Yoga is one of the best ways to relax physically and emotionally during the pregnancy. Do you know that yoga during pregnancy help you to ease childbirth and promote your baby’s health? Here, you can understand about benefits and best pregnancy yoga poses you can try.
Benefits of Pregnancy Yoga
Practicing pregnancy yoga offers several benefits such as reduced labor time, improved postpartum recovery and enhanced connection with your baby. Here is a more detailed look at the benefits of pregnancy yoga.
Improve Strength and Flexibility:
During pregnancy, your body weight increases and muscles become more strained. Pregnancy yoga helps you to improve the flexibility and activate pelvic and abdominal muscles to prepare your body for the childbirth. Practicing yoga during pregnancy regularly help these muscles to remain strong and flexible reducing labor time and pain during the childbirth.
Reduce Pregnancy Discomfort:
As a pregnant mother, you may experience aches and pains such as rib pain during pregnancy, lower back pain, swelling, and tension. Pregnancy yoga helps you to reduce discomfort due to those aches and pains through several specific yoga poses.
Reduce Stress and Anxiety:
During the pregnancy, your hormonal changes causes on both your physical and mental transformations. Doing yoga during pregnancy helps you to reduce cortisol level that causes stress ensuring healthy mental state for you.
Enhanced Blood Circulation:
Pregnancy yoga promotes meditation techniques and breathing exercises. Therefore, practicing yoga during pregnancy helps you to enhance blood flow to your heart. This approach helps essential nutrients and oxygen saturated in your blood to reach the baby effectively.
Improved Posture and Spinal Health:
As the pregnancy progresses, your baby adds an extra weight on muscles that support your spine and posture. There are several pregnancy yoga poses and techniques that focus on adjusting your posture and the flexibility of your spine.
Best Pregnancy Yoga Poses
During pregnancy you have to more caution about pregnancy yoga poses and techniques you are following. Here are the best pregnancy yoga poses that you can try.
Cat-Cow Pose:
This is an excellent early pregnancy yoga pose you can try to improve your posture and spinal health. Cat-cow pose is a gentle and effective way of promoting your flexibility and blood circulation to reveal the discomfort during pregnancy.
Downward-Facing Dog:
Downward-facing dog is a pose that you can practice during your 2nd trimester of pregnancy. This position imitate a dog bending forward to strengthen muscles of your legs, arms and shoulders. Practicing downward-facing dog helps you to calm your mind and reveal nausea and headache during pregnancy.
Butterfly Pose:
Butterfly pose is a yoga for pregnancy first trimester. This position helps to improve strength and blood circulation of pelvic floor muscles to reveal tailbone pain during pregnancy. Sitting straight like a butterfly helps you to stretch your legs while reducing anxiety and constipation.
Warrior II Pose:
During third trimester as pregnancy progress your baby is taking up more space. Therefore, you may experience breathing difficulties and pain in your legs due to addition weight on your legs. You can try warrior II pose to strengthen your legs, hips and arms while relieving neck and back pain.
Triangle Pose:
You can try triangle pose during second trimester of pregnancy. Staying in this position for 5 minutes helps you to stretch and strengthen thighs, knees, hips, shoulders and spine. Standing with your legs wide apart in this position helps you to improve the balance.
Practicing above mentioned poses of pregnancy yoga at home provides you many benefits. But adherence to personalized pregnancy yoga programs designed by certified yoga instructors is more beneficial during pregnancy. Alo yoga pregnancy is such an online fitness platform that designed by certified instructors and moms. Alo moves focus on your safety by designing a strong yoga practice program that include trimester-specific yoga poses.
Yoga Poses to Avoid During Pregnancy
Pregnancy yoga benefits you in many ways during pregnancy. But, certain poses should be avoided as they can be harmful to both you and your baby.
Avoid intense backbends, twists and forward bends as these bendscan put pressure on the abdomen and spine. During the first trimester of pregnancy you have to avoid these bends as these can cause increased back pain. Inversions can cause injuries during pregnancy because poses like headstands and shoulder stands can put pressure on your abdomen and uterus. During second and third trimester you have to avoid poses like lying on the back. These pregnancy yoga practices can restrict blood flow to the placenta and that is harmful to your baby. Hot yoga is another pregnancy yoga practice that you have to avoid as increased body temperature can be dehydrating your body and harmful to your baby.