yoga Archives - Advanced Chiropractic of South Carolina
When I first started yoga, I felt clumsy, inadequate, and certain that I would never master anything but the simplest of poses.
But as I continued with yoga, I began to discover that there is a significant mind-body connection that served me not only during yoga class, but in my daily life.
Where previously I would react, now I can take a moment to consider before I act. I have a fiery personality and usually my reactions to life would be hair-trigger and often inflammatory.
Yoga helped me to temper that heat and my responses to unexpected events in life. The beauty of yoga is that there is a pose for every mood I’m experiencing, for where my body is on any given day considering the abuses of my youth on my knees and my back, and even more importantly, my mental presence. Some days I am eager for the challenges of the warrior poses, the triangle, and the intensity of King Pigeon.
Other days, I want to just melt into the mat during the restful Child’s pose, my forehead meeting the mat, eyes closed, listening both to my mind and my body. On those days, I might even find downward dog to be too much for my elbows, wrists, shoulders, and I will modify into puppy dog.
The whole idea behind yoga is to not only look for a way to fitness of the body, but fitness of the mind. We are not always ready to carry the burdens of life as fully one day to the next. So it is with yoga. Some days, you are eager for the feeling almost of aggression as you move through your flow practice.
But other days, you will find that your body and/or your mind needs something different. An astute yoga instructor will notice this immediately, and may even have further suggestions for modifications for you that day. If you can remember that yoga is an individual practice, not a competition, you can find what you need every single day you meet yourself at your mat.
I have a few poses that I tend to favor, and on days when I can’t get to a yoga class I try to do an abbreviated practice of the poses I most need on any given day.
I won’t give them to you because your needs are likely different from mine. What I want to encourage you to do is to find the poses that bring you the greatest release, the best connection between mind and body. It might be a single pose that you hold for five to fifteen minutes in the yin tradition. Or it might be an abbreviated flow of your favorite poses.
Whatever your favorite pose, use it as often as possible to maintain both physical and mental health.
Yoga Exercise by Anna Langova
Written by Admin · Categorized: Exercise, Health, Uncategorized · Tagged: exercise, health, mental health, yoga
Can yoga actually benefit seniors?
Isn’t yoga all about an intensive physical practice where you writhe around on the floor and put your body into a series of contorted positions?
From the perspective of an outsider, perhaps yoga may look that way. However, the yoga instructors at the studio I attend often provide classes for seniors at senior centers as well as community centers. They do it because they have seen first-hand the great benefits of yoga on our elderly population.
Yoga can help seniors stay active, improve their flexibility and the suppleness of their muscles. It also helps them with their proprioception, their ability to know where their body is in terms of the space around them. Loss of proprioception is the leading cause of falls in seniors today. Perhaps a yoga class for grandma would be a superb idea.
It might even be better if you joined her!
Yoga can help promote healthy bones, improve flexibility, and provide a certain amount of stress relief which translates into a more positive attitude and better sleeping habits.
Yoga is safe for all ages. But especially seniors. It helps them to keep their minds and bodies in good health.
As a senior, you want to make sure the yoga instructor for your class knows you are a senior. They will then take the time to come and chat briefly with you to see if you have any issues they need to know about. Then, during the class, they will observe carefully, and the best ones know how to come over to you, gently reposition an arm, a knee, provide a prop or suggest a modification that makes that particular pose available to you.
No yoga instructor wants you to feel that you are out of your league. Most well-trained yoga instructors know that they will be working with a variety of limited abilities. When you find a good instructor, hang onto them! A good yoga instructor will make the difference between loving or hating yoga.
I once participated in a chair yoga class, designed to assist those recovering from cardiac events like heart attack or open heart surgery. Most of the participants were not able to get up and down from the floor. The yoga instructor then prepared a series of yoga movements to be done from a seated position in a chair. The benefits at the end of the class were remarkable. A couple of people left as soon as the class was over, but the rest stayed to ask more questions about how they could continue a regular yoga practice on their own.
Seniors come in all shapes, sizes, and physical abilities. Whether you are a senior, or you love a senior, look into an appropriate yoga class/practice that will help them achieve a greater quality of life.
