blissful fitness

Hello friends! This week, we are going to let our focus travel up the body a bit, to our hips. However, our hips are not alone. So instead of isolating our hips, I’d like us to sense the relationship – the connection – the dance – between our feet and our hips. We still want to let our dance start from the ground up – from our feet. As we do that, we will sense for the relationship between our dancing feet and our dancing hips.

read the rest of this post focusing on dancing your hips

Good morning! Today I invite you to emerge from the chrysalis and experience the deliciousness of the new Nia routine, Butterfly!

Butterfly
Choreographed by Nia Co-Founder, Debbie Rosas Stewart, this routine is designed to take us on an extraordinary journey of flight. The focus of Butterfly is on awakening your imagination and integrating your beautiful butterfly wings (arms, hands, and fingers) while you dance. As we dance our feet, we will be folding and unfolding our wings in a variety of ways that energize the muscles of the core and arms, and encourage systemic (whole-body integrated) flow. By activating systemic flow, we feel integrated, graceful, and powerful as we dance, all the while receiving a great total body workout. It’s time to be airborne! Fly, baby, fly!

read more about today’s focus

Good morning! Today let’s spend a little more time once again with our base (feet and legs)… This time, let’s focus on our base specifically with the intent of creating a foundation that allows the rest of our body to move with eeeeeease.

Stable Base = Free Core and Arms
How we step, stand, and kick with our feet and legs can greatly affect the freedom and comfort of our core and upper extremities. If our base is unstable, the rest of the body may react by “bracing itself” (tensing up) to avoid falling. If you have ever had to walk on ice or a shaky foot bridge, you know what I mean. If the core and upper extremities are “bracing themselves” then it becomes quite difficult for them to dance (imagine doing hip bumps, chest isolations, shimmys, upward blocks, or freedance) as you walk across the ice. In my head, it’s not a pretty picture. In Nia, we want our whoooooole body (including our core and arms) to be able to dance freely and with ease! We can help to make this happen by setting up a strong, relaxed, grounded, and stable foundation (yep – even when we are stepping quickly!). read more about why and how

There are two main ways that we play with the Nia concept of Dynamic Ease.

One way is to separate “Dynamic” and “Ease” as individual “qualities” of movement: a) Dynamic = the “uumph” & b) Ease = rest, relaxation, re-centering. You can read more about that here.

Another way to play with Dynamic Ease, is to see it as a unique quality of its own.

To move with “dynamic ease” is to move with maximal efficiency – generating max power with minimal effort. This involves moving dynamically, yet with ease at the same time (eliminating unnecessary tension/stress)… read more

Tonight our focus will be on activating the 13 main joints of the body: the ankles, knees, hips, wrists, elbows, shoulders and spine. Here are a few reasons why…. read more