1. What is your essential question? What is the best answer to your essential question? Why?
How best can Hatha yoga improve strength and flexibility? The best answer to my essential question is to perform the more intense poses such as inversions, standing poses, twists and arm balances. I stand by this answer because those poses tend to use more of your muscles. It takes a lot of balance, coordination, and strength to hold the poses and smoothly transition to another one, thus improving strength and flexibility.
2. What process did you take to arrive at this answer?
To arrive at this answer, I ran mini tests on my answers. For example, I tried taking classes at a studio and a gym for a while. After, I made sure my alignment was all correct. I realized that being in a yoga studio makes it more personal and intimate, but it doesn't guarantee an improvement in strength and flexibility. I figured that with poses such as inversions, standing, twists and arm balances, it will benefit the practitioner no matter if the alignment is off or if it is done in or outside a yoga studio.
3. What problems did you face? How did you resolve them?
One of the biggest problems I had to overcome was my availability. Things got hectic at school and I was recently hired to close in retail. This left me with little to no time to take classes, learn and experience. Although taking classes didn't count as mentorship, it was the main source of information I acquired (I don't know how to cite this as a source if it counts). Anyway, to counter this problem, I decided to do yoga at home using videos online. It wasn't as effective but it did the job and I still learned a lot about the poses, breathing, and how to teach a class.
4. What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?
One of the sources I found to be extremely significant are my interviews with teachers at the yoga studio. I really utilized the ability to create questions on the interview to make their answers suitable and more personal to my essential questions. Through these interviews, I was able to attain information that could have been unavailable to me via Google. As for a print resource, I found Yoga for Dummies by Georg Feuerstein and Larry Payne to be very helpful. This book was unlike anything else. Instead of descriptions on how to perform certain yoga poses, this book had information regarding the history, the Eight Limbs of Yoga, the styles, and so much more. In other words, it had substance and quality information that not many yoga based books offer.
5. What is your product and why?
My product is my increase in strength and flexibility. Coming into senior year, I was barely able to touch my nose to my knees. Class after class, I can now touch my nose to my knee in more ways than one. In terms of strength, I can now do chaturanga (plank to push up) with a strong body and no limp limbs. I've also noticed that my lung capacity has increased. Not only during yoga, but when I am at the gym, I feel less winded than I used too. The product of my senior project basically resulted in many physical change.
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