30 Day Yoga Challenge: Self Advancement with Julia Jarvis

Day 1 kicks it off with some strengthening poses for the hips & hamstrings. Usually most practices will focus on flexibility in these areas, but it will help you progress further will your flexibility to add strength training.

Opening through the chest and through the heart will help you to improve posture, spirits and allow for better breathing. Often when the chest is caving in the heart and the mind will follow. So by working on opening the chest, and releasing tension in the shoulders and neck, it can give you a little bit of an energy boost and make you feel a little happier

Day 3 will help you compare the right and left side of the body and use lateral bending to restore balance between the two sides.

Today's class is all about relieving tension in the neck and upper back, so the focus is going to be on contracting those upper back muscles that might be pulling on the neck and causing pain, and exploring the relationship between that and the spine in general.

In today's class you'll be moving through the joint freeing series, a series designed by the yoga therapy center to reach every joint in the body. It's purpose is to melt away all of your stiffness and to prepare you for a longer more comfortable seated meditation.

Day 6 focuses on iRest therapy. It's a super easy guided meditation based around the Yoga Nidra lineage where you will put your body to sleep and one thread of consciousness stays awake.

At the end of week 1 you'll be working on hip opening. You may notice a lot of emotions bubbling up throughout this practice and that's because the hips are heavily involved in the flight or flight response. Oftentimes when we experience trauma we clench those really deep pelvic muscles and have no idea how to release them.

Join Julia for day 8 which focuses on core awareness and strength. So you'll be breaking up the core into developing awareness of the muscles and how they work, building your strength, giving yourself a workout and also focusing on stability as the core is an integral foundation of your body

Day 9 is all about shoulder mobility. Oftentimes your shoulders and shoulder joints aren't the problem, they're just on the receiving end of problems from the neck and upper back. So today's class will focus on engaging the correct muscles, releasing tension and freeing up space for your shoulders.

In today's class you'll be working through a warrior sequence. This sequence is going to focus on the lower body foundations you covered in the first few days of this series, but also hone in on the awareness you have built in the other classes as well.

Today's class is going to focus on tension and tightness in the lower back and also explore the reasons why those problems are occurring.

Getting good sleep is a really important part of self care. Whilst you sleep you're going through physical recovery as well as mental assimilation for the day that you have just gone through. The quickest way to enter a sleep state is to promote parasympathetic nervous system activity, which you will learn how to control using breath in this practice.

The glutes can be really neglected in a lot of yoga classes. The glutes are responsible for maintaining the level of your pelvis and the integrity of our structure as a whole, so it's really important to work with them.

The side body can be neglected in most movement and yoga classes, but by opening it up you can improve your spinal health and overall flexibility and mobility

Halfway through the series! After yesterdays class working on the side body, today's class adds some twists. Twists are naturally detoxifying because it gives you chance to compress your internal organs, giving them a little bit of a massage, and then allowing fresh blood flow when you release

Today you'll be delving back into the lower body and the hip flexor area to work with the psoas muscle. A lot of people don't know what the psoas is or even how to stretch it, but it is a really important muscle for the position of your pelvis. So in this class you'll be working on locating it and opening and stretching the surrounding areas.

Today's practice is all about cultivating and expanding your energy instead of just cranking it up. This practice would be a great addition to some sun salutations which would give you a quick energy boost that may not last all day without the addition of this flow.

Day 18 builds on what you worked on in day 17 as far as breathing, energy management and ratios. You'll concentrate your emotion down into your belly and then use kapalabhati to cultivate emotional release

Today's class is sequenced around wheel pose, and as with any backbend it's important to take a look at what the other parts of the body are doing. So for wheel pose you'll be targeting 4 areas: opening up the hip flexors, opening up the chest, warming up the quads and coming into full flexion with the shoulders

Day 20 is all about lengthening the hamstrings. Hopefully you should already be feeling pretty open and flexible in your hamstrings after the other classes in this series, so today you'll be working just a little bit deeper into those stretches

It's important to have a strong pelvic floor because that where all of your organs sit, but for it to be strong it also needs to be flexible. This class is going to be a super easy class focusing on flexibility in the pelvic floor and growing awareness through subtlety of movement

Everything in your body is designed to keep you naturally standing upright. Today's class weaves in that same theme you've been working with of focusing on undoing instead of doing. If we remove all these things that are getting in the way of us standing upright, then your posture will resolve itself

A lot of people want to get their splits, and yoga can be a great way of achieving that. In this video Julia shares some great stretches you can do in your splits journey, and also a supported way to get into the splits.

Join Julia for today's class that focuses on the muscles that surround the ribcage and our lung tissue in general. You can't actually move your lungs since they don't have muscle tissue, you'll actually be moving the surrounding muscle and organs to provide space for the lungs to expand into

The vagus nerve can be thought of as a super highway that connects your brain to the rest of your body, it passes through pretty much all of your organs, your heart and your gut and governs all those systems that we have no control over. Most importantly your heart rate and the switch between flight or flight and rest and digest.