TotalImmersion

This Yoga DVD was designed to enhance swimming with dry land training, but it can be used by anyone who wishes to stay healthy, strong, flexible and balanced. It was filmed in beautiful Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts and Paradise Island, Bahamas The DVD has four parts:

1. “Connecting to Gravity and Breath” - a seated sequence that focuses on conditioning movements and breath to warm up the core and open the shoulders and side seams.
2. “Finding Fluidity” - coming down to the mat on all fours. This works on keeping your spine fluid along with correcting imbalances in shoulders, legs and feet.
3. “Building Agne, or Fire” - focuses on standing postures developing balance, strength, flexibility and symmetrical alignment.
4. ”Coming Back to the Earth” - a restful segment involving legs and feet; a relaxed lateral stretch, and deep relaxation.

What This DVD Can Do For You

* Yoga and swimming complement and enhance each other. When done together they make for a more balanced athlete.
* Swimming provides aerobic activity that’s soft on joints, but it is not weight-bearing. This DVD will help provide very important weight-bearing activity.
* It promotes elongation and fluidity of muscles so important in swimming.
* This practice of yoga helps to bring your body into symmetrical alignment and strengthen your core, which is important in all sports - and in daily living.
* This DVD will help correct strength and flexibility imbalances caused by the repetitive nature of swimming and many forms of exercise.
* Through a regular practice you’ll notice the deeper effects: a clearer mind and a nervous system which will be better able to handle stress and make choices.

Why Are We Featuring a Yoga DVD on a Swimming-Improvement Website?

Susan Jacque began planning this DVD at my encouragement. I had begun practicing yoga myself in 1993, at age 42,hoping for an antidote to aging-related aches and twinges I'd begun to notice in my mid-30s. I noticed that I felt better after each class than I had before it and within weeks began to feel more healthful overall.

Before long I also noticed that it strongly complemented a new way of teaching swimming I had begun just a few years earlier, when I founded Total Immersion, in the way it promoted mindfulness, attentive repetition and good use of the body. The overall design of many TI drill sequences has been strongly influenced by what I learned through yoga practice.

When I first attended one of Susan's classes at a health club that shared space with our New Paltz Swim Studio, I was struck by two things I'd not noticed in other yoga classes:

(1) While her teaching was faithful to yoga principles it was more accessible to yoga newbies, even in the names she had given to various postures -- like "sciatica stretch;" and

(2) She had adapted many of the basic movements in ways that resembled and reinforced swimming movements that I had not seen before. I described it to her as "bilateral accommodation."

So I encouraged Susan to think about producing a DVD aimed particularly at people whose most valued activity was swimming, but who had little prior familiarity with yoga. During the planning stages I spent a fair few hours suggesting further adaptations to the movements so they would even more closely resemble the movements taught in TI skill progressions. I hope you enjoy being introduced to yoga practice as much as I have and that this DVD will contribute as much to your swimming improvement as to your overall health.

Terry Laughlin