Small classes, often two or three people, sometimes one. The shape of the session is set once the practitioner has seen who turned up.
This is not a led class you keep up with. If your hamstrings are the limiting factor you get a session about hamstrings, and if your attention is the limiting factor you get a slower one with longer holds.
Morning sessions run on the pavilion deck when the weather allows, which puts you outside and facing water before you have spoken to anyone. Several guests report that this is the part of the stay they end up rebuilding their week around.
Available now
Morning or evening practice on the open deck. Breath first, then movement.
Sessions cap at four people and are often one, so the sequence is built around the bodies that turned up rather than delivered to whoever can already keep up.
Sixty minutes, small group or private · The Garden Pavilion
The research
Yoga for anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
Depression and Anxiety · 2018
This review pooled randomized controlled trials of yoga for people with anxiety disorders or elevated anxiety levels. Eight trials with 319 participants, mostly in their 30s, were included. Compared with no treatment, yoga showed small short-term reductions in anxiety, and compared with active comparison groups the effects were larger. There were also small effects on depression compared with no treatment. Importantly, no effects were found for people whose anxiety disorder was formally diagnosed under DSM criteria; the benefits appeared in those diagnosed by other methods and in people with elevated anxiety but no formal diagnosis. Only three trials reported side effect data, and these did not show more injuries with yoga. The authors call the evidence preliminary and ask for more high-quality trials, and the small number of studies is the main limitation.
Yoga for chronic non-specific low back pain
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews · 2022
This Cochrane review assessed yoga for adults with chronic low back pain that has no specific identified cause. It included 21 randomized trials with 2,223 participants, mostly women in their 40s and 50s practicing Iyengar, hatha or viniyoga styles. Compared with no exercise, yoga produced small improvements in back function and pain at three months, smaller than what is usually considered clinically important, along with a small improvement in physical and mental quality of life and possibly a higher chance that people rated their back as improved. Compared with other back-focused exercise, yoga made little or no difference. Yoga was also associated with more adverse events, mainly temporary increases in back pain. A key limitation is that participants could not be blinded, and most outcomes were self-reported.
Yoga, mindfulness-based stress reduction and stress-related physiological measures: A meta-analysis
Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2017
Rather than relying on how people say they feel, this meta-analysis looked at physical markers of stress. It included 42 randomised controlled trials comparing practices that involve yoga postures (asanas), with or without mindfulness-based stress reduction, against active control groups. Compared with active controls, yoga-based practices were associated with lower evening and waking cortisol, lower ambulatory systolic blood pressure, lower resting heart rate, changes in heart rate variability, and lower fasting blood glucose, total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol. The authors conclude that yoga-based practices appear to be associated with better regulation of the body's main stress systems, the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. The main limitation is that the yoga programs studied were very different from each other, which makes it hard to say which style, dose or format matters most.
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