There are a number of different yin poses that you can string together into a sequence to activate the parasympathetic response-some that focus on the legs and hips and others that target the upper body, including the shoulders and thoracic spine. You can listen to music if you like-something that is not highly stimulating but you really want to keep your environment as clean and undistracted as possible.
Don’t watch Netflix or scroll through images on your phone. Therefore, I recommend that you don’t do anything else while you practice yin yoga. This is going to negate the calming properties of the practice and could even make it harder to sleep. If you stretch mindlessly without paying attention to your breath, you can actually create more tension in the body.
There is actually a little more to it than that as you need to control your attention and practice a particular style of breathing to get the most out of it.
In yin, we don’t flow between poses like we do in sun salutations but instead hold each posture for 10-15 breaths, using gravity not force to increase the intensity of the stretch. There are many different styles of yoga but the one I am going to cover in this article is accessible to everyone, requires little motivation, no previous experience and is highly effective for smoothing the passage into restorative sleep. What you have to do is get out of your head and into your body to trigger a bottom-up state change.Ī few years ago, I received a message from a world champ-“Do you do pre-sleep ANTI stress yoga? Like before a race?” And of course, the answer is yes. For example, stressful thoughts and increased muscle tension trigger the sympathetic response whereas peaceful thoughts and conscious, belly breathing activate the parasympathetic response.īefore an important or challenging event, it is close to impossible to use your mind to calm your mind, especially if you have a disappointing performance that you need to put behind you. Something else to consider is that the nervous system response is bi-directional, meaning that it can be triggered either top-down by your thoughts or by bottom-up through bodily sensations. The parasympathetic response does the opposite-decreasing your heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tension to ease your body into rest, sleep or digestion. In sympathetic mode, your heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension and other functions increase to prepare your body for physical exertion-a mountain bike race or training session at the gym. There are two branches of the autonomic nervous system that mediate your level of arousal on a continuum from deep calm to high alert. It’s almost impossible to will yourself to sleep so we need to come up with a better strategy. Say, the night before a world cup race, before taking on the A-Line in Whistler or before an important presentation at work. The trouble with sleep, however, is that it can be the most illusive when we most need it the most. We get tired faster, feel more achy and don’t have the strength or power that we have access to after a night of deep, restorative sleep. After a poor night’s sleep, we feel lethargic, find it hard to concentrate and our athletic performance is noticeably impaired. And aside from the research, I think we all feel it. For example, in a 2021 WHOOP study, they found that individuals had a 5-10% decrease in next-day executive function and cognitive control after accumulating 45 minutes of sleep debt. There are an increasing number of studies showing that poor sleep correlates with reduced next-day performance. And the best part is, they require very little effort and no previous yoga experience.
YIN YOGA SEQUENCE FOR SLEEP SERIES
In this article, I am going to give you a short series of yoga poses that you can practice before bed to help you get an amazing night's sleep. Whether they are riders that thrive on the pressure of being out in front or that put in their best times on finals day, we all know how hard it can be to sleep when we’re anticipating something exciting or challenging that we have to do the next day. Watching the first World Cup race of the season in Lourdes last month, I couldn’t help thinking how hard it must be for the riders to put their qualification runs behind them and get a decent night’s sleep ahead of the final.
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