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Written by Admin · Categorized: Exercise, Health, Uncategorized · Tagged: exercise, health, seniors, yoga
I was once “adopted” by an elderly woman, called Genevieve. I met her when a group from our church went to help her clean her screens and take care of switching out her storm windows. There was something about her that intrigued me and she felt the same way.
Soon enough we had regular lunch dates, trips to the museum, occasional nights I slept over when she wasn’t feeling well. I guess, in the way of our transient society, I became the granddaughter who lived nearby because her granddaughter lived thousands of miles away.
One day, Genevieve invited me to go to a yoga class with her. I looked at her 84-year-old stooped body and raised my eyebrows. Seriously, yoga? But as I’d gotten to know Genevieve, she didn’t back down from an idea once she got it in her head. “It’s good for us seniors, you know.” Then she peered at me intently, “And it wouldn’t hurt you youngsters either!”
I’d been told. I was 23 at the time and the only yoga I remembered were the triumphant headstands I’d managed to do during gym class in high school. I knew nothing about the health and therapeutic benefits of yoga then. And when I accompanied Genevieve to her senior yoga class, I wasn’t so sure about it either.
Instead of the thin mats most yoga practitioners used, the floor was padded with four inch thick gym mats. The instructor met my raised eyebrows with a murmured explanation, “Their bones and skin are so frail, it’s the only way to get them out of a chair.”
Our yoga instructor started the class by inviting us to assume a comfortable position on the mats. To my surprise, every single senior attending found a way to sit down on the padded floor. “If you can breathe, you can do yoga,” she continued. And the class began.
Young as I was, I had an arrogance about my physical abilities. I hadn’t lived over three-quarters of a century as most of the people in the class had. I found the poses to be very easy to achieve. But then the instructor began to talk as if just to me, “breathe into the pose and notice your body, notice your mind. You may be resisting something, and it is up to you to notice.”
Had I been resisting the message that yoga was for everyone. In my arrogance of youth, I figured that Genevieve and her friends were beyond the reaches of physical fitness. They proved me wrong.
According to recent studies, yoga surpassed conventional physical activity interventions. It proved to be far more beneficial than most other modalities. The next time I accompanied Genevieve to class, I was humbled by the seniors who were determined to life what remained of their lives as fully functional as possible. I loved Genevieve for embracing my ignorance and helping to educate me to the benefits of yoga for seniors.
Outdoor Seminar Group by Gerhard Lipold
Written by Admin · Categorized: Exercise, Uncategorized · Tagged: elderly, exercise, yoga
Yoga Nidra – The Science Behind It
Most people know yoga for the excellent physical exercise that it is, and for those who regularly practice yoga, they understand the mind-body connection.
Yoga Nidra is different.
Nidra is a term for “yogic sleep” and while you don’t exactly fall asleep, you do go into a combined alert awareness and deep relaxation state. Practitioners of nidra experience both alpha brain waves and eventually theta brain waves.
It is in this state that your brain is able to tap into your own intuition, creativity, and health.
Yoga Nidra is practiced in a prone position, sometimes with a bolster under the knees to alleviate any lower back stress you may experience as you can expect to be in this position anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour depending on the class you’re taking.
The first time I left my Yin/Nidra class I wondered if I had just paid $15 to take a nap at the yoga studio. Because that is almost what it felt like. And yet I felt lighter, more energetic, and much more inspired than I had felt in a very long time.
My instructor took us through a series of breathing exercises to get us to focus on our breathing in a meditative way. Then she took us through a couple of simple instructions before going into a visual guided imagery of my body. This helped me to stay focused on my body and kept me from wondering what my kids were doing, whether my client was going to be happy with my last draft, and what we were going to have for dinner.
That kind of mind-chatter is what keeps us in our usual beta brain wave state. Beta brain waves are where we live during the majority of our waking hours. Beta waves indicate a strongly engaged mind. When we’re awake and talking and interacting with others, we’re experiencing beta brain waves.
As we begin to relax into our yoga nidra, we move from beta brain waves to alpha. These represent non-arousal. These brainwaves are slower, higher in amplitude. We experience this after a job well done. After we have completed a difficult task, taking time to pause and reflect on that task often takes us into the alpha state. That person walking in the garden after their presentation is often in an alpha state. This state is linked to reduced stress hormone production, lower blood pressure and decreased heart rates.
