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By Lesly Levy, APOGEE Director of Pilates and Pilates Programming

If you’re standing for a few minutes—in a line at a store or airport or in your own kitchen—use the time as an opportunity to strengthen your core and energize your body and spirit.  It’s all too easy to become leaden and lethargic when you’re standing and waiting. Here’s a simple exercise that will create length, lift and openness and boost your vitality.

Align your body. Stand with your heels together and toes slightly apart, then draw your legs together, hugging the midline of your body. Adjust your body so that your heels, sacrum, top of your pelvis, bottom of your ribs and the tips of your shoulder blades are aligned as if you were standing against a wall.

Lift and lengthen. Lift your abdominals in and up, starting with the lowest part, as if you were zipping up a tight pair of jeans. Feel your tailbone lengthening toward the floor. As your abdominals lift, allow your ribs to soften, your chest to open and create length in your spine,  through the top of your head.  As your spine aligns, you should feel a lightness through the crown of your head.

Breathe. As you breathe, think about filling the back of your lungs. Allow your lungs to open, and feel the length and width of your spine, from front to back and top to bottom.

Turn. Inhale, and look right, then look left; bring your head to center and exhale. Repeat, looking left first. Do two sets.

Lift, lower and extend. Use your powerhouse (abdominals, thighs and buttocks) to float your heels two inches off the floor as you inhale. Hold for a count of three, then exhale and lower, keeping your head in the space where it was. This should feel as if you are stretching in two directions, up through the crown of your head and down through your heels.

Now relax and enjoy the awareness you’ve brought to your body and mind!

Learn more ways to turn on the calm in your life in our Unwind workshops, starting in January 2011.

For APOGEE instructor Noell Clark, yoga doesn’t end when she steps off the mat. “Part of a complete yoga practice is Seva, the practice of selfless service,” says Clark. Clark fulfills that aspect of her yoga at My Sister’s Place, a Westchester County-based non-profit that helps survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking.  For the last two years, Clark has been teaching yoga to the women enrolled in the center’s Life Skills Program, a 12-week empowerment and job readiness program.

For ten women at a time—a total of about 30 a year—the Life Skills Program provides skills and empowerment workshops. Clark has managed the Life Skills program since 2006. As a whole, My Sister’s Place provides legal services, counseling, education, and emergency shelter to thousands of women recovering from abuse and trafficking.

Yoga and My Sister’s Place are a good fit for Clark. She has a degree in Women’s Studies and Political Science from Purchase College, with a concentration in human services and social work.  And she knows personally how yoga, with its focus on joining the physical and spiritual, can help someone to become empowered. “I don’t come from the most pristine background—I’ve faced many challenges and overcome a lot in my life. Yoga has helped me with these transitions.” Clark says. “Yoga completely changed my life. For me it’s a no-brainer to give others the gift that was given to me and allowed me to get to the other side of my adversity.”

Exactly what yoga poses Clark teaches depends on her students. “If the women need to work through their anger, I do a rigorous practice so they can release their emotions and take it out on the mat,” she says. “If they’re farther along in their resolution, I do healing, restorative poses.” (We recently featured one of Clark’s restorative poses on this blog.)  Clark teaches five classes a week at APOGEE White Plains and encourages APOGEE members to practice Seva, too. “There’s a concept that in order to keep a gift you have to give it away,” Clark says. “If you act compassionately to others, the more you are open to receive compassion from the world around you.”

By Deborah Slade, APOGEE Pilates Instructor

While Joe Pilates didn’t coin the phrase “less is more,” it was a credo that informed his lifework. Those fortunate enough to have studied directly with the master recall him saying: “Never do ten pounds of effort for a five pound movement.” Not surprisingly, newcomers to the Pilates method are often skeptical about the efficacy of a workout during which the average exercise is performed fewer than ten times—that is, until they experience the physical and mental challenge of their first mat class or Reformer session. As students progress, they realize that “less is more” doesn’t only apply to beginners. For advanced Pilates students, completing just two repetitions of very complex movements may be the often unrealized ideal.

Why so few repetitions? One reason is Pilates’ emphasis on the mind-body connection. The mental aspects of a movement—awareness, intention, control, and concentration—are just as important as the physical, measurable ones, such as strength, stretch, and range of motion. Each exercise must be executed with precision and efficiency in order to realize the maximum benefit, and this requires extraordinary mental focus. If you bring your entire being to your workout you will not need to do many repetitions to reap the rewards.

There’s a physical reason as well: Because Pilates addresses the body as an integrated whole to develop long, lean, symmetrical muscles, each session includes a large number and a wide range of exercises (as many as 33!) that engage every muscle group. Conditioning methods that emphasize repetitions tend to focus on isolated muscle groups with a greater chance of overdeveloping them.

Joe Pilates believed that not only were endless repetitions unnecessary, they could turn a workout into a “fatiguing system of dull, boring, abhorred exercises” that ultimately became “mindless,” put undue wear and tear on the joints, and increased the chance for injury. For most of his career Pilates challenged the conventional wisdom; today he is considered a visionary. So, while Pilates’ exercises were designed for few repetitions, his words certainly bear repeating.

By Jennifer Vagios, RD,
APOGEE’s Dietitian

Clients often come to me and ask about alternatives to wheat. Perhaps they’ve heard that wheat can be an irritant—even an allergen—causing sluggishness, indigestion, headaches, joint aches and more. APOGEE’s own integrative health advisor, Woodson Merrell, M.D., suggests removing wheat from your diet when you’re on his Power Up 21-day energy plan. “In my experience, wheat is the most sensitizing food,” says Merrell. “Nearly 50 percent of my patients become sensitive to wheat by age 40.”  If you’re in that group, Merrell says, you’ll feel more energetic when wheat is cut from your diet.

My advice? Choose breads and pastas made from kamut, an ancient form of wheat that’s 30 percent higher in protein than the modern hybridized wheat we eat today. It’s also a good source of fiber, iron, magnesium and antioxidants.

You can substitute kamut in most recipes requiring wheat—it has a slightly nutty and sweet flavor. Look for kamut in prepared breads and pastas, in flour and baking mixes, or as whole grain. Keep in mind that because kamut has less gluten than traditional wheat, baked goods made with it will probably be denser. (However, kamut is not an alternative grain for people with celiac disease who must avoid all gluten.)

My favorite recipe for kamut is as a substitute for oatmeal at breakfast: Measure out the dry grain; add the appropriate amount of water, milk, or soymilk; mash up a banana or add sautéed or fresh apples; then sprinkle in spices such as cinnamon, pie spice, or vanilla extract and heat.  Yum!

Learn more about energizing your life from Woodson Merrell, M.D., at APOGEE White Plains on December 2. Details.