The Branches

Nicole, our Strength Director, shares her top three tips for how to add cardio to your strength training in a sustainable way.

Back in 2021 there was just one weekly Strength Training class on the studio’s schedule. Fast forward to 2026 and Strength Training is now offered seven times per week! Leena, studio director, recently added “Strength” to our website tagline because it has become such a big part of what we offer. We are now The Branches; Yoga & Strength, Rooted in Community.

Leena and I have been noodling on building out our strength programming in different ways and this has led to the addition of a new class: Conditioning & Core with Alissa (Wednesdays at 9:00 AM). We put it smack dab in the middle of the week in hopes that it can be a helpful companion to our Strength Training classes.

Why pair them? Because while lifting weights is incredible, pairing strength with cardiorespiratory fitness (good old-fashioned cardio) is where the real magic happens. Together, they form a powerhouse duo that protects your long-term health, fights chronic disease, and delivers a big ol’ boost to your mental well-being.

Getting into the nitty-gritty of it all, the Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines recommend an accumulation of at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic activity per week, in addition to twice weekly strength training for all adults, including seniors 65 and older. In addition to getting adequate sleep, and decreasing sedentary behaviours, they specifically cite a reduced risk of heart disease and stroke, type-2 diabetes, hypertension, and several cancers, when the minimum weekly accumulation of aerobic exercise is met. They also refer to the positive bone health effects of strength training. And as icing on the cake, both strength and cardio contribute to better cognition, balance, and overall physical function. Pretty compelling stuff. But despite knowing what is best for us, getting motivated to do cardio can still be tough.

I was not a fan of cardio when I first added it to my workout routine a few years ago. It wasn’t my favourite, but over time I have come to appreciate it, with some tweaking of my approach and expectations. If you’ve tried out our Conditioning & Core class, and went a little to hard or a little too easy, I’m here to give you some ideas to find that Goldilocks zone. Here are a few of my best tips to make the addition of cardio training into your routine feel a little easier.

Pace yourself and commit to coming back.

If you’re brand new to interval training (like in Conditioning & Core), this can be the hardest hurdle to overcome. As with anything new, you’ll need to give yourself time to figure this out because it takes time, practice, and some small-scale failure. In order to make progress, you need to balance out the extremes of going too hard, or going too easy, and instead seek a path down the middle as your reference point. From my own experience, it takes trial and error.

Once you commit to returning for a future workout, you’ll relieve some of the pressure you might be feeling to over-perform in the moment. Adapting to the stresses of higher intensity conditioning takes time, so give yourself a grace period of several months of consistency to observe the outcome of your efforts.

Make notes – keep a workout journal!

As your fitness improves, you’ll notice that your comfort zone expands, and with that, so too does your readiness to push harder. And as capacity grows, your baseline will track upwards, so that what once felt like a full-out effort no longer does. You’ll then continue to push against your own threshold to make progress. The great thing is that you’ll become more familiar with your body’s own cues about your limits on any given day. Jotting down short-hand notes about how you felt during and after a workout — including the post-workout recovery period of 24-48 hours — can be an effective way to understand your patterns over time. You could use a simplified scale to rate your overall workout effort on a scale of 1-10 with the 5-7 range being “moderate to high-moderate” and 8-10 tracking upwards into the “vigorous” zone. It’s basically journaling for gym-goers and it can be as simple as making notes in an app on your phone, or in a physical notebook.

Leverage the group, but compete with yourself.

It can be tough not to compare yourself to others in a group fitness setting even in a supportive environment like The Branches. I encourage you to draw from the positive energy of the people around you, and to use it as inspiration to fuel your motivation. Remember that you are not in competition with others, but rather in an ongoing process to improve your own quality of life.

If you can put the above tips into practice, you’ll be on your way to successfully building towards that 150 minute-per-week target and sooner-than-later, your workouts can be one of the best parts of your week, too!

If you try out the Conditioning & Core class, let me know! I’d love to hear how it feels in tandem with your strength practice, or in tandem with your yoga practice.

With enthusiasm for all things strength,
Nicole

This dispatch is from Kimberley Luu, facilitator of The Branches’ Trauma Informed Yoga Nidra Teacher Training.

I felt a light, buzzing energy rising up my face as I read through our yoga nidra facilitator trainees’ final practicum reflection. For this assignment, the trainees guided a yoga nidra practice for a participant or small group. A few lines I remember, paraphrased:

“My participant described feeling depleted and overwhelmed, so I decided it was best to avoid any intense emotional processing and focus on settling, resourcing, and visuals of ocean coasts which he said were peaceful places for him.”

