, do anything you can to help your body relax. Just make sure you use a timer. It’s easy to lose track of time and hold your poses for too long or hold them imbalanced, meaning longer on one side than the other.

I have a weakness and an old injury. Should I continue to practice? My acupuncturist says no.

So here’s the deal with injuries. If you’re in the midst of an injury, if your injury is inflamed, if you feel your injury all day long, if you can feel swelling, if you can see redness, it’s time to take a break. After the initial injury, after the swelling goes down, after that initial pain, it’s start to get back into movement, and the reason you need to do this is because if you don’t you will heal weak. You’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to do this letting your teachers know, you’ve got to do this with the right advice.

But if you heal weak, your chances of getting another injury are very, very, very common, and it happens a lot. Somebody will pull a hamstring, they’ll quit doing anything for a year, then the moment they start doing anything, whether it’s yoga or running, whatever it is, they re-pull that hamstring, because they healed with imbalances and they healed weak and it happens a lot. You’ve got to be careful.

In your videos, I see you into down-dog, doing knees, chest and chin and also doing Chaturanga-style pushups in sun salutes. Which is correct?

There is no correct or right or wrong. You can do either one. So basically, knees, chest and chin transition is a classical sun salutation movement, from like a Sivananda, from an integral yoga. And a half pushup position, plank position, is more from like an Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga tradition.

They’re both great and they’ve very different and they have different benefits. Knees off the floor requires more upper body strength. It’s actually a very challenging pose that most people do wrong. Knees, chest and chin is actually a pretty good back opener and requires a fair amount of coordination and stability in your spine as well. So I’d practice both of them, they’re both really great.

When doing hamstring stretches and I’m laying on my back, I lower my leg out to the side and I feel it in my left hip, instead of in my right leg. Is that okay?

The way our bodies work is, the story I always tell is when I do forward bends, I feel it in my calves. I don’t feel it in my hamstrings. My hamstrings are open, my calves are tight. So for me, a forward bend is all about my calves. It’s very weird, but this is common.

So you opening your leg out to the right and feeling it in your left hip, as long as it’s not an acute, funny, twinging, electrifying kind of pain, it’s probably just your body balancing some things out. Everything is connected to everything else, and so it’s just that tightness being transmitted over, and I wouldn’t worry about it. Chances are good that you’ll move through that quickly.

Is it more important to keep the knees together while doing lightning bolt pose, or can the knees come apart as long as they stay on the ground?

Your knees can come apart. Lightning bolt is a pose where you’re sitting on your knees, between your knees, bum on the ground. Eventually you’ll lay down on your back, a big stretch for the tops of your legs. The only thing here, Kai, is you don’t want your knees to splay way out. If your legs are making a V shape, you’re too tight. Come up and do the pose seated, until you can go back. Your knees should not come apart more than say three-fifths width distance between your knees.

I have made some great gains in my twisting ability using the twister pose. Are there any other poses that I can do?

Twister pose is a supine pose. It’s done on your back. It’s a great pose. For gravity yoga, it’s the best pose. Other gravity poses for twisting, I don’t usually teach other ones. The other poses I’ll teach are dynamic poses, different style of pose.

One of the best ones that you can work on is a twisted side angle pose. It’s a fantastic pose. It’s taught in most yoga classes, but it’s often skipped over. It’s a very common pose, but it’s taught very quickly and people don’t have enough time to get into it deeply. If you start working on side angle followed up by twisted side angle, as part of your normal yoga routine, you can get some really great benefits there quickly.

About 10 years ago, on an occasion of a stiff neck, my doctor said I have spurs in my cervical vertebrae. I am working in the office, so I have stiff neck and shoulders all the time. Can I do a headstand?

First of all, Maggie, and everyone listening, never learn a headstand at the wall. I don’t know why, but yoga teachers always want to teach headstand at the wall. Well I do know why, they want to do it so that you can do it right away. The problem is, if you do a headstand at the wall, anybody can do it right away and anybody is not ready for it.

What that means is, your whole body weight is now resting on a very weak, imbalanced neck and shoulders, and it can cause all kinds of problems. I get really upset when teachers teach it this way. A lot of people learned it this way, and it can work out just fine 9 out of 10 times, and that 1 out of 10 times people get neck problems.

When you do a headstand properly, when you learn it in the middle of the room day one, never, ever use a wall in headstand. In handstand, in shoulder stand, yeah, for sure wall. Headstand, never use a wall. As long as you learn it in the middle of the room, it can actually be really great for your neck.

Now, is it great for your neck, Maggie if you have spurs on your cervical spine, on your neck? I’m not sure. You need to talk to your doctor and make sure that’s the case. What you’ll find is that headstand done properly, strengthens your neck and your shoulders. Sometimes that strengthening can also be balancing and stability and can actually relieve pain. But again, everybody’s different. Do be cautious, do be careful and don’t use the wall.

While stretching, when the muscle is tight, tense or hard, is it a bad idea to massage it? Can you massage tight muscles?

Let’s say you’re doing the frontal splits, Jeff, and your quads, on the front leg, are very, very tense. You can certainly massage it. That can be a good way to help you relax into a pose.

I like to do pigeon pose, but I am not able to fully do it. What would be the best way to practice it?

There’s two poses that are commonly referred to as pigeon pose. Jeff is talking about the hip-opening pose, where your front leg is across you’re the matt. Your shin is going across the mat and it’s a deep hip stretch. The way to practice it, Jeff, is to do pigeon pose every day and try to work up to five-minute holds.

Instead of laying down over the leg, here’s what I want you to do. Put one hand on the knee, put the other hand on your ankle. If that’s not working, put your fingertips on the floor. Again, one hand on the knee, one hand on the ankle or fingertips on the floor. So you’re upright. When you’re upright like that, you have more leverage, you’ll get a lot further. A lot of people teach pigeon pose flopped over the leg. It’s really easy for your body to find a way to distribute the weight so you don’t get a deep stretch there. Practice it with your body upright most of the time.

