“I had been looking for something to enhance my running because I was kind of plateauing,” Janette says. Janette lives in a small house with a lush front yard in Imperial Beach, CA, with her two children. She’s a slender woman with blond hair in a simple ponytail, and she loves to run.Janette started running in 2013, and was soon running every morning. After about six months, the improvement that she’d been noticing began to level off. Yoga helped her push through that wall. “I didn’t know much about running or yoga, but the one thing I did know is that if I wanted to do it well, I had to use some type of stretching before and after every run and Yoga Studio has given me that with confidence.”
Janette now runs five to eight miles every single day, on the streets and trails near her house. She does yoga before every run to warm up and after every run to cool down. Since adopting Yoga Studio, Janette is running the mile a full minute and twenty seconds faster than she was before, but for her, it’s not just the timing that’s important. “The best part is the actual strength that I’ve gotten from the stretching,” she says. “The core stretching has actually given my body the ability to run with the correct posture and form. It’s really given me that edge that I didn’t have before.”
She’s not the only one who’s noticed improvements. Marcus and Max, her two young sons, now use the app every day with their mom. They lay mats out in the front yard, prop up their tablet, and go through the sequences together as a family. Sometimes they’re serious, fully absorbed in their practice, and sometimes the kids’ energy level makes the routine a little more light-hearted and they end up laughing and rolling around on the grass together.Marcus, 8, picked it up first. “She could touch her toes and I was really jealous,” he says. “When she showed me the app I was really excited to try it.” Max picked it up as well and has seen substantial improvements. “Seeing that it was improving my mom’s flexibility is what made me want to do it,” he says. “I want to do track, and if I’m not flexible then I can’t jump the hurdles.”
Janette loves that her kids use the app with her. “I have a 5th-grader and anybody who has a 5th grader knows how heavy their backpacks are. He was getting a hunchback and was actually having problems. When he started he could not even get his legs straight on the ground. He’s told me that he has more focus in school, he has more confidence playing sports…they always want to have that edge.”
For Janette, though, the best part of the app is its accessibility. “It actually has taught me the correct form and the correct breathing,” she says. “My eight-year-old and my ten-year-old can do every pose that I can do. And you can do yoga. Anyone can do yoga.”
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