Pre-Wedding Yoga: 5 Benefits for Brides (and Grooms!)

From booking the right venue to shopping for your wedding needs, there are numerous tasks to tick off prior to your wedding day. The checklist may be truly long enough to make you feel overwhelmed and unnerved. After hours and days of conceptualizing, planning, fitting, and canvassing materials for the wedding, some even feel body pain, muscle tension, headache, and many other physical discomforts. In fact, even the most laid-back brides can feel the pre-wedding stress at some point.

As we want to be in our best shape before and during our big day, how do we get that well-needed beauty rest and rejuvenation?

There are many ways to achieve these—one is through yoga! This ancient practice for wellness has been seen to help one relieve stress and combat physical distress.

Yoga for your grand day

Let’s discuss yoga’s benefits for brides-to-be (even grooms-to-be) and start breathing them in.

1. Reconnect to your core and release stress

Per the National Institutes of Health, scientific evidence shows that yoga can support stress management, mindfulness, and mental health.

Surely, the long wedding preparations will induce stress. To help you and your groom-to-be manage stress better, it helps to do yoga poses like Corpse Pose (Savasana) and Eagle Pose (Garudasana). Such mood-enhancing and stress-busting practices can help couples cultivate resilience and better handle daily life stresses and strains.

There are pressures associated with external concerns—what to wear, how to look, the bridal bouquet, and many more. With yoga, brides-to-be can help themselves calm down, reconnect to their core, and work through their emotions better. This way, they can also reflect on how eager they are to get married to the love of their lives.

By aligning your body through your stretches, you can achieve your full lung capacity that when you breathe deeply and softly, your mind feels calmer while your body feels more relaxed. The calmness and connectedness can surely remain even after the big day.

2. Ground yourself

Have cold feet about your marriage? Experiencing pre-wedding jitters? Try yoga to help ground yourself and feel relaxed.

We constantly think of, worry about, and imagine what will happen during the wedding day. These mean that we’re allowing our energy to flow in various directions. Staying grounded means allowing our energy to instead flow in a downward direction.

To help ground yourself, try Malasana, a restorative and grounding pose that allows your energy to flow downwards. Consider restorative yoga, which is designed to gradually open the body while triggering the parasympathetic nervous system to initiate a healing response.

3. Clear your mind

With so many things to consider and happenings to process before the wedding day, minds can get cluttered. Admittedly, it's challenging to find clarity when everything seems tangled.

To help clear your mind, consider yoga. You can try Asanas to foster mind clarity. Some poses include Inverted Asanas and Forward Bends, balancing yoga poses, and seated yoga poses. These can help you still your thoughts, let go of rumination to find focus and direction, get things done one step at a time, prioritize the most important things for your wedding, and keep your creative juices flowing. Who knows, aside from all the planning you’re doing, you may even be able to come up with a captivating wedding hashtag that’ll totally work.

4. Physical relief

You may have to stand a lot and exhaust your feet during wedding shopping and fitting. With yoga, you can find physical relief through its different poses.

You and your groom-to-be can practice the Triangle Pose (Trikonasana) to strengthen your ankle, thigh, and knee areas. Here, you stretch these parts of your body, promoting better blood circulation and easing up wedding stress. It also helps to try Mountain Pose (Tadasana). This can stimulate your nervous system and regulate your menstrual cycle. If you’re walking down the aisle on your period, try using period underwear. This will surely keep you collected and confident while wearing your alluring white dress on your wedding day.

A week before the wedding, you may find yourself struggling with sleeping—perhaps because of excitement and stress. To help yourself feel relaxed to sleep better, do the Legs-Up-the-Wall Pose for five to 10 minutes.

Of course, there are many more poses with a different set of benefits to check out. You can look up plans online, sign up with a yoga instructor, and search for yoga Instagrammers for inspo.

5. Tone up

Some want to tone up their bodies to strut their wedding outfits in style and slay their walk down the aisle. Interestingly, yoga can help you have long lean muscles and develop good posture over time.

To specifically tone your body, try Vinyasa yoga. This is good for toning your abdominal area and shoulders. Doing inversion poses such as Down Dog can also effectively fortify your arm and shoulder muscles. Should you want to gain abs, then poses like Boat Pose (Navasana) and Plank (Phalakasana) are the best ways to go. If there are specific body parts that you and your groom-to-be want to focus on improving, customized yoga class plans can reap rewards.

Capping off with intention setting pose

Start sitting up tall, then as you inhale, reach up for all your marriage hopes and dreams. As you exhale, bring them close to your heart. This movement does not only help keep your posture tall; it also helps you and your groom-to-be look forward to your dreams and beyond.

Consider also the tips above and you’ll surely kiss your pre-wedding stress goodbye!

Images from styled brand shoot at The Reset Conference led and styled by Alisa Nicholle

Model: Janaya Combs

Location: Lightbox Studio, Lexington, KY

Makeup: Sarah Lynn; Jalise Cartier

Hair: Hair by Maddie Woff; Emma Hope