Friday, June 10, 2011

Its The Final Countdown!

Insert the Van Halen song here (Showing my age I know).



But the final countdown is officially on! Today we started the first of our "lasts". That is to say we had our last Friday yoga classes and our last ever Friday lecture. What a feeling :-)



Then as if that wasn't great enough we were given tonight off - no lecture, no movies. Oh man, around here that is the best news ever and was met with thunderous applause when Bikram announced it before this afternoon's yoga class. You'd think we'd all just won lotto!



I'd like to say that we went out for a night on the town, but my priority at the moment is sleep, sleep and more sleep. So my roommate and I ordered french fries through room service and ate them in bed while watching tv. Exciting stuff eh! But EXACTLY what the body ordered. An early night is worth its weight in gold here after a week of late night lectures and movies.



Following are some random notes and musings that I had written down over the past few weeks but not managed to work into a post.



- The dialogue is synoptic. That is to say it is written as commands so that the brain doesn't have to think about whether or not to do the posture. There is no question, no thoughts, just commands to "do". Which we only had explained to us in about 7th week by a teacher in Posture Clinic who just happened to mention it. But it explains why the dialogue is written the way it is and what we all thought was just bad grammar has actually been written very specifically that way.


- A line to use while in the set up for Standing Bow Pose: "Put your hand up if you like bow pose / or Bikram Yoga " For those non-yogis this is funny because you have to put your hand up to do the posture. Hee hee. Small things I know, but trust me anything that brings a smile to your face while you are in that room is a god-send.



- Set up the podium for yourself with water & towel etc prior to start of class. When you're ready to start, walk onto the podium, take a breath & settle yourself and then introduce yourself (rather than starting to talk from the back of the room as you walk in).




- Record your class and then you can check later to see how accurate your dialogue was. Gulp.......ok.............I'll let you know how that one goes :-)

The Power of Water

So I did a little research on water and hydration. (Its after 10:00pm and my brain function is def impeded by my lack of sleep over the week so this is as much as I can handle tonight.)

Here is a link to a page I found most helpful but I will summarise my findings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehydration

Like Joel said yesterday:

Your body absorbs only 4-6 oz / 250ml of water every 15-20 mins.

That equates to 32 oz / 1 L per hour - so drinking any more than that through the class is not going to increase your hydration. This stresses the importance of hydrating prior to class rather than relying on the water you are drinking while you are in class.

The best way to work out how much water you need is to weigh yourself before and after exercise and to see what the difference is. You need to drink 2-3 cups of water for every lb lost.

To work out how much water in total through the day you should drink you can use the following formula:

For moderate exercise -your body weight in lbs divided by 2 = # of oz of water required per day.

For strenuous exercise with excessive sweating - thats us folks! - your body weight in lbs equals the # of oz of water req'd per day.

For those in metric 20 oz = 600ml.



Hope this helps :-)