Episode #50: Yoga for Fertility With Jennifer Edmonds

I’m sure many of you listening, have heard that yoga is a very good form of exercise for PCOS. In today’s episode with our guest, Jennifer Edmunds, we’re going to dive into all of the benefits of yoga for PCOS and boosting fertility. We’re also going to talk about how simple and easy it can be to get started because I don’t know about you, but yoga can feel a little intimidating to some people. Jennifer is a yoga, Pilates, and meditation teacher who specializes in fertility and women’s health. During a long and difficult fertility journey of her own, Jennifer eventually found the practice of fertility yoga, this practice was able to ease her anxiety while trying to conceive, relieve chronic insomnia, rebalance a thyroid condition, and eventually, it helped her to fall pregnant naturally. She now runs an online business helping women all over the world to overcome fertility challenges and find their own way to motherhood. You guys are going to love this episode with Jennifer Edmunds and without further ado, let’s get started.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair podcast, where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek, and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast, where we have the pleasure of speaking to Jennifer Edmunds today all about yoga and the benefits to our hormones, into our fertility. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today.

Ashlene, it’s a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

So can you share a little bit about how you got into yoga for hormone health and fertility?

I can. So I actually started teaching Pilates originally in 2009, so that was my main focus for a really long time and I worked primarily with pre and postnatal women and working through their journeys was such a special time. But none of them really spoke about whether or not they had had trouble getting to that point of being pregnant. I just assumed, as most women do, that you want to have a family and you fall pregnant. But it wasn’t until I got married and my husband and I wanted to have a family of our own that after we started trying, we realized, sadly, it wasn’t so simple and for so many of us, we realized this, the hard way and we had no health concerns, no real reason to worry that we’d have trouble having a family. So after about a year, we went down the medical road and started investigating as to why things were happening and eventually, we got referred to IVF, and it was our second round of IVF that I was fortunate enough to fall pregnant with my daughter, which was very exciting. When she was about a year old, we decided that we would start trying straight away for another baby because we had always wanted to have two kids and we thought this time was going to be a lot easier. A few of the issues that we’d had previously had been resolved, and we thought, Okay, after everything we went through the first time, we’re just going to make this happen as soon as we possibly can. But unfortunately, the second journey ended up being a lot more difficult than the first.

It’s not uncommon. I know a lot of people are going to relate to that.

The secondary and fertility come with a whole host of additional issues and beliefs and pressure. It is a different beast and experiencing infertility, both in the first instance and the second. I completely relate to how it is for both ends of the spectrum. Fast forward, several months of, again, medicated cycles and different treatments. Then we again went through IVF and we had two embryos that we transferred, but they both failed. It was soon after this last round of IVF that we went through that COVID came along and we went into lockdown. Even if I had wanted to do IVF again, it just wasn’t an option. All the clinics were closed and I had a friend at the time who was a yoga teacher. She said to me, Look, I don’t teach it myself, but I know a lot of women who teach fertility yoga. Is this something that you want to give a go? And I thought I’ve just been through IVF. What is a bit of yoga going to do? Seriously. But we’re in lockdown, like the rest of the world, I literally had nothing else to do and I just felt like I wanted something that I could do to help myself in any small way, and this sounds dramatic, but it really changed my life in so many ways. I ended up with chronic insomnia throughout my second fertility journey and after I started practicing yoga, a couple of months later, it just disappeared. I had a thyroid condition which started to rebalance, and eventually I stopped taking my medication completely. I just felt like my life was a bit easier. I stopped bursting into tears and everything. I was nicer to my husband, I felt like a more present parent to my daughter, and then I felt pregnant naturally and obviously that blew my mind, and I thought I have stumbled across something incredible, and I wanted to learn more. So luckily, thanks to COVID, a lot of amazing training schools all around the world had taken all their training online. So I was able to work with these incredible teachers that I probably wouldn’t have had access to had it not been locked down. Towards the end of 2020, I did all of my yoga training, and I eventually found Hormonal Balance yoga, and then I found fertility yoga training. I went through all of that, and I now focus on that work. I think there is a lot of work out there offering services to pre and postnatal women, and that’s incredible but when it comes to fertility, there is just so little available in terms of exercise and gentle holistic therapies like this that can really help. So that’s my main focus of my work these days.

