First, can a pregnant ever practice Yoga within her delicate pregnant period? The answer is boldly YES. Doing yoga during pregnancy can be beneficial in a way that it can help you adjust to the physical demands of pregnancy. During pregnancy, pregnant women undergo sudden changes physically, mentally, and emotionally and doing yoga can be of great help in dealing with these changes. Yoga exercises can soothe muscle tensions and muscle cramps. It can calm ever-changing emotions due to the hormonal changes during pregnancy. It can also provide a peaceful state of mind.

	Benefits Of Yoga During Pregnancy The use of yoga during pregnancy has already been known to improve a pregnant woman’s well-being. Thus more and more pregnant women are turning to yoga in order to experience the maximum benefits that yoga can offer.
	Yoga Exercises For Pregnant Women For pregnant women, there are yoga poses/postures that can be performed to help in dealing with pregnancy symptoms. Performing these yoga postures can ease delivery and promote faster recovery after giving birth as well.
	Yoga Poses To Avoid During Pregnancy Rigorous or strenuous yoga techniques are not advised for pregnant women because these postures might only complicate things or jeopardize the pregnancy, thereby putting the mother and child’s lives at harm’s way.

Breathing exercises performed during yoga is also helpful especially during labor.  But with pregnancy being a delicate phase, there are a lot of people who question the safety of yoga during pregnancy.  Is it really safe to attend yoga classes even when pregnant?  Are there any side effects to the mother and the unborn child?  Are yoga postures safe to perform?  At what stage/phase of pregnancy should one stop doing yoga?  These are just some of the questions that pregnant women ask with regard to doing yoga during pregnancy.

Yoga in general is safe to perform, however under special circumstances such as pregnancy; considerations should be taken into account.  There are yoga postures that cannot be performed during pregnancy to avoid any complications.  Would-be mothers are refrained from doing the strenuous postures such as back bending, balancing poses on one leg, camel, handstands and headstands, and upward bow so as not to compromise their safety and those of the babies in their wombs.

Pregnant women however can still perform safe postures such as butterfly stretch, cat-cow, seated forward bend with modification, side angle pose, standing forward bend with chair for modification, and triangle pose also with chair modification.  The cobra posture is also safe and can be done face-down pose in the first trimester if comfortable.

These safe posture exercises can still be done up to the third trimester, however, extreme caution should be undertaken.  Pregnant women should know their own bodies.  If you feel that you can no longer perform these safe yoga postures, then it is already time to stop.  There is no point in trying so hard to do these yoga postures if it will only jeopardize your pregnancy.  There are pregnant women though who are still able tolerate these safe yoga postures even in their last trimesters.  Women who have been doing yoga even prior to their pregnancy claim that they are still able to tolerate yoga exercises even after their second trimesters while others who have only started doing yoga during pregnancy claim otherwise.

In doing Bikram Yoga for example, most women advise not to do Bikram yoga in any circumstances while pregnant.  However some still claim that they are able to tolerate this type of yoga while others cannot.  This all boils down to how well do you know your body and its ability to do the yoga exercises even during pregnancy.

To sum it all up, yoga is safe to practice during pregnancy.  Most women who have tried yoga during their pregnancies recommend it to other women and claim that yoga greatly helps in reducing labor time and in easing delivery.