Yesterday, I attended my first yoga class in over a year. Relying solely on my memory, I wandered up to Kirkstall Leisure Centre fully expecting that I would be attending an hour-and-a-half Zumba session, and expecting to die there. This is based on my intolerance of the (apparently) meager hour-long Zumba class which I went to the previous day, at which several times I wondered if that thing I could taste was blood, and if the pressure on the back of my head was normal.
Obviously I had remembered wrong, because it actually turned out to be a yoga class. I won't lie, I was relieved; I could only presume I was more adept at slower, endurance-related activities, than high cardio, high excitement ones, which assumption I merely based on my Zumba experience.
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| Joey's epic abdominals... |
As I entered the room of relaxation, there were about six people present: four ladies, and – to my surprise – two guys. Oh, and equally to my surprise, a lady roughly in her 80s. She piped up: “Hello.”
“Err... hello.”
Surely not? I don't know if this is a gross repercussion of the brainwashing powers of all things like advertising, TV, films and, ahem, the media, but I imagine yoga instructors to be at the peak of their fitness: supple like a young sequoia and toned to an air-brushed perfection. And this lady did not embody the stereotype my head had composed.
She was wearing leggings, and objectively speaking, they were pretty good legs she was showcasing. And sadly enough for me, they were much more flexible than my own 25-year-old trotters. She had a red t-shirt on with a schematic of the sun salutation, which incidentally we didn't do.
An hour of stretching felt good. It made my hibernated muscles feel alive for the first time in a long while. I have to say, a couple of moves didn't make my ankle injury (a year-and-a-few-months old injury. From sport. Me! I know, what!), or my dodgy knee (from nothing) feel brilliant. But she did time and time again stress that we should listen to our bodies and stop if we're going too far, so for my perseverance I have only myself to blame. The rest of it was very pleasant. I'd only criticise that it was a little bit easy maybe, which I didn't think I'd say, given how shamefully out-of-practice I was, but it didn't have any level of difficulty on the timetable, so it was always a shot in the dark.
The lady instructor, apart from her obvious knowledge and yoga ability, also had a very relaxing voice for the cool-down portion of the session. All the more, she was pretty damn jazzy.
In the end, my embarrassingly narrow-minded first impression were stretched beyond what I see and hear all around me each day, and my poor unsuspecting body along with them.
Wednesday, 8:30–10pm, Kirkstall Leisure centre
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