Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Yoga

At our last meeting with Miss Mary Rose, Olivia’s amazing physical therapist, we all agreed that Olivia would not receive PT next year during school. Miss MR has brought Olivia as far as she could and Olivia’s gross motor skills have improved to the point that she can navigate the school halls, her lunch, the bus steps, the restroom and even gym class just fine without additional help. We’re eternally grateful to this PT for all that she’s done for Olivia over the last four years. Olivia adores Miss Mary Rose and was willing to work hard for her.

So yes, we had that meeting and it was good.

During said meeting, Miss Mary Rose gave us some suggestions of things for Olivia to do over the summer to maintain the strength she’s built through PT as well as increase her strength, flexibility, coordination, etc.

Some of those suggestions were to play catch with various sized balls, walk on a low balance beam, swing, ride her bike, kick a ball and finally, do yoga.

Yes, yoga. Sigh.

So I bought a yoga DVD last weekend and we (Olivia, Alyssa and I) attempted to do the yoga they were doing on that DVD. Yes, we attempted it.

It was awful. Well, it was awful for me because, well I’m chunky and I’m out of shape, I have no flexibility, I HATE to work out, I detest sweating and I hate doing things I’m not good at. I was a whiny brat during the entire half hour of this yoga.

About ten minutes in, Olivia asked why the yoga was so hard.

It was then that it occurred to me that we were doing yoga as instructed by Jillian Michaels. Yes, we were doing ‘yoga for weight loss.’ I’m such an idiot. Neither Alyssa nor Olivia needs to lose weight. They were both able to keep up with Jillian and do most of the moves but when I realized they were both struggling, I suggested that today I try and find a ‘gentle’ yoga video for us to do tonight.

Olivia was all over that. She declared, “This is NOT gentle yoga. This is hard yoga. I want to try to do gentle yoga.”

So we’re going to do just that. We’re going to try yoga for strength and stretching rather than for weight loss. I figure that no matter what I do, it’s better for me than sitting on my big butt and eating cherry pie filling out of a can so yeah, gentle yoga it is.

Maybe as we build strength we’ll try Jillian’s version of yoga again in a month or so.

1 comment:

Julie said...

Your mom has cable, right? I know our cable "on demand" service has yoga on demand and you can try out all different kinds of yoga til you find one that you like.

Riley is supposed to do yoga for core strength training and to help her back. She does NOT do it.