I love that story because it really speaks to when… I mean, not that infertility treatments aren’t helpful, I’m glad they’re there for us when we need them, but how powerful turning towards a holistic approach can really be and how much further it can touch our lives than just our hormone balance and fertility? What a well-rounded gift that can be.

Definitely.

So you touched on some of it vaguely, but can you share some of the specific benefits that you see when you’re working with women with fertility yoga that it provides for hormone balancing, for boosting fertility and so forth.

There are three main ways that yoga helps benefit your fertility and your hormones overall health. But when we’re speaking about fertility yoga, I need to point out first of all, that it is a specific way that we practice. It’s not some fancy new type of yoga that’s been invented. It is exactly like the yoga that you may have seen in studios or in anywhere else. But it’s the way that we work the practices and the poses and the sequences around the menstrual cycle. So we have our four phases of the menstrual cycle, and depending on which phase we’re in, we change the practice and the exercises or whatever we’re doing accordingly and so what this does to do is let someone live more in sync with how their body is meant to be operating and responding, and the more that we do this, the more we find that it has flow-on benefits to the rest of our life. So for example, during our menstrual phase, we need to rest and we’ve grown up thinking that we should be the same at every day of the month, and we should be pushing ourselves and you can go to the gym, you can go out to a cocktail party and chat to people for four hours. We should be able to do this any day of the month. But in reality, that’s not how we’re designed, so if we can take that moment to rest during our period, it actually sets you up for a much better month ahead, you’ll have more energy, hopefully, your sleep will improve, you’ll have better libido of elation will be improved and then that has flow and effects for the rest of the month as well. So it’s quite cumulative in the way that it works and we can get to what happens if you don’t have a cycle or you don’t have a regular cycle later on as well, which I know is incredibly common with us and a lot of our students.

Definitely.

Yeah, of course. The first thing I want to talk about with yoga is its ability to help regulate your nervous system. So when you’ve been on the fertility journey for a while, or you have any common or regular stressor in your life, or you just live in modern society, I mean, we deal with stresses that just didn’t exist hundreds and thousands of years ago. Our biology and our bodies and our brains haven’t evolved to the point that we can deal with all of these stresses that we now live with and technology is a wonderful gift, but it is also a huge stressor in a lot of ways. So what yoga does is it allows you to bring the focus to your breath, to your body, and to the movements that you’re doing, which brings you into a present moment and it really brings that fight or flight response back to a place where instead of your body thinking, Okay, I have to pump out cortisol and adrenaline to keep up with this stressor that’s happening to me right now, it can start to realize that you’re safe, you’re in a place where you don’t need to stress, there isn’t anything that’s coming to hurt you and unfortunately, your brain can’t tell the difference between that tiger over there might be coming to eat me, or I’m really running late to this work meeting, and I’m afraid I’m going to lose my job. Your brain doesn’t know that there’s a difference. So when you are practicing yoga, it really brings you to a place where you realize that you’re safe and when your nervous system can start to regulate, this is where things like digestion can happen more easily, your immune system responds better to any infection or challenges that it might come across and it can start to reset its ability to reproduce and we find people who are long term stressed have a lot of fertility issues and that is because it affects your ovulation in particular so much.

No, if the environment doesn’t feel safe at a primal level, then we probably should hold off on reproducing and unfortunately, it hasn’t… Not necessarily unfortunately, it’s good for us to learn how to de-stress, but our bodies can’t tell the difference, like you said, between we’re actually safe, we’re just too busy. It thinks that, yeah, we could be being chased by a tiger. Not a good time to take care of your family.

