Welcome to Hope Zvara and Core Functional Fitness!
If you're a yoga student, teacher or fitness professional, you've come to the right place...
Hope Zvara-The Real Deal, is a Yoga Teacher, Trainer and Expert specializing in the true art of Yoga and Core Functional Fitness™ for students, teachers and Fitness Professionals interested in practicing authentic mind-body Yoga and other practices in need of true connection.
Unlike traditional or extreme Yoga practices, Hope’s Yoga & Core Functional Fitness™ method empowers you to understand the “WHY” behind particular postures, and to effectively translate what you experience on the mat into your everyday life.
Hope helps to eliminate frustrations with understanding why you move as you do on your mat - if you can’t tell her WHY you are doing the pose you are doing, perhaps you shouldn’t be doing it. A common issue Hope sees in her practice is issues with High Lunge or Warrior One pose. We don’t functionally walk around with an anteriorally tilted pelvis, a collapsed back ankle (an exterior rotated back foot feeds hip tightness), knee, thigh and a noodle-like body as many trainers may teach you to do, so why train your body to posture this way? The result is an exaggerated kyphotic upper back, continual tightness in the hamstrings, hip flexors and lower back, coupled with weak abdominal's. And this is only the beginning! Function trumps tradition. Click here to see the visual example.
Hope promises to really get you thinking! When you leave her workshops and trainings, you’ll begin understanding “WHY” and “HOW” to apply functional technique to your practice.
Hope Zvara-The Real Deal, is a Yoga Teacher, Trainer and Expert specializing in the true art of Yoga and Core Functional Fitness™ for students, teachers and Fitness Professionals interested in practicing authentic mind-body Yoga and other practices in need of true connection.
Unlike traditional or extreme Yoga practices, Hope’s Yoga & Core Functional Fitness™ method empowers you to understand the “WHY” behind particular postures, and to effectively translate what you experience on the mat into your everyday life.
Hope helps to eliminate frustrations with understanding why you move as you do on your mat - if you can’t tell her WHY you are doing the pose you are doing, perhaps you shouldn’t be doing it. A common issue Hope sees in her practice is issues with High Lunge or Warrior One pose. We don’t functionally walk around with an anteriorally tilted pelvis, a collapsed back ankle (an exterior rotated back foot feeds hip tightness), knee, thigh and a noodle-like body as many trainers may teach you to do, so why train your body to posture this way? The result is an exaggerated kyphotic upper back, continual tightness in the hamstrings, hip flexors and lower back, coupled with weak abdominal's. And this is only the beginning! Function trumps tradition. Click here to see the visual example.
Hope promises to really get you thinking! When you leave her workshops and trainings, you’ll begin understanding “WHY” and “HOW” to apply functional technique to your practice.
Read about Hope in the May 2013 edition of Nature's Pathways
Catch Hope as she blogs regularly for:
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Read More About Hope
_ It’s time to stop defeatist thinking and instead begin to look at ourselves as whole beings - our bodies, our minds, and our emotions - and how they merge to create who we are. Hope Zvara, Yoga Teacher, Functional Fitness Expert, and creator of Core Functional Fitness™, believes that in order to achieve ultimate balance we must look at ourselves in a functional way by considering questions like, why are we doing what we’re doing. Why are we are the way we are? And, how can I achieve whole body wellness inside and out? And maybe, just maybe it’s to stop looking at trying to be perfectly balanced and instead look for what the asymmetry and imbalances are and work from there.
People often say to Hope, “I can’t believe how young you are and how much crap you have been through already”. Throughout Hope’s life and teaching career a continual comment has followed her in all she does “Hope is wise beyond her years, an old soul in a young woman’s body” is the comment that has partly molded this fit framed women under the age of 30. In a septic tank of an eating disorder just out of high school, Hope wholeheartedly believes Yoga saved her life, saying “I didn’t find Yoga, Yoga found me”. Prior to Yoga, Hope recalls feeling “broken on the inside, a walking corpse” flooded with friends a great academic platform, Hope looks back and can see that this was indeed a “platform” just not the kind she thought she was on and heading towards. “I think life was preparing me from young on, through this all, an amazing faith in God and a heavy searching knowing that there had to be something more than this, something that I was being taught, however hard that was to acknowledge that this all was a lesson, a preparation, not a punishment.” Hope can clearly recall attending Marquette University and exams approaching, a heavy Catholic driven university Hope was looking to be a motivational speaker and study theology. “Looking back I was moving in the right direction just not the exact path intended for the future.” “It had to be right, the way everything worked out so smoothly and that is not the story of my life, but that moment was very smooth”, Hope recalls. Taking exams early to attend an ashram in Colorado for month long intensive yoga training, Hope dropped everything and without question jumped on a plane and her life would be forever change. Since then, Hope has immersed herself in a true, body/mind/spirit Yogic lifestyle with principles based on functionality and unlocking the true essence of your identity center (core fitness). She teaches the same philosophies and principles she used to heal from a life of addiction and depression to yoga students and fitness professionals who want to have life at their fingertips and live the life they desire. “It’s a unique combination; most people are driven in the physical body and immerse themselves in learning and teaching about that in the fullest. While others zoom to the spiritual side and teach mostly from that pathway; for whatever reason I have been privileged with the ability to so cohesively intertwine both. “She has had a distinctive charismatic quality about her from birth on, people are drawn to her and she goes by the beat of her own drum from early on”, says Hope’s mom Kathy, who also is a yoga teacher and teachers at Hope’s studio. Hope’s passion is helping people to start to live and become the best version of themselves; to learn more about life and how we ravel and unravel into it. Hope’s ultimate goals are to reach as many people as possible who really want to grow in their lifetime. Many people today are consumed by their egos and fear… and let what comes from that limit and hinder their growth because they look to their left or right and feel that “the grass is always greener on the other side” and this leaves them in a whirl-wind, no further forward than before. “I believe that there are no mistakes in life, just opportunities to learn and grow, I was lucky enough to survive all my opportunities and live to share them and now teach from those experiences. I look back and can see now that I have been given a grace that when people think she doesn’t get it, she’s never been there, I have!” When it comes to mind-body health and core functionality, Hope is known as “the real deal”. If you’d like to benefit from Hope’s insight and expertise you can reach her directly at e-mail. “Mindless movements have to stop; they are creating injuries on a physical level (even in yoga) and are not doing the mind-body world of practice any justice. I question my students by asking them ‘if you can’t be stable why are you trying so hard to be mobile’. Everyone is so quick to jump around and do a zillion push-ups and cha-cha all over the room without even for a second questioning the concept of stability and actually having awareness-real awareness of what the heck they are doing.” From Hope’s continual research, training and teaching she has found the missing puzzle pieces and put them together and she believes and has seen it work that this method of movement is Core Functional Fitness™ a method she both teaches solely and integrates into her HOPE Yoga Teacher Trainings and methods of movements and practices. Physical fitness and functionality should not be kept separate from mental, spiritual and emotional growth; they feed off of each other and should be integrated together seeing both as extremely important and valuable. |
