Yamuna Body Rolling – an alternative to yoga and pilates?

Yamuna Body Rolling is quickly making its own place in the sun. Traditional yoga and pilates goers swear by the teachings of Yamuna Zake and her Yamuna Body Rolling technique.

As much as certain yoga and pilates currents, Yamuna Body Rolling is quite a bit of a workout. But this new stretching technique, that uses different size half inflated balls, also contains elements of massage. Many regular massage goers switch to Yamuna Body Rolling for the double benefit of massage and stretching workout. Yamuna Zake developed this deep tissue stretching and therapy to recover from her own injury. The various dense plastic balls used in the workout therapy help muscles find their own place again. Once you walk out of a YBR session, you feel like you have grown 2 inches because all your muscles are realigned and lengthened as a result of the tension release the balls help achieve. Very few people realize that their lower back problems for example may originate in their heels or tense calf muscles. All of the leg muscles starting from your foot, through your calves, hamstrings up to your glutes are connected to your lower back. Very often as you release tension in your calves and hamstrings you feel your lower back realigning itself and pain subsiding.

In her latest book The Ultimate Body Rolling Workout: The Revolutionary Way to Tone, Lengthen, and Realign Your Body (See all Healthy Living Books), Yamuna Zake describes the most common injuries for runners’ ankles and knees: “People who walk heavily or do much high-impact exercise also often lose the natural shock absorption of the intra-articular space in the ankles, the space that keeps the bones from touching each other. . . . The decrease in space within the ankle forces the knee to absorb more weighted impact. If this extra stress persists over time, the knee can weaken and become injured, resulting in increasingly limited range of motion in the ankle.” Yamuna Body Rolling helps recreate that space between bone and muscle and thus reduces injury risk while helping overall muscle toning and posture.

The YBR small, half-inflated dense balls help replicate the same results that deep tissue massaging produces. Muscles are realigned and elongated back into their natural position.