Triple-digit temperatures don’t keep Chicago senior citizens from aerobics
Posted: July 7, 2012 at 8:17 am
M. Spencer Green / AP
Chicago Housing Authority Asset Manager Sondrae Lewis, takes part in a well-being check on Bessie Rogers, 83, at her home in Apartamentos Las Americas on Friday.
By Miguel Llanos, msnbc.com
Chicago on Friday suffered through a third straight day above 100 degreesthe first such string since 1947but that didn't stop seniors from their regular aerobics class at the city's Levy Senior Center. If anything, the heat was an incentive given the air-conditioned refuge.
"They're very happy to get inside," said Joyce Gallagher, executive director for the city agency that oversees 21 senior centers.
But she was also clear that the centers aren't shelters to come in for a nap."It isn't a place where you come and sit to get some cool air," Gallagher emphasized. "It's a place where you come to participate and socialize and coincidentally it's air-conditioned."
It's normally in the mid-80s this time of year in Chicago, but this week has been special: 103 degrees on Friday, and the humidity made it feel like 108. Thursday also saw 103, which is just 2 degrees shy of Chicago's all-time record, set in 1934. Wednesday topped out at 102.
The 95-year-old woman's death on Tuesday might have been heat related, officials said, but an autopsy was inconclusive, NBCChicago.com reported. Heat stress was determined to be a contributing factor in the deaths this week of two men, one 53 and the other 48, both of whom were obese and died of heart disease.
Related:Tips for seniors to avoid heat stress
Tens of thousands of Chicagoans also lost power during the weekend storms that impacted millions across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.
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Triple-digit temperatures don't keep Chicago senior citizens from aerobics
Megan Quinn: Torah yoga melds multi-faith and body-mind studies
Posted: at 8:17 am
Like many in Boulder, Erin Masket found a spiritual message in her regular yoga practice. Yet the inspiration she discovered didn't just connect back to the Buddha, but to the wisdom of the Torah.
Masket, a yoga instructor, hosts a summer Torah Yoga class in the hopes of drawing in Jewish people to the world of yoga while exploring how the Torah and yoga's Eastern principles intersect. The classes take place 5:30 p.m. Wednesdays at Prana, 1147 Pearl St.
"There are so many parallels between Torah teachings and yoga, so many connections," she said.
The event is part of Flatiron Tribe, a networking and socializing group through the Jewish Community Center meant for people ages 21-45.
Michael Rosenzweig, an organizer of the group, said Flatirons Tribe's main focus has generally been to connect young Jewish Boulderites through happy hour events. The group also has hosted an Ignite Chanukah party and a "Persian Shore"-themed Purim party.
"I just want people to be welcome whenever and wherever they feel comfortable. For a lot of people, that's at a bar with a beer," Rosenzweig said.
Yet after meeting Masket and hearing about her ideas for a yoga class, Rosenzweig said Flatiron Tribe saw the potential to expand their social programs outside the bar scene.
"For some, maybe they don't like to drink, maybe they already do yoga or want to start," he said.
With help from a grant from the Rose Community Foundation, Masket will lead the Torah Yoga sessions through July.
Masket began intertwining yoga and Torah studies after graduating college with an architecture degree. Wanting to take some time away from architecture, she got an instructor certification and began teaching classes.
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Megan Quinn: Torah yoga melds multi-faith and body-mind studies
Aerial yoga embraces inner child while hanging upside down
Posted: at 8:17 am
By Reshma Kirpalani
Lydia Michelson-Maverick hangs upside down from a purple hammock, her compact body folding into a traditional yoga pose that has been spun on its head. Her black mass of hair grazes the yoga mat below as she teaches her Austin Aerial Yoga students how to invert the traditional ground yoga pose, Baddha Konasana, and hang loose from their own hammocks. Later, Michelson-Maverick will describe inverted postures as inner-child work in action. "It feels good. I'm decompressing my spine," she says. "It's like being a 5-year-old again, kind of like being on monkey bars."
On a blistering Thursday afternoon in Dane's Body Shop, I cling to my right-side-up view of the world; I'm not quite ready to shake hands with my inner child. Meanwhile, the six students to the left and right of me each get ready to take the plunge and hang from their respective hammocks, which are attached by hardware to the ceiling. Across from me, student Elizabeth Hamilton gazes at the student to my right, Angela Sparks, who I can only imagine looks as flushed as I do after 45 minutes of "monkey-barring" our way through the class. Hamilton leaves us with encouraging words before inverting her Baddha Konasana pose. "If I can do it, you can do it." Then, she flips over, suspending herself from her hammock. Within minutes, Sparks does the same. I decide to cut myself some slack with the inverted Baddha Konasana pose, considering that this is my first aerial yoga class.
