Aerial yoga is a unique and fun activity to try with your friends. However, it has deep health benefits that motivate aerial yogis to come back to classes. Check what benefits I’m talking about!
1. Full Body Workout
When performing aerial yoga, you are forced to use every muscle of your body. With most sports and physical disciplines, there is always the trouble of switching between upper and lower body workouts, but with aerial yoga, you train them both at the same time. You will strengthen and stretch the whole body with an aerial yoga hammock.
A study performed by the American Council on Exercise shows that aerial yoga rivals the effectiveness of aerobic exercise. During a 50-minute aerial yoga session, you have the potential to burn 320 calories. After six weeks of regular practice, your risk of cardiovascular disease will be significantly lower.
2. Core muscles enhancement
A huge benefit of taking your yoga practice off the ground is that you lose your point of stability. It causes you to engage your core more effectively without even realizing it.
Aerial Yoga exercises help strengthen the core muscles, including the back, stomach, and pelvis muscles to improve all-round physical strength. The look of a killer six-pack is pretty impressive, but having deep core strength is more important than popping the abdominals. A strong core not only cares for back health. It is based on holistic health. The core muscles that surround your spine, support and protect the vertebral column. Keeping these muscles strong and flexible, prevents back pains. By removing the stability of the ground, the core is required to work harder and in parts that may be ignored during standard floor ab drills. The aerial hammock allows the teacher to use a variety of poses that intensify core activation and development. This improves your general fitness level and boosts your skills with other sports too.
3. Easier access to inverted poses
Have you been working on your headstand or forearm stand in yoga? Forget kicking up against the wall and consider this: the hammock wraps around your body and supports you in certain difficult poses like inversions, giving you the experience of how a pose should feel. In other words, taking a few aerial classes might raise your game in your regular yoga classes as well.
Inversions can be difficult for many people to master but are more doable with the assistance of a hammock. One of the best ways to use the hammock is for inversions because it is fairly easy to go upside-down with the hammock, and it can be done with no pressure on the head, neck, or rest of the spine. For some students, this is preferable over the floor version.
4. Spine decompression
All day long, your vertebrae sit stacked, being pulled down into each other by gravity. This is why flipping yourself upside-down and allowing your spine to be free of that pressure can help you feel lengthened and relaxed. Hanging like a bat in the aerial hammock allows the vertebrae and the discs between them, causing fresh synovial fluid, oxygen, and other nutrients to flood and nourish them.
Although there’s very little research undertaken on providing the benefits of aerial yoga with back pain, if we look into physiotherapy anti-gravity stretches we can see that these stretches are used to improve conditions such as scoliosis and muscle spasms. Applying force to the spine separates the vertebrae, relieving pressure on discs and ligaments.
5. Flexibility improvement
The regular practice of aerial yoga improves your flexibility. Being suspended in the air releases tension in your body and allows you to perform new moves at a range you did not know you were capable of. Spinal and shoulder flexibility is increased the most, and you become able to move freely and with less effort.
6. Low-impact exercise
Aerial Yoga is an excellent option for those who want to move their body, but experience joint issues thanks to low-impact nature. The hammock supports body weight partly and allows you to create space and softness in the body without compressing the joints. There are even joint-relief-focused aerial yoga classes that specifically target joint pressure and pain.
7. Circulation enhancement and lymphatic movement
Everyone can appreciate the feeling of putting your feet up after a hard day at work. This is because the fluid in our bodies can become trapped and stagnant in our lower limbs from being upright for a long time. Thanks, gravity! While our blood is pushed around the body by continual pumping of our heart, our lymphatic fluid is not. Our lymphatic system is directly related to our immune system and requires movement to circulate. This can be in the form of massage or physical movement. By changing the way our body is positioned, for example raising our legs above our heads in a supported and suspended inversion in an aerial hammock, we’re able to move our lymphatic fluid around our body and help to deliver fresh blood to our organs and muscles.
8. Stress relief
Don’t underestimate the stress relief that stems from practicing aerial yoga classes. If you happen to be going through a rough time or experiencing anxiety attacks, aerial yoga will help put your mind at ease. It gives you an opportunity to meditate and focus on positive thoughts (while hanging upside-down!). Beyond the stress relief, the pros of being inverted include increased balance, more energy, and a better focus. When you’re inverted, blood flows to your brain and provides more oxygen that is needed for brain function.
When talking about yoga, the spiritual aspect should never be overlooked. Aerial yoga undeniably offers an uplifting spiritual experience and takes the mind away from everyday life problems, leading it to an extraordinary place. When your mind returns to the present moment and your body to its balanced position, something will be changed, and not only your ability to perform impressive yoga poses.
The meditative state promoted by yoga helps you to combat stress throughout the day, thus allowing you ti rebuild your emotional system and increase your creativity. Practicing aerial yoga regularly enhances your mood and simply allows you to enjoy life more. Exercising upside-down on aerial yoga class will help you fight depression, anxiety, and mood swings.
Researches show that mind-body activities can reduce stress, and aerial yoga is no exception. My all classes end with you lying in savasana, cocooned in a hammock as you gently swing from side to side. That’s pure blissing out!
9. Mood booster
When you first attempt this class, you might be overwhelmed with adrenaline due to upside-down positions you’ve never experienced before. Being upside-down increases adrenaline and produces hormones such as serotonin, dopamine, and good old endorphins, improving our all-round happiness.
10. Focus and proprioception improvement
When you try a new type of exercise, your mind learns something new. With aerial yoga, focus is improved because you are probably not used to the yoga exercises you will be performing. This way, you become more aware of your body posture and even gain a new perspective on other aspects of life.
Inversions increase blood flow to the brain providing it with more oxygen, which makes it work faster and more effectively, boosts mental focus, increases memory, improves mental focus, and increases clarity of thoughts. Sport fortifies your neural connections and boosts your memory power – aerial yoga will make you smarter and enable you to maintain your brain capacity unaltered for a longer time.
11. Empowerment
I think everyone should try the experience of hanging upside-down at least once in their lifetime. Children find the idea of inverse poses very fun, and adults should give it a try as well. It is worth stepping (er, swing) outside your comfort zone.
The feeling of conquering a challenge is empowering. Trying something new can be a challenge, and trying something out of the ordinary can be an even bigger challenge. The realm of aerial yoga provides challenges for every lever. From conquering the fear of lifting your feet off the ground for the first time to completing your first drop. Every challenge delivers a little rush of adrenaline, followed by the release of endorphins and the desire to high-five yourself.
