Power yoga or the Indian Ashtanga Yoga emphasizes on the flexibility of your body along with promoting the ability of maintaining self-discipline. It involves rigorous physical exercise of your entire body and also helps you in generating the power of concentration by providing you with mental stability. However, you should keep in mind that practicing power Yoga can be painful at the beginning and you must have a strong determination to keep following this rigorous physical Yoga practice.
Famous Sanskrit scholar, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois first introduced Power Yoga to the west with the help of his philosophies of Ashtanga Yoga styles. However, the term Power Yoga was first coined by Beryl Bendere Birch, a famous Ashtanga Yoga teacher and author of the book, “Power Yoga: the Practice.”
Power Yoga is practiced by performing different Yoga poses in a certain order while maintaining your breathing pattern parallel to your body movement, thereby executing a series of perfect and graceful Yoga poses. For a non-Yoga practitioner, each pose of Power Yoga may seem easy, free-flowing and soft as a ballet dancing while for the power Yoga performer, the practice is a rigorous exercise involving pushing, stretching and contorting every limb up to its limit.
One of the important aspects of Power Yoga is the way of its transition. Each transition is carried out slowly and steadily in order to pull off a flawless and graceful body movement while maintaining full concentration and a sense of inner peace within yourself. Some of the poses are held for such longer duration that it requires the practitioner to take more than five breaths. The objective of performing at a slow pace is to raise your capacity of physical endurance and to acquire the power of keeping your focus on a single task for a longer duration of time.
Before starting Power Yoga every time, it is very important to stretch and relax your muscles through Warm-ups. Moreover, to obtain optimum muscle flexibility, Power Yoga is performed in a heated room. The heated room is also helpful for a novice Yoga practitioner as most of the moves involved in Power Yoga can be exceedingly painful initially.
Power Yoga demands self-discipline, determination, concentration and most of all the ability to keep going on in spite of obstacles. Although very painful initially, but this form of Yoga has always been attracting people because of its tremendous health benefits. Its ability to boost strength, flexibility and stamina and the power to release your body from any kind of stress or anxiety is one of its many health benefits. Besides this, it nurtures and allows your spiritual power to grow within yourself leading to the formation of a strong self-determination. However, Power Yoga is only suitable for physically fit people and not for the people diagnosed with any kind of chronic diseases.
