7 benefits of getting upside down
If you attend yoga classes regularly, you may notice a teacher offering students the option to go into headstand, forearm stand, or handstand. And you might wonder…..why? That looks dangerous and scary. And it can be! But it can also be fun and exhilarating, and a personal journey full of challenge and growth. Here are my top seven reasons for practicing inversions (specifically handstand, but it applies to the others as well). If you are new to these, please practice under the guidance of a skilled teacher and be safe!
1) It gets the heart pounding. People do things all the time to get an adrenaline rush — sky diving, trapeze classes, rock climbing. Handstanding is no different. The thrill of standing on your hands or your head sends a burst of epinephrine into the bloodstream, increasing your heart rate, your respiratory rate, dilating your pupils, and making you breathe faster. Basically, it sends you into a fight-or-flight state and makes you totally aware of everything that is going on inside your body. It can be an amazing feeling.
2) It’s hard! And people love a good challenge. Especially in this area. Not to stereotype, but people in the DMV tend to be a little competitive. So if you tell me to handstand, I’m going to figure out how to handstand! It’s also fun to have a goal to work towards. One of the greatest parts of yoga is the journey, and noticing the progress you make along the way. So you might start off not believing that you’ll ever be able to do a handstand, and a year later amaze yourself at everything you have accomplished. And an even greater part is that the journey is never complete! There’s always another way to challenge yourself within that one pose — hang time, variations, entry and exit points. The journey never ends with inversions: you can continually challenge yourself, continually grow, continually refine.
Timber!
3) It’s fun to fall. Sometimes we need to learn to let go of being perfect, and have fun. Kids are cool with falling and acting silly, and learning to do this in our adult lives can help us let go of anxiety and stress. Be willing to fall, and be willing to fall in front of other people. By learning to fall we’ll eventually be able to float and fly.
4) Build strength and muscle! Placing the weight of the body on the shoulders and hands requires a good amount of strength, and it also requires you to learn how to activate and use the right core muscles to stay up there. Practicing inversions for a few minutes daily will help you build and use muscles you never even knew you had.
5) Increase body awareness. My personal favorite part of yoga and Pilates is the connection I make to my body. My practice allows me to feel every muscle, feel the control I have over them (or feel the lack of control), and feel how to ease myself into poses or challenge myself by pushing beyond where I think I can go. Well, a handstand is the ultimate of expression of this because you have to be aware of EVERYTHING. Like, literally, every part of your body is involved in order to stay afloat, from your fingertips to your toes. In order to be completely straight your fingertips are gripping like crazy, your toes are pointed to the max, your shoulders are a particular way, your core is pulled tight, and your glutes are squeezing…AND, you still have to be breathing! To catch even a few moments of hang times feels like the most amazing success, and you leave it feeling fully exhilarated and jumping for joy. And like you want to just try it again and again and again.
6) Get a sense of pride and accomplishment. This has nothing to do with bragging (although it can be fun to show off yoga tricks at parties…just make sure you’re wearing pants!) I started wanting to handstand a couple years ago, and have since tried practicing on my own, getting tips from handstand experts (yep, those exist), going to handstand workshops (like the one we having coming up on March 6 at Mind the Mat with Mauricio Valle), and spending a lot, A LOT, of time practicing. The practice ebbs and flows. Sometimes I go on a streak of practicing for a good bit each day, to not practicing much for several months. Inversions can be taxing on the body so you have to take good care of your wrists, elbows, and shoulders, and make sure to take breaks for injuries and strains. It took me over a year to feel like I had any control over my handstand. And just recently I actually kind of feel like I know what I’m doing, most of the time. Being able to kick or jump up into a handstand, on purpose, make the shape I want to make, and hold it is one of the biggest accomplishments of my life. It may sound silly, I know. But I have so much pride and self-love for all the hard work I put in, which in the end is even more valuable to me than the actual handstand!
7) Inversions give you the ultimate Zen. Once you find the balance point upside down — the floaty, flying, dreamlike state…there’s no match. You have tapped into what I have found to be the ultimate meditative state, one where you are all at once completely in tune with everything that is going on in your body — your breath, all the muscles, the small movements, the catching of yourself — but also completely checked out and floating. It can be an unbelievable feeling, no matter if it lasts for two seconds or one minute.
Interested in learning how to get upside down? Attend the upcoming workshop or try out my Rock and Roll Yoga class on Friday nights at 7:30p, where we spend time each week breaking down all of these inversions and arm balances that you might be intimidated by. Also try classes from Georgia, Kevin, and Dana to name a few! Feel free to shoot me an email and check out our schedules in Alexandria and Arlington.
1 Comment
I’ve loved watching your progression and excitement, the floating and the falls!