Beginning with your first tentative toddler days until this moment, your legs have let you stroll, stride, or sprint your way through life. Or maybe, they’ve just let you stand on your feet all day. But it’s not surprising that after 60-plus years, they might need a chance to recover.

Sixty and Me is here to help! In the sixth of our free Gentle Yoga for Seniors video workouts for older adults, instructor and healer Cat Kabira works her magic once again. Read on to see what this latest offering has in store!

Gentle Yoga for Seniors: An Easy-as-She-Goes Approach

In this 32-minute session, you’ll learn to align your feet and legs correctly. Then you’ll practice three poses that help your legs entire lower body become stronger and more flexible.

 As always, Cat emphasizes that how deeply you can stretch or how long you can hold a pose isn’t what counts. Simply working at your personal edge and breathing into whatever parts of your body you’re challenging is enough.

As she put it in our series’ introductory video, “Show up, do what you can, breathe. If you focus on your breath with your body and you don’t push yourself, if you really just stay within what feels right, that’s the best thing.”

Do you suffer from arthritis? Have you been through knee or hip surgery? Are sensitive knees holding you back? Not to worry, because Cat’s approach can work for you too!

By presenting each pose with several variations you can perform with or without props, she allows you to simply tailor your workout to where your legs’ limits are each day!

Feet First

Be honest. Other than having their toenails trimmed and painted or their calluses smoothed, how much attention do your feet get?  Yet how you position our feet when standing determines how correctly your knees, back, shoulders and neck are aligned.

In this workout, you’ll practice having your feet face forward, with all four of their “corners” pressing evenly on the ground. If you have flat feet, this is a great way to rebuild your arches. Why does that matter?

Yoga for Women over 60: Those Curves Still Count!

As Cat explains:

“That lifting, that healthy buoyancy in your arches… (can) change not just the structure of your feet but also change the structure of the rest of your body… So what gives us that vitality is keeping buoyancy in the curves of our body… in the arches of the feet… and that natural curve in the low back and the curve in the neck. “

In other words, using yoga after 60 to rebuild or maintain your feet’s natural arches is one of the kindest things you can do for your entire body.

And — as you might have guessed — being kind to yourself is central to Cat’s philosophy. “The primary practice of yoga,” she stresses, “is learning to listen to yourself in a very kind way and just seeing what does your body need.”

Why do you think your legs and feet may be ready for some gentle yoga? If you’ve tried other kinds of yoga since reaching 60, what was your impression? Or, if you’ve been working your way through our Gentle Yoga for Seniors videos, how have they made a difference in your life?