Exactly. You don’t need to create a new life when you’re trying to run away from a tiger, right? And this has a cumulative effect as well. So the more you start to find these moments of regulation and reminding your brain that you are in a safe place, it does end up having bigger, better effects the more that you do it, so that’s the biggest thing I think when it comes to practicing yoga. The second thing is probably, I mean, the hormonal balance is entirely affected by regulating the nervous system, but the actual physical practices of yoga have benefits for your hormonal system as well. So for example, there are many poses we do when we’re in an inversion, and an inversion is when your hips are higher than your heart. So it could be something as simple as a bridge where you’re laying on your back lift in your hips, or a downward dog, which I’m sure we’ve all seen, or a handstand, something that advances out. So when you’re in an inversion, what happens is that the blood then reverses its flow, and it ends up traveling towards your brain, where your pituitary and your hypothalamus is and so when fresh blood nourishes these areas, it then allows the glands to then carry the hormones to the rest of the body a little more easily when you then come back to the right way up, if that makes sense. So it just allows better blood flow to the endocrine system and allows the body to start waking up and especially for my students who have PCOS, that connection between their brain and their ovaries is often lost and interrupted by so many things, cortisol, testosterone, etc and these practices tend to help us rebalance it. And the third thing that I want to mention that yoga has a beautiful ability to do is bring your awareness to your breath and there are not that many forms of exercise that can do this in such a unique way. But your breath is the single most powerful tool you have to help regulate your nervous system, stop the release of stress hormones at any moment during the day. So we’re so lucky that we have control over our breath. We don’t have control over digestion or reproduction. We can’t say, Okay, I’m going to digest my food now, or I’m going to ovulate now. We don’t have that control, but we can control breathing and this does have flow-on effects. When we are stressed, we tend to breathe quite shallowly, we breathe really rapidly, and our heart rate tends to increase, but if you can slow down your breath, particularly your exhale, it slows down your heart rate, and you can’t be in a stressed place when you breathe slowly and mindfully. So putting all of this together and practicing it, say, a couple of times a week or more has incredible benefits over a short amount of time.

I love that. I recently was listening to an audiobook, and I hadn’t ever heard this before, but they were talking about stress hormone and it really wasn’t even about yoga, but they were talking about how oxytocin is one of the quickest ways to turn off your stress hormone. If you can increase your oxytocin, and they mentioned yoga as one of the best ways to have a quick oxytocin boost, aside from all of the relationship aspects that can give you an oxytocin boost and I found that really interesting. Have you heard that before?

Absolutely. Yes. So on top of all of the benefits that I already mentioned, we have the benefit of exercise, which is widely researched and proven to be an enormous benefit. So when you are exercising, you are releasing oxytocin, so it’s your happy hormone, and it’s something that then circulates through the body and you can get this from many, many forms of exercise, whatever you enjoy doing but the beautiful part about yoga is you’ve probably seen, if you’ve been to a class before, at the end of the class, you lay down in Shubhasana and if you think about how many other types of exercise we do this, it’s not very many, so when you do have this beautiful oxytocin release, at the end of the practice, you lay down and you do nothing but breathe. So it is basically impossible for your body to be in a fight or flight state of response when you’ve had the oxytocin flowing through your body, when you’re lying down doing absolutely nothing, closing your eyes, and you’re focusing on your breathing, so I think that’s why yoga has such an incredible benefit or result from that oxytocin release.

Which is extra exciting for women with PCOS or hormone regulation in general, because oftentimes with PCOS, as I’m sure you know, the progesterone is an issue and so oxytocin is one of the best hormones to start that progesterone regulation. So yeah, yoga for the win.

Absolutely.

For some people who may have never done yoga, maybe they’ve seen people in these crazy versions like you were talking about, or the more simple ones that you mentioned as well, how do you recommend people get started or be brave enough to go to their first class and try it out?

