Did you dream of being an acrobat or of being able to fly as a child? Discover the health benefits of suspension yoga while invigorating your inner child.
As children we spent countless hours imagining ourselves in fantastical situations: balancing on a tightrope over immense canyons, gliding through the air on aerial sheets, flying over treetops. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, the health benefits to this imaginative play promoted balance, stretching, and focus. What if there were a way to gain these health benefits as an adult while feeling that exhilaration experienced as a child, would you try it? If you eagerly answered Yes!, then you’ll want to try suspension yoga.
Suspension yoga combines aerial and grounded asana. Using an adjustable sling of fabric for support and added handles for stability, suspension yoga allows you to perform complex poses and inversions more easily. Suspension yoga is perfect for all ages, skill levels, and abilities; however, the health benefits alone should be enough to convince you to try it.
The Flying Yogi, Canada’s original Suspension Yoga™
studio and Teacher Training Academy, describes seven benefits of suspended inversion, including relieving back pain, increasing spinal mobility, boosting brain power, improving digestion and elimination, promoting lymphatic drainage, relieving depression, promoting relaxation and sounder sleep, and improved posture. Read on to learn how!
1. Relieves back pain and increases spinal mobility by allowing gravity to naturally and gently align, adjust, and give traction to the spine.
Suspended Inversions relieve back pain with better posture and greater spinal mobility. The gravity gently aligns, adjusts, and gives traction to the spine.
Prime back care results are experienced when the supportive muscles of the spinal column are synergistically lengthened and strengthened from performing inversion and therapeutic movement.
Suspended Inversion offers the easiest way to ease strains caused by compression and to lift the weight off the superimposed segments of the body. The muscles, tendons, and ligaments of the back and torso are all stretched, creating a great feeling of release. Subluxations of the vertebrae tend to correct, helping to diminish back pain. Studies have proven it to be helpful in correcting or greatly improving the condition of herniated nucleus pulposis, herniated discs, spondylolisthesis, lumbar osteoarthritis, sciatica, paralytic scoliosis and inclinatory skeletal defects (rib angle changes, thin discs, and compression wedging of the vertebrae). Only when the spinal column is in good health, can the rest of the body function properly. It is normal to see a dramatic change in overall strength, immunity, and emotional wellbeing by toning and taking care of your spinal column.
2. Suspended Inversions boost brain power.
Blood flow to the brain is increased, nourishing the brain cells with more oxygen and nutrients required for optimal brain function. Inverted poses commonly increase concentration, memory, awareness, and stimulate thought.
“We know that the brain is the center of nerve control and that all movements originate in the brain. When this brain mass lacks a sufficient supply of blood the natural results will be slow body reactions and sluggish mental and physical reflexes – a possible for lack of mental alertness and response…When these symptoms appear, it is evident that postures which alter gravity’s effect are vitally needed” (Dr Robert M Martin, The Gravity Guiding System; Turning the Aging Process Upside Down).
Hanging upside-down increases blood flow to the brain, which in-turn increases the bioavailability of oxygen and glucose, the two most important metabolic substrates for the brain. Bathing the brain cells in this vital solution will increase the creation of neurotransmitters (such as norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin), which are imperative for healthy brain function and tend to decrease with age. Norephinephrine is needed for attention and arousal. Dopamine is needed to accurately assess the passage of time and control movement. Seratonin regulates a healthy emotional state.
Simultaneously, inversions alter the flow of cerebral spinal fluid and relieve compression of the bottom portion of the brain, which could also greatly help to improve overall brain function. Dr. Robert M Martin wrote that the brain operates 14% more accurately when the brain is operating on an inverted, inclined plane.
3. Suspended Inversions improve digestion and elimination.
The yogic approach to overcoming constipation is to perform inversions. When in the upright position, stool moving from the ileocecal valve through the ascending colon is moving against the force of gravity and may prove to be difficult. When inverted, it is moving with gravity. The pressing of the stool against the intestinal walls also encourages movement. When inverted, the pressure on the walls stimulates a stronger peristalsis.
Variations (such as twists during inversion) are also useful to increase elimination. Relief from constipation can help with general fatigue, tension and anxiety, skin disorders (such as acne), and bad breath. For constipation relief, try gently massaging your abdomen while in a relaxed, inverted position on the YogiGym Suspension System.
4. Suspended Inversions promote lymphatic drainage and blood purification.
This healthy detoxification is partly why a great feeling of rejuvenation is experienced when using the YogiGym Suspension System. Immunity is boosted with increased lymphatic cleansing and overall body function happens more efficiently and effectively.
The lymphatic system clears toxins from the tissues and plays a vital role in the immune system. Inversions are recognized by yoga practitioners as important positions to keep lymph in circulation, thus reducing edemous (swelling) conditions of the legs, relieving pressure in varicose veins and hemorrhoids.
In the course of a day spent upright (standing or sitting), the gravitational pull toward the feet is sufficient to promote leakage of lymph, mainly in the lower limbs, and the legs tend to swell. Limbs positioned below the heart that are physically inactive are more prone to this accumulation of lymphatic fluid.
