yoga, relaxation, and osa?

For as long as I can remember I've not been a great sleeper. When I have taken a (gentle) yoga class we ended with relaxation and I would invariably fall asleep on my mat and even start to snore. Diagnosis of OSA explains what has probably been going on for years. I have a friend who is a yoga teacher and she suggested coming to an evening class as everyone says they leave very relaxed and sleep great afterward. She knows I have a sleep disorder. Thinking about relaxation and sleep and OSA made me wonder if others have found that yoga relaxation helps in terms of xpap therapy. It's correct to think that when your throat muscles relax you have events, I believe. Has anyone had any experience with yoga helping to diminish OSA or events or not? thanks

While I'm not in a yoga class (right now), I have used gentle yoga for years to help me relax. During high stress periods of my life, yoga has been an important weapon in my anti-insomnia arsenal.

Very early in my therapy, all of the sensory overload from the CPAP triggered major bedtime insomnia. I was literally too wound up and too tense to even try going to sleep many nights until it was 3:00 AM. I eventually started doing some serious yoga stretching after 1:30 or 2:00 AM on the nights where I was simply too wound up to sleep in spite of being utterly exhausted physically. It took the edge of the insomnia (but was no where near enough to cure the insomnia). And as far as I could tell had little or no effect on my AHIs.

At the beginning of the year, one of my resolutions was to work harder to incorporate exercise into my daily schedule. My husband and I rejoined the town's Aquatic and Fitness Center, and I'm now doing some weight lifting about times a week. I'm not getting as much yoga into my weekly schedule as I'd like. We've also been skiing once a week all winter long. I have noticed a weak correlation between overdoing the exercise and the AHI being somewhat elevated. But more appropriate levels of exercise (of all types) seems to be weakly correlated to somewhat better than normal AHI. Unfortunately the line between "just enough" and "too much" exercise remains pretty fuzzy. And yoga seems to affect the AHI the same way as the weights or the skiing does: Too much (in the sense of too long of a yoga session or too strenuous of a yoga session) can elevate the AHI a bit. Just the right amount, seems to reduce the AHI just a bit. And the line between too much and just right is pretty hard to identify.

My own feeling is that the relaxation you get from yoga is that the muscles you can control consciously get stretched out and relaxed. And the mind tends to be able to clear itself of anxious, troubling thoughts. Those both encourage decent quality sleep. The apnea is caused by the unconscious over relaxation of certain muscles in the neck as well as abnormal structures in the upper airway (over large palate, extra small airway, tendency of tongue to roll backwards, etc.). I don't think that yoga is going to increase the tendency of the throat muscles to over relax when you are sleeping. But too much exercise in general can leave the whole body more tired than normal. And in my case, being more tired than normal does seem to be weakly correlated with more events.

I do yoga stretching every am.
I have from the Cyclo-core programs two yoga routines that I do.
One is a recovery routine and one is called power yoga.
I try to do the recovery atleast every Monday, as that is the recovery day
from the weekend riding. Power yoga is a full blown workout that
will tax your mind and body to the max.

If you incorporate the breathing and mind/body awarness,
that is a critical part of yoga, w/Barry Krakow's SOLO techinique from
Sound mind, sound sleep, you have a winning
combination to let that sleep wave come in
and consume you. I don't think that yoga can
have an effect on OSA, one way or the other.
Let each piece do their specific job:
Yoga/breathing to relax you and let you sleep.
Cpap to keep your air way open and protect you,
while in that sleep.