Our goal here, at Sequence Wiz, is to help you understand some of the more complex yogic ideas and deepen your yoga practice. All the information we give here is based on traditional approach to yoga AND contemporary understanding of the inner workings of the human body. But all of this information means nothing until you take it, try it and decide for yourself if it makes sense. Please tell us how it goes!
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Yoga for the Body
How to stretch your neck and relieve neck tension more effectively
Are the simple front-to-back, side-to-side neck stretches that effective? Not really. There is a better way.
6 reasons your yoga practice can become a pain in the neck
Does your neck feel better or worse after a yoga class? You might be building tension instead of relieving it if you do any of the these.
Want pain-free shoulders? Cut down on your Downward dogs and Planks
Upper body strengthening is a worthy goal, but are you compromising your shoulder safety in the process?
Why do we get hip pain and what can we do about it?
If you look at the structure of the hip joint, it is clear that it was meant to be stable and strong; then how come we have so many incidents of hip pain?
Stretching the hip flexors (especially psoas) is not always a good idea
We all know that feeling of tightness in the hips after a long drive or a day at the office. Will it go away after couple of lunges? Not necessarily.
Neglecting your hip abductors can mess up your walk, sleep and balance
Explore six common misconceptions about hip abductors and adductors and how the imbalance between the two can affect your quality of life.
Too many asymmetrical poses can create sacroiliac joint issues
Who is at risk of a sacroiliac joint injury and how can we minimize it in a yoga class.
3 types of pain in the butt and what you can do about it
A literal pain in the butt can make it difficult to walk, sit and sleep comfortably. Sometimes we unknowingly exacerbate it by stretching the injured are. Is there a better way?
IT band stretching and rolling won’t relieve the tension
If you’ve experienced some IT band tightness, you probably tried IT band stretching or rolling. Does it work? Not necessarily. Here is why.
Yoga for Energy
Yogic breathing: chest to belly or belly to chest, and why do we care?
As yoga teachers, we talk a lot about the breath. And sometimes we unknowingly misinterpret what our respiratory systems can and cannot do.
What’s more important – your hamstrings or your liver? Panchamaya (koshas) model
My yoga teacher likes to say: “I’ve never seen a lumbar spine come into my office without a liver attached to it. Or a liver come in without an attitude.” When designing practices for ourselves or others we need to consider the WHOLE person.
Why bother with breath in yoga?
Here are 6 examples of how breathing affects your health and physiological function, and what yoga practice can do to improve the way you feel.
What makes your heart beat? A yogic view of energy and physiology
Do you feel healthy and vital? If not, you might need to work on expanding your life force.
How to use yoga to energize or unwind
Five currents of prana and how they organize your physiology (5 Vayus )
Since we like to talk about using yoga for health and healing, it is essential that we understand the interplay of body’s subtle energies and use this knowledge to create better practices for ourselves and our students.
Practice tips
5 ways to forgo the benefits of yoga poses
When you practice yoga, you are trying to do something good for yourself. And sometimes you end up hurting something else in the process.
The cult of a yoga pose: what yoga poses are and are not
My teacher, Gary Kraftsow, likes to ask: “Are you for yoga, or is yoga for you?” The answer seems obvious, yet often from the way we practice it appears as if WE are serving yoga, not the other way around.
Stretching is overrated: it doesn’t help with muscle tension or muscle soreness
Why the foot pain is connected to the neck pain: your movement patterns shape your body
Stretching the painful area is often ineffective because “It’s the victims who cry out, not the criminals.” Instead we need to address the movement patterns that caused the problem in the first place.
3 steps to making any yoga pose more effective: why do we repeat the pose before we hold it
In viniyoga tradition we move in and out of the pose several times before holding it. Here is why.
We hold yoga poses to increase muscle tolerance, redistribute the tension, pump energy into different parts of the system and change the way we move every day.
How to design yoga practices
How to design a yoga practice for a specific activity
Empower your students to practice yoga at home – hook their practice to an activity that they are already doing.
How to create a yoga practice to prepare for a difficult posture
Any complex/intricate yoga pose requires specific preparation. As yoga teachers we have the responsibility to both analyze the biomechanics of movement in any difficult posture and try to foresee potential risks that it has for the body.
How to create a target yoga practice for a specific body area
Want to design a yoga practice for a tight neck? hip? back? Here are some tips on how to do it.
Teaching Tips
9 phrases to purge from your yoga instruction
Language is the most powerful tool for a yoga teacher. What we say to our students matters. How do we keep the language simple, clean and concise?
How to integrate your right and left brain through movement
You know how sometimes you feel more detail-oriented and at other times more attuned to the big picture? Turns out your brain hemispheres alternate in their dominance throughout the day.
How to sequence a class for the Shoulderstand (5 steps)
Learn how to choose and arrange poses for safer and more effective Shoulderstand practice.
Check out our Virtual Yoga Studio for videos of yoga classes!
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