“I could see one participant struggling to physically settle, so I offered some extra prop supports. I also offered an eye covering but they preferred access to the soft lighting rather than complete darkness. Happily, they settled much easier afterwards.”

“I decided to share a poem to shape the sankalpa. I knew the participant was a poet themself and sensed that this one would resonate given their personality.”

What lies in each of these lines is a portrayal that they are listening. They are listening to their participants and sharing what is truly needed, rather than relying on pre-formulated structures and scripts. They can do this because in our training, we learned the essential purpose of each yoga nidra technique and trauma-informed considerations behind each one. This way, they can simply be present to the bodies in front of them, and deliver practices that make sense, context-to-context.

This last quote I’ll share is especially moving to me, portraying the trainees’ ability to not only listen to their participant, but also to themselves:

“My participant was interested in exploring a challenging experience which we could facilitate with pairs of opposites. After some reflection, I felt that it was wiser to begin with a more resourceful practice as I build trust in my own abilities to hold space. I let her know that we may be able to explore the challenging experience in a future session.”

What an incredible choice to make for one’s self, and ultimately the other too! For those in healing professions, it can be difficult to remember that we operate best when we feel safe and confident in our role. The first integrative exercise we did in our training weekend was discuss our scope as individual facilitators, and grow familiar with all of the grey territory we will have to navigate.

All in all, I want to say congratulations to our first cohort of graduates. I am truly proud of how they grew throughout these last five months and am excited for what they will be offering to the world. I trust with my whole heart that they will do a wonderful job in offering the gifts of integrative rest.

Curious about yoga nidra? Keep an eye out for workshops and courses coming in the fall. As for the next training, we usually offer our training programs every two years, meaning that the next time we’d offer this one would likely be Winter of 2028. If you’re interested, let us know so we can flag it for you when it comes around again.

Nicole is the studio’s Strength Director, who creates and develops all of our Strength Training programming. This post is about a new interval class we’ve added to complement our Strength classes.

If you follow exercise topics in the media, you’ll be aware that strength training (for women in particular) has garnered more attention over the past few years. And here at the Branches, we’ve never been more committed to offering lots of strength training options — not least because of the incredible quality of life benefits that it confers. We’ve recently added an interval-style class to our drop-in schedule. Developed and instructed by Alissa, Conditioning & Core (Wednesdays at 9:00 am) is intentionally positioned on the schedule to complement our Strength Training classes.

Conditioning & Core adds the option of sustained cardiovascular respiratory fitness to our programming at The Branches. The reason for this is that strength training is bolstered, quite significantly, by the addition of “cardio”. Cardio is a separate but related capacity that offers unique physiological adaptations and health outcomes. When combined, the health benefits of strength training and cardio are known to reduce the risk of premature death and chronic diseases, as well as contribute to positive mental health.

Four years ago, when I got more serious about strength training, I could not have been LESS interested in interval-style cardio. While strength training was challenging, the cost of recovery (aka muscle soreness and fatigue) felt worth it to me. It was only because conditioning/cardio came as a package-deal with the strength programming at my gym that I reluctantly started doing it. I initially jumped to the conclusion that it wasn’t for me because it just felt so HARD and I really didn’t like it. It turns out, I had some lessons to learn in how to manage the workload and recovery of not only conditioning, but also training strength, as two separate but related practices.

I’ll share my tips in a later post about how to make the addition of cardio training into your routine feel a little easier. But to start, I want to highlight some carry-over benefits between cardio, strength training, and everyday life. This has been my main motivation for my strength practice – because I feel a difference day to day. So if you’re looking for some motivation to sign up for our new Conditioning class, here it is!

You can count on your muscular endurance getting better.

No matter the physical task, whether a structured workout, or a demand of life — like hauling groceries across a parking lot — you’ll be able to withstand the task for longer without getting exhausted. Strength training is what allows you to lift the heavy bags with relative ease, while cardio training is what allows you to carry them over a longer distance, or over a longer period of time.

Your recovery time will improve, meaning you can do more, at a higher quality.

By adding cardio to your routine, your recovery will improve. This means your recovery will change not just in the minutes between your working strength or cardio interval sets, but also in the days between separate workout sessions. This is important over the long term as it translates to having more productive and higher-quality work intervals, which in turn leads to higher fitness levels. In my experience, a faster recovery period gets me back to the gym sooner, fresher, and ready to accumulate more exercise minutes. Hooray!