I have to point out that when yoga was invented in North India many thousands of years ago, there was no Instagram, there was no fancy studios, there was no Lululemon, and there is nothing wrong with any of those things. If that’s what people enjoy and that’s part of their yoga life for them, that’s amazing, but this was never the intention of yoga. Really, the whole purpose of yoga was to bring you to the highest version of yourself in a spiritual, physical, and emotional, and a mental and healthful way. When you can remember that, it’s not about doing crazy handstands, and backbends and wearing amazing outfits and going to the best studios. So you don’t have to do any of those things in order to get the benefits from yoga. So what I would recommend is if you are confident to go to a studio, then absolutely find one that is either for beginners or offers slow flow or something that is catered to people who are new to the practice, there are also some amazing resources online, there are some really great fertility yoga teachers out there and a lot of them will have specialized classes for PCOS and I have a YouTube channel which offers a whole bunch of free classes that I always send people to, to go and get started with. I find with yoga, it is all about the teacher, so you have to find someone that you vibe with and you can’t really put a description around that. It’s just you get the feeling you like that person or you don’t so I do try and encourage people to perhaps shop around or go to a few different classes to see what really works for them, you might have a totally different experience from one teacher to the next.

Just for all of you listening, we will put Jennifer’s YouTube channel link in the show notes, so be sure to check that out and go over there and get started with some of her videos for yoga as well, because that will be a great place to get started. They’ll be geared specifically towards that fertility mindset.

Definitely.

What about for people who’ve been doing yoga for a little while or are ready to get started? Do you combine this? You were talking about how to do it differently throughout your cycle and how there’s different phases. Do you combine this or recommend combining this with other types of fitness, such as strength training and cardio and things like that for overall well-roundedness? Absolutely. So yes, we can adapt our yoga practice to the menstrual cycle, but if you are doing other forms of exercise and you’re not also adapting those to the menstrual cycle, you are not going to see the benefits. Definitely and we can go through it briefly if you like, but during your menstrual phase, this is time that you want to rest. Gentle walks are great, getting outdoors is great, going to the beach but you want to stay away from hit classes, heavyweights, going to the gym, doing long workout, sleeping, try to take a few days off. It is hard initially when you’re used to exercising a lot, but after a couple of months, the benefits really do start to present themselves. When you move through to the follicular and the ovulatory stages, this is where you can increase your intensity so you want to be going to those higher-intensity cardio exercise workouts, heavier weights, more frequent workouts. So whatever you enjoy doing, your energy will peak up until the middle of the cycle when you ovulate. After ovulation, and especially if you’re trying to conceive, this is when we want to start bringing that intensity back down so I’m not saying don’t exercise, but I’m saying reduce your intensity. But it’s a flow, so straight after ovulation, some of your sex hormones are still quite high, and they’re on their way to dropping. So you will still have the energy for the first few days after ovulation. So perhaps continue with whatever exercise you have been doing. But as you get towards the middle of your two week weight and definitely towards when your period would be coming, or hopefully not if you’re trying to conceive, that’s where we want to start bringing it back to gentle cardio. So swimming, walking, bike riding, gentle and slower weights, perhaps lighter weights as opposed to very heavy or very intense and we want to stay away from those hit workouts, power yoga, hot yoga, power Pilates, all that thing.

The more intense things, yes, definitely. Now, you mentioned earlier, what about people who aren’t currently having a period or having very irregular periods until they’re not sure where they’re at in their cycle? How should they approach that?

This is such a good question. And of course, it always comes down to what the reason is for the missing or irregular cycle. But I do find with my students who have PCOS, I mean, there is a level of insulin resistance to quite a lot of people with PCOS. So in those instances, we do want to wake up that connection between the brain and the ovaries. So to do that, we do need some slightly more energetic yoga practices, and they’re very specific in the way that they work. But I wouldn’t say they are high-intensity, but they are more energetic than some of the two-week weight type flows that we would do. But at the same time, it’s great to have this waking up of the hormonal system, but we do want to focus on that regulation too. So if someone hasn’t had a cycle for a while, it does put the body into quite a stressed and overwhelmed place and mentally and emotionally as well. Those restorative yoga practices are going to be incredibly helpful for bringing down those stress levels, helping to remind your brain that it is a safe time to conceive and it’s okay for the ovulation and the hormones to kick back in. So I would definitely say it would be a combination of both slightly more energetic flows but balancing that out with the restorative work as well.

Okay. Then do you see that as people start to do that, that they’ll more likely start to regain their cycle and then get a better idea, maybe where they’re at in that to adjust it to being more cyclical in their yoga practice?

