Healing Injury Through Yoga
Use yoga to heal injury
As all physical therapists will tell you you must move gently to heal. The issue I see is that people get bored with their physical therapy movements. I’ve started building yoga classes with some traditional physical therapy movements inside to keep people from getting bored. Book me now for a custom class built for healing your injury and check out my YouTube to see those.
Lets talk about how each type of tissue heals:
Broken Bones
Go to a hospital and get a doctor to fix you! There isn’t any yoga moves to fix bones. Once you’ve gone to a physical therapist and gotten approval, you can start doing physical asana again. But even while you are waiting in the waiting room to be seen by the doctor there are some non asana yoga things you can do to start to heal and to calm your mind:
1. You can do a humming bee breath to calm your nervous system. Here is a demonstration of the humming bee breath.
2. After you get home you can do a yoga Nidra.
3. Focus on being grateful.
Here is a yoga Nidra on gratitude that I totally recommend.
Tendons/ligaments/ Joint injuries
Blood flow is critical for healing. Movement brings the fresh blood in carrying O2 and nutrients to the injured area and carries away the waste products. Any yoga practice that focuses on alignment, strengthening, dynamic and static stretches will be healing for these type of injuries, BUT only if done gently and without reinjury.
Use these steps to heal with physical yoga asana (poses) without reinjury:
Let your teacher know about your injury at the start of class and ask for modifications.
Listen carefully to your body
Move slowly
A small amount of heat and sensation in the area means that blood is moving into it. Back off if anything feels sharp.
I have a series of videos for various injuries on my YouTube.
Muscles
Blood flow is critical for healing. Movement brings the fresh blood in carrying O2 and nutrients to the injured area and carries away the waste products. The muscle will atrophy if it its not used. Use the same guidelines for tendons/ligaments above. For each type of muscle injury there is a type of movement that will help heal it. Check my YouTube channel to find movements for many common injuries. I was able to heal my shoulder by building yoga exercises built around physical therapy movements for rotator cuff injuries.