There is a movement we do in my yoga class, where I’m on the tip of my toes, my bum near my ankles, bringing the pelvis up so I’m into a forward bend and it causes cracks in my knees. What can I do about the cracks in my knees?

Here’s the thing. In yoga, you’ll find that at different times, different parts of your body will crack. I remember my sternum was cracking every time I did a sun salutation for a while. My lower back used to pop a lot, my knees always still, every day when I do a forward bend, will pop. And my knees are totally solid, strong, never had a problem.

So it can mean nothing. It can also be painful, depending on what you’re doing. If you want to just make sure your joints are warmed up, that’s a really great idea. The way to do that is to bring your joints through a full range of motion. If we’re talking about knees here, that means fully extend your leg, engage the leg and lock the knee. That means bend down deep into a squat, and that means doing some lateral movements, so twisting your leg to the inside and outside, as though you were kicking a hackie sack, first on the inside and then on the outside.

If you’re worried about cracks in your knees, do that routine before you practice yoga. It should be quite helpful.

What do you think of cracking in general, like someone who cracks their fingers, cracks their neck?

I don’t think it’s a great idea. In terms of whether it’s safe or a medical problem, it certainly is habit-forming, meaning people who need to crack their neck all the time, they need to crack their neck all the time. And people who need to crack their knuckles do that as well. So I tend to not recommend it. There’s different opinions on whether it’s actually problematic or not. The general consensus, I found, is that it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do, in my opinion, though. If somebody else knows something about cracking joints, post it down in the notes. I’d be interested to hear.

Have you ever thought about teaching a class or thought of certifying instructors in the gravity yoga series?

Jeffrey, yes, we teach gravity yoga as a full class. We teach all the poses, it’s about 75 minutes long, been doing that for about 5 years. In terms of teacher training, we will have one. It will be coming up sometime in the next 18 months. It will probably be invite-only and a small course, the first one. So if you or anybody else is interested, please just get in touch with us, let us know. We’ll probably be doing that some time in the near future, either in Thailand or else somewhere on the east coast of the United States.

I do Ashtanga yoga and I’ve spoken to my teacher, and I don’t understand why my hamstrings tighten up when I do a straddle stretch.

I am confused by this question, Kai. If you could send me more information for next week, I’d love to answer this. I’m just a little bit confused. You say your inner thighs have no tension, hamstrings tighten up. Saddle stretch, I’m just not 100 percent sure which pose in Ashtanga you’re talking about. Send me the pose name, and hopefully we can help you next week.

Can I take YOGABODY Stretch at the same time as maca powder?

Maca, for those of you who don’t know, we sell it in the YOGABODY store. It’s called Mojo in our YOGABODY store. It’s a Peruvian root vegetable. That’s all it is, and then it’s concentrated. They get rid of some of the starch, so it’s easier to digest, but it’s basically just a root vegetable. It looks like a turnip. It’s an adaptogen, meaning it’s adaptogenic plants, which basically are kind of like all-purpose cleaners. They do lots of different things in your body.

What maca is most known for is its ability to balance hormones, increase libido and increase fertility, thousands and thousands of documented case on maca increasing fertility. A lot of people, even if they’re not trying to get pregnant, they like it because it balances hormones. It can balance hormones in women, raise testosterone in men. It does it very naturally. It is not a hormone in and of itself, so it’s very, very safe.

Can you take them together? Yes. In terms of all supplementation and super foods, I mean, maca is not even a supplement, it’s a super food. You need to be careful with your digestion. When you’re taking really, really strong, concentrated things, the breaking point would be your digestion. So if you take, for example, a normal dose of maca is like 2 to 5 grams, something like that. If you were to take 20 grams of maca, you would feel an upset stomach. If you were to take 20 capsules of YOGABODY Stretch, you’d feel an upset stomach. If you were to take 10 grams of Vitamin C, you’d have horrible gas.

So you really need to gauge your digestion. Sometimes you need to space out your doses, and just pay attention to what’s going on internally. A lot of times people will start taking some new supplement, and they’ll think, “Oh, it’s a cleansing reaction or this is supposed to happen or the gas is supposed to be there.” That’s not the case. Sometimes your body just needs to get used to it, sometimes you need to space our your dose, sometimes you need to take it with food, sometimes you need to take it at a different time of the day.

So can you take maca with YOGABODY Stretch? For sure. I do it all the time. I would just take it at a different time of the day.

I have large fibroids which were surgically removed 7 years ago, but have returned with the same speed. Can you give me some suggestions to help dissolve them naturally?

Doreen, this is not something that I could help you with, but I would recommend, for sure, meeting with your allopathic medical doctor and then maybe considering talking to someone like a naturopath or an ayurveda practitioner, to see if they can help. But that’s way beyond my expertise.

I took yoga for a few years. I have been taught to breathe in and out through the nose, not the mouth. Are both methods correct?

The answer is, Jessie, in most traditional yoga practices, you’ll almost always breathe in and out through your nose. This is, more than anything, for energetic reasons. It’s very calming, puts you in a very different brainwave mental state. There’s all kinds of study and research around nose breathing versus mouth breathing.

In terms of inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth, like we do in gravity poses, you’ll also see this taught in some Pilates classes. It’s a different approach. It’s still very, very similar. The inhaling through the nose has that same affect on calming your body. The reason we do it in gravity yoga, and it’s not required, it tends to allow people to relax more deeply on the exhale, when they exhale through their mouth, and it also has kind of a natural relief throughout the whole body.

It’s not required. Plenty of people practice gravity yoga poses, breathing in and out through their nose. If that’s more comfortable or more natural for you, go ahead and do that. But I do find a lot of people find it really beneficial in gravity yoga, long-hold poses in particular, to inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. You still get the same calming benefits, but it has this kind of physiological release that happens in your body.

As of now, I do not do yoga. There are no studios near my house, but I take acro, so I can do back bends, splits and many other flexible things. I would love to practice yoga in my basement. What are some beginner moves that increase back and shoulder flexibility?

Ashley, if you can, I’d recommend trying to find a studio. If there’s not one in your area, maybe you could go visit one in a neighboring city or a neighboring town. It’s always good to go check in with a class, even though in many cases, myself included, mostly we practice at home.

