Yoga for Beginners: Always Practice on an Empty Stomach!

 

Like any other physical program, you will enjoy your yoga practice and enhance your results if you practice on an empty stomach. This is one principal advantage of scheduling your yoga practice in the morning before you eat breakfast. If that's not feasible, please allow at least 3 hours after a solid meal and 2 hours after a snack before you launch a practice session. Yoga works your body from the inside out.  When you hold yoga poses, you work not only your muscles, but you also massage your inner organs - stomach, glands, thyroid, and the like. 

Consequently, it is only logical that if you have just eaten, you are going to be working at cross purposes by trying to enter the shoulder stand or other inverted poses or positions that target your abdominal muscles and the organs that lie beneath. You will interfere with your digestion. Although you might not get cramps as you would if you jogged 3 miles after eating a meal, your are not going to be operating at peak efficiency and you won't gain maximum results.  You may feel uncomfortable!  As yoga practitioner, Ina Marx, says, because yoga poses compress your organs, practicing yoga after eating can interfere with your digestive and excretory systems. "A sense of fullness interferes with your ability to concentrate." Use common sense. Allow several hours after eating before entering poses that work major internal organs.  You can do neck rolls and facial exercises - but, anything else - just don't do it, if at all possible.

Yoga Thought of the Day:  When starting yoga, "regard your body as unused territory that will need patient cultivation."  You are in Charge:  The IM Method Total Fitness for the Fit and Not so Fit, Ina Marx.

Comments

[Laura Rodriguez]

Thank you, Low T. I have created this blog myself through Typepad.com. I began writing it in January 2008.

Much success to you.

Laura

[Low T]

I love your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you create this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz reply as I'm looking to create my own blog and would like to know where u got this from. cheers