5 Ways Yamuna Body Rolling Can Change Your Mind and Body

Mika Childs, Hong Kong’s first licensed Yamuna Body Rolling practitioner, shares how the practice has changed her clients in both body and mind

Yamuna® Body Rolling (YBR) is a technique that has been around for 30 years now, having taken the US by storm. Today, over 450 certified practitioners and more than 2,000 holistic practitioners worldwide are using Yamuna Balls to self-heal from bone to muscle.

In Hong Kong, Mika Childs represents the fitness legend Yamuna Zake as the city’s first licensed YBR practitioner. Personally trained by Yamuna herself, Mika can be found at Flex, the only studio in Hong Kong that offers YBR workshops, weekly classes and private lessons.

This month, in sync with Yamuna Zake’s visit to Hong Kong, Mika shares how YBR impacts her clients’ minds and bodies.

It elongates the muscles

YBR is one way of conducting “self-myofascial release”, like giving yourself a massage to release muscle tightness or trigger points. This is done by using a ball to roll out tissue from origin to insertion. The many benefits include increased flexibility and breaking down of scar tissue, to name a few.

Yamuna’s method goes deep into the muscle and beyond to “wake up the bone”. “You’ll feel there’s a certain sensation at that point, and then the muscle just begins to unwind,” says Yamuna. “The minute you hold the ball on a spot,  then roll the ball as little as one cm, you’re elongating and toning muscle, increasing the range of motion in your joints.”

“When using the Yamuna ball, focus your mind, body and breath as you sink into the ball. Relax and wait until your muscles feel like they are melting into the ball – that is the body telling you that your fascia has started to soften, elongate and release,” says Mika.

Mika’s clients have reported being able to recover space in all their joints, which has freed the movement of their bodies. “A lot of pain is created in our joints when we lose the spaces in between our bones,” she says. “It’s been great to see how body rolling brings that back, elongating the muscle.”

It improves alignment

With all muscles, Yamuna says it is important to work in alignment with the natural order of how they work. “Over and over I see challenging issues mainly due to poor posture,” says Yamuna. “People often break down in the same areas because of wrong alignment in the body.”

“Using the Yamuna ball helps bring your body back into optimum functional health in a very relaxed way,” says Mika. “Once your body moves more freely, your muscles become more balanced and your body will be more correctly aligned.”

“In my work helping my clients to align their bodies, I can see them successfully attaining a stress free body, which leads to stress free mind!” says Mika.

It deepens the breathing

“I literally have a better body at the age of 60 than I did when I was 30,” says Yamuna. She attributes this not only to her increased body awareness and thus far fewer injuries. “I have also dramatically improved my lung capacity – did you know that most of us only use  25% of our breathing capacity?”

One of Yamuna’s workshops this month involves training the breath and increasing awareness in the breathing process to maximize benefits to the body. These include releasing inner tension, freeing restricted areas and becoming more relaxed and peaceful in a meditative state.

“We need to use breathing in Yamuna Body Rolling,” says Mika. “This increases relaxation and the response of body and mind.”

It gives you a better understanding of your own body

“Our clients really need to listen to their own body’s voice, and this happens through the YBR session,” says Mika. “They get to know their bodies… allowing us to self-heal.”

“I can tell you these effects are instant, and all will experience remarkable changes in their body after just one session,” Mika continues. “It’s similar to but better than any massage they can get, because they open up restricted areas through body rolling, creating spaces and developing an intuitive understanding of their own anatomy.”

Mika believes we do not need to rely on someone else, because we can fix our bodies by ourselves, which led Yamuna to developing this technique three decades ago. “We can do this by just learning your own voice from your body… we change from within,” says Mika.

“When I do YBR, I listen to my own body’s voice. When I put my hands on my clients, I can hear their body’s voice… we learn how to communicate with our body through YBR sessions,” Mika says. “Learning YBR is like learning a new language. Yamuna balls can help our clients feel, listen and hear the messages from their own body – like a translator.”

It improves your circulation

As YBR is intrinsically linked to working on the fascial system, its way of Myofascial Release (MFR) eases the fascia – a fibrous network that covers the entire body from head to toe. This not only helps restore flexibility and range of motion, ease tension to muscles, organs and tissues, but also improves the function of the nervous and circulatory systems.

A 3D spiderweb of membranes, the fascial system wraps the muscles, blood vessels and nerves and connects the musculoskeletal, circulatory and nervous systems. In layman’s terms, Mika says that better blood circulation leads to a brightening of facial color and mood improvement, as she observes among her clients.

Yamuna is back in Flex this month with two workshops:

SAVE YOUR BACK & SHOULDERS on Friday, Oct 18 2019 at One Island South from 11AM–12:30PM

BREATHE BETTER on Saturday, Oct 19 2019 at One Island South from 6PM–7:30PM

Click here for more information