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Is your body too hard to practice yoga? When you mention the word “yoga”, do you think of a person twisting his leg into a pretzel? However, even if you can do that, you can’t be a good yogi.
Real yoga is to feel that you have made progress in practice, which is very important.
Of course, if you need to improve flexibility to better complete yoga asana practice, what should you do? First of all, let’s share the process of a yoga enthusiast’s flexibility improvement: there is a yoga enthusiast named Emily who has just started to practice yoga and is shocked at the speed of her flexibility improvement.
Because in the first class, she had to work hard to touch her knees when she bent forward.
A few months later, when she did the same action, her fingers could touch her toes, which was a huge progress! However, after a year of practice, she began to doubt that her flexibility had reached the limit.
So she forced herself to follow the teacher for more powerful flexibility stretching exercises, but it didn’t work.
And she found that forced practice of flexibility only made the body tighter, as if it was stuck.
So she decided to stop practicing.
I think that since the flexibility has reached the maximum, let it go! Surprisingly, later, when she no longer worried about flexibility, she found that her flexibility gradually improved.
Because the practice of flexibility is to relax your body and requires you to feel and practice with your heart, not just to make your body more flexible and flexible.
So she felt her body slowly open again.
From the experience of this enthusiast, you can see how to improve flexibility correctly! Next, I will introduce you 7 ways to improve your flexibility.
Stay away from stiffness and practice yoga well.
Maybe you can improve! First, don’t force flexibility to practice.
The traditional view is that improving flexibility exercises and stretching exercises should be strength exercises, even painful.
Although there is some truth, we should understand that one of the reasons why our body muscles are tight is that the brain thinks it needs to protect you from pain and injury.
So the more you stretch and stretch, the tighter your muscles will be, but this is not wrong, After all, we want our bodies to protect us from harm.
For some yoga lovers who have practiced for several years, there are still many potential flexibility to explore and release, so don’t worry, take your time, and tell your body and mind: stretching and practicing flexibility is beneficial and safe for us.
In addition, it is very important to keep your body relaxed and not tense your muscles during yoga practice.
If you stretch and stretch with too much force and in an uncomfortable way, your body and mind can’t understand that this deeper posture is safe, and it will only make your muscles more tense.
You need to keep calm and relax your body, and your body will remember this comfortable and relaxed feeling, so that you will find the same feeling of flexibility more easily in practice.
Second, focus on specific body parts.
Everyone’s body will have more or less natural tight areas.
It feels like those parts will never open no matter how you practice.
The common parts are hips, shoulders and thighs.
When some areas feel very tight in yoga practice, we can’t help changing to avoid the tense posture of these areas, and prefer to practice in the position that we can easily complete.
In fact, what is our fear and insecurity of lack of flexibility that actually makes the most tense part of our body stiff! Instead of avoiding these parts, focus on practicing them.
For example, if your thigh is already very flexible, but your hip is not, you should spend twice as much time practicing the posture that makes the hip muscles open.
If you like to do backward leaning posture when doing yoga, you should practice more forward leaning movements such as head-to-knee posture.
Third, balance the flexibility of the body.
Many people will find that one side of the body is more flexible than the other, so they are more willing to spend a lot of time practicing the side they feel comfortable and flexible.
Next time you do yoga, you can pay attention to which side of your body is not flexible and change your previous practice habits.
Practice the less flexible side of your body until your flexibility becomes balanced.
Fourth, learn to breathe correctly.
This is related to the idea of “don’t force” we said earlier.
Slowly and naturally take a deep breath, relax your body, and make your body feel comfortable and safe in the deepening stretching and posture.
At the same time, the combination of breathing in and breathing out with movements will help you to do a good yoga posture.
For example, when practicing yoga wheel asana, you will find that slowly and naturally inhaling can make it easier for you to do spine bending.
Fifth, try to practice Yin Yoga.
If you have been practicing strength yoga or tandem yoga, which requires maintaining posture for a short time, you can try Yin Yoga, a slower style of yoga.
Yin yoga emphasizes the relaxation of the whole body, clearing all distractions and combining with slow and natural breathing, maintaining the movement for a long time, exercising the bones and their connecting tissues, regulating the nervous system, and enhancing endurance in the state of complete relaxation of muscles to achieve the state of physical and mental integration.
Sixth, change your diet Many people find that eating “alkaline food” will improve their flexibility.
If you want to have a more flexible (healthier) body, you can increase the intake of vegetables, especially dark, leafy wild vegetables, fruits, scented tea, nuts and seeds, as well as turmeric and ginger and other spices.
Reduce caffeine, alcohol, sugar, and processed foods.
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