You will be able to move well, more quickly. If you enjoy walking for exercise, you’ll know the difference between walking on flat, even terrain as compared to jogging on that same terrain. Of course you could walk a bit faster than your average pace, but until you bump up your pacing to a jog (or change some of the other variables), you won’t experience a noticeable increase to your heart rate above resting. In order to more fully train your cardiovascular system, we need to do exercises that elevate the heart rate into the moderate-to-vigorous category. In good news, lots of conditioning exercises will challenge you to work more quickly, and some of them will look a lot like the ones you already know from strength work. One such example is doing overhead shoulder presses with a pair of dumbbells. Unlike in strength training, where the goal is to lift progressively heavier over time, when doing this same exercise in a conditioning workout, you will perform that same exercise with lighter weights to optimize for higher reps and a higher, sustained heart rate. I can almost feel my heart rate getting higher just thinking about it!

We are hoping to add more Conditioning & Core classes to the schedule as demand grows. Our Strength Training classes started with just one class a week and over the years has grown to seven – will Conditioning & Core follow the same trajectory? Only time will tell.

We hope you are able to try out our Wednesday 9am class in the next few months. If you have suggestions for a different time on the schedule that you’d love to see this class, let us know! We’ll be taking your feedback into account as we consider what classes to add in the fall.

Yours in getting stronger and training for longer,
Nicole

This post is from Wendy, a studio manager and lead teacher. Wendy has been sharing her practices of tarot + journaling in a range of different workshops over the last few years – last summer’s tarot event was sold out with a waitlist! Read on for some of Wendy’s tips on selecting a deck that works for you.

One of my favorite self-reflective practices is reading tarot cards for myself. It’s been such a meaningful part of my own journey, and something I love to share with other folks. Whenever I do, the same question inevitably comes up: “How do I choose a deck?”

There are sooo many tarot and oracle card decks available today. Traditional decks, Indie decks, & mass-market decks – all with different art styles and themes. It can be pretty overwhelming at first, so here are a few things to think about that might help you narrow things down:

1. Define your “Why”

Most decks are beautiful works of art. If you want to add more beauty to your life, choose a deck you love to look at. I definitely have a few of those! If you’re wanting to use those cards for divination or self-reflection, look for images that tell a story. Find cards with layers of symbology and lots of interesting details – things that you don’t necessarily notice the first time. Look for cards that make you curious, that make you pause and look a little closer.

2. Look for your own reflection

When you’re trying to uncover your inner voice, it’s easiest to use a deck that speaks to your unique values and interests. For example, I’m happiest when I’m swimming in a lake, digging in the garden, or walking through the forest, so most of my favorite decks are nature-themed. When I see a honeybee on a card, I don’t just see honey or a stinger; I see community, a hive working together, and the sweetness of a harvest. Whether you love modern art, history, cats, pop culture, or decks that celebrate queer joy, there is a deck out there that speaks to exactly who you are.

3. Explore the artists behind the cards

If you’re looking for something unique, try searching for “indie tarot decks.” You’ll find incredible creations by independent artists, and some great sites that review them. I think it’s important to take a little time to learn the story behind the deck before purchasing. It adds another layer of meaning to the cards, and ensures your practice supports independent creativity by real artists.

Share your story with us!

If you find a deck that speaks to you, I hope you’ll bring it to our Tarot as a Contemplative Tool workshop on Sunday, July 19. I love seeing all the beautiful artwork and hearing the stories of why people chose their decks and what those images represent for them.

No deck yet? Come anyway! I’ll have a few different tarot and oracle decks available for you to explore and see what kind of imagery speaks loudest to you.

With care,
Wendy

This post is by Branches co-director, Emma.

A few nights ago, the women’s circle I started five years ago said goodbye to three of its members. Two were moving away, and one had decided their time in the circle had come to a natural close. The gathering was not focused on their leaving, but the prompt was to respond to these three words: Change. Time. Endings.

All the women leaned into the theme in a different way. Some reflected on how they had changed and grown over the last decade, others spoke about current changes coming their way and how they might look back on them in time. We spoke about endings that never were, changes of heart, and the spiralic nature of learning and understanding oneself.

It was beautiful to listen to each woman in turn, share from their heart into a group that had been nurtured for five years. We know each other well, but there remains a beautiful mystery to other people’s inner worlds. It is a gift and a privilege to be granted a window into these women’s hearts and minds each month when we gather.

One thing I spoke about was how grateful I was to be offering the Leading Circles Training at The Branches, about how fulfilled I feel about my work at the studio. To be able to teach others how to lead in community feels like my life’s work, and it is exactly what I want to be spreading and sharing with the world.

