Wholistic Fitness

For Steve Ilg, who teaches locally at the Northern Arizona Yoga Center in addition to being a world-class athlete and founder of his own fitness empire, Wholistic Fitness®, yoga came to him naturally. “By age 16, I had already grown so tight from distance running that I knew, intuitively, that I would need to balance the contractive sports with expansive or elongation disciplines. It seemed common sense. I began to fundamentally intertwine my already passionate embrace of Western sport training within the yogic system.”

However, Ilg took a different path to yoga than most, beyond its physical aspects and benefits, which he believes saved his life, “I say that I came into yoga different than most Westerners because when I paralyzed my spine from a winter mountaineering incident, I simply could not move my physical body. I began immediately with my spiritual body, my breath body. I had to rely upon Tibetan-based Chakra meditations and yogic pranayams (precise and regulated breathing exercises) to literally breathe life (prana) back into my broken spine and smashed pelvis.”

“My practice of yoga immediately took me out of a ‘victim role’ and immersed the wholeness of my inherent enlightenment potential into this most humbling yet majestic maturation of self-discovery, which continues to this day – to this moment.” Ilg continues to compete across the country in everything from cycling to skiing and in 2009 alone took fourth place out of 125 master cyclists at the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic and is the reigning Arizona State Nordic Champion. He also created his own form of yoga dubbed High Performance Yoga® which he teaches at the Northern Arizona Yoga Center. “My style of yoga completely honors everything that is written in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the other Hatha Yoga scriptures,” Ilg said. “The chief delineation in my approach to asana is wholeness, mental concentration, spiritual tenacity, joint health, and stablization – strength before suppleness, wholeness before specialization.”

I have taken many yoga classes before and like to think of myself as fit and active. However, Ilg’s “HP Yoga” class left me with every muscle trembling and a sore weekend.

“Only by attacking our weaknesses, our negative tendencies, is there growth,” Ilg said. “In comfort, there is only stagnation.”