Yoga teaches people how to sustain poses while still breathing, a skill most yogis use to live undetected in wax museums. Trick a tourist with today's Groupon: for $20, you get any 10 classes at Almaden Yoga (up to a $120 value).
Almaden Yoga's certified instructors lead 15 different mind and body classes to accommodate an array of interests and experience levels. The studio's integrated schedule of sessions includes 75-minute Yin yoga classes, which benefit beginning students and savvy stretchers alike, utilizing longer-held poses to target the body's connective tissues, ligaments, bones, and joints to help rusty skeletons increase mobility. Traditional, gentle Hatha sessions help create limber limbs with balancing poses, back bends, and static postures. The studio temperature increases to leather pants levels during Heated Detox Hatha, where breathing exercises and a series of twisting and compressing poses tickles organs until they admit where they're hiding the body's secret stash of toxins. In YogaTone, encouraging teachers combine elements of traditional yoga with core-centric Pilates floor exercises to help flexperts hone lean muscles and strong coordination skills needed to manipulate sweaty sticky mats into origami swans.
Almaden Yoga
At Almaden Yoga, owners Ron Victor and Anuja Chaudhri work alongside a team of instructors to reach out to those who have always wanted to practice yoga but never thought they could. Targeting the mind and body, their classes ensure that everyone, from beginning pupils to experts to expectant mothers, can find a course that suits their needs.
Aside from a way to stay in shape and lengthen limbs, the instructors see yoga as a philosophy for navigating the world. They believe that a combination of postures, focused breathing, and meditation is a method for discovering calmness in any uncomfortable situation, be it an all-night study session or a postapocalyptic decade trapped in a fallout shelter. Their life-changing approach has extended to charity events, such as a sun-salutation event to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and their positive influence on health and mental wellness made them a Talk of the Town winner in 2012.