Yoga for Digestion Series Episode #1: How Yoga Can Help Your Digestion

Greetings! My name is Kimberly Kubicki and I'm an Ayurvedic practitioner and yoga teacher for Joyful Belly and I'm here today to talk to you about yoga for digestion. Now yoga has been used for thousands of years to effectively treat digestive complaints and we'd like to present a step-by-step series of classes introducing how you can use yoga for digestion. Today we're going to begin with an introduction and then each of the concepts that I introduce today we'll build on in subsequent videos so make sure you stay tuned. Now yoga is great for digestion for a number of reasons. First off, it allows you to develop a sense of awareness for your GI tract so you get to know how your digestion is doing as well as how your digestive organs are doing. Yoga also brings movement to the lower abdomen so it improves abdominal circulation in doing that and that brings fresh blood into your GI tract and we want fresh blood in our digestive tract because it allows more juice to be there for which we need for enzyme production. More blood also translates into faster absorption of our nutrients. It flushes out toxins, waste, fat buildup and more blood means better immunity in our digestive tract. Altogether more blood means more oomph so more oomph for your digestion which means more oomph in your life in general. Yoga poses create movement that push food along in your digestive tract so it aids the process of what is called peristalsis and peristalsis is the rhythmic contractions that move food throughout your digestive tract and when we do yoga and increase the effectiveness of our peristalsis we ensure that no food is getting stuck or laying around in our digestive tract. It makes sure that everything is getting pumped and moved and nothing has anywhere to hide out. Yoga reduces stress and so when you relax your parasympathetic nervous system more blood goes to the digestive system. This is called rest and digest mode versus fight or flight mode. When we're stressed we're in fight or flight mode and our body is sending all of our blood to our extremities so that we can run or we can fight. It's not worried about getting a lot of nutrients out of our foods when we're in a life-or-death situation. So when we relax and de-stress we allow more blood to go to the core to go to the digestive organs and to ensure efficient and healthy digestion. Yoga relaxes tension and it's very easy a lot of people experience abdominal tension or just when they get stressed or nervous they tense those muscles up and this prevents peristalsis from happening. It might make you constipated, food just gets stuck in its place if we're holding those muscles tense clenching down. So when we stretch the muscles doing yoga we ease that tension and it allows for healthy flow in the digestive tract. Yoga also improves alignment so that you're naturally able to stand up straighter and when we're more aligned when our posture is more aligned blood flow to the digestive organs improves and peristalsis is then optimal. There are some situations where you wouldn't want to do yoga for digestion. Number one being right after you eat. The intestines are easily overstretched or distended so you don't want to do stretches or compressions when they're full. We don't want to put a lot of pressure there right after we eat. We want to wait until at least two hours after eating before we do a yoga practice. Ideally we're practicing yoga on an empty stomach. You want to avoid poses that increase cardiovascular activity so poses that get your heart rate up right after you eat also because we want to send all of our blood to our GI tract. Digestion requires a lot of energy and once we eat it's best to just allow our body to digest rather than taking on another activity. You also want to be careful if you have smelly gas or poop you don't want to do any aerobic exercises. Aerobic activity increases the absorption of toxins from the intestines so you want to wait until you have a good bowel movement in the morning before you do any kind of vigorous yoga practice. If you haven't had a good bowel movement and you want to practice go for a more restorative yoga or just some gentle stretching to prevent any toxins from getting into your bloodstream. Now before we get deeper with the concepts that I've introduced I'm going to leave you with three poses today that are good for digestion and then like I said you can stay tuned to get more information about some of these things that we've talked about in our upcoming videos that will be released very soon. So the first pose I want to teach you is called cobra pose and cobra pose is great for digestion because it addresses the lower abdomen which like I mentioned is a common area of food stagnation and tension in the body. This pose is then great for constipation, for gas, for bloating. It gently massages the lower abdomen by putting pressure on it so it helps to move along anything that's stagnant there and it stretches these muscles so that it encourages us to relax them, open them up, breathe into them and create space there throughout the whole front body. All back bends