All About Baby Yoga
Our Baby Yoga course integrates positive touch and movement from birth through to the early years of your babies life. Our sessions also focus on you, being pregnant and giving birth has an enormous effect both physically and mentally on us and we incorporate specific movements to support, strengthen and improve posture and muscle tone.
The class incorporates various poses and positions to promote you and your baby’s general health and wellbeing. The postures and positions used help to provide flexibility, beneficial stretching, improve muscle tone and co ordination. Postures can also help to promote postural control and body awareness. Our class is for everyone, no need to have any Yoga experience.
The benefits of baby yoga
Baby yoga promotes tummy time for your baby, and active play in the form of swings and dips which help to develop baby’s prospective and vestibular system. Yoga poses are practised to songs to develop baby’s sense of rhythm and promote language development and communication between you and your baby.
The positive use of touch in baby yoga helps to create a happy secure trusting relationship between mother and baby and can help in bonding. The release of the endorphins in both mother and baby’s body can help to promote relaxation and wellbeing, and relaxation at the end of the class is important so that you can relax and so that baby can learn that there are times to simply relax and unwind. A relaxed mother helps to make a relaxed baby.
By you both moving and playing together through baby yoga, you both can spend quality time improving emotional and physical states whilst having fun, relaxing and meeting other parents.
Baby yoga will also aid the development of your baby:
- gross motor movements – the large movements such as stretching the arms up which are important for physical development
- fine motor movement – holding a prop – important for writing
in addition to more complex co-ordination movements such as
- reciprocal integration – like cycling the legs (both sides of the body are doing the same thing)
- bi-lateral integration such as waving a hand, (where each side of the body is doing something different) a developmental step towards writing.
Baby Yoga moves are designed for certain stages of your baby’s development. In some areas you baby may be slower to develop, in others, faster. It doesn’t matter, the important thing is to be safe, and be aware of things like head control and core development.
Our baby courses in Bath always focus on the babies needs making sure they come first; therefore if baby needs feeding, changing or is unsettled, their needs will always come first. If baby is asleep, do not worry, we encourage babies to do exactly as they want to so there’s no need to wake them, you can practice the movements yourself and when you get home you can do it for real with baby in your own time.
There is no pressure in the sessions, they are very relaxed and you will always be put at ease, and most importantly they are fun for both you and your baby!
At the end of the course you will have made some great new friends and have learnt beneficial yoga movements to practice at home safely with your baby.
At what age can I start the course?
We have two courses available: pre-crawlers and crawlers/walkers (up to a 12 months).