By Scott Hughes
Many adults practice yoga to improve both their physical and mental health. Yoga not only improves flexibility, but also improves strength, stamina, concentration, blood circulation, balance, and more. If you do not already practice yoga, you may want to consider it. Whether you already practice yoga or not, you may consider letting your children practice yoga.
You may wonder if children can practice yoga safely. Of course they can! In fact, in many ways children may be more suitable for yoga than many adults. Children are often more flexible and physically active than adults. Additionally, children learn new things very easily, as learning is a natural part of growing up.
Yoga is generally safe for children, but before starting any new exercise program, you want to check with a doctor. Doctors can examine you and your children and make sure you do not have any special physical needs. Luckily, yoga is a relatively accessible exercise program, and has much less physical requirements than other more intense exercise routines. In fact, yoga is often used as physical therapy and a way to help treat various injuries.
When practicing yoga with children, there are some special issues you want to keep in mind.
For one, children like to have fun and sometimes have shorter attention spans than adults, so their yoga routines may benefit from a more upbeat and fast-paced workout. Additionally, you want to work games into their workouts and exercises if you can.
Children are also not as experienced or educated as adults, and are still learning. For that reason, they may not be able to comprehend complex spiritual teachings, and they may not be as interested as adults in trying to understand complex ideas. It may be wiser to offer children a simplified introduction to yoga, as opposed to the more advanced approaches that would be offered to experienced adults.
If teaching children who are not your own, it is often a good idea to avoid mixing strong religious messages or opinions with the yoga lessons. The children's parents may have different religious views than you, and thus may not want you teaching their children your views. Religion can be a very sensitive subject for some people. For the same reason, if you are sending your children to a yoga class or buying them some sort of yoga media, you may want to review it first and make sure you find its messages suitable.
If you decide to let your children do yoga, there are many ways to start them. You can find classes that offer yoga to kids. You can also find Yoga for kids videos, as well as other media. You can even do the yoga routines on the videos at home with your children. Good luck and have fun!
Scott Hughes owns and operates OnlineYogaClub.com which is a great website with free information about yoga. You can also talk about yoga for free at the Yoga Forums.
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posted by Cheryl Levesque @ 8:49 AM
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