About Yamuna Body Rolling

What is Yamuna Body Rolling?

It’s Health, Wellness & Massage rolled into one!

Yamuna Body Rolling, or YBR for short, is a revolutionary holistic healing approach to health and wellness using balls designed exclusively for this practice. This natural therapy consists of a series of routines using 6 to 10-inch balls. Unlike other ball exercises, YBR goes far beyond random movement and stretch. It allows you to work specific muscles in detail, to create suppleness in tight areas and optimize range of motion. Yamuna Body Rolling reeducates muscles and stimulates bone, creating positive, permanent changes in the body.

With YBR, mastering a sport or fitness practice, achieving maximal flexibility or feeling a degree of better that enhances everything one does in life, becomes reality. YBR is a powerful, interactive, relaxing deep-tissue massage that a person can do themselves by rolling the body over specially designed balls. The YBR ball applies traction that creates space around joints and vertebrae and lengthens muscles. By following specific routines, a person can unwind and free up the entire body, giving all its parts the space needed to function optimally, while eliminating restrictions and relieving the effects of everyday stress and tension. YBR is easy. Anyone can do it, anywhere, no matter their age or physical condition.

YBR can provide relief to anyone and help those suffering from conditions such as headaches/migraines, sciatica, strains and sprains, shoulder, knee and ankle injuries, scoliosis, MS, herniated discs, IBS, shin splints, bladder problems, pinched nerves, fatigue and many more. It also improves flexibility, range of motion and can be a crucial tool in rehabilitation and injury-prevention strategies.

How Does It Work?

Yamuna Body RollingYamuna Body Rolling works the way a hands-on practitioner works only using a ball. The ball replaces hands as it moves on muscles to stretch them, dislodge tension and discomfort, increase blood flow, and promote healing.

Lying over the ball, you literally roll your body out almost like dough, stretching and elongating your muscles. The YBR routines follow specific sequences that match the body’s own logic and order. Starting where each muscle begins, at its origin, you roll toward where it attaches to the point called its insertion.

The Yamuna Body Rolling practice has earned respect from chiropractors, physical therapists, Yoga instructors, Pilates and Gyrotonic instructors, massage therapists, bodyworkers, fitness instructors and dance teachers.

“The beauty of Yamuna Body Rolling is that it takes you from the origin of the muscle at the tendon, elongating the muscle while stimulating the bone and soft tissue. Working with the body’s own gravity, the exercises ease movement in the muscles to the point of relaxation, offering one of the finest weight-bearing exercises, with the benefits of a deep self-massage.”
-Ms. Fitness Magazine

“The idea behind Body Rolling is that tension starts where the muscle originates-in the dense fibrous tendons that anchor them to bone. It’s this precise attention to stretching muscles from tendon to tendon that makes the exercise unique…After 15 minutes of doing the exercises on both legs, I can bend over and place my palms flat against the floor, a move I can usually only execute at the end of a two-hour yoga class.”
– Catherine Guthrie, Health Magazine

Yamuna Zake, Creator, Innovator, Educator, Bodyworker

“I’m a master body therapist, creator of the YAMUNA® Foot Fitness (YFF) system for keeping the feet in shape, the YAMUNA® Body Rolling fitness and therapy system (YBR), and the YAMUNA® Body Logic (YBL) hands-on therapy. These three practices combine injury prevention, healing, and wellness that lasts a lifetime. My philosophy is to empower people to take care of their own bodies. If everyone knew how to care for their body, we could prevent many painful conditions that age us before our time.”

Yamuna (Ya-men-ah), named after a river in India, has shared her fluid energy with thousands as an internationally acclaimed Educator, Bodyworker, Herbalist and Aromatherapist. A woman whose life is devoted to enhancing well-being, she is known for taking each of her specialties to new heights. Yamuna Body Rolling is a key example-the unique system she devised providing health, wellness and massage all rolled into one.

Worth noting: Yamuna means river. Her innovative work is all about flow, distributing positive energy everywhere it touches, like a river itself. Yamuna Zake (rhymes with lake) has been a force for healing and wellness all of her life.

A certified Hatha Yoga instructor by age 16, she completed her B.S. in alternative education and wrote her Master’s Thesis on Integrating Yogic breathing techniques and Yoga balance postures into mainstream elementary level education.

She partnered to open New York’s Serenity Yoga Center in 1977. Constantly exploring and expanding her work in the healing arts, she delved into Herbology and Aromatherapy as Yoga complements. People started coming from all over to experience Yamuna’s special blends of herbs and essential oils to help their particular problems. In August 1979, Yamuna’s world changed with the birth of her daughter, Yael.

During labor, Yamuna suffered an injury that destabilized her left hip. Unable to find adequate treatment, she experimented with Yoga to heal herself. Yamuna Body Logic was born, which is a type of massage using the elbow to create deeper muscle release. As potent as Body Logic is, Yamuna came to believe that its limitation was that it required working with a trained practitioner. Her goal was to give people a way to take care of their own bodies—at home, work, and when traveling. Thus, the birth of body rolling. Yamuna began rolling on a toy ball as a way to provide relief without the assistance from a practitioner. Eventually, she met with a manufacturer and spent five years designing and creating the balls we roll on today.

As word spread of how she was helping people experience rapid and profound physical benefits, Yamuna soon had a full-time practice healing people through a combination of Body Logic and her uniquely formulated herbal preparations. Increasingly, her clientele came to include world leaders in business, government and the arts. They were seeking what we all seek: enhanced health and wellness; relief from physical disorders.

Over and over, the theme of her life emerges: to help people feel better, move better, gain strength, eliminate pain. If creating maximum strength and suppleness in your body is what you have in mind, then you have come to the right place.

In 2003, Yamuna established headquarters in New York City. Her studio is situated in the West Village of Manhattan. People from all over the world come to her studio for training, classes, small group sessions and individual sessions. Yamuna herself works with people in New York and also travels throughout the world, sharing her teachings and work. For more information, please visit www.yamunausa.com

To set up a rolling session or to order equipment, please contact your local Certified Yamuna Body Rolling Practitioner. Your local practitioner is: Becky Bridson, MS, CSCS