My yoga practice made me a better gym rat

I am a gymrat as far as I go to the gym about five mornings a week. That is huge for me. If you had told me three years ago that I would be a regular customer in the gym, I would have laughed and then desperately asked to sum up your top fitness tips. I saved workouts on social media, actively Benjoerd Vrienden with healthy training routines and mourned a youth wasted on creative art instead of sport.

It turned out that I only needed more time on my yoga mat to go to the gym.

After completing my 200-hour yoga teacher training this spring, I felt more in contact with my body than ever before. Suddenly I could call every muscle group that shot or stretched, and the feeling that I had to move exactly when my back felt tight. I was also in a fundamentally open space, recorded a new experience as a sponge, or a really deep, long -term breathing.

This mix of mental and physical knowledge was stimulating, as if I had discovered part of a person I had actively missed. I have always been really good in the Spirit (sometimes against my own disadvantage), but everyone, look: I am in one body!

With this new perspective I increased my rise from a few times a month to every weekday. I soon discovered that it was no shortage of natural physicality or athletics that had loved me a regular training routine, but a lack of discipline and willpower. What is more important, I discovered that I did not have to force my way into a new identity obsessed by the exercise, but simply flows into the lifestyle shift. Breathe and come on, just like me on my mat. Breathe and lean in the inconvenience. Breathe and drain another representative.

Your definition of a gym rat can differ from mine; I do not prioritize fitness about everything and will probably never do that. But I am proud to say that the daily exercise no longer feels like an impossibility or a burden or a chore, but a privilege. I am an embodied and yoga gave me the tools to really recognize that.