Today, more than ever before, we recognize the role played by physical relaxation and exercise in maintaining health and fitness. For the young this role is especially important.

From birth onwards, babies stretch their limbs and twist and their bodies to create a wonderful range of movement and establish the flexibility of their body's major joints.

Having first established flexibility the toddler then becomes a weightlifter and strengthenens rapidly by lifting and carrying their ever increasing body weight through space.

Like all weightlifters however, unless the child continues to experience a  wide variety and range of movement flexibility is lost.

Stiffness and inflexibility may be associated with old age but this starts very early in life and gradually becomes more pronounced and more obvious.

The origins of stiffness, poor posture, rounded backs and hollow chests and shallow breathing  most often stem from early infancy and many young children who are considered otherwise healthy, display signs of stiff spines, tight hips, tense shoulders and a variety of postural imbalances related to the muscles and joints that have lost suppleness and flexibility.

Check out your local health venue for flexibility classes for you and your children, as this is something that can be remedied with a little practice and, for you, instead of growing old and stiff, you can get older and more flexible, which will make just as big a difference to your quality of life as flexibility does to your children's.

Alternatively, check out YogaGym, the DVD in our shop.

This DVD has flexibility techniques for the whole family.

YogaGym is in three parts. It starts with toddlers and then goes on to children and then to adults. Although it covers the whole family this allows you to access the age group you need without having to watch it all.

In YogaGym the techniques cover four main areas:

1. The upper limbs – shoulders and arms;

2. The lower limbs – hips, knees and ankles;

3. The spinal column – neck and trunk;

4. Balance and relaxation.

The techniques shown in YogaGym allows parents to assist and encourage their children to continue to retain a wide range and variety of movement throughout childhood. It also enables a parent to see where they and their children lack flexibility and remedy this in an easy way.

Many emotional and physical disorders encountered in later childhood and adulthood are known to stem from stresses and strains of unresolved traumas that have occured in early childhood and the sooner this is addressed the easier it is to relieve.

Every feeling is supported by a muscular reaction and more and research over many years has shown that anxiety, fear, shock and trauma go hand in hand with muscular armouring.

Hyper-tense muscles are the main features of muscular armouring and this  reduces  range of movement and distorts posture. Given a long period of time without treatment, as in the ageing process, muscular armouring becomes increasingly permanent and more and more difficult to treat.

Only movement can maintain and restore movement and at no other time in life are the possibilities for cure as good as in early childhood when growth is its fastest the body is still malleable.

Maintaining flexibility is far easier than trying to regain it and as the child strengthens the wide range of versatile movement encouraged in YogaGym can be especially effective in maintaining muscular suppleness and joint flexibility

However when stiffness is seen in movement and posture from infancy to adulthood this can relieved by regular periods of YogaGym

For toddlers YogaGym is a continuation of 'Developmental Baby Massage'adapted to suit an active child and child development. The techniques are simple and easy to perform and they provide parents with a means to keep check on the health and integrity of their infant's muscles and joints, and ensure their child's movements remained unaffected following emotional trauma and physical injury.