Going for the Crow

When I did my year long stint at the Y, I ended up going to a yoga class with a bunch of friends and really loved every minute of it. It was nice carving out an hour each week to slow down, focus on myself and as strange as it sounds focus on breathing, stretching and strength. I always left class feeling relaxed, anxiety free and exhausted because it is a serious workout if you make it one.

Needless to say I left the Y due to lack of use and when I briefly joined Aspen this winter the yoga classes were so packed I couldn't focus and I wasn't jiving with the instructor, so when I saw a Groupon this last winter for 6 classes at a local studio for $20 I was pretty jazzed. For example, classes at a studio here in Des Moines can be in the $17 range / class so they are really not something I can go to regularly. Anywho Nic got the Groupon too and last night we finally were able to make it to our first class.

We went to Iowa Powered Yoga, and I highly recommend Ryan the owner. He was fun, not as serious as a lot of instructors and very welcoming! We got to the studio early to make sure everything was cool with our deal and we were panicked when we saw we were the only car in the parking lot. Um, a private lesson is not something we were anticipating! We finally bucked up and went in to the tiny room where we settled in with our mats and realized we were in a "hot" studio. I'm guessing the temp was in the 80's-90's, so it wasn't your typical hot yoga class but warm nonetheless. We had no towels or water bottles, so we felt dumb but Ryan supplied us with water bottles and we both survived sans towels.

Class was less regimented than I was used to but I liked it, we were in a class of 6 and we were all different skill levels so we got to see some pretty advanced poses and try some new ones that were pretty intimidating at first but fun when you started to get closer to hitting them. The end of the class ended in some free mat time where Ryan and almost everyone else began practicing handstands. Yes handstands. Nic and I looked at each other and assumed some more basic poses while the other around us worked on the handstands. I finally worked up the nerve to ask the instructor to come tell me about a pose we tried earlier called crow and began working on that, I almost got into it once but definitely need some more work to make it look like this!

All in all I am excited to use up our 5 other sessions and the studio has some fun nights that offer discounts so hopefully I can get going to something I enjoy more often, and by the end show off my new pose, the crow.