What is Yin Yoga? What You Should Know About the Yoga
What is yin yoga?
Yin yoga targets your deep connective tissues, like your fascia, ligaments, joints, and bones. It’s slower and more meditative, giving you space to turn inward and tune into both your mind and the physical sensations of your body. Because you’re holding poses for a longer period of time than you would in other traditional types of yoga, yin yoga helps you stretch and lengthen those rarely-used tissues while also teaching you how to breathe through discomfort and sit with your thoughts.
The practice of yin yoga is based on ancient Chinese philosophies and Taoist principles which believe there are pathways of Qi (energy) that run through our bodies. By stretching and deepening into poses, we’re opening up any blockages and releasing that energy to flow freely.
During yin yoga, you hold postures for longer periods of time in a very passive and receptive way. Most postures are also done on the floor, which can help to target specific tissues, increase circulation, and encourage more mobility. Sometimes yin yoga is also practiced in a way in which the slower more gentle approach is used to encourage internal awareness practices like meditation, contemplation, or pranayama or breath practices.
Here, the goal isn’t to move through postures freely, instead postures could be held for three to five minutes, or even 20 minutes at a time. A yin practitioner is trying to access the deeper tissues, and many of the postures focus on areas that encompass a joint such as the hips, sacrum, and spine.
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Yin and yang
The terms yin and yang are borrowed from Taoism and Tradition Chinese Medicine. The word yang refers to relative masculine qualities in comparison to something that would be more yin and feminine. Yang is faster, stronger, more external and dynamic. Yin is softer, more passive, internal and gentle. In fact, most physical styles of yoga today emphasize a more yang, or faster approach. While yin yoga refers to a more yin, or gentle approach.
What are the health benefits?
There are actually plenty of physical health benefits to practicing yin yoga, and additionally there are plenty of mental health benefits too. Below are some of the most popular health benefits, from stretching your connective tissue to reducing stress and anxiety.
Lengthens connective tissue
Think of your fascia like shrink wrap around your muscles and bones. When this connective tissue is underused, it becomes less elastic which can lead to aches and stiffness. If you gently stretch connective tissue by holding a yin pose for a long time, the body will respond by making them a little longer and stronger, which is exactly what you want.
Increases flexibility
Elastic fascia and mobile joints lead to better flexibility, which is one of the key benefits to a regular yin yoga practice. Because fascia needs at least 120 seconds of sustained stretching to actually affect its elasticity, yin is one of the most effective ways at improving your flexibility and releasing tension in tight spots thanks to its long holds.
Boosts your circulation
By breathing into each pose and targeting your deeper tissues and ligaments, you bring more oxygen into your body and to your muscles. Through bringing more oxygen into your body and your muscles, you are in turn increasing your blood flow and circulation.
Reduces stress levels
That calm you feel after a yin class is very real because it has been found that yin yoga has a significant impact on lowering stress and anxiety, and reducing the risk of depression. Additionally it activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which calms your body and slows your heart rate. Yin yoga activates your parasympathetic nervous system rather than the autonomic nervous system, which triggers your fight-or-flight response.
How to practice yin yoga
Because yin yoga is practiced in a non-heated room, it’s easy to do anywhere, anytime. The key is holding each pose for an extended length of time, typically for two to five minutes or even longer. As for the poses themselves, many yin yoga postures are seated or reclined poses, since they require your muscles to be fully relaxed. Think of a butterfly pose, seated forward fold, or frog pose.
While you’re in each pose, work to find stillness. Avoid fidgeting or moving around as best as you can in order to release fully into the posture. You want to push yourself to a point where you feel a deep sensation, and that helps to stretch your fascia and ligaments. However, you should never stretch to the point of pain.
Breath is an important component of yin yoga because it gives you something to focus on in the more difficult and uncomfortable postures. In yin, you’ll breathe from your diaphragm, and with every inhale you will feel your belly and ribs expand, and then with every exhale you will pull your navel into your spine. Another good rule of thumb for deep breathing in a restorative yoga flow is to make your exhales twice as long as your inhales.
Another tip is that yin yoga is also a great place to make use of props for added support or lengthening because the more your bones are supported, the more your muscles can release. Blocks can be used under your knees in a forward fold, for instance, while a bolster or rolled-up blanket can be placed under your seat during butterfly to ease tight hips.
