Benefits of Combining Yoga With Massage

Both yoga and massage therapy are highly beneficial for your body-be it in fostering wellness, enhancing relaxation, or providing relief and respite from pain, tension, or anxiety. However, juxtaposing Yoga with Massage can well turn out to be an even more powerful way to make the most out of yoga sessions and practices.

Yoga and massage have many similarities to speak of. Both are designed to help your body to undergo relaxation mode and heal up. But combining Yoga with Massage and creating a full-body holistic, wellness approach can be even more beneficial and utilitarian in keeping with your wellbeing.

What is Yoga?

Yoga is an ancient Indian practice with a primary focus on posture, breathwork, and meditation techniques. It’s used to promote mental, emotional, and physical wellness, as well as facilitate increasing flexibility, improving balance and gait, coordination, minimizing stress and anxiety, and fostering relaxation and wellness in the process.

What is Massage?

Massage therapy is a practice that employs applied pressure, traction, and stretching for helping out to relieve stress and tension in the muscles and promote relaxation. Massages can be carried out to reduce pain, increase blood circulation to the body, and minimize stress levels.

Reasons Validating the Combination of Yoga with Massage

Massage therapy acts as a facilitator in relaxing and loosening up the muscles, which in turn, helps to increase the body’s flexibility and range of motion. This signifies that having a massage before a yoga class (or performing a yoga session at home) can have a massive, phenomenal impact on accentuating your performance.

Getting a Massage Done Before Yoga

While it may appear counterintuitive to undergo a relaxing massage before a yoga session or practice rather than afterward, it makes sense; yoga is already designed to be a relaxing form of exercise meets meditation, so one doesn’t feel or experience burnout, weary, or exhausted in the same manner one may feel post a run or a sweaty cardiac session.

A pre-yoga massage, so to say, a fruitful and meaningful juxtaposition of Yoga with Massage, will aid in loosening up the muscles whilst enhancing blood flow, which will facilitate lengthening and elongating your muscles as you perform specific stretches and yoga postures in the course of your yoga session. 

Moreover, the relaxing, soothing, and calming effects and sensations that the massage will provide you with, help you to remain mindful, attentive, and zen during yoga. Simultaneously, it’ll strengthen your mind-body connection, compounding the effects of the exercises, workouts, and yoga poses.

Getting a Massage Done Post a Yoga

While a pre-yoga massage is incredibly beneficial for your overall well-being and performance, there’s no such reason elucidating or justifying that you can’t indulge in some massage therapy post your yoga session. 

Getting a massage treatment done after your session culmination of Yoga with Massage, aids in reducing lactic acid build-up (lactic acid build-up tends to take place post any form of exercise or yoga workout session), whilst also prolonging the feeling of relaxation that yoga session or technique can typically bring about.

Pre-Yoga or Post-Yoga Massage: Which one is better?

The only answer to this pertinent, relevant question is the one that suits you the best or works wonders for you. For instance, some kinds of massage like deep tissue massages, need some downtime to let your body recover, which denotes that heading towards a yoga class directly after massage therapy is not going to be good for you and your body, even resulting in prolonged discomfort or some kind of injury.

Likewise, if you’re looking to work on a particular area of your body during the yoga session, you may find it hugely beneficial to have a massage done beforehand. This powerful combination of Yoga with Massage enables your muscles to loosen up, thus making you prepped for increased functionality and mobility.

At the end of the day, the best way to make the most of juxtaposing Yoga with Massage therapy is to make room for experimentation and see what works best for you. Once you have figured out how to optimize your performance in yoga class (or for your general well-being), make sure to stick to it unflinchingly and wholeheartedly!

What kind of Massage should be combined with Yoga?

Generally, all you want is to steer clear of deep tissue massages before or before a yoga class. These types of massages are incredibly intensive, requiring a period of downtime so that your muscles and tissues can take the path of recovery. 

In this respect, a traditional Swedish massage is your best, go-to option for fruitfully combining Yoga with Massage. Swedish massage therapies tend to use gentle and tender, soothing strokes for easing tension and worries thereby improving blood circulation throughout the body, and making it apt for pre and post-yoga treatment and sessions.

Get your daily dose of Yoga with Massage at Diya Yoga – Yoga Alliance RYS200 school located in Mandrem small town in North Goa, India. Our best yoga teacher training programs fuse ancient Vedic knowledge with modern asanas taught by skilled Indian and International yoga teachers or instructors. 

We decipher comprehensive theoretical and practical training programs during our 24-day structured course. After completion of our teacher training course in Goa, you’ll emerge as a confident and competent yoga teacher ready to impart yoga lessons to wannabes. 

Come, be a part of our noble endeavor to propagate the all-encompassing benefits of yoga the world over!