I am looking forward to seeing how our women’s circle will continue to evolve, now with 7 members rather than 10. It will be a new iteration as we figure out together who we are as a circle now. I am excited to see what will change in the group, what will be possible with this new configuration. I hold myself as a leader in this group. It doesn’t mean I make decisions for the group, or decide the direction. For me, leading a group actually means constantly calling us to reflect on ourselves, on the purpose and experience of the group, and how we can nudge and nurture the process to get more of what we want. More closeness. More investigation. More curiosity, vulnerability, support and shared joy.

If the idea of leading a circle sounds like something you want in your life, but it feels unattainable, I want to assure you, it is not. It is possible for all of us to experience this kind of intimate group friendship. We simply need to learn skills to be able to nurture this kind of experience. I have many years of experience of shepherding groups through processes of change and growth. From that experience I have created the formats and processes that I will be sharing in the Leading Circles Training. I am looking forward to sharing my experienced approach to circle leadership with just 12 individuals in this small group program.

And, if the idea of leading a circle feels farther off, I’ll leave you with some resources. This booklet I created has some contemplation questions to get you thinking about what kind of circle you might want to convene, and contains some of my favourite resources for thinking about group gatherings.

If you’ve been meaning to sign up for the Leading Circles virtual info session, the link is here. I look forward to seeing who I might spend the eight months contemplating and churning community leadership with.

Yours in the learning,
Emma

A post by Branches co-owner + director Leslie Stokman.

I leave it unnamed most of the time, but there is a secret ingredient that has supercharged many of the benefits of my yoga practice.

The benefits I’m thinking of are deeper presence, softened body tension, increased flexibility, and more resilience in my nervous system. We might practice meditation, restorative yoga, active asana or mobility work, and pranayama to cultivate these benefits. But there is one practice that cultivates them all, all at once.

Even though I’ve been back to teaching twice a week for a few months now, I don’t bring it up. The reason I don’t talk about it in my classes is because I want the practices we are engaging in to reveal their own goodness and worth. This isn’t about detracting from activities we already enjoy.

That said, it also doesn’t sit right with me to keep quiet. So let me tell you a little about TRE.

TRE stands for Tension (or Trauma) Release Exercises. The long and short of it is this: when you practice TRE, you tap into an ability to complete unfinished cycles of stress responses by voluntarily invoking involuntary shaking called neurogenic tremors (shaking that emerges from the function of your autonomic nervous system.)

Everyone’s body possesses this ability, and some folks can recall times that it happened on its own. Knees knocking before a big presentation, tummy trembles as you lean in for a first kiss, wild leg shakes around giving birth, or shivering terribly after a car accident are some common experiences for which our culture tends to lack context or accurate explanation.

These tremors serve their purpose when they come up on their own. Spontaneous shaking like the examples above give our bodies an outlet for the overwhelming effervescence of exciting moments. Shaking also offers a resolution to the intense activation of survival energy in the face of frightening events.

Thankfully, you don’t have to put yourself through another stressful experience to access this miraculous and fascinating process. The keys to engaging with your neurogenic tremors in a therapeutic way are all about creating safety and a sense of grounding, then staying present while finding the right amount of intensity. That’s where I can help.

Since 2019 I’ve been a Certified TRE Provider, and it’s one of my greatest professional joys to guide others to discover and refine their personal practice. Branches’ co-directors Leena and Emma were some of my first practice clients!

Check out this snippet of the time Leena, Emma and I practiced TRE together in the final days of renovations at 9 Samuel Street.

We certainly had a lot of stress to shake off, which is putting it lightly.

Notice each of us tremoring with unique tempo and style, while also making voluntary choices about to how to move or lay.

The sky is the limit when it comes to what bodies can do when engaged in the therapeutic tremoring of TRE, but almost everyone starts like Emma pictured above, with some moderate hip and leg shakes.

Because a regular TRE practice can release body tension, build nervous system resilience, and deepen presence through a novel type of embodiment, it might be the next game-changing element in your meditation, yoga, or strength and mobility practice. I really believe (and have seen) that TRE is that powerful, and I’ve felt it for myself.

If this resonates with you, too, let’s chat.

I’m excited to return to work as a TRE Provider, and am currently offering weekly one-on-one appointments on Tuesday afternoons at 1:00pm and 2:30pm. Read more about TRE and how to get started on my webpage.

And if you want to catch me in class, I’m teaching on Sundays – 9:45am Stretch & Centre, and Mondays – 7:30pm Slow Flow.

Yours in discovery of all our weird and wonderful capacities,
Leslie