Starting Yoga – Advice for people with arthritis

Yoga can help to ease arthritis by gently increasing range of motion and movement through exercising all the joints. Yoga not only safe for the muscles and ligaments is also stimulates the production of feel-good hormones that can help to reduce pain. One of the great benefits of reducing stress and pain is better sleep. If you are based in Brisbane, you might start with Aqua Yoga classes (taught in a swimming pool) where weightlessness is beneficial for arthritic joints – sounds great but skip the forward bends!

If you have arthritis consider these guidelines before starting:

Delay your practice until later in the day – with some types of arthritis joints tend to be stiffer in the morning so give your muscles and joints time to loosen and wait until later in the day. Only you can tell when yoga will feel the best for you so listen to your body and practice yoga at the most comfortable time for you.

Go easy – give those big full-on movements a miss as they might aggravate the joints.

Keep Moving – a gentle flowing style of yoga class where postures are not held for longer periods of time is really best. Holding postures for those people with arthritis maybe painful. You may decide to gentle move in and out of a posture as an alternative. You need to be taught by a yoga teacher that understands your limitations.

Check with your doctor about flare-ups – when your joints are hurting you maybe able to do some yoga but only for a shorter length of time.

If you are interested in starting yoga please talk to your doctor before starting and when you get to class tell the teacher about your condition so that they can discuss modfication’s to the postures to help you stay comfortable. Remember you can always practice meditation and pranayama (breathing techniques) instead and gain the mind/ body benefits.

What Does It Mean to Have Tight Hips?

Although the hip joint is confined to a finite range of motion it is capable of being resilient, responsive, and stable.

Looking after your hips joints with the same gym routine or exercises over time can become ineffective and a bit like Chinese water torture for your joints and soft tissues. Your nervous system and muscles will quickly learn the routine and will not continue to develop and respond. If you have ever been stuck and can’t seem to make any more progress with strength, endurance, or weight loss, you could think about mixing up your routine or starting something new like yoga.

What’s causing tight hips? It’s actually the muscles and fascia attached to your joints that restrict your movement. How do these muscles become tight? Very simply your body adapts to what you do most frequently and the one body position we all do with great frequency is sit.  In a nutshell, our over-use of the sitting posture shortens the muscles, turns off the powerful glutes (buttock muscles) and basically throws our hips and pelvis out of balance. The result is tight hips and lower back pain.