How Yoga and Pilates Can Help You Deal With Fibromyalgia Pain

Fibromyalgia can cause severe chronic pain in patients. It also leads to debilitating symptoms, including fatigue, constant muscle spasms and leg pain, insomnia, tension headaches, stiffness, and numbness in limbs and joints.

People living with fibromyalgia often deal with excruciating symptoms that make it difficult to live a normal life. Stress also makes the symptoms worse. Thankfully, yoga and pilates can help, especially because they are exercise practices. Without any exercise, pain from fibromyalgia can only get worse.

Depending on the severity of your fibromyalgia light to moderate forms of yoga and pilates can help especially when you have low energy. On days you feel you have more energy, your body can benefit greatly from more intense forms of either of the workouts.

How Yoga Help With Fibromyalgia Pain

The many postures, also known as asanas, in yoga, are created to help the body heal from mental and physical disease through the union of mind, body, and spirit. Restorative poses can help provide relief from flares caused by fibromyalgia, which can sometimes be extremely painful. Yoga equipment such as straps, bolsters, and blocks are also beneficial when the condition is worse, restricting full mobility from the patient.

Gentle yoga routines, even for as little as 20 minutes a day are beneficial for improving muscle recovery, and circulation, and reducing inflammation. Practicing yoga regularly will also help patients manage stress more effectively, reducing the chances of making the pain worse and will also contribute to better sleep.

Stress significantly makes pain much worse, and aside from that it can also lead to other health problems including strokes and heart attacks. Intense yoga sessions can produce endorphins in the body, which make you feel good and improve your overall mood.

Some people think that yoga isn’t ideal if you aren’t flexible, but with practice even if you have fibromyalgia it can improve your overall flexibility. Besides, it isn’t a requirement to be able to do difficult postures, such as touching your toes. Yoga helps you increase muscle flexibility and improves spinal alignment.

With fibromyalgia, the pain can be so debilitating that even lifting objects becomes a serious chore. Through yoga, you can increase the strength of muscles throughout the body to help reduce the severity of your symptoms to feel better.

Yoga also helps target the areas most affected by fibromyalgia: shoulders, neck, and upper back. These areas are where 10 out of 18 tender points are found, but with just a few simple yoga poses pain in these areas can be addressed significantly.

One of the biggest benefits of yoga for fibromyalgia patients is its impact on mental and emotional well-being. Through regular yoga practice, patients can shift the nervous system and reduce the stress response, placing the body in a more relaxed state.

This is especially helpful for patients who also suffer from depression and anxiety as a result of this debilitating condition. What’s worse is that these mental conditions make pain much worse.

Although yoga is not a cure for fibromyalgia, regularly practicing it can improve the well-being of patients.

Healing breathing exercises in yoga such as pranayama can also contribute to less stress and pain. Patients who suffer from chronic pain tend to default to shallow breathing which results in the body going into fight-or-flight mode. Through deep breathing, stress is countered since it stimulates the vagus nerve.

Warm and hot yoga practices are highly recommended for fibromyalgia patients. Cold body temperature can cause body muscles to tighten up.

How Pilates Help With Fibromyalgia Pain

Pilates can help patients manage fibromyalgia symptoms by helping tone their muscles. When symptoms are worse, patients can opt for non-weight-bearing pilates exercises. Additionally, patients can benefit from pilates because they work in slow and controlled movements. The controlled movements also reduce lactic acid build-up in muscles, which can be therapeutic for patients and make you feel better through regular practice.

Pilates also requires patients to strengthen and lengthen the body in a balanced manner, which can help alleviate soreness caused by fibromyalgia. Regular practice also improves overall lung capacity and encourages healthy circulation throughout the body; better blood and oxygen supply means that nutrients are distributed to muscles and tendons, relieving pain.

In addition, pilates also requires patients to be more focused mentally and have a greater deal of concentration throughout the workout. Pilates is not just a physical workout but a mental one as well – which helps reduce stress from fibromyalgia patients. The mental aspect of Pilates helps patients increase awareness about different alignments and body postures, helping them realize which positions are most beneficial against stress and pain.

Pilates also strengthens joints, encouraging movements even in painful areas which immediately provides therapy in areas the body needs the most. Pilates helps patients get into good postures, stimulating the surfaces of joints so they produce synovial fluid which is necessary to add lubrication so that the body can move more efficiently. The lubrication also works as a shock absorber for specific joints because of the emphasis on proper alignment.

Both Yoga and Pilates may help alleviate the symptoms of fibromyalgia. Since cold body temperature can cause body muscles to tighten, warm and hot yoga practices are highly recommended for fibromyalgia patients. Compared to other forms of exercise, pilates results in less wear and tear in joints because it encourages the production of synovial fluid.