TUNNEL VISION

Wrist problems are often caused by carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). To understand how to heal them, it helps to know a bit about the area’s anatomy. The carpal tunnel is a narrow passageway in the wrist formed by ligaments and the eight small carpal bones. These bones are arranged in two rows of four, and lie on either side of the crease between hand and forearm. CTS is caused when the median nerve to the hand gets compressed in this tunnel. It’s become near-epidemic among computer users in recent years.

The problem, however, is not always caused by repetitive motion. Anything that decreases the space in the wrist joint and compresses the median nerve can lead to CTS. Fluid retention due to pregnancy or thyroid disease, for example, can narrow the carpal tunnel, as can cysts, old fractures, or arthritic changes in the bones.

The symptoms of CTS include intermittent numbness and tingling in the hands, which often wake people at night. The sensations typically occur in the area of the palm served by the median nerve, though some people get arm or shoulder pain. Left unchecked, compression in the wrist can progress to permanent nerve damage and muscle weakness in the hands.

HOW YOGA FITS IN

During my medical training, the entire conversation about carpal tunnel syndrome focused on about one inch of anatomy, the canal in the wrist through which tendons and the median nerve pass . There is some validity to this perspective. The compression of the carpal tunnel often happens when people engage in activities like typing which require that they rotate the forearms so that the palm faces down. This can cause flattening of the normal arch made by the carpal bones. Cocking the wrists up, as many people do at the keyboard, can intensify this flattening of the carpal tunnel arch, putting further pressure on the tendons and the median nerve.

But from a yogic point of view, the failure to consider other factors beyond compression in the carpal tunnel is simply shortsighted. It is precisely this myopic approach that results in surgeries to open up that space before other options have been thoroughly explored.

Yoga in Prisons workshops throw up the philosophical questions such as Who am I? Am I separate from what I do? They investigate basic goodness, identity, and forgiveness as well as develop listening and empathy skills. Leaders also introduce simple meditations to help prisoners learn how to calmly be with whatever emotions arise in the present moment. The boys count their breaths and do body scans to get into their bodies, relax, and find freedom from reactivity.

The idea of spending less time in solitary may lure the prisoners but once he started attending the yoga meetings they start to see the benefits. Each session offered a brief respite from isolation, a glimpse of self-awareness, and a chance to connect to others who had similar lives filled with drugs and gangs.

Thinking it over and talking with others, I was able to sort out my ideas. Using a breathing technique, which he learned in group sessions, to control his temper. My anger and other people just don’t mix. Yoga breathing techniques have helped me cope with everyday life.

People tend to either love or dislike poses like Pigeon. Regardless of which camp you inhabit, keep in mind that Pigeon can help safeguard your knees and low back and make other poses infinitely more pleasant. Here’s a look at the tremendous benefits of hip openers.

Open hips can mean less back pain – Tight hip flexors pull your pelvis forward and exaggerate the curve in your lower back. Picture your entire pelvis as a bowl of water spilling toward your toes, with the back side of the bowl raised up. When your lumbar becomes shortened, you’re likely to feel compression and discomfort over time. You’ll notice it in your poses, too. If your hip flexors are short in a pose like Warrior I or Camel, your lower back will overdo the arch, and you’ll feel pain. Open hip flexors help bring the pelvis back to neutral and mitigate pain.

Hip openers help your knees – Here’s an example: When your outer hips are relatively open in a pose like Warrior II, you’ll be able to rotate your front thigh out and line up your front knee toward the pinky side of the toes. But if that area is tight, your knee will buckle in toward your big toe, which can strain the inner knee. So if you’re unable to externally rotate the femur bone in the hip socket (which is one result of tight hips), the smaller and more delicate knee joint can become overworked.

The hip is a ball-and-socket joint constructed for movement in a whole slew of directions – Including rotation (as opposed to the knee, which is a hinge joint that it is supposed to bend and extend but not rotate). The great thing about Pigeon is that if you practice it on both sides, you get flexion and extension of your knees and your hips. The added bonus is that you get external rotation of the femur in your hip socket, too. Barring injury, it’s a good idea to regularly take your joints through their full range of motion in your yoga practice—you’ll move through your daily life with more ease.

What’s your yoga intention? When I began practicing yoga I was always to have Presence of mind.

I think of that expression. No matter where I am, it brings me back to his message: Presence of mind. At first, it was helpful when my muscles shook and balance tottered in Warrior III, but now it helps me when I’m in traffic or standing in line at the newsagents.

I like to think of these ingrained reminders I’ve gathered over the years as a Yoga Intention for my practice, a spiritual twist on those advertising tunes that we can’t get our of our heads. Instead of urging me to buy some floor cleaner, however, my jingle reminds me to stay calm, stay present, and remember that everything is unfolding just as it should.

