Move Ya Body Girl
With the holidays and the food that comes with it here, it’s been extra hard for me to get up and move my body around, only because all I want to do is lay in bed under four blankets with my dog and be cozy. BUT when I do manage to get up and move around, this is what I like to do.
For a cardio workout, I love love love my dance/fitness studio called Hipline. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not a typical dance studio where the focus is to be as accurate as possible. As a recovering perfectionist, this was something that was VERY hard for me to break. With my dance background, I was so used to mimicking exactly what the choreographer was doing, and breaking the habit of striving for perfection and potentially looking silly in my body is something that’s really hard for me. What I love about Hipline is how much they simultaneously encourage self-discovery through movement and learning what your body intuitively wants to do, while still providing optional choreography if you’d like to follow along. I’ve never been in a dance class environment where they encouraged you to move the way you want to and encouraged embracing imperfections and flaws. Not only is it an insanely fun cardio workout, but also a soul cleansing hour of ass shaking and laughing and bonding with the community.
Yoga is another one of my great loves in life. I’ve been practicing yoga on and off since around 2010. When I lived in San Francisco, my go-to studio was Yoga to the People on 16th and Mission. It was great for college Sarah since it was a donation based studio, and the bus route was one of my favorites to take and have the time to myself before class. Luckily now there are so many great online options for yoga to practice at home.
One of my favorite yoga streaming platforms is Glo. It’s about $18/month for unlimited access to thousands of classes, and some great teachers. A couple of my favorites are Jason Crandell and Amy Ippoliti for their vinyasa practices. They also have classes by length from 10-60 minutes which is great for people who require a flexible workout schedule. My only criticism of Glo is a lack of BIPOC teachers, but they do have really great classes in all yoga styles from Ashtanga, Hatha, Kundalini, Prenatal, Postnatal, and Vinyasa just to name a few.
Lately, my go-to yoga practice has been with my girl Yoga With Adriene. I love how approachable her teaching style is, and how her dog Benji is usually in the videos as well. She’s also funny and makes these little side jokes during practice where you’re like, did she just half sing Destiny’s Child’s “No, No, No” ?? Yes, yes she did just reference a Destiny’s Child deepcut while teaching yoga and it WORKED. She also offers a ton of modifications that are great for all levels of yoga, which is cool even for my husband, whom I sort of forced to try yoga and now we practice together in the mornings :)
When I don’t have the time for an hour long cardio workout, and yoga might feel a bit too chill, I’ve been loving pilates! My husband also does this with me in the mornings, and that shit is hard for the both of us. I tried pilates from the free workout app FitOn, which has all kinds of workouts like strength training, HIIT, pilates, ballet, and they have a variety of awesome fitness instructors who are well known in their own right. I love working out with Cassey Ho of Blogilates, and even though she can be a little too chipper for me for the mornings, her you-can-do-it attitude makes the workout mentally doable even while my arms are falling off ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Moving your body in any way is so beneficial in more than one way. Aside from being good for you physically, I love the mental aspect of feeling accomplished while doing something fun, and knowing that I did something nice for myself. Admittedly I don’t workout or move my body every day, but I also don’t beat myself up about it. Sometimes I do need the extra hour of sleep and rest and that’s ok too. We should rest as much as we move and never feel guilty about it. All that matters is that when I do move my body it’s in a way that I love, and hope you’re able to do the same for yourself too!
xoxo