Definitely. I see it quite often and especially in the case of the insulin resistance, which is something that is very hormonal and I wouldn’t say easy to work around, but you know why it’s happening. In other cases with hypothalamic amenorrhea, and it’s been many, many months or years that you haven’t had a period, things are a little more difficult, and it may have come from a different cause. I do think the nutrition piece is incredibly important when we’re talking about PCOS, and your listeners will be well aware of how important that is and I’m sure that if they are regular listeners, they know that there are things that they need to focus on throughout this time, but it is a holistic approach and when you’ve got the nutrition piece and perhaps some supplementation happening, but you’re just finding you want something a little bit extra to help yourself along, I do find that these practices are where things start to change for people.

When you’re coaching with yoga and fertility, do you talk a whole lot about the nutrition? Do you have them cycle that as well with their yoga or do you focus mostly on the yoga?

I focus mostly on the yoga, but I do talk about the nutrition and the supplementation piece as well. Now, I am not a nutritionist or naturopath. I do work with a functional nutritionist who has put together a lot of resources for me, and she can offer more personalized advice if a particular student wants to go down that route as well and I have compiled a lot of that information within my courses, but I do stress that it is general. It is general work and a lot of it is very, I wouldn’t say just common sense, but it is the first point of call that a nutritionist or a naturopath or a dietitian would then start to introduce you to if you are coming to them with PCOS. So it is general and broad, but yes, it is included.

Well, on nutrition, something we definitely talk a lot about here on the PCOS Repair podcast. But I think that sometimes we haven’t talked as much about where to pair that and there definitely can be some benefits of pairing certain ways of eating and certain ways during your first part of your cycle and the second part of your cycle. But I think a little bit too, what you were alluding to is it’s important to listen to your body and a lot of times your body will actually give you a lot of that advice for us if you’re listening to it and in tune with it. I think that, like you said, bringing that breath in and becoming more aware actually is very helpful in creating that awareness of what our body is needing at any given point in our cycle.

Definitely. It is the missing puzzle piece in a lot of cases, I find.

Yeah. so what else would you want our listeners today to know about yoga as they’re getting started or as they’re realizing how beneficial yoga can be for fertility, even if they have practiced yoga previously or currently? What else would you want someone to know as they start to create this in their fertility journey?

I think it’s really important to know that this isn’t an Instagrammy impossible practice to get started with. Literally, some of the practices are lying down with pillows on a yoga mat. That is yoga and a lot of people don’t realize this, that it isn’t about being physically capable or able. It really is about reconnecting with your body in a completely different way. So please don’t ever be put off by the thought that I’m not strong enough, or fit enough, or flexible enough to do yoga and there are so many ways that we can modify the practice. I mean, I have such an exercise science background that my anatomy knowledge is ingrained in my brain. When someone comes to me with an injury, it is very easy to modify and change the practice for them around other things that we could be doing. If you are worried that you’re not a yog and you’re not strong and you’re not flexible, I promise you that is the least of your worries.

It’s 100 % true. I can… Funny side story, I have done yoga for many, many years. Recently, my husband’s more of an athlete than I am. Does lots of weight lifting, running, cardio. He’s never done yoga in his life. I recently started doing yoga in the evenings after putting my kids to bed just like 10, 15 minutes, just purely almost for the relaxation effects, after about a week or two of me doing it, he started to join me. If you guys could have a video of the first couple of times he did this. I mean, he’s what you would consider a very good athlete, and he looked ridiculous. He probably had about five blocks stacked beneath his bun because he wasn’t even flexible enough to sit on his knees. Over the course of the last two, three months, he can actually go without some of the blocks that he used to use. I guess that just to share that is more just to say, look, you don’t have to be athletic, you don’t have to have great balance, you don’t have to be like you were saying, you don’t have to consider yourself someone who would have a lot of flexibility or be able to do this and you can still find ways of modifying and using blocks or whatever, different things and the benefits that he’s had, he says that he hardly ever takes any medication. But when he’s sick, he’ll take a nitrile, which has some Benadryl effect to it. He’s like, yoga makes me sleep so much better than a nitrile. He’s like, I can’t believe we weren’t doing this for years. This is the best thing ever that I can do for my sleep and my relaxation and stress level, so you don’t have to be coordinated or flexible or anything to get started with yoga, but it has some pretty awesome magic powers.