That said, you can check out our YouTube channel, which is YouTube.com/LRockwood, like my name. Or you can check out our site. We’ve got tons of videos, and of course we have DVDs and other things you can practice with at home, too, but that would be a good place to get started.

A friend of mine has trouble with his knee. It sounds like a ligament problem, and he had an injury the last year or two. Is there any exercises that can strengthen his knees?

Okay, so first of all, I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a ligament problem. You don’t really know. It could be any number of things. It could be meniscus, it could be ACL, it could be a lot of different things. With knees, don’t mess around. I always tell people, just go get checked out.

If you have a knee injury and it gets worse, it could mean surgery. You might need surgery now. There’s plenty of times when you don’t need surgery, but there are times when people get a little bit of twinge in their knee, they don’t look after it and it turns into something that’s really serious.

So for sure, I’d go get that checked out. Provided your doctor signs off on it and it sounds like a good idea, the yoga practice that I think is most restorative to knees, tends to be hot yoga practices, like an absolute yoga style, like we teach, or a Bikram hot yoga or a Moksha yoga or a Barkan hot yoga. All of these yoga’s have really strong standing practices, often asymmetric standing, so standing on one leg. They’re very safe, because your knee is stabilized. They very much work on engaging and strengthening your lower body and your core, which is really, really fantastic for your knees.

In terms of knee rehabilitation, those practices are some of the most renown, those styles of practice. Hope that’s helpful.

I’m in my late 50′s and have never been very flexible, so I am eager to make the most of Yogabody gravity poses. When I try The Hangman pose, I can’t seem to straighten my arms. Is that okay?

So Hangman pose is when you lay next to the wall, with your hands up the wall, with your head dangling between your arms. When you first start, Bernita, it’s really common for your elbows to bend. That’s no problem at all. Just work towards straight arms. And even when your arms are straight, it’s still a soft bend in the elbow, so they’re not locked out straight. So don’t worry about that at all, just keep practicing.

Another approach I’ve played with to stretch and bend in the waist is to an L shape. I am initially not quite true to the L shape. At first, it seems I can get a good stretch that way, progressing in that direction. What do you think of this approach?

Bernita is doing a Hangman pose, at a 90 degree angle at the wall, with hinging at the hips, hands on the wall. That’s a really great variation. It’s not nearly as strong of a pose, but it is certainly gentler, and it’s a good way to warm up and a good way to approach it.

In terms of the benefits, the Hangman is a much more powerful pose, but you’ve got to work with where you’re at. So if that’s working for you, keep doing that.

: I have been working hard on my stretching for the past week or so, and I’m getting really sore. My hips are my problem area. After a week of doing lots of bhadda konasana (when you’re sitting on the floor, bring your feet together, your knees stick out like butterfly wings. We call it Butterfly in gravity yoga poses.) I can barely get into it, let alone start to lean my upper body forward. It feels like I’m moving backwards rather than improving. Is this a normal part of the process? Should I push through?

First of all, if you’re getting too sore, take a couple days off, or you’re not going to do yourself any good. You don’t want to get too sore. So take a couple days off, if you need to. Bhadda konasana is an awkward pose. What I would recommend doing is rolling up a towel and putting it under your bum, to give you a little bit of leverage forward.

If you can, place your hands on the floor in front of you, and keep your back long. Your back is going to want to roll up like a roly-poly bug. Instead, try to put your hands on the floor and lengthen your chest forward, especially if you’re really struggling. And take it easy. Don’t push through. That idea of pushing through in yoga is generally not a great idea.

I took 3 YOGABODY Stretch capsules 40 minutes before class, with a large glass of water. I realize I should have started with 1 capsule and see how my stomach handled it. I had a bad class. What is your feedback for the next time?

For sure, you want to practice on an empty stomach. If you’re taking YOGABODY Stretch or any other nutritional supplement, or even any kind of medication, you’d want to take it at least an hour before practice so that it’s not sitting there in your stomach. The same goes for food and all kinds of other things.

With vitamins in particular, you’ve got to kind of play with it. Some people have more sensitive stomachs than others, but if you do, I’d recommend taking them with meals. It takes a little bit longer to absorb. In some cases, it might impair absorption, but that’s okay. As long as your stomach is feeling good, that’s a better approach.

So I would suggest try taking your nutritional supplements with meals, if you have a sensitive stomach, and make sure you don’t eat about three hours before practice.

Would YOGABODY Stretch have a negative effect on someone with blood thinning drug Warfrin? People on this drug are supposed to limit foods with Vitamin K, due to its ability to clot the blood.

What I would say, Carolyn, is for sure check with your doctor on this. In theory, there shouldn’t be any kind of complications, but when you’re on medications like this, blood thinning medications, for sure you want to check with your doctor and make sure that’s okay.

I have asked you about stretches to improve Full Wheel pose. The problem is, it’s so hard for me, even after a good warm up, to get into Urdhva Dhanurasana, the Full Wheel pose. When I attempt it, my elbows cannot straighten, and I struggle to hold it for 10 seconds. I can hold Hangman (which is a gravity passive pose) for 5 minutes, but I still have this problem. Any other tips to loosen up these muscles and develop the Full Wheel pose?

Steve, the deal is, especially for men, we tend to develop upper body muscle and strength, which is kind of the antithesis of flexibility. They can go hand-in-hand, but they don’t naturally. We tend to have to work towards it. So the Urdhva Dhanurasana can be a real brutal one.

A couple of things. The first thing is, if you can hold it for 10 seconds, that’s just great. Just make sure that you’re breathing. Don’t hold your breath. If you can hold 10 seconds, do 5 sets of 10 seconds and that’s great and build from there.

