Amazing Advantages of Prenatal Yoga

From your physical body to your emotional state, prenatal yoga is just a key ingredient to a healthier, happy pregnancy. Prenatal yoga sounds like a healthy practice to adopt during pregnancy – and it is. But what specifically can prenatal yoga do to help you feel great and stay calm during the most important nine months of your life? Read on for seven important ways yoga may make a positive difference in your pregnancy.
Supports Your Changing Body

"Our anatomies are always changing," says Jane Austin, a pre- and postnatal yoga teacher situated in San Francisco and the founder of prenatal yoga school Mama Tree. But in pregnancy, your body experiences "an accelerated pace of change," she says, and needs help adjusting and compensating. "Prenatal yoga practice was created to support the changes that happen in a pregnant body," Austin says, by offering women healthy, safe methods to stretch their muscles and strengthen their bodies – their lower bodies in particular – to help relieve the procedure of supporting a growing belly.
Tones Important Muscle Groups

Prenatal yoga "tones the physical body, especially the pelvic floor, hip, and abdominal core muscles, in preparation for the birthing process," says Liz Owen, a Boston-based yoga teacher and the co-author of Yoga for a Healthy Lower Back: A Practical Guide to Developing Strength and Relieving Pain. An adequately toned muscle has the right balance between length and strength – it's neither too lax nor too tight. Building and maintaining muscle tone during pregnancy, with yoga poses like lunges and gentle backbends, can help minimize the aches and pains of the nine months, and are key in bringing the human body back again to a toned condition after delivery, Owen says.

Prepares for Labor and Delivery

A top priority in Austin's prenatal yoga classes is teaching women "they can trust that their bodies will open" as much as labor and birth. "When we're afraid, we tighten up," she says, and that tightening leads to what she calls a "fear-tension-pain cycle." This may sabotage a woman's efforts to stay present and calm in labor, particularly if she hopes to experience childbirth with minimal or no pain medication. Working to connect with yogic ways of deep, mindful breathing can help your body loosen and relax, and help women reach a "mammalian place," Austin says, where they are able to let their bodies do what they instinctively already know how to do: give birth.

Promotes Connection With Your Baby

Even the act of planning to a prenatal yoga class once (or more) weekly is a mild reminder to take some time out of a busy work and home life to care for and bond together with your growing baby. As your pregnancy progresses, your body's different responses to yoga poses would have been a reminder of other physical changes happening in your body. Certain poses, such as for instance Hero pose, in which you settle-back on your heels and then sit up directly to lengthen your spine, can be meaningful in the event that you breathe deeply while in it.

For more details please visit prenatal yoga teacher training.