ELDOA
Restore Space, Relieve Pain, and Improve Posture with ELDOA
Experience a self-care technique designed to give your spine room to breathe with ELDOA at Elevation Fitness. We specialize in guided postural exercises that move beyond typical stretching to target the space within your joints, improving mechanics, circulation, and disc health.
Our sessions provide focused, hands-on guidance through each posture, helping you relieve pain, rehydrate spinal discs, and build lasting body awareness — whether you’re managing a specific issue or simply investing in long-term spinal health.
What is ELDOA?
ELDOA (translated as LOADS in English) is a set of postural exercises designed to increase the space within a chosen joint. As this space is created, the body experiences a range of benefits, including:
- Improved joint mechanics
- Increased blood flow
- Reduced pressure on spinal discs
- Spinal disc rehydration
- Better muscle tone and posture
- Reduced pain
- Greater well-being and body awareness
How ELDOA Exercises Work
ELDOA is a postural self-normalizing technique developed by world-renowned French osteopath Dr. Guy Voyer to widen the space within a chosen joint. Each exercise creates fascial tension to fix the vertebra below, while contracting muscles at the extreme range of motion to normalize the vertebra above the targeted disc.
For example, just one minute a day of a specific ELDOA exercise can relieve disc compression between L4-L5 — one of the most common sites for disc bulges, protrusions, herniations, and degenerative disc disease.
Dr. Voyer designed an ELDOA exercise for every joint in the spine, from the base of the skull down to the sacroiliac joint.
Participant Experience with ELDOA Class
I took a group ELDOA class with a personal trainer and ELDOA student practitioner in Pensacola, FL. The 45-minute session was a typical ELDOA for wellness class, with a mix of postures each held for 60 seconds. The basic postures were performed sitting, lying down, half-kneeling, or on all fours. The class didn't feel like cardio or strength training — or really like any workout I've done before. The closest thing I can compare it to is yoga, but only because ELDOA involves holding postures; otherwise, the similarities end there. The goal of ELDOA isn't to gain flexibility. "When you stretch, you are elongating a muscle, but when you do an ELDOA, you are contracting muscles. ELDOA works with the nervous system, rather than on muscle flexibility."