Beverly Hills Posture offers a unique therapeutic yoga program addressing fertility issues and challenges, called Strong Yoga®4Fertility. This specialized and comprehensive program teaches many key elements in understanding and honoring the body’s needs while trying to conceive.
What is Strong Yoga®4Fertility?
Created by Brenda Strong (National Spokesperson for the American Fertility Association), Strong Yoga®4Fertility is a proprietary approach to yoga for fertility which “uses the ancient healing wisdom of yoga and applies it to the modern issue of reproductive difficulty.” This unique program offers expert instruction specific to and ideal for fertility. The specificity of these teachings is a key element in understanding and honoring the body’s needs while trying to conceive.
By combining yoga, breath work, meditation,visualization, and the incorporation of the Fertility Ball Yoga Method®, this practice helps to:
- Release tightness in muscle and connective tissue
- Increase blood flow to the reproductive organs
- Nourish the neuro-endocrine system
- Significantly reduces stress
Stress and Fertility:
Science reveals that chronic stress can contribute to a variety of disease in the body, including heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and a significant disruption on reproduction. Chronic stress leads to chronic elevation of stress hormones. Stress hormones, such as cortisol, can impede reproductive hormonal function, impacting the system in a variety of ways, including:
- Production of fewer eggs to fertilize
- Timing of ovulation
- Suppression of progesterone and/or a shortened luteal phase
- The possible creation of a “blighted uterine environment” by promoting an inflammatory response that is hostile to the developing embryo.
Studies performed on the benefits of yoga and meditation has shown these practices lower blood pressure, decrease levels of stress hormones and significantly improve the subjects’ sense of wellbeing. “Reproductive health experts have long wondered about the impact that stress may have on fertility, thus impeding a woman’s ability to conceive,” says Alice Domar, Ph.D., Executive Director of The Domar Center for Mind/Body Health and a renowned researcher in fertility. One of the studies she conducted involved infertile women who had been trying to get pregnant for at least one year with no success. Some of the women were put into a 10-week mind/body program that included yoga, meditation, nutrition and lifestyle education and support to change negative thought patterns. 55% of the participants in this program became pregnant within the next year, compared to only 20% of women in a control group.
Yoga and Fertility:
- As a gentler form of exercise and when led by an expert,* yoga is safe to do during an entire cycle when a woman is trying to conceive, even when she is being assisted by fertility treatments.
- Yoga (and specific breathing practices) improves physical health, keeping blood and energy circulating freely as it helps rid toxins via the lungs. This is especially important for women on fertility drugs to help their bodies rid any toxic effects of those drugs.
- Yoga reduces the physical effects of stress providing an antidote to the negative physical ramifications of depression, anger, anxiety, fear, etc.
- Yoga allows one the space to feel less ‘out of control’ as this can also impact a woman’s fertility journey at a more psychological level.
Each pre- and post- natal session is part of an individualized treatment plan and takes into consideration your trimester as well as any specific injuries, ailments, or conditions.
*If you are practicing yoga while trying to conceive, it is imperative that you seek out a guide that is trained in the field and understands some of the specific contraindications as you move through a cycle (whether a natural or assisted cycle).
Service Provider: Wendy Obstler
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