Get Back In Shape With Yoga

With a new baby in your life, hitting the gym may seem like an exercise in futility. Sleep deprivation and trying to find a sitter often stand in the way.

After your doctor clears you to exercise, moderate or low-impact programs such as yoga can strengthen core muscles, tone tummies and and help new moms regain strength.

Yoga can also help relieve neck or back pain, eases stress and more.  Even if you’ve had a  C-section or complicated delivery, you can feel good about yoga.

And since it’s not a competition, you can modify most yoga poses to accommodate your own comfort or skill level.

There are special yoga “recovery” poses that can help new moms get back into shape in short order.

Yoga class can also fuction as a support network for new moms, an opportunity to interact with women who share a common experience of a new birth, and getting themselves back in shape in a confortable, low-stress environment.

Getting enought rest, drinking lots of water and eating a healthy diet will also go a long way to helping you regain your pre-pregnancy body as soon as possible.

Yoga For A Better Pregnancy

Staying fit and healthy during your pregnancy is one of the most important things that you can do for yourself and your baby.

Yoga is a great way to do this and it can help not only your body but your mind and spirit as well.
Some of the top benefits of doing yoga during pregnancy are:

A Holistic Approach

Your body is an important part of staying fit and healthy but so is your mind and spirit. Keeping your body fit and healthy without having a fit and healthy mind and spirit will not give you the maximum overall health benefit that you really want in your life.

Having all three of these functioning well while you are pregnant is even more important. Many yoga practices teach you how to keep fit and healthy in mind, body and spirit.

This holistic approach to health is one of the top benefits of doing yoga during pregnancy.

Proper Breathing and Relaxation

Knowing how to breathe properly during childbirth is important for helping you during this process. The sooner you start yoga during pregnancy, the better because that way it will be a normal and natural way of breathing for you.

Relaxation techniques can also help you during childbirth.  Being able to focus and relax during childbirth can benefit both you and your baby. Again, starting yoga early during pregnancy can help relaxation techniques come more easily to you during childbirth.

Flexible Body and Mind

Doing yoga during pregnancy is a great way to make your body more flexible. And having a flexible body can help during childbirth and after. Having a flexible mind is just as important as having a flexible body, especially as you embark on the journey of motherhood.

Staying flexible with your schedule and your demands on yourself during those first few months is important for you and your baby and everyone else around you too!

Doing yoga during pregnancy can help you in many ways, especially because of the integrated approach to health that yoga offers.

Yoga & Physical Health

Yoga does not see a distinction between the body and the mind; and this is an understanding that western psychology has also concluded for many years now (the link between mental health and physical health, and vice versa). 

If you’ve come to this book looking to understand yoga as a means to help your body heal or improve, then please don’t worry; you’ve come to the right place! 

Yoga is indeed a process that involves releasing blocked tension and energy in the body, and helping make the muscles, tendons, joints, ligaments, and all other components work to their utmost potential. 

Yoga believes that human beings are optimally designed, by nature, to be flexible and agile; and stiffness and lack of mobility only arrive when the body is unhealthy or out of alignment. 

Therefore, countless people have found themselves in a yoga class, or on a yoga mat at home in front of a Yoga video or DVD, in the hopes of improving their physical health; and perhaps you may be one of them.  If that’s the case, then keep reading! 

There are proven physical benefits of yoga, which include:

• Increased flexibility and range of motion
• Reduced pain in joints and muscles
• Stronger immune system
• Increased  lung capacity and therefore higher quality respiration
• Increased metabolism (which can lead to weight loss!)
• Higher quality of sleep (especially due to improved breathing and a more oxygenated body)

Given that certain yoga practices require postures to be mastered, yoga has always helped promote the body’s flexibility; it also helps in lubricating the joints, ligaments  and tendons. 

So please do keep in mind that, while yoga is often discussed in terms of its mental approach, there are clear and proven physical benefits that are a part of this approach. 

Therefore, if a healthy pregnancy or returning to your pre-baby body is your goal, or the ability to shovel the snow in winter without having your back ache for days, then yoga is as viable an option to you!

The Many Benefits Of Yoga

Yoga through meditation works remarkably to achieve harmony and helps the mind work in synchronization with the body.

