Yoga, Health, and Wellness Articles + Recipes

When your yoga teacher moves into backbends, does it spark excitement or anxiety? Backbends have so many benefits for our body, our mind, and our heart but sometimes they can stoke fear, especially if you’ve had back injuries or issues. No surprise as the Anahata or Heart Chakra is the seat of courage, love, and fear. Let’s break down the benefits and the cautions to these enlivening poses because there’s a version for you! Physically, bending backwards strengthens your back, shoulders, and hips. Backbends improve your posture and increase mobility of your entire spine, while opening the chest, abdominals, and front of your pelvis and legs. Emotionally, these poses open your heart for more compassion and aid in letting go of fear. Mentally, backbends energize and awaken your brain, helping impart a sense of clarity and alertness.

Backbends are exceptionally and uniquely beneficial yoga postures. This family of poses have impactful physical, mental, and emotional benefits. Understanding and practicing these poses can allow one to access these benefits and experience real-life breakthroughs and improvements to their well-being. Here are the 6 best benefits of yoga backbends! 1. Get Happy. Backbends bring strong emotional benefits. Iyengar and other yoga teachers recommend backbends as to cure for depression. These shapes have the potential to relieve heavy sadness, and you can see it in their form. When one is sad, their posture and body language is often hunched forwards, with their head hanging down. Backbends are the opposite, and reverse this pattern, giving an uplifting improvement to one's posture and a boost to their mood.

Tune into your heart and find joy in settling into Camel pose. Camel is a deep heart-opening posture that strengthens your back while freeing your neck, chest, lungs, abdominals, and thighs. Explore how good it feels to open up through the heart by breathing into the space surrounding it. Because Camel pose directly links to the Anahata, or heart chakra, practicing it allows us to tap into our energy center to foster more genuine self-love, trust, compassion and forgiveness.

How do you energize? There isn’t a shortage of energizing yoga classes or sequences, but I often wonder what we are actually asking of our students and ourselves when we practice with this goal. Often an energizing yoga class is just fast and hard. When done a bit more mindfully, it can focus on poses or breath patterns that stimulate and excite the nervous system into a more focused, instead of frantic state. My essential energizing poses, which find their way into my energizing classes, tell the chest to expand and invite an empowered inhalation. They connect me to the ground but suggest a rise of vital energy or prana upwards.

Backbends are demanding and invigorating. They require a combination of flexibility and strength that can vary from person to person. They require patience and preparation. Often our ability to backbend in big and deep ways can be limited by muscular and soft tissue tightness across the front of the hips, around the numerous connections of the spine itself, and across the front and back of the shoulders. Here are three warm ups focused on stretch and release of these regions to help you deepen your backbends.

As a yoga therapist, one of the most common questions that people ask me is how to get great, strong abs. Even some of the elite, world-class athletes that I have trained have asked me how to get especially the lower abs strong and toned.

If you’ve ever experienced low back pain before, you know that it ranges in severity from mildly annoying to so severe you have to take off work because you can’t get out of bed.