The Yoga Wellbeing team would love to know what’s your Yoga Intention? How do you use it in your everyday life?

This is a message from a London Yogi who was struggling at first with the sterotypes related to Western yoga.

Four years ago I thought yoga was for girls. I play football, end of story. Despite this, for various reasons not worth sharing now, I started to go along to yoga classes to support my partner. Six months later I was still going, and really enjoying it. Nonetheless my practice at this stage was a little sporadic, and yoga was languishing a long way behind football in my set of priorities.

There are times (and I don’t say this lightly) when I’d rather do yoga than play football. Let me explain the attraction. Firstly the physical side of things. Football is great because it clears my mind, gives me an outlet for my physical energies, and leaves me mellow yet somewhat elated. Yoga also has that effect on me. It gives me the high.

I also have a sense of progress. I am no natural yogi; I am bony and angular and not naturally flexible. When I started I had trouble sitting cross-legged. Yet now I can sit with cross legs, I can touch my toes with ease (even put my palms on the ground), I can stay in a head stand for a couple of minutes… in short, there are a multitude of postures that were once beyond me and now are quite achievable.

It has benefited my health. I used to suffer from chronic lower back pain but yoga has now got that under control. (As it happens I have had back troubles again recently, of a different sort, but this seems unrelated.) I have noticed a dramatic increase in lung capacity (all the positions in yoga are coordinated with the breath, so one learns to regulate one’s breathing and to breath more deeply). The other day I swam a kilometre for the first time in my life. This was with almost no swimming practice, but lots of yoga.

I have much more control over different parts of my body. Whereas playing football benefits only a subset of the muscles in the body, yoga does the lot. Before I did yoga there were whole areas of my body that were weak and unutilised – that I didn’t know were there. Now I have awareness of these areas, and can use them (for instance when lifting heavy things, instead of busting my back like I used to).

Yoga isn’t just physical though. It also challenges and benefits my mental/ spiritual side. Firstly this takes place through regulating the breath. I have learned to breath deeply and slowly, thereby lowering the heart rate, and naturally calming the mind. This aids concentration and eases stress: when we’re stressed our breathing tends towards shallowness and hyperventilation; by dealing with the physical symptoms of stress, some of the mental symptoms are also relieved.

Yoga also builds awareness of the present moment – what the Buddhists would call “mindfulness”. Yoga requires awareness of one’s whole body and full involvement in the here and now. Just as when I play football I am entirely focussed on the game without thought or worry of the past or future, so too in yoga I am freed of these distractions. Yoga seems somehow more beneficial though, because my mental state remains calm. (I’m not calm when I play football!)

Yoga is refreshingly non-competitive. While I admire very talented yoga practitioners (see video for an extreme example), a good session of yoga for me can be much more modest yet still push my physical and mental boundaries, and bring just as much benefit. With this in mind I’d recommend yoga to anyone, no matter what their state of physical health, for they will surely benefit.

I was asked by one of the yogis this week if it helped to practice yoga while trying to concieve and during pregnancy and whether it effected you if you were stressed.

Stressed-out women are 12% less likely to become pregnant during their fertile time, Oxford University scientists have said after testing the advice to women to relax when trying for a baby.

They carried out saliva tests on 274 women and analysed levels of the stress hormone cortisol and the enzyme alpha-amylase, an indicator of adrenalin levels.

All the women were aged between 18 and 40 and were trying for a baby naturally. Researchers carried out the tests on day six of each woman’s menstrual cycle for six cycles or until the woman fell pregnant. They used fertility monitors to identify ovulation and confirmed the pregnancies with testing kits.

The study, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, found no effect from cortisol on the chances of falling pregnant. But women in the group with the highest levels of alpha-amylase had a 12% lower chance of falling pregnant for each day of their most fertile days than those with the lowest levels of alpha-amylase.

The authors concluded: “Stress significantly reduced the probability of conception each day during the fertile window.”

This is the first study to find that a biological measure of stress is associated with a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant that month. We found that those women with high levels of a marker for stress were less likely to succeed in conceiving.

“The findings support the idea that couples should aim to stay as relaxed as they can about trying for a baby. In some people’s cases, it might be relevant to look at relaxation techniques like yoga and meditation.

If you would like to book a one to one session click here.

It’s the paradox of sunscreen. When you dutifully slather on the SPF 30 before heading outside on a sunny day, you’re protecting your skin 
from harmful ultraviolet rays. But you’re also preventing those rays from prompting your skin, liver, and kidneys to make an essential vitamin—vitamin D.

For more than 90 years, vitamin D has been known to play a role in bone health. But new research suggests that vitamin D may have many other health benefits. Vitamin D may play a role in reducing the risk of cancer, heart attack, and stroke. Emerging studies are examining the effects of higher doses of vitamin D on depression and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.