It does, it has magic powers and you were saying only in 10 or 15 minutes a day. How easy is that?

It’s so easy. In fact, it’s something where kinda like you were saying during your story of how you got into fertility yoga, it goes so much beyond that. We have removed our screen time from evenings and instead, we do… Technically our screen is on because we have someone guiding us through, but we’re not watching it, it’s more for audio. So we’re no longer scrolling through our phones at night before bed, we’re having some time together doing something that helps us sleep better, helps us decompress from the day, helps us be more limber and it’s the benefits go on and on, and on. Our kids sometimes will come out on the couch and watch us because they didn’t stay in bed like they were supposed to and then they’re into it. They want to do yoga with us and it carries that on to where the whole family is starting to get the benefits of it.

That is awesome.

Anything else that we want to make sure people are aware of as they start their yoga fertility journey?

Just know that it is a completely safe and gentle practice no matter where you are on your journey and all of the things that we do, especially in that two-week weight period, are completely safe if you are pregnant and it’s something that you can continue throughout your early pregnancy as well.

Yeah, it’s a good question. So is there anything that you would change? So you mentioned there’s the two-week weight phase of how you would practice yoga. Is there anything that you strongly change as you enter that first trimester once you do become pregnant, or is it more of the same?

It is more of the same. So especially if someone has been on a fertility journey for a while, and this is probably a very stressful time for them, the benefits of restorative yoga, which is the type of yoga that really helps on that nervous system regulation, is what we continue and we do gentle movements and mobility exercises to keep blood flowing to the reproductive organs, to nourish the uterus and the growing baby, but we do a lot of work where it is just focusing on breath and positioning your body in a way that is completely comfortable when you are relaxed and you can get into that regulated state. So yes, the first trimester practices are very gentle and very similar to what you do during the two-week week. Once you’re in your second trimester and we start experiencing things like public pain and lower back pain, then we start to change the practice a little bit around strength and keeping the body stable. But yes, in that first trimester, it’s quite similar.

That’s good for listeners to be able to know they can just continue their practice and don’t have to all of a sudden shake everything up. They can continue to rely on that relaxation and that stress release.

Definitely.

You mentioned your YouTube channel. Where else can our listeners find you to learn more about what you do and how to incorporate yoga in their fertility journey?

So you can have a look at the different programs and offerings that I have on my website, which is www.Elementpilatesyoga.com. I spend most of my time if you want to connect with me personally, on Instagram and TikTok. My handle is jen.elementpilatesyoga.

And I’ll put all of those links in our show notes today so that those are easy to find and you can just click on over through those then you had mentioned you have a resource that you would be willing to share with us. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how listeners can find that?

Absolutely. So my free fertility yoga guide is something that I recommend for anyone who is new to this practice. If you’re trying to conceive, you’re just starting a journey, or if you’ve been on your journey for a while. So this goes through yoga practices, breath work, meditation, and cycle sinking. It’s a free guide, it’s quite extensive, there’s a lot of info in there, but it will really work through how you want to be modifying your exercise, your yoga practice, and your daily life in order to work in sync with your cycle and of course, this has all the flow and benefits to your hormones as well.

Amazing, I know everyone’s going to want to grab that because I know I get a lot of questions about how to incorporate various exercises into their monthly cycle, and I am not a yoga instructor. So this will be extremely helpful to help answer some of those questions for them.

Awesome.

Well, thank you, Jennifer. It has been a pleasure to have you here on the podcast and thank you so much for all of your amazing information and the gift of your time to my listeners. I will be sure to link all of those resources in the show notes so you guys can go down, scroll down if you’re on whatever listening platform. If you’re on the web page, they’ll be below the link to listen so that you can find all of those. Jennifer, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today.

My absolute pleasure, Ashlene, anytime. This is such a lovely chat.

Yes, it was. I really enjoyed it. All right, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS fertility meal guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.