The other thing I want to talk to you about is when you’re doing the Full Wheel pose, your whole focus, your whole job, is to try to get out of your lower back. So naturally, your body is going to hinge right at your L4, L5, S1, right at your lower back. And your job, in your mind, in your body, you want to think, get out of my lower back, get out of my lower back. You do that by really pushing down into your heels, so you get a lot of pelvic rotation, so you’ll start to feel it in the tops of your legs, your iliopsoas muscles, you’ll feel your quads start to tremble. And you’ll also want to get it into your middle and upper back, and that’s when you’ll start to feel it in your arms, in your shoulders, in your chest. You want to feel your heart melting between your hands.

Now in terms of are there any tricks, what you’re doing is right. Hangman is very, very helpful. Urdhva Dhanurasana itself is very helpful. If you can only hold it for 10 seconds, first of all, make sure you’re breathing and do more of them. As long as you’re not experiencing pain, do more of them and keep building from there.

You really want to get up to 30-second holds. Almost nobody does this, but when you get to 30-second holds in Full Wheel pose, that’s when you start to make really, really big progress. Make sure you’re breathing, and also, you can practice on your head. So you do 10 seconds, lower down to your head and just pause there and then come back up. It’s like an Ashtanga style.

There’s some big benefits to that. The biggest one is you keep your body in that position, and your nervous system allows you just to slowly open up more and more. Keep in touch, let me know how that goes. We’ll give you some more tips on that as we go along.

I’m just wondering, what your take on Kombucha and do you drink it? Also, what’s your opinion on juicing veggie drinks versus blending them in a Vitamixer? Should we mix it up and do both?

Okay, Kombucha, for those of you who don’t know, is a wild fermented tea. Really simply, you take black tea, like an Orange Pekoe, like an English Breakfast, like a really, really dark Chinese tea, black Chinese tea, and you put a bunch of sugar or some type of sweetener, but white sugar tends to be used what’s most often and you ferment it, just like you would ferment wine. It is slightly alcoholic, very, very little, but they actually for a while there in California, they had to take it off the market because of the alcohol content.

The other thing you need to know about it is in almost all cases, there’s a lot of caffeine. By a lot of caffeine, I mean about as much as a cup of tea, except people tend to drink a big 16 ounce, 24 ounces of Kombucha, so it can be as much as a cup of coffee. I’m not a big fan of caffeine, for that reason.

The other thing is, it is fairly sweet. Now depending on the Kombucha, it can be pretty low in sugars, but it really depends. All that said, I do like it, I love it actually. I love everything fermented. I love Kimchi, I love sour kraut, I love anything pickled, I love all of that stuff, kefirs, I love anything that’s fermented. Something about it, my body reacts really, really well.

The one thing you need to know about Kombucha and anything that’s wild fermented, is that there’s all kinds of other bacteria in it. It’s not controlled. Kombucha is a wild ferment. You buy something that’s called The Mother, and it looks like this alien space pod, mushroom, goopy thing and you throw it in the bottom of your Kombucha thing to ferment. It’s like a starter, basically. The same way, if you were making yogurt, you’d take a spoonful of yogurt and throw it in there. You have this thing called a Mother, and some people have Mothers that are decades old, literally. They passed it down from generation to generation. It’s this big, goopy pod thing. It’s pretty weird looking. It’s basically a big bacteria thing that’s used to ferment.

Now in an ideal scenario, you’d have all kinds of beneficial bacteria in there, and there almost always are. But because it’s a wild ferment, you also get other stuff that you don’t want, yeasts and other bacterias that may or may not be helpful. So that’s the real risk of wild fermentation. Is it a big risk? No, but it is a risk.

And so, who should be concerned? Well, if you’re someone who suffers from Candida, if you’re someone who suffers from yeast infections and fungal infections, wild ferments can sometimes make those conditions worse, when you’re trying to make it better, and a controlled fermentation process might be better for you, which would mean making kefirs and yogurts right from a controlled from a laboratory or from a capsule, like if you use our probiotics to create the ferment. That’s a controlled fermentation process, as opposed to wild. Kombucha is essentially wild, and a lot of other stuff gets in there.

Again, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re someone who struggles with yeast or fungal problems, it could be a problem. So what’s my take on it? I don’t like the caffeine. I have made non-caffeinated Kombucha, which I like a whole lot better because I have sort of a personal vendetta against caffeine, and you’ve just got to be careful that you ferment it long enough to get rid of most of that sugar, because who wants a big sugary tea. But, once you get rid of that, it’s really, really refreshing. Fermented foods give you this kind of super charge. They can be really, really fantastic for your digestion, provided you’re not struggling with some kind of fungal or yeast infection as it is.

Second part of Amy’s question is, what is your opinion on juicing veggies or blending them? So both are really great. What happens is, most people don’t eat any fiber, and when I say not any fiber, I mean like less than 25 grams a day. Some people less than 10 grams a day. Most people rely on things like whole grains to get their fiber, which is terrible. Whole grains, they’re inflammatory towards your GI tract and you get a little bit of fiber from them, but that’s not where you want to get your fiber.

You want to get your fiber just from vegetables, really, fruits and vegetables. And so a lot of people say, oh we shouldn’t juice, we’re throwing away all that great fiber. And that might be true for you, if you’re somebody who doesn’t eat a lot of fiber. Once you really get into this plant-based thing, you don’t need any more fiber. You have so much fiber, it’s no big deal at all. Somebody who’s really eating plant-based is eating tons and tons of fiber. Every single meal is fiber-rich, and so to have a vegetable juice is just fine.

Now, if you’re someone who struggles with infrequent bowels or stagnant bowels or irritable bowels, it might be beneficial for you to bend them. So, Amy, there’s no right or wrong answer here, but if you’re someone who struggles with bowel issues, that insoluble fiber that you’ll find in plant foods can be really beneficial. So maybe mix it up, maybe do both. With green juices, I really like to just juice them, because again, I get plenty of fiber and I like to take a lot more than I could take.

For example, let’s say I was going to do a huge, huge spinach salad, 500 grams, a little over a pound of spinach. If I was to eat all that fiber, it would be pretty rough on my digestion. I can take a lot, but in one meal that would be a little bit much. My stomach wouldn’t feel that great. But I can juice 500 grams of spinach. I can drink it down, and I feel fantastic.