Aerial yoga is a version of ground yoga that includes the use of fabric hammocks to help intensify and sometimes invert poses. Practitioners benefit from these postures by relieving tension in their muscles, elongating their spines and increasing their overall flexibility. Michelson-Maverick describes aerial yoga as "more intense" than other forms of yoga. She says, "It forces you even more to be present because you're in the air, doing movements you never experienced before, having fabric press on you in different ways. It really makes you feel and makes your mind aware of what's going on in your body."
Although Austin is a breeding ground for yoga studios, aerial yoga remains relatively new to this fit-minded city. Among the few studios that offer varying styles of aerial yoga is Fit to the Core from the AntiGravity Yoga global franchise, which started offering aerial yoga classes to Austinites in February 2011, but temporarily suspended them while it searches for a new studio space. Austin Aerial Yoga, co-owned by Michelson-Maverick and her husband, John Maverick, started offering classes in October after Michelson-Maverick became certified as a registered yoga teacher by the international Yoga Alliance and received a certification of completion from an aerial yoga teacher training program in Boulder, Colo., by Aircat Aerial Arts.
Michelson-Maverick describes herself as a "new teacher who is still in the process of figuring out what my style is as I continue to do more training, learn more, and grow more." The 30-year-old New York native, who is positively origamilike in her flexibility, rekindled her childhood passion for dance and fused it with the practice of yoga more than five years ago after watching an aerial dance segment in a Cirque du Soleil show in Austin. The stunning performance by acrobatic dancers "just spoke to me," she says. Countless Google searches and aerial dance classes later, a nylon hammock was suspended from the ceiling of Michelson-Maverick's home, where she started her own gentle, aerial yoga practice.
She admits that in the beginning, she was scared. "Over time, I think you learn to breathe there and realize it's not scary and relax into it," Michelson-Maverick says.
Her students agree. After her fourth class, Sparks admits that the first class might feel "weird." "You have to give it more than one try," she says. "The second time, you learn how the fabric works and you can really get into it."
Hamilton, who has been taking Austin Aerial Yoga classes for four months, says, "I feel 10-times stronger now and far more flexible." The evidence lives in the ease of her inversions, at one point, hanging upside down and wrapping the hammock around her, turning into a human cocoon.
In the class I took, fans were blowing loudly in Dane's Body Shop in the un-air-conditioned space. The structure of the class seemed loose, with pauses for instructions about how to use the fabric rather than seamless transitions between poses. Positions were held for a long time while Michelson-Maverick checked on each of her seven students. Michelson-Maverick says small aerial yoga classes are essential to giving individual attention to students and prioritizing safety. "I really want to make sure that each student is feeling the stretches in the right place and is using correct alignment because each body is so different," she says.
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Aerial yoga embraces inner child while hanging upside down
Try This! Yoga's crescent tones legs, builds balance
Posted: at 8:17 am
By Melinda Fulmer, Special to the Los Angeles Times
July 7, 2012
Yoga is a great way for athletes of any stripe to build lean muscle and improve their balance. No knowledge of Sanskrit is necessary.
Crescent reps, demonstrated by Tamal Dodge, co-founder of Santa Monica's Yoga Collective and the yogi behind Element's "Hatha & Flow Yoga for Beginners" DVD, are a great way to tone the legs and get the body warmed up for other exercise.
What it does
The movement in this pose gets your heart rate up at the same time you're working your glutes and hamstrings. It also challenges the center of balance, which indirectly works the abdominal muscles.
How to do it
Start in a standing forward bend, with your hands touching the mat in front of you (or as close to the floor as you can get). Step your right leg back 3 to 4 feet so you're in a runner's lunge with your left knee bent and right leg extended on the ball of your right foot. (The taller you are, the wider your stance should be.) Slowly bring your hands to your sides, so your body forms a straight line from your right foot to your head. Inhale and raise your hands and your upper body until they form a straight line to the ceiling. Exhale and slowly lower the arms and upper body until you are back at your starting position. Once you're finished with 10 repetitions, step your right foot back in standing forward bend and switch to the other side.