How often do we find that we are unable to perform our activities properly and in a satisfying manner because of the confusions and conflicts in our mind weigh down heavily upon us?

Stress is the number one suspect affecting all parts of our physical, endocrinal and emotional system. And with the help of yoga this things can be corrected.

At the physical level, yoga and its cleansing practices have proven to be extremely effective for various disorders.

Listed below are just some of the benefits of yoga ………..

Benefit #1: Yoga is known to increase flexibility; yoga has postures that trigger the different joints of the body. Including those joints that are not acted upon with regular exercises routines.

Benefit # 2: Yoga also increases the lubrication of joints, ligament and tendons. The well-researched yoga positions exercise the different tendons and ligaments of the body.

Benefit # 3: Yoga also massages all organs of the body. Yoga is perhaps the only exercise that can work on through your internal organs in a thorough manner, including those that hardly get externally stimulated during our entire lifetime.

Benefit #4: Yoga acts in a wholesome manner on the various body parts. This stimulation and massage of the organs in turn benefits us by keeping away disease and providing a forewarning at the first possible instance of a likely onset of disease or disorder.

One of the far-reaching benefits of yoga is the uncanny sense of awareness that it develops in the practitioner of an impending health disorder or infection. This in turn enables the person to take pre-emptive corrective action

Benefit #5: Yoga offers a complete detoxification of the body. It gently stretches the muscles and joints as well as massaging the various organs, yoga ensures the optimum blood supply to various parts of the body.

This helps in the flushing out of toxins from every nook and cranny of your body as well as providing nourishment up to the last point. This leads to benefits such as delayed ageing, energy and a remarkable zest for life.

Benefit #6: Yoga is also an excellent way to tone your muscles. Muscles which have been flaccid and weak are stimulated repeatedly to shed excess fats and become more toned.

These enormous physical benefits are just a “side effect” of this powerful practice. What yoga does is harmonize the mind with the body and these results in real quantum benefits.

It is now an open secret that the will of the mind has enabled people to achieve extraordinary physical feats, which proves beyond doubt the mind and body connection.

In fact yoga = meditation, because both work together in achieving the common goal of unity of mind, body and spirit which can lead to an experience of eternal bliss that you can only feel through yoga.

The meditative practices through yoga help in achieving an emotional balance and a stronger, healthier body. This in turn creates a remarkable calmness and a positive outlook, which also has
tremendous benefits.

Motherhood & Yoga

I am not a Yoga teacher. I’ve only attended about 3 Yoga classes although my gym offers Yoga classes.

So, why am I writing about Yoga when I know nothing about it? I am curious – that’s my nature. And through the years, this curiosity has helped me develop a career as a freelance graphic designer and writer.

And it is through a very weird type of Yoga (my own type, or whatever I thought was Yoga at that point in time) that helped me swim ashore when I was teetering between drowning in the sea of depression after giving birth to my sons.

Both times, I was hit badly and constantly turned to the bottle for a solution. The bottle never will be a solution and yet, I hoped it would be.

Yoga and the soon-to-be-mother

There’s all this hype about Yoga that I didn’t fully understand before – what’s all this clamor about Yoga for pregnancy?? What’s the big deal? You have a big belly, retch half the time, have a sudden liking for pickle and have to wear your husband’s clothing….you need Yoga to help you deal with all that?

But of course, I only began the understand the benefits of Yoga as a mother when I started going for the classes, read about them in books, magazines and websites. This amazing method can help mothers regain their physical strength and sends them into a journey of self-discovery and improvement.

Instead of helping you deal with others, in Yoga, everything starts from within. Therefore, to solve a problem, you have to go inside.

And inside a mother, it’s always a battle zone…and it’s tumultuous half the time. Pizza or no pizza? Sex or no sex tonight? What kind of mother will I be? Will I sprain my own child’s fingers when I try to put his/her clothes on?

With the kind of bizarre thinking (and hormones) going on inside our mind and our body, mothers often have a  difficulty finding peace. Your doctor will tell you time and time again that although nutrition is important, finding peace, quiet and calm in yourself and in your life is just important for an expectant mother.