So it kind of goes both ways. With greens, I’m usually looking for quantity. I’m usually looking to mega dose the minerals and the chlorophyll in those veggies, and so I like to get rid of the fiber, but I’m a guy who’s got plenty of fiber, so it depends on who you are.

I’ve been doing your 5-day stretching routine from the YOGABODY Handbook for 2 years. It’s awesome and I’ve made lots of progress on all the stretches, with the exception of Wide Dog. I can’t find any of the benefits or challenges of it. It’s just an awkward pose for me. Can you give me any tips on how to do this pose?

Okay, so first thing’s first, Kore, you might not need this pose. Maybe you’re just fine, maybe it’s not helpful for you. For everyone listening who’s never done it, Wide Dog is like a Downward Dog, but shorten your stance, so walk your feet in closer, and then bring your feet way, way, way wide on the mat and drop down into your shoulders.

This is a shoulder stress, as well as a hamstring stretch. Some people just can’t feel this. Kore, what I’m going to recommend is do it on the edge of a bed. So nice wide stance with your legs, but put your hands up on the edge of a high bed and try that. You should feel a nice, deep stretch in your shoulders.

If you don’t, it sounds like you’re really committed, doing a lot of practice, just don’t do it. Not every pose works for everybody. It sounds like you’re doing a lot of things right. If it’s not working for you, skip it, but do try that bed variation, see if that helps.

I need to lose 70 pounds safely, and my neck and my back hurt. What can I do?

Okay, this is a really, really complicated question, Denise. Let me just give you a couple things to start with. First of all, I do a lot of work with weight loss. I do a lot of work with weight loss of 50 to 100 pounds, 100 pound-plus clients, like lots of work, like thousands of clients.

What I can tell you is, almost everybody, in terms of dietary stuff, needs to get their blood sugar under control. This is a much, much longer conversation than we can go into here, but I’m just going to give you a few things to think about.

Almost everybody who needs to lose 50 pounds-plus, even 40, even 20 pounds-plus, has blood sugar issues, meaning their blood sugar is going up and down, up and down, up and down throughout the day. It’s causing tremendous cravings, and it’s also causing you to gain weight. It’s a catch-22.

So how do you get your blood sugar under control? Well first of all, you need to eat very, very regularly. Don’t skip breakfast, don’t skip that first meal, almost everybody does. You’ve got to eat about every four or five hours, at the most, to keep your blood sugar stable. Secondly, you want to eat really, really, really low-glycemic foods. That means get rid of your breads, get rid of your pastas, get rid of your rice and focus on fatty foods and protein foods. You’ve got to get your blood sugar under control.

Once your blood sugar is under control, you might be able to add some of those foods back in later, but it’s really, really crucial, to fight your cravings, is to get your blood sugar stabilized. If your blood sugar is swinging up and swinging down, you’re always going to feel so hungry it’s going to be impossible.

Those are a couple of things to think about. Again, this is a big, big, big, long conversation. I would encourage you to take a look at TheGabrielMethod.com. This is one of our sister companies. We do a lot of work there with mind/body weight loss, holistic weight loss, balancing blood sugar, balancing lifestyle. You can learn a lot over there.

I would like to know how to get fluoride out of my city water so I don’t have to drink it and pay for it. I have been getting well water from someone else for almost a year and now, but I found I have kidney stones. I do not know if their water is filtered and leaves red residue in jars it has a strong sulfur smell when turning on the hot water in the house , so I am wondering if this is where the kidney stones came from. Can you tell me if water with sulfur can cause stones?

Kidney stones are kind of a big mystery. A lot of people are attributing them to over-supplementation of things like Vitamin C. Some people are attributing them to hard water, like you were talking about. Nobody really knows. There’s a lot of speculation.

If you’re getting well water and it smells funny and leaves residue, it’s a really bad sign. I’d, for sure, get that water tested. Well water, in some cases, can be terrible. In some cases, it’s fantastic. Even funky-colored water and funky-smelling water can still be fantastic, so it’s not necessarily an indication, but definitely, definitely get it tested. You never know what kind of petrochemicals, residues from farms, you never know what’s in there, so get it tested.

In terms of getting fluoride out of your water, we talked a lot about a few different filter options last week. We’ll put a link here in the class notes, or else just flip back to last week’s show. We talked about reverse osmosis and carbon filters and a couple other filtration options. There’s no real easy answer. Everybody has to kind of make do with what they’ve got, but I would definitely be leery of that well water. That sounds funky.

How often can you do a certain gravity pose, such as Hip Blaster, in a day? Is it beneficial to do it more than once a day?

Samir, you always risk over doing it, so I wouldn’t recommend. For Blaster pose, I’d work on longer holds, rather than multiple times. Could you do it more? Yes, I’d just be leery of it. You don’t want to get yourself too sore.

I can get into Full Lotus taking first my left leg and then the right leg and can sit in that pose for 10 to15 minutes. However, when I try to bring first the right leg and then the left leg, I can’t keep the pose for more than 5 minutes. It feels uncomfortable on my shin. Should I insist on working on the hard side, or is it normal to be better on one side?

Seda, a traditional Lotus pose, as is taught in tons and tons of traditions, is right leg first, left leg on top. And so it looks like you’re doing it the opposite way. It doesn’t really matter. Certain teachers will say it’s more auspicious or more beneficial to have the right leg first, left leg on top. I don’t really buy any of that. I just think it leads to imbalance.

It’s totally normal to have one side easier than the other. If you’re doing 5 minutes on one side, 10 minutes on the other, it’s a pretty normal imbalance. What you want to try to do is become more balanced. If you’re just feeling it in the shins, that’s a really good sign. You want to be leery of knee pain and really strong ankle pain. If you’re just feeling it in the shins, you’re probably doing okay, so I would just keep working on that weak side.

The key thing is, you don’t want to exacerbate the imbalance. So you want to basically keep your weak side your maximum. So if you can only hold it for five minutes on the lopsided side, hold the other side for five minutes, too, and so you try to balance yourself back out. If you keep holding that strong side longer and longer, you’ll just exacerbate that imbalance.

