When I started P90x seven weeks ago, I had no idea Thursday yoga would be one of the most difficult days. For someone that has never done much yoga (or any yoga), I had no idea what I was getting into.
One of the things I tried to do was make it part of my routine. With P90x, you have a different workout six days a week. Once I set the same time each day, the routine became much easier.
My next step, as Nike says, was just do it. Try yoga. Don't get caught up in reading all about it. You can do that later. As a software engineer, that's sort of what I've done my entire life. You tend to learn more when you jump into things. You can always go back after the fact and refine what you've learned. Learn by doing.
Learn by doing.
After the first two weeks of doing yoga on Thursdays, I thought it was time to do some research. I had questions like, "Is P90x yoga a good start for a beginner?" and "What's the deal with all these different poses?". I tried to come up with a bunch of resources to read more about yoga and start my journey to become involved in the yoga community.
My first stop was Reddit. For those of you that don't know, Reddit is the front page of the internet. Users share links and vote those links up in popularity. It's also a place that's home to some extremely strong communities in fitness. Even the Terminator posts on Reddit.
If you're looking to get inspired, the yoga section of Reddit has 22,000 yogis at the time of writing this. Get involved.
Mind Body Green is a popular resource with some community driven content. People submit blog posts that get featured on the website. Tula Software has some yoga content featured there as well.
I particularly enjoyed Mind Body Green to learn about the different types of yoga poses. With P90x, you only perform a subset of the poses, so I was always curious what else is out there (and what poses I know I'll never be able to do).
I was surprised to find this post from Huffington Post and figure out that I had only done one of these poses in P90x. Yoga is a whole new world to me.
To me, Yoga Journal seems similar to Mind Body Green. It's another great resource to read about yoga. Their yoga sequence builder seems like a hit in the community. I've already seen many yoga studios using it to showcase their classes.
After reading this article, it was the first time I knew about the many different types of yoga. Helping our customers with their yoga studios, I've always known there were many different types, but this was an eye opener. Bikram yoga was the one that keened my interest, but I don't feel like turning the heat up in my house. I'll have to take a class for that experience.
This was such a great use of the yoga sequence builder from Yoga Journal. Thanks to Yoga on the Brazos for these series for beginners.
Is P90x a good start for a beginner?" This review helped me answer that question. This was the first time I read that P90x is mainly power yoga. This made sense to me since many of the poses require a ton of strength in your legs. I even found that I could barely hold my arms up halfway through the yoga session.
Reading this review brought more questions to my mind. What is power yoga good for? Obviously, strength, but what else? If you have a good answer for me, I'd love to hear from you.