To prevent swelling of the tissue, it is necessary to pump lymph back to the heart, where it will again join the blood supply in the vascular system. Inversions and exercise circulate lymphatic fluid, helping to drain toxins from the extremities and move them towards the lymph nodes. Lymph nodes filter the lymphatic fluid that is moving towards the heart.
The lymphatic nodul system is imperative to immunity as it contains macrophage cells, which intercept and kill foreign bacteria, and lyphocytes, which manufacture antibodies in order to control foreign microorganisms. As inversions promote more rapid circulation of the lymph through the nodes, the rate of blood purification and detoxification increases, helping to revitalize and maintain youth and beauty.
5. Suspended inversions elevate the mood and relieve depression.
With increased circulation and oxygen to the brain, the release of neurotransmitters, the balancing of hormones, endorphin-releasing movement, and therapeutic postural correction, it is normal to feel immediately uplifted after inversion after aerial classes. The effects are a powerful way to counteract depression, premenstrual symptoms, mood swings, and SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder).
6. Suspended Inversions enhance relaxation and promote sounder sleep.
Muscle tension is reported to decrease by 35% while inverting. Anxiety, tension, and insomnia are all treatable with natural inversion therapy.
7. Anti-aging and longevity!
Suspended Inversions can lead to a more beautiful appearance. Good posture leads to statuesque poise, grace, balance and symmetry. Circulation affects the “glow” and tone of the skin. With more blood flow to the head, the facial capillaries and hair follicles of the scalp receive more oxygen and nutrients, nature’s best beauty treatment. With boosted lymphatic drainage and detoxification, visual signs of toxicity (including acne, cellulite, fluid retention, and varicose veins) tend to reduce. The inverted position during aerial classes also helps prolapsed, protruding organs return to their normal shape and position.
If you knew all this as a child, do you think you would have ever stopped playing acrobat or imagining you could fly?! Why not try it out to feel the difference yourself. The Peaceful Warrior Wellness Centre offers suspension yoga classes for a variety of age and skill levels. Click here to see our class schedules and sign up today!
I am thrilled you are choosing to make Yoga a part of your happy, healthy, and mindful life. Really. Thrilled! Because finding Yoga has brought me so many positive changes as I grow and muddle my way through this life. Yoga has helped me to manage physical ailments, like back pain and headaches, and it helps me maintain a sense of peace and balance by bringing me better sleep and reducing my stress responses. My hope is that I can share with you what I know, so that you can find your way to becoming your best you. Whatever that is for you in this time and space.
Some of you may have practiced Yoga Asana (poses) in the past, some of you may not have. I am here to tell you that Yoga is more than exercise. And whether you practiced Asana this morning, twenty years ago, or never, you have probably been practicing Yoga all your life. Yoga is about living a good life, a clean life, a life of respect for yourself and everything around you. Yoga is not a workout, Yoga is a lifestyle. Sounds cliché, I know. At times we stray from that lifestyle, sometimes we make poor choices in thoughts, words, or deeds, but Yoga means we can always come back and get in touch with what is a righteous path, honour our missteps, and move forward.
Yoga Asana is the perfect place to do that. Taking time to step onto your mat in your favourite room in your home, or into your favourite group class with your favourite teacher, is the simplest way to withdraw from the business of life and really check in. Ask yourself the tough questions. “What do I REALLY need right now?” “How do I REALLY feel about what is going on outside of me at work (or school, or in my kitchen…)?” “How do I REALLY feel about my mental chatter and the messages I am sending myself daily?” And, most importantly, “How can I take steps to honour myself more? Grow my healthy relationships? Foster positive thinking?”
On the other hand, sometimes all we need is a place to leave the hard questions behind and return to the basics of listening to the breath and moving through a practice, freeing the mind and body, rearranging our atoms so that we can return to the fullness of our lives with a new perspective and a fresh approach. A Yoga Asana practice can be a respite, offering a chance to reenergize and refocus our energy.
The practice of Yoga Asana meets you where you are on any given day, at any given moment. That is one of the best things about it. It truly is all your own. You decide where you want to let it take you. Some days we need a challenge, or way to work out stuck energy in the form of frustration, anger, or sadness. Other days we need to be gentle and more compassionate with ourselves. Yoga Asana gives you the opportunity to honour all of those facets of the self, without judgment or expectation.
I am not here to work you out. I am not here to push you. I am not here to force you to force your body into some form of contortion because I think it is good for you. I am here to help you find a deeper way to connect to yourself, so that you can find more benefits from your commitment to honouring yourself. Will it be challenging? At times. Will it be unfamiliar and a bit confusing? Possibly. Will you find strength, flexibility, and balance, not only in your body but in your mind as well? You better believe it!
And that is why I am here. And why I am thrilled, really, thrilled that you are here too.
An honest conversation with Patricia from Peaceful Warrior Wellness Studio encouraged me to give yoga a chance.
I love the idea of yoga--suspension yoga and hatha yoga are so appealing--and the health benefits alone are enough to convince any couch potato that it’s worth venturing away from Netflix for a little bit.