4 things to know about yin yoga
Yin as a more passive practice that’s meant to create energy through breath, visualization, and stillness. The more common and dynamic yoga styles, on the other hand, use up energy as you move. Find out why yin yoga is worth incorporating into your routine with the following components.
You hold poses for longer
First and foremost, you’ll notice that Yin yoga has you holding poses, or asanas, for far longer than you’d expect. You will be holding these poses for at least three minutes or more, and sometimes even up to about 10 minutes for a single asana. So even if you’re the sort of responsible athlete who makes sure to hold their static stretches for 45-plus seconds, one Yin pose will feel like a pretty long hold at first.
The difference between yin yoga and stretching is that you continue to push the edge of your body’s limitations in a supportive way. So you use soft props, like pillows or blankets, to support the fragile tissues like the joints and the ligaments so that you actually can stretch the capacity of these tissues and the muscle can do an even better job to use this energy more efficiently and get things done.
You need to know your body
Part of Yin yoga is pushing your limits and finding the edge of what your muscles can handle. But there is cautions in that, especially if you aren’t practicing with an instructor in person. You need to be in tune with the cues your body gives you.
Because you’re using gravity to compress and pull on sensitive tissues, you need to understand your own body. A good example is doing a posture that compresses one muscle but pulls on another. If the focus is finding the edge of the stretch in your hamstrings, for instance, you’d still want to make sure you don’t pull something else. Say you’re doing a posture that’s compressing something but you’re pulling on something else.
You can’t just go for one sensation without considering what other part of the body has to be utilized in order to get that sensation, and you need to understand, and what props you need to support this sensation.
It’s good for anyone, but particularly useful for athletes
Yin yoga helps people connect to their parasympathetic nervous system and helps them to feel sensations in their body and understand them. It gives them a greater awareness and perspective of what their edges are. And as an athlete, that’s really good because it gives you much better proprioception.
Really getting to know your body, both its physical and emotional limits, can be helpful to anyone but especially athletes. By learning to anchor yourself with breathing and taking a more holistic approach to boosting performance, you can be more productive on the whole, and of course your muscles are also benefiting.
You’re genuinely also nourishing your connective tissue, which essentially then gives muscles more pliability because the truth is if you’re not nourishing your connective tissues, the muscles will tighten around those areas in order to protect them. A lot of times there’s tightness in muscles because we’re not nourishing our ligaments, joints and tendons as well. And ligaments joints get nourished by stillness, by slow compression and pulling with gravity. Then the muscle doesn’t have to get tight around those areas, because it doesn’t need to become the stabilizer because the stabilizer tissues can do their job.
Instruction is worth paying for
Since Yin yoga is so meditative, you will literally be holding poses for up to 10 or so minutes at a time. This is why I stress the importance of investing in at least some sort of instruction. Whether signing up for classes, joining a challenge that includes coaching, like my own challenges and coaching, or utilizing things like books or guided sessions, it’s a key aspect of Yin. I recommend getting instruction so you can make sure that the sequencing is intelligent, and I think that the truth is that you do probably have to pay for that.
Who is yin yoga for?
Many of us live fast-paced, active lives, whether we’re going for a run, powering through an Ashtanga yoga class, or sweating it out on a spin bike. Yin yoga is the perfect balance to those intense exercises, providing a slower, more meditative counterpart to help you round out your workouts.
Yin yoga is also for anyone who is dealing with injuries or a chronic condition like arthritis or osteoporosis as this style in particular is a more restorative practice than other forms of exercise. Yin can also be a great starting point for anyone interested in meditation as it has such an internal focus.
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Yin yoga isn’t your typical sweaty, intense vinyasa flow, but that doesn’t make it any less of a workout. Give it a try the next time you’re in an exercise rut to experience its many physical and mental health benefits for yourself.
Extra tips for yin yoga
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The yin yoga practice has the potential to calm the nervous system, and you can develop your meditation practice during the long holds.
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Slowing down, focusing on internal sensations, and staying close to the floor could all be considered yin qualities you can bring into your yoga practice.
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Holding the posture for longer amounts of time allows the opportunity to explore sensation and the nature of the mind. In this way, you can develop greater states of presence while at the same time opening the physical body.
