Tag: yoga during pregnancy

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Yoga for pregnant women

Many women have written to us asking whether it is safe for them to do yoga during pregnancy. Most pregnant women find that yoga has both emotional and physical benefits. However, they tend to be unsure about what yoga poses offers the most benefits and which yoga poses they as pregnant women should avoid.

How yoga helps pregnant women

Practicing yoga offer many health benefits for pregnant women. Research as shown that yoga helps pregnant women to develop good breathing techniques and to relax. Better breathing and relaxation will help pregnant women to better deal with the physical demands of pregnancy. The benefits of better breathing and relaxation will help during labor, birth and the early stages of motherhood. Yoga helps pregnant women to relieve stress associated with pregnancy. Pregnant women who have taken prenatal yoga class found it to be a great way to meet other soon to be moms and share their journey toward motherhood together.

Things pregnant women should be careful about when doing yoga

It you are attending a regular yoga class, tell your yoga instructor that you’re pregnant, and which trimester you’re in. If you’re attending a yoga class that is specifically geared to pregnant women, all the better.

After your first trimester, don’t do any yoga pose or asanas that can reduce blood flow to the uterus. This includes any yoga poses that involve you lying on your back. Such yoga poses can reduce blood flow to your uterus which is not good for the baby.

Don’t do yoga poses that require you to stretch your muscles too much. In particular, avoid doing yoga poses that stretches your abdominals. Being pregnant releases relaxin, which enables your uterus to expand, but this results in the softening of your connective tissues. The soften connective tissues means as a pregnant woman, you’re more susceptible to injuries including strains and pulls. Therefore, it’s best to avoid yoga poses that require strenuous stretching.

During your second trimester, your center gravity changes so it is important to keep your balance when doing yoga. If you are doing a standing yoga pose, we recommend that you do such standing poses with your heel to the wall or a stable chair to give you support. This will ensure that you avoid losing your balance and falling. You should always remember to keep yourself well supported to prevent injury to yourself and your baby.

Stay away from hot yoga or Bikram. Steer clear from hot yoga like the plague if you are pregnant. According to researchers, pregnant women working out in such an overheated room exposes their growing fetus to risk. The high heat could adversely affect the healthy development of your baby in the uterus. So hot yoga is a definite no no during pregnancy.

During yoga practice, its important when you bend forward, hinge from the hips, leading with the breastbone and extending the spine from the crown of the head down to the tailbone. This technique will give more space for your ribs to move and will make breathing easier.

During yoga poses, always keep your pelvis in a neutral position by engaging the abdominals and slightly tucking the tailbone down and in. Doing this will help to relax your buttocks muscle (your glutes) and hip flexors, and will reduce and prevent sciatic pain down the back of your leg, which is a common symptom in pregnant women. By keeping your pelvis in a neutral position and engaging you abdominals, you can prevent injury the connective tissue in your body that stabilizes your pelvis.

When you bend forward while seated, it’s a good idea to place a towel or yoga strap behind your feet and hold both ends. Avoid compression your abdomen by bending from your hips and lifting your chest. If you find this movement to be too difficult if your belly is too large, you can place a rolled-up towel under your buttocks to elevate the body, and spread your legs slightly to give your belly more room to move forward.

Avoid doing yoga pose that require deep twisting movement. If you doing a mild twisting yoga poses, be careful to avoid putting any pressure on your abdomen. You can twist more from your shoulders and back rather than your waist.

Be mindful of your limitations. It’s a good idea to be in tune to your body. Listen to what your body is telling you. Don’t do anything that feels uncomfortable. When you feel the even the slightest discomfort, stop. This will ensure that you don’t do anything that will harm you and your baby. If necessary, you can modify the yoga pose so that you are completely comfortable. Good yoga instructors will always help to customize the yoga class to suit pregnant women.

Safe yoga poses for pregnant women

Butterfly stretch

Cat-Cow

Cobra (in the first trimester, if you feel comfortable doing this face-down pose)

Seated forward bend (with modifications as described above)

Side angle pose

Standing forward bend (with chair for modification)

Triangle pose (with chair for modification)

Yoga poses that are dangerous to pregnant and should be avoided during pregnancy

Backbends

Balancing poses on one leg (unless supported by chair or wall)

Camel

Handstands

Headstands

Upward bow

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How does yoga benefit your health?

What are the health benefits of doing yoga? We have the answers, read on!

There are loads of health benefits to doing yoga. Doing yoga benefits your health in many was including: improved blood circulation around your body, increased self confidence and self esteem and better breathing. Yoga also helps with weight loss because it is an aerobic form of exercise. Yoga will help to improve your health by improving your general fitness and helping with detoxification of your body. Yoga also helps improve your strength and flexibility.

Yoga improves circulation

Circulation refers to the circulation of blood around your body. But why is circulation important to you? The circulation of blood around your body deliver fresh oxygen supply and essential nutrients to all your body’s cells helps to keep them healthy. Healthy cells in your body means your body is better at healing wounds, tissue repair and boost immunity from germs and bacteria. By enhancing your body’s circulation, yoga directly makes your body stronger and improves your sense of vitality. Practicing yoga increase your heart rate and boost the circulation of oxygen rich blood around your body. In addition, yoga further benefits your health by improving blood flow to regions of your body that don’t normally good blood circulation, particularly your joints, connective tissues and internal organs. When you do Yoga postures and moves involving deep stretches, twists, backbends, and muscular contractions, your body actively send fresh blood to your joints, connective tissues and internal organ to delivery more oxygen and nutrients to these areas. yoga helps with detoxification of your body

Toxins are everywhere in our environment. A toxin is a chemical or poison is harmful to your body and may cause disease. Toxins can be found in food or water, from chemicals used to grow or prepare food, and even from the air that we breathe. Our bodies naturally process toxins through our liver and kidneys and other organs. Toxins also pass out of your bodies through sweat, urine and feces. So how does yoga help your body get rid of toxins? When you practice yoga, your body generate sweat and cause you to breathe more deeply, your heart rate increases. All these twisting, bending and stretching movements in yoga helps improve circulation and massage and stimulate your organs to actively detoxify you body.

