Yoga Reduces Enlarged Prostate

Since my two surgeries to remove a kidney stone about a month ago, I've struggled to keep up my daily yoga practice. My prostate gland swelled to the point where I was conscious of it as an obstruction when I walked. And I was experiencing pain when I urinated and occasional incontinence. Just a few days ago, I successfully performed my full yoga workout for the first time since my surgeries. Pain, incontinence and swelling gone! 

Note: the instructor in the above video: Yoga Exercises for Prostate is female! Yoga is female dominated to a degree that can be quite discouraging to traditional macho men who want to practice. I've met few male instructors. Classes are overwhelming female. Extreme leftist, pussified political views are common among women (and men) in the yoga world. Often, they won't even shut up about these views in class. Don't let this discourage  you. Yoga is great.

I've been doing yoga for 15 years. Yoga provides all kinds of health and emotional benefits. I've was diagnosed with an enlarged prostate two decades ago. Quite by accident, I discovered that a certain combination of yoga postures caused my prostate to shrink. (This is something that I can actually feel.) No, my regimen is not like the one in the video above.

Yoga Journal publishes a Yoga Poses for Prostate Health page that, amusingly, features attractive women demonstrating the poses. I do some of these poses. Who wants to look at a hairy, ugly sweaty man, anyway?

Yoga is at the center of my fitness regimen. First, it rids me of any symptoms of arthritis. I have severe arthritis if I don't do yoga. So, even my ability to work on my fitness at any level depends on doing yoga first. Without yoga, I'd be crippled and sedentary.

I developed my regimen during a period of about 3 or 4 years of weekly lessons at Chelsea Piers, a health club in lower Manhattan built on piers over the Hudson River. My late wife, Myrna, and I attended classes together. I had been playing corporate league basketball for a few weeks. My entire body seized up and turned into a rock after one game. My doctor diagnosed me with severe arthritis the next day. I quickly looked to yoga for answers.

The instruction level in Chelsea Piers yoga classes is very good. Over the years when I attended classes I developed 30, 60 and 90 minute sets of poses that suited my needs. Although I do enjoy attending a class now and then, I don't feel that that is necessary for me. I do fine on my own.

I wish I'd discovered yoga when I was a kid. The benefits of yoga including greatly increased flexibility and improved aerobic strength. I was a very good three sport athlete when I was a kid. I would have been much better had I practiced yoga.

If you are suffering from an enlarged prostate, I recommend yoga. Start slow. Go to your local gym and get some good instruction. You'll need at least six months in a beginning course that meets once a week. Practice your lesson at home every day.

You'll sleep better, too. Yoga is a great relaxer and stress reliever.

Comments

[Dad Bones]

Congrats on your yoga success. If yoga is anything at all like Chi Kung, a Chinese version of it that I got started on in the 1980's, it's a good way to tune up our organs and develop an awareness of how they're doing. My sensitivity to those organs pales in comparison to more adept practitioners but I'm further ahead than I would be if I'd never got started on it.

I've never been to a class. I picked it up from a book by Geoff Pike, an English seaman turned cartoonist who learned it in the Phillipines from some Chinese in the course of his travels to the orient.

It would have been to my advantage to find a class but at least I didn't have to suffer leftist classmates.

[Howlin' Steve]

I'll look into Chi Kung.

Never heard of it.