Yay! My first guest post from Miracleof Yoga…so exciting. I hope you enjoy the post below and remember…if you have a weight loss story, tip, or anything relevant to healthy weight loss and being healthy I want you to guest post on this blog! Just contact me…and Enjoy!
MIRACLE OF YOGA:
Christian Leeby has years of experience seeing students feel better both physically and emotionally from practicing yoga correctly. Visit him at www.miracleofyoga.com.
Every mom knows. Being fit before, during, and after having a baby is just as much about fitness of the mind as it is about the body. That’s why yoga is the ultimate fitness for new moms. Not only does it help the body, it also helps the mind.
Proper yoga practice strengthens weak muscles and stretches tight ones, which is great for taking care of aches and pains. As the muscles start to balance out, they pull more evenly on the skeleton, and joint problems also improve. That’s common sense when you think about it. Good stretching helps the body feel better.
What many people don’t know is that yoga also helps the body function better. As the varied movements from different yoga poses tone and balance your muscles, they’re also effecting all of the internal organs. Extension, rotation, compression, even going upside down are, put together, like a comprehensive massage for the organs.
The chest provides a great example. Most of us walk around with our shoulders rolling forward and our chests falling back, into the body. This “collapsed chest” position isn’t really our fault, it has a lot more to do with what we’ve been given, namely a body on two legs in the field of gravity. It’s just human posture. However it’s well known in yoga that when the chest falls in too much depression can follow.
If you think it through it makes a lot of sense. When you practice it you know without a doubt. When the chest is collapsed the heart and lungs have less room. When the chest is spacious they have more room. So when you understand how to properly open the chest, you get a physiological benefit because both the breathing and the blood flow improve.
When the breathing improves you get more oxygen in your blood, and when the blood flow improves you get that healthy oxygenated blood into more of the tissues of the body. That’s good for everything, but one thing that’s specifically important for new mom’s is, that’s very good for the endocrine system, which controls the hormones.
The hormones travel through the blood so as you circulate that healthy blood throughout all of the nooks and crannies in the body, the system becomes efficient and balanced, and . . . you feel better. Practicing yoga is one of the best things moms can do to get their bodies back in shape, and help calm the emotions.
Here’s a simple way to actually get some of the benefits from yoga poses without doing yoga.
No matter what position you’re in right now, think about the place where the front of your shoulder meets the chest. There’s a crease there. It’s the sides of the chest, and the inner edges of the shoulders. Very subtly roll your shoulders out, away from the breastbone, so those creases start to come out. Do it slowly. We’re used to jerking the body around and rigidly “sitting up straight” when we think about this kind of thing, but that never helps.
Now here’s the trick. Your shoulders shouldn’t just go back, towards the wall behind you. They should get wider, apart. This is the part that takes concentration. Imagine I’m standing behind you holding your shoulders, and I’m pulling them apart, increasing the space between them as you roll the shoulders away from the chest.
Then, very subtly, lift the top of the chest up, towards the chin, and you’ve created space for the heart and lungs. You can do this movement anywhere, anytime and it really will help some. If you’re inspired, learn a couple of basic yoga postures and you’ll see that you can gradually open your chest more, and you’ll know firsthand that as yoga tones and fixes the body, it also helps balance the emotions.