Vitamin D occurs naturally in a few foods, such as salmon, egg yolks, and liver, and many other foods are fortified with 
it. The Food and Nutrition Board at the Institute of Medicine deems a vitamin D intake of 2,000 international units per day to be adequate for adults aged 50 and younger; older people need more. In light of new research, those recommendations are currently under review. But many of us aren’t getting enough even by the current recommendations. By some estimates, as many as three out of every four people in the UK aren’t getting enough vitamin D. While some nutritionists recommend seeking vitamin D by going outside for 10 or 15 minutes without sunscreen on a sunny day, dermatologists argue that’s neither a safe nor reliable way to ensure adequate vitamin D levels.

What’s the yogic message today? Read the label of your multivitamin to see if it contains the daily value of vitamin D, and ask your doctor to check your vitamin D levels 
at your next physical, if you’re concerned. And don’t forget your sunscreen and hat when you head for the beach.

Wondering whether a private session would suit you? Here’s a little bit of an insight to booking a private yoga session.

Yoga Wellbeing will send you the right teacher for your private yoga wherever and whenever it suits you. Laura will spend as long as you need discussing what you’d like to achieve and how you’d like to achieve it. We will talk about what you need to help your body and mind, what you enjoy doing and any particular requirements. You choose the time and place and then we choose a teacher who is ideally qualified to help you.

You pay a flat rate of only £60 per hour, so whether you prefer a one-on-one or you want to share your class with family, friends or colleagues, the cost is the same regardless of location or group size. There is no minimum time commitment, and you can always cancel an appointment without charge as long as you give your teacher twenty-four hours notice. All Yoga Wellbeing teachers are fully qualified, fully insured and have been personally picked by the Yoga Wellbeing team.

Call  now 0845 843 0895  for a personal consultation or to book a Yoga Wellbeing teacher to visit you at your home, office or hotel.

There are many benefits to yoga, but many of our Yoga Wellbeing yogi’s ask us. Will yoga help me lose weight?

From a traditional standpoint, calories need to be expended to burn fat and achieve weight loss. One of the best ways to burn calories is to raise your heart rate with cardiovascular exercise. Yoga can accomplish the same thing. As you are focusing on your stance in a posture, the correct alignment, activating the proper muscles and trying to deepen your breath, suddenly you have an elevated heart rate. Any yoga practice will also strengthen and tone your muscles, which is necessary for any weight loss program.

One example of a high calorie burning practice is vinyasa yoga. Vinyasa yoga will challenge your stamina and strength while swiftly moving from pose to pose, not to mention the specific vinyasa poses meant to stimulate the metabolism. Your metabolism is regulated by the endocrine system, more specifically the thyroid. Poses that compress the thyroid (shoulder stand, head-to-knee forward bend) act as a reset button for your thyroid, regulating hormones and emotions. Twisting poses also have the compression benefit of metabolism stimulation.

Taking a mind-body approach to journey that yoga offers will help you in reaching your goals in a unique way. Deep breathing is an essential element to a yoga practice that allows more oxygen to flow through the body, causing the systems to work effectively. When your systems are functioning efficiently, your body assimilates the nutrients it needs from your foods, causing you to crave less. Yoga raises your consciousness too, among other things, making you more aware of your eating choices.

After a yoga practice most of us don’t crave heavy, greasy, junk food, but fresh whole foods. Contrary to popular beliefs, not all yogis are vegetarian; most simply listen to what their bodies tell them they need. Simply put, the key to any successful diet is not deprivation, but moderation. A regular yoga practice has also been proven to reduce anxiety, which is a major cause of overeating. As most good decisions go, one good choice for yourself will lead you to another.

In the end, as most of us know, crash-diets, fads, and magic pills are not permanent solutions. Establishing a lifestyle of regular practice, whole foods and fun is key to attaining a healthy life. Simply start by working towards creating balance in your life.

While chemotherapy can save your life, the process is brutal and difficult to say the least. Patients report sleep loss, loss of hair, little appetite, and a general sense of disease. New research to be highlighted at the next meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology–finds that doing yoga in addition to chemotherapy improves sleep, reduces dependency on sedative medication, and helps patients make the transition back to a normal life.

The research performed at the University of Rochester, enrolled 410 early-stage cancer survivors, and found that after four weeks, those who did yoga regularly reported significantly improved sleep, reduced fatigue, and a higher quality of life. Lead researcher Karen Mustian,an assistant professor in Radiation, crafted a practice focused on breathing exercises, gentle asanas, and restorative postures.

Your doctor might not yet be ready to jump on the yoga bandwagon; your insurance probably won’t cover it. But why wait for the system to catch up to this breaking news? This is one “alternative” treatment that’s perfectly safe to prescribe for yourself (or for friends and family who might be suffering in the wake of cancer treatment). Better rest, peace of mind, and an improved sense of wellbeing.