1. It relaxes the muscles around your chest, ribs, shoulders and neck.  These are the same muscles that get tight and cause headache symptoms.
2. Yoga helps reduce your stress.  When you’re feeling all stressed, your muscles “clamp down” on nerves that go to your head.
3. It helps strengthen the muscles of your backside, and makes you long and strong; it creates muscular balance.  A strong back and a long, strong body helps you have good posture.  Good posture, with your head over your body instead of out in front, reduces headaches.
4. Yoga gets your circulation moving and that helps move the metabolic (body) wastes out of your body.  It reduces swelling which can also be a cause for head pain.
5. It helps you become more “in tune” with your body.  When your muscles start to complain or your head starts to hurt, you will be able to figure out the cause and correct it.
6. Yoga can help reduce your blood pressure, but if you are having high blood pressure headaches, you’d better get to a doctor immediately!

Yoga is a full-body stretching and strengthening movement program with a lot of benefits.

If you take a class, always remember:  It’s your body.  If a move doesn’t feel appropriate to you, or feels like it will make your head hurt or your headache feel worse, DON’T DO IT.  Instead, practice a different movement (pose) or breathing.

So, yoga helps take the pressure off the muscles around your head and neck, and helps you relax, and reduces stress, and improves your breathing (shallow breathing could also be a cause of your headaches by not giving you enough oxygen.)

That’s how yoga can help you get rid of your headaches.

Why?  Because muscles are responsible for most of our pain.

Tight muscles pull on bones.  Tight muscles cause bone spurs (arthritis.)  Tight muscles press on nerves and blood vessels.  Overstretched muscles get trigger points which “fire” pain into other parts of your body, sometimes quite far away.

To be fair, there are a few doctors who do look at posture.  When they don’t, it’s because they haven’t been trained in “muscular medicine” or because they simply don’t have time.

But, poor posture is responsible for most pain and dysfunction, including headaches.

You can see that there are a lot of ways for your muscles to cause head pain because muscles have many roles.  Bones act as our structure: they are our framework and support.  The role of muscles is to help us move.  Muscles move bones.  Muscles move us.

Sometimes we start using our muscles as bones.  We expect our poor muscles to hold us upright, because our posture is failing, but that’s not their job.  When our posture fails, it puts a lot of strain on our muscles.  Our muscles become unhappy.  They cause symptoms like headaches.  They cause pain in our heads and elsewhere.

How can you correct your posture?

It took a while for you to get into poor posture, and it’ll take a while for your body to remember how to be tall again.  But, you can do it!

The muscles in the front of your body have shortened.  Maybe your shoulders are rolled forward.  Those muscles need to be relaxed, or lengthened.

The muscles in your back–and the whole backside of your body, except your calves–need to be strengthened.

When you start letting your muscles do their job again, instead of trying to act like bones and support you,  you will be on the road to getting rid of your headaches.