Weekend Yoga Classes with Azmi

For the past two days, I attended Azmi’s private classes which were held at the poolside in Menara Bukit Ceylon (Yogababy’s place). It was the first time that I had done yoga in an outdoor environment and it was really different especially when I look up and saw one of the residents of the condo looking down at us. I guess he quickly went back in when he saw five pairs of eyes looking back up at him. We also had to deal with the windy weather on Saturday while doing our poses but the weather was very nice as it was quite cooling on both days.

The class on Saturday was Hatha Vinyasa, a faster-paced vinyasa class newly introduced by Azmi. We started off with doing a few rounds of sun salutations followed by the warrior, standing and sitting poses, with vinyasas in between the poses. The vinyasas can be quite challenging for newcomers to Azmi’s class as doing the chaturangas can be quite tiring for the arms if you are not use to doing it after every few poses. But these vinyasas really helped to build up arm strength for the arm-balancing poses. Anyway, Azmi always gave us the option to go straight to the downward dog pose if the vinyasas were getting too intense for us. The shorter count for holding each of the poses (three breaths instead of five) means that we had to adjust ourselves quickly to go into the poses. I needed some time to adjust to Azmi’s slight variation for the sun salutation sequence but overall, it was a good workout as it is always with Azmi's classes.

Sunday’s Hatha Flow class was only attended by three practitioners with Yogababy as an observer cum photographer. (The photos shown here are courtesy of Yogababy. You can see more photos at Yogababy's website). I hope that we will see more practitioners coming to the class next week. The Flow class has some arm-balancing poses and with some pointers from Azmi, I was able to lift my legs off the floor for Baksana and Tittibhasana. The arm-balancing poses are always a challenge for me as I not strong in my core and I tend to look down instead of looking forward in these poses.

All in, I really enjoyed the classes especially with the attention paid by Azmi in adjusting and helping us to go deeper in our poses.