If you only get into the alpha brain wave state during yoga nidra, you are working to counteract the daily effects of stress in your life. This is an excellent reason to practice nidra.
Yoga nidra will then progress to a state of deeper relaxation, to the theta brain wave state. In this state, your brain waves have an even greater amplitude, but a slower frequency. When we daydream, we are frequently in the theta state. Even experiencing driving hypnosis where you don’t remember how you drove from one place to the next is often done in the theta state.
In yoga nidra, the theta state is closest to sleeping without sleeping you can get. It produces deep relaxation and is the surest way to connect with the subconscious. In this state, it is possible to have the logical left brain connect to the intuitive right brain.
One of the purposes of yoga nidra is to balance the left and right brain activity. The very least you can expect to achieve from reaching the theta state in nidra is a sense of very deep relaxation.
By repeating the practice, you can connect to your inner self for healing, for transformation, for inspiration. It is in this state that you can often find your hidden inner potential.
For anyone who has never tried yoga nidra, give it a chance. Don’t concentrate on anyone else in the room. All yoga practice is individual even while done in a studio with other people in the class. You will get out of it what you put into it.
For me, I have found my creativity has increased many times over since I have begun a regular nidra practice.
Garden Buddha by Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc
Written by Admin · Categorized: Health, Uncategorized · Tagged: Chiropractic Tips, health, sleep, yoga, yoga nidra
Yoga Benefits Over 50
I was introduced to the benefits of yoga for older people when I was still very young. At 23 I was “adopted” by an older woman as her granddaughter, and I became a companion of sorts for her. She became my friend. She introduced me to the idea of yoga for seniors and as the weeks passed I began to see exactly why she wanted to take the class.
Elderly people, whether 50 or 80, tend to get stiff, especially if they don’t participate in any type of regular exercise. It could be due to illness, injury, or just plain bad habits. But the problem is that once you become stiff and unable to move, it’s very, very hard to recover from that.
Yoga to the rescue. Here are a few very specific health benefits to yoga that might appeal to you, especially if you’re not as young as you used to be, or you’re the “granddaughter” of someone who isn’t as young as they used to be. It’s always fun to have a companion to go to classes with.
1. No Strain. No Pain. This is a very different concept from the “no pain, no gain” attitude found in just about every fitness center I’ve ever entered. With yoga, you gently move your body into poses that give you the benefit of becoming more flexible, more supple without straining or causing pain that could lock you up for weeks at a time. In order to age in a healthy manner, exercise is mandatory. Exercise cuts the risk of chronic disease almost by half. This makes yoga an excellent low-impact option that makes it easily available to seniors. It’s not all-out running, or even heavy weight lifting. In yoga, you use your own body as your equipment.
2. Increasing suppleness and flexibility. Yoga can gently stretch muscles that haven’t been used in a long time. There are so many patients who have endured an injury and never completely recovered. My own mother broke her arm just below the shoulder socket. It took her nearly three months to recover from the break. She has almost never recovered her entire ability to lift her arm over her head. Yoga’s gentle influence on muscles, tendons, and ligaments changes this. Limited range of motion makes older people more prone to falling. Helping to improve both suppleness and flexibility improves their balance as well.
3. Bye-bye Osteoporosis. Yoga is an excellent exercise in terms of promoting good bone health. It is not only safe for those who suffer from osteoporosis, but it can actually slow down even reverse bone density loss. Weight bearing exercise is considered to be the best exercise for osteoporosis patients. Using the very weight of our own bodies is an excellent start. That is why heavy women do better in terms of osteoporosis because they carry their weight, which strengthens their bones. Yoga used our body weight in certain poses, all of which are open to modification as needed. This type of weight-bearing exercise is exactly what the doctor ordered.
In addition to these three benefits, regular yoga practice keeps the mental fog at bay. People over 50 who regularly practice yoga report a better overall feeling of satisfaction with life, lowered stress levels, and more energy and vitality than before. Those reasons alone should be enough for you to seek out a yoga practice designed for ages 50 and over.
Grandfather and Grandson by Petr Kratochvil
Written by Admin · Categorized: Exercise, Health Tips, Uncategorized · Tagged: elderly, health, healthy tips, yoga