Dubbed “alien yoga” on Instagram because of how your stomach looks while doing the movement, the new exercise involves contorting your stomach into strange poses.
Officially recognised as Nauli, alien yoga is said to cleanse the internal organs and tone the abdominal region.
The strange shape is achieved by emptying your lungs, pulling in your abdomen under your rib cage and isolating and contracting the central, left and right side of the abdominal muscles.
While the exercise claims to have health benefits, it is not one that’s commonly taught or practiced in Western yoga classes.
“Nauli is something that real yoga practitioners tend to keep to themselves, and newer, less experienced teachers don’t learn because it’s very hard to master as it involves a very different breathing technique,” says Simon Borg-Olivier, Director of Yoga Synergy in Sydney.
As popular yoga practises often require you to focus on breathing more, to successfully achieve the Nauli technique, you must be able to blow out all of your breath for at least a minute.
“Society has become obsessed with hardening the core and opening the chest, and this technique is not about that at all,” says Simon.
According to the Huffington Post, many advise that pregnant women, and those with hernias, hypertension, heart disease, ulcers, or various gastrointestinal ailments do not practice nauli.
Even for a fit and healthy person, nauli should not be painful — it should always still be practiced with care and caution.
“Some people can end up hyperventilating because they can’t master the breathing technique and with that comes a risk of fainting and falling over,” warns Simon.
“Inaccurate breathing can also cause negative pressure changes in the body that affect the blood vessels and potentially the brain.”
For those who would rather stick to normal yoga or no yoga at all, you can keep up with the weird and wonderful fitness trend on social media.
@aubrymarie, @kellygreenyoga, and @yellabella are some of the yogis who have been demonstrating their nauli moves on Instagram and YouTube.
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