Essentrics® 103: Complimentary Movement
Love yoga? Great! Love running? Great! Love cycling, cross fit, a good weights workout, dancing, or competitive sports? Great! Do you also want to continue to grow as an athlete, deepening your practice and continuing to strengthen while preventing injury and relieving pain? Then Essentrics is for you!
I love teaching group classes because of the diversity of my students. I’ve had the fortune of instructing yoga instructors, runners, baseball players, pregnant women and postpartum moms, teenage ballerinas, senior athletes, and people with severely restricted movement over the years. After taking my classes, they’ve all said the same thing:
‘After doing Essentrics, I felt looser and stronger, and my body was more prepared moving into my next practice.
It’s a great complement to what I’m already doing.’
The whole point of Essentrics is to make moving through life easier. That includes everything from walking, lifting, reaching, and bending, all the way through the most intense forms of exercise and movement you can imagine. It brings your body into balance, working through all the bones and joints in every workout by elongating, reforming, and strengthening muscles from one end of a muscle chain to the end.
The way I’ve been describing this practice to people lately, beyond the standard ‘dynamic stretching & strengthening workout’, is that it’s a gentle, low-impact workout with a high yield. The movements are big and flowing, done while simultaneously relaxing and working your muscles. It sounds confusing, but once you try it out you understand just how natural it feels, liberating your body to feel long, tall, open, balanced, and let’s not forget, strong.
How does ESSENTRICS® benefit other forms of movement?
In order to be limber and flexible, ready to move in any direction safely, go deeper in ‘Warrior 2’ with more strength and balance, carry around your kids off-and-on for hours on end, or even walk taller with less pain and more mobility, you have to rebalance your muscles and joints. In doing so, you become more aware of your body, sensing where you’re most imbalanced or the most free.
It’s amazing to think that a full-body workout can leave you feeling lighter, more energized instead of exhausted and beat down. But that’s exactly what Essentrics does. It puts your body in a zone of natural comfort and the more you do it, the more you feel like yourself again, ready to take on life or something a little more intense.