Yoga helps improve strength and flexibility

Yoga is one of the best form of exercise to increase your body strength and flexibility. Don’t worry if you have trouble touching your toes. With yoga practice, you’ll become much stronger and more flexible can you ever imagined. This makes yoga is ideal for those to have to sit for long hours in front of the computer who tend to have weak muscles and poor flexibility.Yoga postures involves twisting, bending and stretching movements which strengthen and lengthen your body’s connective tissues through physical postures. Regular yoga practice will transform even the most stiff body into a more flexible and stronger body with stronger muscles. Therefore, you can become stronger and more flexible simply by doing yoga. No need to buy expensive exercise machines or hire costly personal trainers. yoga helps reduce stress relief

If you are reduce by the pressures of life, we highly recommend that you give yoga a try. It’s important to reduce stress because stress can lead to all sorts of health problems if left unchecked. By regularly doing yoga, you will effectively calm your body both physically and mentally. Many yoga fans find that after their yoga session, they feel refreshed and have a greater sense of wellbeing. Yoga will help to make you feel energized and calm at the same time. So kiss away your stress with yoga today.

Yoga helps increase self confidence & self esteem

Research conducted by the National Institute of Health in the United States confirmed that practicing yoga have many therapeutic benefits. The study showed that yoga led to increased body strength in the adult participants. Participants in the study showed an increase in self confidence and self esteem after doing yoga as part of the study. Additional research by Central Washington University has also shown a significant increase in the self-esteem of in young after doing yoga.

With an increasing percentage of the population becoming affected by low self confidence, self esteem and depression, it’s never been more important to look into the benefits of yoga in addressing these problems. Fans of yoga consistently report that practicing yoga make them feel healthier, stronger, and more flexible. In additional yoga also provide a boost to their self esteem and self confidence.

Regular yoga exercise makes your heart, bones and muscles stronger, reduce your risk for chronic disease and reduces feelings of anxiety and depression. Yoga will boost your energy levels, oxygen capacity, muscle tone and general fitness, leading to the benefit an increase in self-esteem. Just the success of doing certain yoga postures give you a great sense of achievement.

Yoga helps breath control

For most people, breathing is something that just happens and we don’t think too much how we breath. In fact, the way we breathe can greatly impact our quality of our physical and mental health and well being. Therefore, it is particularly important that we develop good breathing habit and yoga is certainly one of the best forms of exercise that will help us improve the quality of our breathing.

Often, we are feeling stress, unhappy or upset, our breathing become faster and shallow. In contrast, when we are relaxed, our breathing become slower and deeper. We take slow, deep breaths when we are at ease. How yoga help your breathing habit is yoga places great importance on good breathing techniques. Yoga encourages you to breathe low and deep during your exercise.

Yoga will help you to learn to develop better quality breathing techniques which will allow you to take in more oxygen with every breath and leaving you more relaxed and comfortable. An advice yoga practice is what is called the “moving meditation,” which require students to maintain deep, consistent breathing throughout their whole yoga session. Students need to keep on with this controlled deep and slow breathing throughout all physical postures. Being doing this, yoga helps to teach us to control our mind by relieving stress, making us more relaxed and give us better quality breathing.

Yoga helps with weight loss

Doing yoga will help is lose weight by encouraging a much healthier lifestyle. Beth A. Lewis, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Kinesiology in Minneapolis believes that: “regular yoga practice can influence weight loss, but not in the “traditional” sense of how we link physical activity to weight loss. Typically, weight loss occurs when a person’s calorie intake (i.e., food and drink consumed) is less than their caloric expenditure (i.e., energy is expended all day and more is expended during exercise).

“Most individuals need to change both their energy intake and energy expenditure to lose weight. Many yoga practices burn fewer calories than traditional exercise (e.g., jogging, brisk walking); however, yoga can increase one’s mindfulness and the way one relates to their body. So, individuals will become more aware of what they are eating and make better food choices. “Individuals may avoid foods that make them feel sluggish and lethargic (most processed foods). Instead, individuals will seek out foods that are healthier, which then may lead to weight loss. “Additionally, many individuals eat more when they are feeling stressed and yoga can help combat stress, which can influence one’s energy intake.”

For these reasons, students of yoga report that after practicing yoga regularly, they feel less hungry and make better choices when eating. By helping you to make better healthy lifestyle choices, yoga is ideal for cleansing your body, increase metabolism, stimulate waste elimination, and reduce food cravings. is yoga an aerobic form of exercise?

The definition of aerobic exercise is exercise which elevate your heart rate for a sustained period of twenty minutes or more. Aerobic exercise helps to make your heart stronger, burn excess fat and increase your metabolism.

Many people have asked: “Is yoga an aerobic form of exercise?” Yoga can in fact be a great aerobic form of exercise. However, this will depend on the types of yoga postures you are practicing. To ensure that you get a good aerobic workout when doing yoga, please sure you that you actively participate in all postures, especially the more challenging yoga postures. yoga helps to improve general fitness

Yoga is a unique form of exercise that can really improve you general fitness by helping to strengthen you both physically and mentally. The added benefit is yoga is low impact and does on come with many of the risk associated with other forms of exercise. For example, running can lead to knee and back injuries. Tennis can damage the wrist and elbow, while weight lifting can result in reduced flexibility. The beauty of yoga is you get the overall benefit of exercise and not subject yourself to many of the risks that arise from other exercise.