Dealing with period symptoms can be tricky—emotionally and physically. Yoga can be a soothing and calm practice before, during, and after your period. But there's a lot of noise out there about yoga being harmful during your period.

Let's set the record straight.

We don’t need to avoid yoga during our cycle, especially during the menstrual phase.

The Benefits

Yoga can help us manage period symptoms by reducing pain, cramping, inflammation, and bloating.

A review in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine analyzed 15 studies’ findings in yoga’s relation to periods and found yoga to be effective in reducing pain, according to TIME Magazine. The authors report that yoga was found to improve women’s bloating and breast tenderness in some of the past research.

VIS Mentor and professional cyclist Maggie Coles-Lyster began practicing yoga at the age of 16. She began the practice as a fun challenge to learn different yoga poses and handstands.

But the various benefits, including the slower form of exercise and breathwork, are what became her favorite part of it. She is now a yoga teacher after having gone through her 200-hour teacher training during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Without a doubt, she agrees that many yoga poses can be really helpful for period discomfort and bloating.

“Gentle movements like cat-cow as well as lying and seated spinal twists can help your body relax and ease some bloating,” Coles-Lyster says.

In her own experience practicing yoga during menstruation, she tends to slow down her practice and hold poses a little longer. Some poses she recommends are twists, child’s pose, forward folds, and downward dog. For her routine to be more intentional and restorative, she pays more attention to her breathing as she switches between poses.

“There is no better time to learn to listen to your body than when you are on your period,”

VIS Mentor Maggie Coles-Lyster

Menstrual Yoga Myths

Despite the positive feedback on practicing yoga during our period, many myths still exist saying we should avoid yoga during menstruation. Coles-Lyster says a common myth we might hear in many traditional yoga classes is to avoid doing inversions. But, she says that there is no scientific reason to be cautious of them.

Realistically, we wouldn’t spend enough time in an inversion to be worried about blood stoppage or blood going back to the uterus, according to the Health and Wellbeing Magazine.

While Coles-Lyster says traditional yoga practices base their reasoning off of aspects of yoga like energy flow, whether you choose to do an inversion comes down to the individual.

“The decision on whether to practice inversions during your period is completely personal and can be decided based on your experience and comfort level,” she says.

The same goes for poses involving deep body stretches.

The Bottom Line

When asked about how she would best advise others about the physical benefits of yoga during your period, Coles-Lyster offered two tips: listening and movement.

“There is no better time to learn to listen to your body than when you are on your period,” she says. By starting to do yoga and movement, Coles-Lyster says we can be guided by the poses that are relaxing and help to alleviate our physical symptoms.

Yoga reminds us that movement really is medicine.

In the end, it all comes down to what makes you comfortable during your period, including the types of exercises you are willing to participate in. There is no right or wrong answer to what yoga can and cannot do to our bodies during menstruation, and it’s just a matter of testing it out. But don’t let menstruation yoga myths stop you from rolling out your mat.