After undergoing surgery, an injury, or just realizing that you’re having difficulty moving around, seeing a physical therapist is typically recommended. This helps to avoid getting reinjured, enhances your strength, and assists in recovering your full range of motion. While physical therapy is certainly beneficial on its own, combining it with yoga can have many added advantages.
Pain Reduction
Those who attend physical therapy to overcome injuries and chronic pain will go through a series of stretching and strengthening for their afflicted area. Yoga is a great asset to combine with traditional physical therapy measures. It helps to address multiple areas of the body, not just your injury area.
By helping to relax the autonomic nervous system through yoga with multiple areas of the body, your muscles become looser. Your blood is better able to flow freely through these areas. This works to reduce inflammation and rid your body of nasty toxins that can cause pain. The more relaxed your body is, the more freely your circulatory system will function to pump blood and remove waste from your various muscles.
Increased Self-Awareness
Yoga is all about conscious movement and relaxation. You want to be able to feel how your body moves when doing certain tasks. When you’re able to slow down while doing yoga, you’re better able to identify areas of your body that are tight, painful, and so forth. With this increased self-awareness, you’ll be better able to address these areas, such as stretching out particular muscles and better-describing pain sources for your physical therapist.
Better Posture
There’s no surprise that poor posture is becoming a big problem in this day and age. Yoga focuses on doing active poses with correct posture. Yoga participants will be able to discover their individualized posture issues as they work through various yoga poses.
With self-awareness and the right instruction, you’ll be more aware of when your posture needs to be self-corrected. This will allow you to actively work towards regaining better posture and movement in your body.
More Relaxation
Patients who undergo an injury tend to deal with a lot of pain and psychological stress. Yoga is a great way to help mitigate some of that stress and pain. Combined with a good physical therapy program to strengthen your body, yoga can allow you to release extra tension and let more blood flow to reinvigorate your body for optimal healing conditions.
Better Mental Clarity
Many of us live busy lifestyles where it seems hard to find just a minute to slow our brains and bodies down. With so much chaos from day-to-day life combined with the psychological restraint of an injury and bodily pain, mental clarity can seem so far away. Much like a walk can help to clear your mind, yoga therapy works in a similar manner to give your mind time to relax. With relaxation, your mind can breathe and achieve a balance of clarity.
Enhanced Flexibility
When you think of flexibility, you may be picturing arching your back or doing a split. While not everyone is that flexible, it’s imperative to remember that flexibility is a necessity to live a happy and pain-free life. Apart from physical therapy exercises to stretch and regain your full range of motion, yoga can assist with creating more bodily flexibility.
Whether it’s your hands and legs or your back, decreased flexibility tends to bring along with it joint pain. Yoga therapy can work to ease your body back into a more flexible state with static stretching and active movement.
Improved Respiration
While physical therapy focuses on helping to move your body, yoga provides the added benefit of relearning how to breathe fully. With each yoga pose, you’ll also be following specific breathing instructions. The more you focus on your breathing, the more your body is going to become programmed to breathe fully on a regular basis.
Many people don’t realize that they restrict their breathing in various ways. One of the most commonly experienced is chest breathing. Individuals only use some of their muscles to partially breathe in throughout the day. This can lead to poor cardiovascular health. Yoga works to allow the body to breathe better more often. The better you breathe, the more oxygen your body and mind get. You’ll feel more refreshed, and your body will be more rejuvenated.
If you’re currently undergoing physical therapy, you should highly consider adding yoga as part of your recovery plan. Our Tulsa chiropractor can assist you in better developing a treatment program that will be highly effective for you.
