Lovely Leggies!

Let’s talk about legs! Do you ever find yourself staring at a flight of stairs and contemplating your choices? Fear not, yoga lovelies, for the answer lies in the magic of a thigh-smoking class at the YLC! That’s right, those classes where your leg muscles are burning and you are quietly wishing ill on your beloved yoga teacher because she has kept you there for SO long! 

Leg work is not just about sculpting a great pair of pins (although that is, indeed, an added bonus), it is about building a foundation strong enough to carry us up and down those pesky stairs without hesitation, and withstand all of the surprises that life throws at us… You never know when you might need to sprint to catch the last bus, chase your dog, or jump over a puddle!

Stairs and surprises aside, our amazing legs are responsible for moving us through the world at the most fundamental level. Even when we are enjoying the mechanical miracles of planes, trains, and automobiles, what gets us to those vehicles so that we can take off? Our legs! It is impossible to overstate the preciousness of our ability to move through the world, and it is easy to take our lovely leggies for granted.  

It’s easy to take walking itself for granted, but the number of skills we need to possess, cultivate, and maintain in our lower extremities in order to propel ourselves forward on a daily basis is worth a moment of appreciation. Think of getting up off the floor, squatting, balance, absorbing a force that might otherwise cause us to fall. How about this very unfun fact from longevity expert and optimization bro, Dr. Peter Attia:

“If you are >65, and you fall and break your hip, there is a 30-40% chance you will be DEAD in 12 months. This can be stopped.”

Steady on, Peter, did you have to put it so bluntly? Maybe he was just trying to wake us up to the beauty of our lower limbs, to remind us that there are things we can do to honor them, like leg-strengthening poses at the YLC! Chair poses, lunges, balance poses, warriors… they ALL help us to experience the joys and potentially life-saving benefits of steady pegs.

Beyond the marvels of basic movements, strong legs can transform our world and propel us into all kinds of flights of fancy. We look to our legs to help us to dance, to run, to hike, to bike, to cook, to play, to surf, to swim, to leap across the court for the pickleball, to climb the rock, or to dive off it into the sea… It’s all in the legs!

At any age, we can appreciate what our legs can do for us and take steps to strengthen them. We can modify the yoga poses so that we are able to challenge our legs safely, and feed all of those muscles, tendons, and bones. We can fill our legs with whatever energy they can handle, like watering a plant and cultivating its soil. We can get curious and discover all of the strengths and connections from our toes, through our feet, into the ankles, up the calves, around the knees, into our quads and through our hips. We can discover the connection between a yoga pose and specific abilities in life that we cherish, that take us to places that we love.

So, give some love to your incredible legs! If you are a YLC Member, you can click here for a great leg-strengthening class... And if you are not a YLC Member, you can sign up here to discover all of the wonderful benefits of strong legs! “Stairs?” you will soon be saying, “Child’s play!”