Baby Yoga Benefits
Benefits of Baby Yoga for Baby
- Strengthens & aids your baby's development
- Stimulates the nervous system
- Improved sleep patterns - Improves your baby's sleeping. Helps settle baby. Gives both mental and physical stimulation, helping tire baby out, allowing them to sleep well
- Helps improve digestion, ease constipation and improves wind and helps ease colic
- Enhanced interaction
- A balance of activity and relaxation
- Helps strengthen the spine
- Promotes muscle strength and joint flexibility
- Deep relaxation for you both
- Pleasure and fun
- Promotes cross-brain function and helps improve concentration
- The use of touch helps to create a happy, secure and trusting relationship between parents and baby and can help in bonding
Benefits of Baby Yoga for Mum
- Improves your strength and flexibility to help with lifting and carrying your growing child. Helps to regain strength and maintain posture giving confidence in handling your baby.
- Tones the abdominal muscles and pelvic floor
- Improves balance
- Helps balance hormones
- Healing for mother, releases tension and is relaxing. Relaxation sections helps you to cope with the stresses of new parenthood
- Nurturing oneself whilst enjoying activities with your baby
- Enhanced positivity and interaction
- Increased bonding and communication between you and your baby
- Meet other mums, dads or carers and share experiences.
- Pleasure and fun
The power of touch... Touching not only improves digestion and circulation but all of the bodies systems including the nervous, endocrine and respiritory systems. Practicing yoga enhances the developmental process. Practicing yoga moves with your baby allows baby to release tension and discomfort thus helping relieve colic. Yoga with your baby is loving play and gives your baby a sence of well being. Practicing yoga with your baby regularly helps not only helps your baby sleep deeper at night but they will become more settled during the day. It also allows you to bond and connect with your baby which aids communication between the two of you.
Baby Yoga is wonderful for aiding and supporting your baby’s development including building your baby’s muscle strength and tone, aiding your baby’s digestive system and so relieving baby wind, encouraging neural development which will help with a baby’s brain development. Baby Yoga is based on the principles of adult yoga; breathing, stretching and relaxation. Baby Yoga classes help to get babies to stretch and move and to discover their abilities and bodies. Parents also practice gentle yoga stretches too which can help the body recover after birth. Yoga helps balance the body and mind and can help boost circulation and digestion, strengthen joints and muscles, and encourage removal of waste and toxins in the body.
Baby Yoga goes far beyond physical exercise by actively engaging a baby’s brain promoting cross brain function and stimulating the vestibular system which is very important. This helps improve concentration. Located in the inner ear, the vestibular system primes the entire nervous system to function effectively. When we make certain movements such as rolling, swinging or tumbling, the fluid in the inner ear passes over the nerve receptors, which send messages to the brain about the position of the body in space. These messages help babies learn to counter gravity and to have control over eye movements, which are vital for the co-ordination of all the sensory messages the brain receives.
The relaxation and the end of a class is also very important so that baby can learn that there are times to simply be still, relax and unwind. Your baby learns to relax by you communicating your intent. Learn breathing techniques to help calm and focus your mind and therefore calming your baby too. A good ten minutes relaxation is sometimes more beneficial that a full nights sleep!
"The experience of movement combined with touch is possibly the richest stimulation we can offer babies from birth" Francoise Barbira Freedman