Yoga for the regular mother
Considering the fact that Yoga can help bring calm into calamity, it’s obviously a good choice for you to try out Yoga if you’re thinking of starting an exercise program. Better yet, join a gym…which is what I did.

I used to scoff at people who join gyms and judging from the loud dance music, I remember thinking to myself… “Yikes…gym is just a sorry excuse for a disco.  Instead of serving peanuts, they serve fruit mixes. Instead of alcohol, they serve bottled water. But everyone’s trying to get into a social thing in the gym. It’s a social club!”

And as a mother, I don’t have the time to join a social club. But I was wrong.

As soon as I gave the 10-day free classes trial, I was hooked. No makeup, no dressup (oh, the younger gym-goers still dress up to the nines and apply mascara for gym) and no pretense. I go to the gym and attend the Yoga class to sweat – to end up looking ugly but feeling damn good!

Mothers can open up their minds and free up their hearts after Yoga
Yoga has this tranquilizing effect on people that can hardly be explained with words. It has to be felt. It’s like you’re striking those poses, stretching those muscles and bending over backwards…and all this while, your mind is opening up and all impure thoughts are just flying out of it.

Yoga can be like ‘taking out the trash’. And this can be good for the whole family, especially the kids, as well. After a session of uninterrupted Yoga, you’ll feel renewed. Even a grumpy, sleeping, tired and beaten-out mother will have more energy to spend time with the kids.

Instead of feeling disgruntled and trapped, a mother can use Yoga to actually find an opening, a release that helps relax, not only the body, but the mind as well.

I don’t know about you…but I am going for more classes because I have seen the benefits. Yoga can do a whole lot for the ordinary non-married kidless people….imagine what it can do for a mother.

Yoga For Kids

Children are exposed to a lot of stress factors nowadays.

There is homework that they do daily…
the competition with other children…
TV and computer games…
and even over-scheduling.

And just like adults these kids need something relaxing to turn into and that could be: Yoga.

Yoga for kids helps then develop better body awareness, it also delivers to them a total self control, flexibility and coordination.

All of these they could carry not just on their class but this exercises can help them with their daily routines.

Yoga for kids has shown to help children who are hyper active to tone down and to brighten up those attention deficit ones. Children today crave movement and sensory motor stimuli that can help then balance out their inner souls flow.

Yoga for kids helps them channel out this impulses in a positive way.

The main Yoga for kids poses that seem to work perfectly with kids are the warrior pose and the tree pose. These two yoga for kids poses helps instill in them calm, confidence and balance.

The trick to get them to do Yoga for kids is to go beyond just doing the proper poses, you should have to get them think about what the real posture means.

Let them think that they are really what the poses are symbolizing, let them be the postures – strong and confident like a warrior.

Yoga for kids with partners is also a good way to build up trust with you children. It develops their team skills and fosters a closer bonding.

Some kids when it comes to relaxation have a big trouble closing their eyes and having them focus on their exercises. One thing that encourages a child to relax is visualization. Let them think of something that they really like and let them imagine being like these things.

You may also have them focus out on belly breathing first and have them listen to soothing and relaxing music.

Then ask them to imagine their favorite spot in the house or let them think that they are in outer space floating, or let them visualize that they are at the beach, playing their favorite sport or doing the best activity that they like.

Sometimes for boys letting them think of a favorite girlfriend helps them relax, but this is sometimes hard to do because they become shy and intolerable when this kind of issues are discussed. Just stick to the visualization thing if this technique is quite complicated for you.

Every day at the end of each relaxation exercises, encourage the children to share their own experiences. Ask them to tell to the group what it was like to be in their visualized surroundings. Ask them also to share what place have they imagined they where in.

Another approach is to create a guided imagination by telling them a story with a calming theme of some sort.

As you know children have the most active imagination, they imagine all sorts of things. And at this point of imagination it makes them feel calm. So when doing yoga for kids let them think that they are walking on a green pasture.

You can even let them think that they are butterflies in a beautiful garden. The main idea in here is to instill a sense of peace and feeling of oneness with nature.

Yoga for kids should be taught more often and in different places. It is important to teach children the meaning of union of mind, body and spirit.

There is such a wealth of knowledge we can offer our children with the practice of Yoga.