I have been eating brown rice with veg almost every day for lunch. I thought I am very healthy, but I keep losing weight and hair. What am I lacking? Also, I need to lose body fat, about 4.4kg. I wonder where my fat comes from?

Okay, first thing’s first. A lot of food in the world tends to be rice-based, wheat-based, pasta-based, grain-based. Whenever you’re thinking of food, if you think of grains at all, they should be kind of like entertainment. What I mean by that is whether it’s bread or rice or noodles, if you eat them at all, it should be fun food. It’s just there like a garnish, extra food. Something else needs to be the primary thing you’re eating.

If you’re a meat eater, maybe it’s a big fish. If you’re a plant-based person, maybe you’re eating primarily legumes or whatever it is, primarily dark greens or broccoli stir, or whatever it is. But the brown rice, the noodles, all the grain stuff, that needs to be entertainment.

In terms of losing weight and losing hair, the hair thing, that’s something to be concerned about. I would definitely go see somebody and check on mineral imbalances. People talk about copper and people talk about a lot of other things for hair. A lot of it is speculation, but you definitely want to get checked out, especially if you’re losing weight quickly. That’s not a good sign, assuming you don’t want to lose weight.

It sounds like, more than anything, you want to lose body fat. So where could fat come from? Well the important thing to remember is that the easiest way to gain body fat is through carbohydrates. It doesn’t matter if they’re simple, it doesn’t matter if they’re complex. Carbohydrates elevate your insulin levels, and insulin is the fat-storage hormone.

So protein will elevate your insulin levels, but not nearly, not even close, to how carbohydrates will. And fat will not elevate your insulin levels at all. So ironically, if you ate pure fat, you would often lose more body fat than if you were to eat pure carbs, and that’s a real mind bender and a paradigm shift and I tell people that a thousand times and they still don’t believe me, but it’s true.

If you’re eating, for example, a primarily rice-based diet, your body is very efficient, it’s called lipogenic, the lipogenic efficiency of converting something like brown rice into fat is very, very high. Whereas if you gave your body much more fat in the source of perhaps meat proteins, perhaps legumes, perhaps nuts and seeds, perhaps you were working with more healthy fats, whether those were oils or those were fatty vegetables or fatty nuts and seeds, your body would have a much harder time converting that into fat.

Kind of a roundabout answer, I opened more doors there than I think I closed, but if you’re losing hair and losing weight, I think that would be a cause for worry and I definitely would go speak to somebody, a trusted doctor or perhaps a holistic health practitioner who could give you a few tips. You don’t want to be losing hair. That sounds strange.

Your idea of “meet or beat your hold time,” when it comes to the daily stretches in your program, most of your poses say to hold the stretches for about 2-5 minutes. How long do you end up holding the stretch once you get to five minutes? Do you continuously hold for five minutes from then on, or do you encourage longer holds?

This is a great question, Samir. Five minutes, for whatever reason, I’ve found to be kind of the magic length of time for holding a pose. It probably has something to do with your nervous system, it probably has something to do with how long it takes your body to fully relax. But five minutes is kind of the magic time.

In terms of holding longer, yeah, sometimes, some poses, yes. Other poses, I find there’s not a whole lot more benefit to holding longer, which is kind of strange. So an idea of poses that I do hold longer would be deep hip stretches, like Blaster. If I’m working on the full side splits, if you can, working up to a 10 minute-plus hold, that’s pretty brutal, but that can be really helpful.

But in general, for most poses, if you’re working at the five-minute hold range or above, you’re going to see tremendous, tremendous breakthroughs really quickly.

Can I mount the Yoga Trapeze on a wall and use it similarly to an Iyengar rope wall? I’ve tried a similar device hanging from a ceiling and got motion sick from the slight swinging motion, I’m very sensitive. I would like to use this mostly as a pelvic swing and perhaps some other stretches.

Sandy, you could certainly mount the Yoga Trapeze on an Iyengar-style wall. For those of you listening who haven’t seen an Iyengar wall, they’re made in different ways, but a lot of times it will be a wooden wall with a lot of different hooks and you can mount different ropes and straps and things to assist you in some postures. It’s a pretty fun device. There’s not that many of them around, primarily just because they’re a little bit complex to set up.

But if you have access to an Iyengar rope wall, you could certainly mount the trapeze from there. A lot of the poses we teach won’t work exactly as we teach them on the wall, but you’ll be able to modify and do a lot of other things, using the Trapeze, that I think you’ll find just as, if not more, beneficial. So short answer is yes, just keep in mind you will have to modify things, because it will be a little bit different.

I eat a Vegan Diet, Gluten Free and I don’t drink any coffee, tea, or anything with caffeine in it. I am still the most inflexible person in Yoga studios, amongst men and women. I’ve tried almost every possible avenue for flexibility and it just seems like my body doesn’t want to open up. Any ideas?

Well, it sounds like you’re eating some really great food and taking care of your body and all that stuff, so that side of things sounds like it’s sorted. My big question would return to what we talked about in the beginning and what I always return to, is are you doing supplemental stretching exercises.

So you’ll go to a yoga studio, you’ll do a 60 or 90-minute class and your progression, in terms of your flexibility, will be very, very small, unless you supplement your practice outside of class. I like to teach gravity yoga poses, there’s other practices as well, but I find them really effective, these long-hold, passive poses, and you’ve got to meet or beat your hold time. So let’s say you’re blocked in your hamstrings and you’re working on Ragdoll pose and you can do a three-minute hold, then tomorrow you do three minutes and five seconds, the next day three minutes and ten seconds and you work up until you’re doing five minute-plus holds, and I’ve never seen that not work.

What I have seen happen is people really have a hard time doing self-practice, and they have a hard time committing. And so they keep going to the yoga studio, keep going to their yoga class, love their yoga studio, love the yoga class, but they’re just not seeing benefits. It’s really, really common. So I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing. Are you doing at-home practice? Are you doing it at least five days a week? Are you timing your poses, and are you meeting and beating your hold times every day?

