Seattle Yoga with Andreas Fetz » caffeine http://www.acrocore.com As seen at Yoga Life and 8 Limbs studios Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:05:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 Caffeine and Yoga http://www.acrocore.com/caffeine-and-yoga/ http://www.acrocore.com/caffeine-and-yoga/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:49:32 +0000 Andreas http://www.acrocore.com/?p=284 I’ve been a coffee and tea drinking almost my entire life. When I was a kid, my favorite ice cream flavor was always coffee and I really looked forward to being old enough to drink a big cup of it when I was old enough that my parents would let me. I can’t actually remember a time since I was a child that I have been caffeine free. But I’ve decided to eliminate it from my diet finally. Caffeine can cause anxiety, mood swings, and insomnia, irritability, and lots of other stuff, yet most of us consume it regularly. It can also make you stiff, which is exactly the opposite of what most of us yoga practitioners are trying to be. I actually had a really hard time finding concrete studies here, but as I understand it from talking to people who know about this, caffeine can cause muscle twitching (hyperflexia), which prevents our muscles from relaxing fully, a necessity to get a good, healthy stretch. Additionally, if taken in large enough doses, it acts as a diuretic, draining you body of precious water and leaving your muscles less able to stretch. That combined with the addictive nature of the drug, are finally getting me to give it up. Instead, I’ll be relying on a short morning yoga practice (which I’ve not always done) and breathing. There are lots of good resources if you are interested in trying to kick caffeine as well. I’ve included a couple of them below:

findbliss.com
yoga journal
yoga-australia.com

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