Keep Kalma and yoga on!
Did you know a single yoga posture can boost your resilience and immunity to common illnesses these days? It’s not just a tool used for stress and anxiety it offers so much more for our children. Kalma Children’s Yoga can be such a powerful tool to help over all resilience. Combining twists, warming poses and restorative postures are a great way to ensure your children stay healthy and of course you too.
Yoga practiced consistently can help boost children’s immune systems. Yoga helps to cultivate balance within the body and its systems, we can support, nourish, strengthen and build our health, immunity, energy and overall quality of life.
It also helps to keep children’s body cells healthy even when they are feeling a little stressed. This is due to the fact that yoga reduces stress systemically in the body, which reduces inflammation overall. This ‘calm even in the chaos’ is why yoga can be a big help for our children’s immune systems. Less inflammation means that your body is working and defending itself the way it should be.
Illnesses like colds and the flu can hit at any time of the year, and while it’s great to get a dash of vitamin C to help those pesky symptoms for our kids why not give Yoga some thought instead! It’s such a great tool to boost the respiratory resilience and immunity within the body. Take a look at 5 of our best asanas for children which we use in our classes with parents, children and often babies to help:
Legs up a wall, a great way to ground the nervous system and manage stress the main contributor to illness. When your feeling lethargic it can give you a good boost. This favourite asana in our baby and toddler classes is also an Inversion, which can also help lymph fluid move through the body, which fight infection.
Forward bend a great inversion to do, our toddlers don’t need any excuse to be able to touch their toes! This inversion not only gives a strong hamstring stretch but will help lymph fluid move through the body fighting infections. Like other inversions it helps drain the sinuses too.
Seated spinal twist another favourite in our baby and toddler classes although adapted to suit the ages, is a great detox posture. It helps the digestive system which some know a great functioning gut system is essential for working immune system.
Downward dog is an inversion so has the affects as legs up wall. The Asana is a popular posture with toddlers and parents draining the sinuses, relieving any pressure caused by colds or sinus infections. Downward dog also moves white blood cells throughout your body that help prevent infection.
Bridge pose a great chest-opener, which opens up the thymus, located in the chest and responsible for the growth of T-cells. T cells are a type of white blood cell essential for supporting the immune system and fighting infection and we all need a bit more of these!
It’s not only the poses great to help combat sickness but our breathing in yoga too. Breathing plays a big part in our classes and gives our blood the boost of oxygen required to generate new circulation which helps aid cell growth!
When doing our yoga poses and breathing, we’re helping this circulation process in our systems, which leads to health and stronger resilience and immunity. Remembering yoga is “movement linked with breath.” By incorporating yoga into everyday life, we can significantly strengthen our body’s ability to combat sickness.