are opening up the front body which is great for the digestive tract because it allows us to create space in there which we need to have good digestion. We need a little space for things to move around. So to begin we'll come onto our belly, feet are flat on the floor pointing away from the head, the hands come underneath the shoulders, fingers spread wide apart and try to evenly distribute the weight and pressure throughout the hand. Then here we'll inhale pressing into the hands and lifting from the back of the heart to bring the chest up and then we'll exhale coming back down. Again inhaling lifting the back of the heart exhaling coming back down and I like to begin doing poses dynamically a few times so that the body gets warmed up and then when you hold the pose you're more comfortable in it and you just have better alignment and integrity in the pose so you get the most out of it. Now this time we'll inhale up and we'll hold and there is some strength coming from my arms and hands but a lot of the effort is coming from my back between the shoulder blades behind the heart. I'm stretching the whole front body up with each inhale everything expands and with each exhale the navel gently contracts toward the spine and you can modify this pose if this is all you can do to begin that's great you're still getting a stretch along the front body and gradually over time you might be able to work up to here but it's important to not strain yourself you need to listen to your body when you're doing yoga and make gradual wise progression in poses. So if you're totally new to yoga starting out fresh start out lower and gradually each time you practice maybe getting a little bit a little bit higher until you work your way up into a full expression of the pose and then we'll exhale coming back down. Next I'm going to show you a lying twist pose and twists are great for digestion because they wring out the digestive organs they encourage the flow of bile from the gallbladder and they are contraindicated if you have any disc issues or low back injury so you want to be really careful if you have anything like that going on think twice about doing a twist. Now to do this pose we'll come onto our back on the mat bring the knees into the chest and the elbows should be in line with the shoulders so you can have your arms fully extended outward if you have the space or you can bend at the elbow so you're kind of creating these like a goal post with your arms we'll inhale here and expand the spine and then exhale navel contracts knees drop over to the right inhaling coming back to center exhaling navel contracts knees drop left so again we're beginning with dynamic movement to get ourselves warmed up and then we'll hold in the pose coming back to center exhaling dropping the knees back over to the right and if you can really press the knees together that's going to help you build core strength inhaling back to center exhaling knees drop left inhaling center exhaling knees to the right and this time we'll hold so allow the knees to come down to the floor you can turn the head away from the knees to deepen the stretch a little bit and we'll breathe always remember to breathe in yoga your breath should always be smooth and even if it's not then you're you're exerting yourself too much so inhaling expanding the whole low belly the hip area sending breath and space into any place where it might feel stuck or tense you can also bring the breath up into the rib cage and the heart and eventually to lift the collarbones and then as you exhale the navel gently contracts toward the spine inhaling the belly expands exhaling navel contracts and then we'll inhale back to center and then you can exhale going over to the left side to even out again you can turn the head away from the knees to deepen the stretch and then the last pose I want to show you is called apanasana or wind relieving pose and this pose is great if you have any constipation or gas it gently compresses the whole lower abdomen and so it relieves anything that's stuck in there it's hence it's called wind relieving pose so you might pass some gas while you're doing it the colon is naturally kinked when we're standing or sitting this is to prevent us from going to the bathroom when it's not an opportune time to and this pose wind relieving pose helps to get that kink out so that things can flow smoothly so again we'll come onto our back hug the knees into the chest you can place the hands either on the knees on the shin bones or you can hug them in deep to the chest and while we're here we're going to inhale filling the low back and low belly really pressing the sacrum into the earth filling the side body so we're expanding in all directions in the lower abdomen and then continuing that full breath up into the rib cage up to the heart eventually reaching the collarbones and then the navel begins to contract toward the spine as we begin the exhale exhaling all the air fully out and then again breathing in deep so that's our introduction for today and like i said we're going to present a step-by-step series on how to use yoga for digestion so please stay tuned thank you so much for being here