The National Fibromyalgia Association recommends that patients of fibromyalgia find multiple ways to deal with their symptoms, including exercise and relaxation techniques. Doctors who work with fibromyalgia patients often recommend yoga because it offers stretching, strengthening, balancing and restorative poses (body postures) and because classes often include meditation and relaxation exercises.
Benefits
Fibromyalgia information sites such as Fibromyalgia Network and the National Fibromyalgia Association recommend yoga as a way to improve a person's quality of life if they suffer from the disorder. Yoga has the potential to relieve or reduce pain, to improve sleep and to increase energy levels for fibromyalgia patients. Depression and lack of concentration may also be reduced with a regular yoga practice.
Yoga Style
A variety of yoga styles may help students with FM. The most important key to yoga and fibromyalgia is that a student finds instructors who will work with them to find suitable poses. Yoga instructors should not push people with fibromyalgia into poses they are not ready to do and should be extremely careful when doing hands-on adjustments. Beginners with FM should try gentle yoga moves as recommended by the gym or yoga studio. Viniyoga and Integrative Yoga Therapy are styles of yoga that specialize in healing and gentle practices.
Recommended Poses
During particularly bad flareups of pain, a yoga student with fibromyalgia should work on restorative yoga poses. "Yoga Journal's" medical editor, Dr. Timothy McCall, lists Legs-Up-the-Wall Pose as a good choice on painful days. The Fibromyalgia Symptoms website recommends Downward Facing Dog and Tree Pose. Some yoga poses that may help an FM patient relieve fatigue include Standing Forward Bend, Half Moon Pose, Cobra and yoga twists. When FM yoga students have good days they can practice any yoga poses they are comfortable doing as as long as they listen to their bodies and resist overdoing things.
Other Yoga
The NFA and McCall encourage FM patients to expand their yoga practice beyond Hatha Yoga (the yoga of poses). Breathing exercises, chanting and meditation may give FM patients an ability to cope with some of the mental anguish or depression that often develops due to frequent or constant pain. A meditation practice may include guided imagery exercises, which yoga instructors use to help bring students to a higher levels of consciousness.
Considerations
It is important that yoga students with fibromyalgia find yoga classes that are conducive to FM patients and that let them ease into their practice gradually. Private or small yoga classes, taught in gentle styles, may allow an instructor to give special attention to students with fibromyalgia. Although yoga students should never practice poses to the point of pain, McCall reminds FM yoga students that they can sometimes work through dull pain during a yoga pose, but not sharp pain.
