As yoga practitioners discover their own style of doing yoga, some come up with quite creative and astonishing ideas. Usually, practitioners who introduce such creative ideas are those who have learned yoga from esteemed yogis at yoga retreats in Rishikesh or Bali or Santa Barbara and other yoga hubs across the world, and have thorough grounding in the process.
One of such idea is practicing yoga in water, which is now known world-wide as Aqua yoga. Aqua yoga is particularly known for enhancing the effects of stretching and relaxation poses. Irrespective of your age and fitness level, you can do Aqua yoga easily. And even if you don’t have any prior experience of doing yoga or swimming, you can still do aqua yoga easily.
In Aqua yoga, some poses become inevitably harder to do and others easier due to the increased resistance and buoyancy force of water. But since water and air are two quite different media, doing Aqua yoga provides an entirely different experience than other regular forms of yoga.
How to Do Aqua Yoga?
The effects of yoga practice are enhanced due to increased resistance of medium in Aqua yoga. Aqua yoga also provides practitioners a way to practice yoga poses at different levels in accordance of their physical limits by getting immersed in water at different levels.
Unlike other forms of yoga, where a bit loose clothing works well enough, in Aqua yoga a swimwear is considered to be the most appropriate attire as it allows free body movements.
A number of poses that we do on land and in air are included in Aqua yoga. And more yoga poses can be done if you use pool wall as floor while floating on water surface.
Let’s see how Aqua yoga enhances the effects of yoga poses. Doing Shavasana requires a great deal of focus, since we are required to become oblivious to our surrounding by feeling that we are floating in the empty space. But when we do Shavasana in Aqua yoga, we are already floating on the water surface, thus, a better feeling is generated with comparatively much less efforts.
Benefits of Doing Aqua Yoga
• Like other water workouts such as Aqua Aerobics and Aqua Kick-boxing, not including swimming, Aqua yoga helps us in improving our muscles strength and flexibility.
• Because of the water’s buoyancy force, we feel less pressure of our weight on our joints, which allows us to do physical exercise more easily.
• While practicing Aqua yoga, practitioners have to work against water resistance and buoyancy force at once, which requires quite more focus than that pose being practiced in air; consequently, we achieve better body alignment.
• In water, our body muscles feel more relaxed due to the buoyancy force. In addition, chances of getting hurt by falling while trying a challenging pose are also omitted when you are partially immersed in water.
• In addition, Aqua yoga is found to be quite effective in fighting against diseases and conditions like Arthritis, Knee or Hip injury, Muscular Dystrophy, post-surgery side-effects, depression, Sclerosis and many more.
If you are already familiar with yoga and looking to something challenging and new then aqua yoga may be just perfect for you.