How much
Start with 10 repetitions on each leg. Work up to two sets of 10.
Knights enjoying life at the Cattery
Posted: July 6, 2012 at 10:16 pm
Matthew Knights. Photo: Craig Abraham
VFL
GEELONG VFL coach Matthew Knights appears to be coaching with renewed passion, with the dark days after being sacked from Essendon in 2010 well behind him.
Knights said yesterday he was enjoying the development role at the Cats and had no ambition to land another role elsewhere.
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"I'm very fortunate to be at a great club," he said. "The communication and direction with the match committee is fantastic with Chris [Scott]. I'm just really enjoying coaching the youth with Max Rooke and Paul Hood. It's just a great role to be able to work with young players.
"I'm only new in this role so I think you've just got to embrace it and have a real crack at it and really get in and work hard with the players and the coaches to form good relationships."
Knights said a top-up of experienced VFL heads over the pre-season has been the key to the team's stunning turnaround this season. It is on track to grab a top-four spot and win its first VFL flag since 2007. The Cats have beaten top side Port Melbourne, but has dropped games to Werribee and Casey above it.
"We've got a lot of first and second-year players, so for them to have guys like Troy Selwood
and Andrew McLean and Dom Gleeson, to mix with on a weekly basis and then on a weekend is fantastic," Knights said.
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A change of course led Woody Hamilton into coaching
Posted: at 10:16 pm
If not for having to take foreign language courses, Woody Hamilton's professional life would have been much different.
While a teenager at Jackson County High School (now Scottsboro), Hamilton was a sports correspondent for The Sentinel-Age (now The Daily Sentinel), and his byline appeared on a number of stories.
He loved sports writing, but when he arrived at the University of Alabama following his high school graduation, he had no interest in taking the foreign language classes required for a degree in journalism.
"I just wasn't going to do it," he said, "so I went into physical education."
It worked out for Hamilton, who went on to a long career as a teacher and coach. He began his love affair with sports particularly basketball at a young age when his father would take him to watch his cousins play. Hamilton, whose mother was a teacher, grew up in Macedonia and played the sport himself, but said he couldn't find a spot on the talent-loaded Jackson County teams of hall of fame coach Q.K. Carter in the early 1950s. "Anywhere else I'd have gone in the county I would've (played)," said the small-statured Hamilton.
Instead, he dove into the game from a sports writer's perspective. Carter allowed Hamilton to ride the bus with the team to road games, and in turn Hamilton began to learn the ins and outs of the sport even more.
And while he loved sports writing, he found he had a love for coaching. He served as the player/coach of his fraternity's intramural team at Alabama, with his fraternity's team enjoying a lot of success. After taking some time away from school, he returned and finished his degree. Then he began a teaching career that spanned five decades. He worked all of those in Jackson County and Walker County, Ga.
Hamilton taught and coached at six different schools in Jackson County, which included two stints at Skyline and North Sand Mountain. "I never was afraid of change," said Hamilton, who coached numerous junior high, junior varsity and varsity teams often during the same year during his career.
He began his career at Woodville before making the move to NSM and then Flat Rock. After teaching in Rossville, Ga., he returned to Jackson County as the head varsity boys basketball coach at Skyline from 1973-1976. He then went back to teach in Georgia. It was then that he was diagnosed with cancer that "nearly took me out of here." Following surgery in 1981, he recovered and returned to teaching and coaching in Jackson County. He was at Stevenson during the 1981-82 school year and then went to Bridgeport, where he spent the following years as an assistant coach to Bridgeport varsity boys coach Kenneth Storey.
"He and I coached against each other for a few years, when he was at Skyline and I at Bridgeport, and when he was at NSM and I was at Bridgeport," Storey said. "When time came for us to finally be on the same side of the court, we really connected, maintained a great working relationship. Woody had his coaching philosophy and I had mine. Together we worked on adapting bits and pieces of each other's. We learned from each other."
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June-Marie Raw Food and Fitness Health Royal Blue Dress July 4th 010 – Video
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The National Institute of Health and Fitness – Part 4 – Vicki Sorensen – Video
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June-Marie Raw Food and Fitness Health July 5 th 2012 modeling pics – Video
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Bipasha Basu Love Yourself – Jumping Jack – Health And Fitness Videos – Video
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