#Broga yoga anytime fitness full

It’s a common issue for those whose main activity is running. During the session my body tells me that my hips are as weak as a pensioners’ but that my hamstrings are strong. ‘The pain isn’t going anywhere so ignore it and focus on your breathing.’ Interestingly the second set doesn’t hurt as much.Īt the start of the class Matt tells us to listen to our body. “Breathe through the pain,” instructs Matt. We come back up, shake it off and are told to repeat. Over the course of ten deep breaths in and out, we take the pose lower and lower. The most torturous is the squat move that sees us bend our knees at 45 degrees and straighten our backs. The session sees us build to around half a dozen different poses and stretches, including variations on leg raises, lunges and squats. With Broga you have enough time to strengthen through the posture.” In a traditional yoga class you can go in and out of a posture quite quickly. It was really important to do that in yoga which no one has ever done. As men we set objectives and we quantify things.

“You repeat things like you would do in say track session, it ends up being strength training. Everything builds, and gets tougher until finally you realise you’re in a genuine yoga posture, and holding it. What I like about Broga is the gradual progression. The class begins and ends with deep breathing exercises, you feel extremely relaxed and that night I enjoy the best night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks. You’re working hard but rarely out of breath. Sweat is the name of the game (Matt’s email signature titles him as Director of Sweat) the warm room encourages the connective tissues to open up a little bit more and help us achieve deeper stretches for longer. By this stage even my shins are pouring with sweat. Pressing the hip of your rear leg into the ground, bend that leg at the knee and grab your foot as you would performing a quad stretch). My perceptions going into the session were, ‘How hard can it be doing a few stretches on a mat?’ Midway through the session I reach back to grab my foot as we all perform a ‘Pigeon Stretch’ (cross one leg out in front of you with the other stretching flat behind. He keeps the room temperature at a sweaty 30 degrees. We call it Broga Sizzle which is everything in one class.”

#Broga yoga anytime fitness full

“There’s legs, chest and triceps, back, shoulders and core, and then we a do a full body workout. Matt breaks his Broga classes down into specific variants like someone might break down a weekly gym routine. We joined a class of eight for a one hour Broga session that focused on legs – the perfect class for a runner to try. Matt invited MR to try a session at Soho Gyms, Covent Garden. Now regular guys and girls (around 20-30 percent of Broga classes are female) are adding his sessions to their regular gym work, using Broga to improve athletic performance in sports like running. I wanted to get away from that but stay very true to the core foundations of the postures in yoga practice.” It’s physiological, more anatomy, more ‘What am I supposed to be feeling? What is this achieving?’ Rather than traditional yoga terminology like ‘Lift your pelvic floor and open your heart.’ How do you open your heart? Do I even have a pelvic floor? It immediately sounds ridiculous. I approach yoga language in a way men can relate to. “Normally you go into yoga classes and there’s one guy, this is the inverse switch. “I wanted to focus on the functional elements of yoga,” he explains. Matt hated yoga but could see the benefits, so he invented Broga. The other ambassadors were all female, and regarded as yoga royalty in Europe.

He turned to bodybuilding then discovered yoga when American clothing brand Lululemon approached him to be an ambassador. Matt had a promising American Football career wrecked by a freak hip injury during college. He looks just like the action men on the homepage of his website Broga, a form of yoga tuned more towards a male sensibility. The image that springs to mind here is that of a skinny guy in India, standing on the rock in the sunset, wearing a ponytail and beads, pulling some kind of Cirque du Soleil contortion.Ĭalifornian Matt Smith is the polar opposite of that image.