Labor Day hiking and yoga?

Happy Labor Day to all you San Diego Fitness Moms! What great free activities can you do on a 3 day weekend in San Diego with light gym schedules, great summer weather, and the kids out of school? Take advantage of where you live and go hiking! Hiking is a great low impact activity that offers a sense of accomplishment and lets you exercise your spirit and the same time! You hike with your girlfriends or the whole family can enjoy hiking together. San Diego Hikers is a great free resource for hikers to finds maps, review, and photos of local hikes as well a forum.

Hiking involves stamina, balance, body awareness, and often overlooked core strength. Body awareness is person’s ability to know where there body is in space. Platform divers, for example, have impeccable body awareness. They know exactly where their body is and how each tiny movement affects their dive. Core strength goes well beyond your 8th grade sit up test. It is one of the most important and often overlooked aspects of you overall health.

Your core protects your spine and is engaged and working in almost everything you do. Basically it controls your movements. Lifting, reaching, twisting, walking, jogging, and hiking all require your core to engage. Many moms at the end of the day have a back ache. This can be because throughout the day your core tired and could no longer control the movements of your spine, so your lower back muscles were called in as back-up. This resulted in that low dull back ache.

Yoga is great for core strength, balance, and body awareness. Hiking and yoga do not sound like a very likely duo, but they actually compliment each other perfectly. In fact Forest Gump would say, “like peas and carrots.” Margaret Burns Vap of The Mountain Culture suggests doing 3 yoga poses before, during and after hiking: Dancer Pose, Wide legged forward bend, and Rock Lunge. Click here to see pictures, descriptions and how to’s for these poses. For anyone new to yoga, remember that it is not a competitive sport. Just live and enjoy each pose. Happy Labor Day & see you on the trails!