In Lightning Bolt, I can lie on my back with my bum on the floor between my feet, just that. I notice my knees automatically come up off the floor. What’s your advice for this?

Lucretia, you’re going too far, too fast. Lightning Bolt, for those listening, is a gravity yoga pose we teach, where you sit between your heels and eventually you’ll lay back. If your knees are coming up off the ground, you’re going back too quickly, it’s a real common thing. I always warn people not to do this. It can be really dangerous on your knees. Don’t go back too quickly. Just sit your bum on the ground, spend a lot of time there.

Once you’re up to five minute-plus holds, just with your bum on the ground between your ankles, you can slowly start to lower back, but do not be in a rush. It should happen very, very naturally, without any pain or twinging in your knees, and definitely without your knees lifting up off the ground.

For The Blaster pose, my back knee hurts doing this pose. Do you recommend I use a towel or a cushion?

For sure, you can do that. It’s a weird thing in yoga. For whatever reason, when you first start practicing or start practicing a new pose, you’ll find that you’ll get pain in your knees and even your elbows and even parts of your spinal process, and then it just goes away. And I don’t really know what happens, it’s just kind of strange. You see old picture of Iyengar practicing on the concrete floor, and it’s not that he had some kind of nerves of steel or anything like that. It just kind of goes away. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, there’s nothing physiologically that really changes. But in the short term, for sure use a towel, like you can fold up a towel, or you can use a pillow. Pillows are great options.

In Wide Dog, it also causes a lot of stiffness in my neck during the stretch. Is there something I’m not doing right?

What I would suggest, in Wide Dog pose, is relax your head completely. If you’re feeling stiffness in your neck, make sure you’re just relaxing your head and neck all the way. You might be over-stretching your neck.

I have been taking YOGABODY Stretch for about a month now, and I’ve noticed TONS of improvement in my hamstrings. Since my hamstrings have healed, I’ve noticed that the tightness seems to have moved to the hip flexors. That really makes it impossible to do the splits still. Are there any poses I should be doing to help this?

We talk a lot about the splits. The frontal splits are a pose that lots of poses build up to. Almost every forward bend, even some backbends are helpful for frontal splits. The side splits is not a pose that many poses build up to well. There are preparatory poses, but they don’t build up too well.

In both cases, practicing the full pose is one of the best ways to learn it. So, Aurora, I would start working on, whether you’re doing frontal splits or side splits, start working on that pose specifically, every single day, and start off with a one or two-minute hold and work your way up to five minutes eventually, and that’s really the best way to grow in that pose, specifically.

Lots and lots of other poses, you can do them all day long and you really get frustrated, because they’re more demonstrative, in terms of flexibility, rather than developmental in terms of flexibility. The splits is not one of them. It’s not demonstrative, it’s very developmental as well.

I read one osteoporosis treatment is to use anti-gravity exercises, such as walking stairs. Are there any good yoga asanas for osteoporosis ?

For sure, check with your doctor. Everybody’s different. Some people are at a place where they need to be really, really careful with whatever they do. In many cases, people need some safe impact exercises. People do things like rebounders, which are small trampolines.

And yoga, in some practices, in some cases, can be helpful for bone density, but everybody’s got a different take on this and there is a lot of controversy, really depends on where you’re at in terms of your stage. So for sure, check with your doctor.

In terms of yoga asanas specifically, there’s a lot of this going around in the yoga community, where people try to use single yoga asanas as diagnosis treatment for certain problems. So you have sleeping problems, do this yoga asana, or you have this whatever, bone problem, try this yoga asana. It’s rarely that cut and dry. So if anything, there might be a style of yoga and a yoga class in particular, with some light impact, that was safe, that could be helpful. But again, for sure, check with your doctor.

I am more an Ayurvedic person, so maybe there’s something that would perhaps best suit a kapha-vata person such as myself?

I’m not sure what this is in reference to. I assume it’s in terms of diet and flexibility. Ayurvedic medicine is the ancient Indian medicine, just like there’s ancient Chinese medicine, there’s ancient Indian medicine. It’s a pretty fascinating system. What Tracy’s referring to, kapha-vata, there’s constitutions, three main constitutional types in Ayurvedic medicine, Kapha, Pitta and Vata, describing different energies in our body. We tend to be a mix and we tend to change throughout our lives as well, but some people are very, very dominant in one area.

Kapha is slow, sluggish energy, tends to be people with larger bones and people tend to be – there’s a whole bunch of different traits we could talk about, and Vata is kind of the opposite, someone with small bones and somebody who has kind of frenetic energy.

And so in terms of how you would approach yoga, I’m definitely not an Ayurvedic expert, so I’m probably not the best person to ask. I do find that people can learn a lot about their yoga practice by studying Ayerveda and by learning about their constitution. And the biggest thing they can learn is which practices they’re going to be most suited for.

So, the very, very athletic practices, you’ll find that the most successful students, they often tend to be people with a really strong Pitta constitution, Ashtanga yoga students things like this. And Kapha, people with a very, very predominate Kapha constitution often gravitate towards more spiritual practices, and this is an over-simplification and it’s borderline stereotype, but it is pretty interesting.

If you take a look deeper, you can learn a lot about your body, your energetic tendencies, and perhaps which style of yoga would be more appropriate for you, or most appropriate for you. Again, I’m not the person to ask specifically, but I do think that’s a valid question and a good line of inquiry. I’ve definitely learned a lot by just my casual studies of Ayerveda as well. Chia Seeds

I live in Chicago, we have fluorinated water. I use a carbon filter attached to the cold water line to my refrigerator. Is it safe enough to drink the water now?

Fluoride is relatively difficult to get out of water, so a carbon filter is somewhat effective. You might be able to get about half of it out with most carbon filters. A carbon filter, if you don’t know what that is, like a Brita brand. Brita is one of the biggest brands in the world for at-home carbon filters, but they make all kinds of different carbon filters. They’re bone char carbon.

The other things that are more effective would be a reverse osmosis system, which is often referred to as RO, RO water reverse osmosis. There’s some challenges with that, too, because it takes out a lot of things from your water. And then activated alumina is another type of filter that’s much more effective than a carbon filter for getting rid of fluoride.

