How long should I hang to decompress my spine?

There's no magic number of minutes here, and that's actually the point. Everything starts small, sometimes just a few seconds of hanging at a time, and your body tells you when it's ready for more. Pushing for a long hang on day one isn't the goal; consistency is.

Think of it this way: gravity presses down on your spine all day long, every day. Hanging in the lianas flips that, gently stretching instead of compressing. Picture the disc between two vertebrae like a little sponge - all day it gets squeezed, and hanging lets it soak up moisture and space again. That's decompression: space comes back, pressure comes off. It doesn't take a marathon session to start that process, just a bit of unweighting, done regularly.

In a class, this happens in short, guided stretches, mixed with breath and movement, never held to the point of strain. The three rules we build every session around are relax, breathe, and never push through pain - if something feels off, we back out and soften rather than hold longer.

For pace, most people feel a bit lighter after their very first time. Any tightness or adjustment period tends to ease around class 4 to 6, and a stable, settled feeling usually takes about 10 classes. One to two sessions a week is plenty; the body absorbs this kind of work better with a little often than a lot at once.

If you're ever in Bali, our studio in the Canggu area runs small guided classes where a trainer paces all of this for you: https://bookgravity.com/canggu