Gaiam yoga is a lifestyle media company that makes products intended to help you develop a healthy lifestyle, achieve self-growth and transform your life in positive ways. Gaiam promotes yoga for children, which has a number of benefits including strengthening their bodies, reducing stress and improving educational performance.
Gaiam
Gaiam offers a range of free yoga resources on its website. Theses include yoga routines and articles designed and written by yoga expert Rodney Yee. Yee, a former gymnast and dancer with the Oakland Ballet Company and the Tokyo Matsuyama Ballet Company, has been teaching all levels of yoga since 1987. He created the Gaiam Online Yoga Club, along with his wife and yoga expert Colleen in 2008. The aim of the online community is to enable the practice of yoga to reach as wide an audience as possible.
Benefits
According to "Yoga Journal," children experience the same benefits from yoga as adults do. Firstly, yoga improves flexibility and coordination. Yoga can also help to develop children's self-awareness, both through the physical movement, the breathing techniques and the practice of meditation. This also helps to reduce stress and boost self-esteem. Yoga can also stimulate the imagination and keep them in touch with their feeling, which helps develop empathy. Parents who practice yoga with their children may also find that it helps them to develop a closer personal bond.
Study
In a 2003, Gaiam-funded study of children in kindergarten through 8th grade in an inner-city school, researchers from California State University examined how yoga affected attendance, academic performance, discipline and self-esteem. The study found a 20 percent increase in student's self-esteem and a 6 percent increase in classroom discipline scores, meaning that students who practiced yoga had fewer discipline problems in the classroom. There was also a significant increase in academic achievement.
Fitness Fun
Marsha Wenig, creator of the Gaiam YogaKids, has been teaching children yoga for 20 years. She says that children enjoy yoga because it keeps them fit and it's also fun. As well as keeping children active, it also has its quiet moments, which means children learn to relax and enjoy the positive side of stillness and focused attention. Wenig points out that another valuable aspect of yoga for kids is that it can also be a springboard to education through kinetic learning. For example, the downward facing dog pose can be used to teach children about acute angles.
Member Comments