So the deal with fluoride is, fluoride is fantastic for your teeth and has tons and tons and tons of research, and as far as dental care, it’s like a breakthrough revolution, in terms of strengthening and preserving your tooth enamel, it’s really fantastic. But all of these tests, all of this research, is all for topical use. So that would be used in things like mouth washes, toothpastes that are not ingested, gels and things that are put on your teeth. Those can be used pretty safely.

Now, there’s very little, if any, evidence to suggest that actually drinking fluoride is helpful for your teeth, and there’s a lot of suggestion that perhaps it weakens your bones, causes brittle bones and things like this. But all of the evidence, even if you’re super pro-fluoride, which I am, you never want to ingest it. It’s just a wrong use for it. You want to use it topically on your teeth, with toothpaste, with mouthwashes and with gels, but you don’t want to drink this stuff. It’s toxic, and it’s not something you want in your body.

But how do you get it out of your water? Well, in the U.S., a lot of water supplies do have it, and so a carbon filter is better than nothing and you’re doing a whole lot better by getting 50, 60 percent out. But if you know you live in an area that has a lot of fluoride in the water, you might think about getting a more complete filtration system.

Water filtration is complex and controversial and there’s no one size fits all answer. It depends on where you live, it depends on your specific water supply and you have to explore all of the options. A reverse osmosis system, for example, will remove most of that fluoride, but it also removes most of the other minerals as well, so you end up with a real weird, lifeless water, which a lot of people think is bad for you. Again, I’m not really sure, there’s good’s and bad’s to both sides of the argument.

So you’ve got to look at your water supply. You might consider getting it tested, it’s not that expensive, and then from there you could make a decision.

I bought the YOGABODY Flexibility Kit. I stopped drinking coffee 2 days ago. I’ve been doing Bikram yoga and functional exercise, TRX and kettle bell training. (If you’re not familiar with those, those are different forms of body weight, resistance training and really healthy, functional exercises that build a balanced body.) Yoga 3 times a week and gym once a week. The past two days I feel stiffer than ever. Could quitting coffee be a probable reason?

No, Susanna, you’re doing a whole bunch of new stuff, especially kettle bell, TRX, those are strength building, and then even a new yoga practice, doing yoga all the time, you’re going to feel sore. And soreness and stiffness go hand in hand. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re getting stiffer. In fact, you’re probably not, but it’s totally normal to feel stiff and to feel soreness, especially if you’re doing all these different training regimes. That’s a lot of stuff. It’s really, really normal. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to feel sore.

My flexibility has become less during the years. Maybe this is something we have to accept as part of the natural aging process. I would like to stretch and be able to do the asanas as I used to. Is there a way to improve and enjoy yoga more as you get old? Do you have any tips?

Susanna, youth and flexibility generally go hand-in-hand. It doesn’t necessarily need to be that way. Strength, for sure, diminishes as you get older, there’s no question about it. Bone density, for sure, diminishes. But in terms of the flexibility of your connective tissues, those can stay consistent all the way until later in your life.

What happens is, we get less and less active and we tend to put on more and more weight, and because of those two things combined, we become more sedentary. A lot of our bodies just start to atrophy. But one of the beautiful things about yoga is it can be done until very, very late stages of life and can be maintained.

So I wouldn’t let the age thing get you down. I’ve seen people make really miraculous transformations in their body, well into their 60s and 70s. So it’s really not an age-specific thing.

My sleep feels “flat,” and I don’t recall dreams the way I always have and I miss them. I’ve been taking antidepressant medication for several years. Any connection to medications could be causing this?

Jenna, I would say almost certainly. It depends on what you’re taking. There’s all kinds of different antidepressants. There’s a whole different class of antidepressants, we don’t need to get into that here, but the effects of them are very, very poorly known. Meaning, most antidepressants work based on a series of assumptions, and neurologists, they don’t really know much of what’s going on.

When I was in my late teens, I took a number of different things, including Prozac and I took St. John’s Wart, which is a natural serotonin herb as well, so I’m very, very familiar with this. I would say for sure, you’ve got to talk to your doctor, but to be on antidepressants for a very long time is not a good idea, in my opinion. They have all kinds of subtle affects that who knows how those will play out. Everything from memory loss to sexual dysfunction to kind of a blasé attitude, all kinds of different things.

Now all that being said, don’t ever do anything without talking with your doctor, because in some cases these medications and medicines save peoples’ lives and they help people to be balanced in a world where they never would be. But if there’s any chance that you think you could switch to a lighter dose or switch medications or remove your medication, talk to your doctor and see if that’s an option, because if you feel your sleeping effected, chances are a whole bunch of other things are being effected as well. Even very bizarre things, like the coordination of your gait, your walking gait, short-term memory, inability to find words when you’re trying to do a quick recall. Very, very subtle things, but they add up to a peculiar and disturbing set of side effects that I don’t think we should be comfortable with.

Is an 80 cm doorway high enough to hang the trapeze for a 5′ 5″ person? Also, if you use an existing beam, how much clearance does it need above it? I would mostly be doing it for backbends and foot to head poses.

Okay, so 80 cm is not a doorway. I’m not sure, Louise, what kind of doorway you have that’s 80 cm. I’m guessing that’s supposed to say 80 inches, because 80 cm is not even a high enough doorway to walk through. So I’m guessing it’s supposed to say 80 inches, in which case, that might be enough. It’s a low doorway, but it depends, since you’re 5’5”, realistically, that’s kind of a low doorway. You’d like to have something higher, if you could, assuming that’s 80 inches, which would be just over 7 feet.

If you do have a beam, that works even better. You said if you had an existing beam. So how much clearance does it need above it? You don’t really need any clearance above the beam if you’re hanging the yoga trapeze. You just need to be able to slip a rope through there so you can hang from the beam itself, or some people I’ve seen have exposed beams in the ceiling of their house and they’ll drill a massive hole right near the top of the beam and they’ll use that as well, if your beam is not full exposed all the way around. Can’t Sleep?