Benefits of Yoga

Derived from the word “yuji” that means yoke or union, yoga is a special practice developed years ago to align the body to the mind and make them resonate in the same frequency.

It combines practices such as meditation, poses designed to reduce stress, relaxation and breathing exercises.

The booming popularity of yoga has been linked to the many mental and physical benefits that yoga practitioners are enjoying, ranging from better eating habits, reduced sicknesses and stress, to more enjoyable sex experiences among many others.

To give you a better understanding of the benefits of yoga, and all the more reason to start practicing yoga, here are some of its major benefits.

• Relieves Stress

With most of yoga poses emphasizing on controlling your breathing alternates, and relaxation of your muscles, yoga has been proven to rapidly reduce stress and anxiety.

When yoga is combined with meditation, you are able to align your mind and body to a state of ultimate relaxation, rare to get under normal body functioning conditions, or any other sport.

To demonstrate the power of yoga on relieving stress, a study was conducted featuring 24 women who regarded themselves as emotionally stressed.

After undergoing a 3-month yoga program, the women had significantly lower levels of fatigue, depression, anxiety and stress, and the levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) had also decreased massively.

Improved Flexibility

The first and most obvious benefit of yoga is increasing flexibility.

It’s no wonder during your first class you won’t be able to comfortably do a cross legged sitting position without experiencing a back pain, leave alone touching your toes.

But as you progress, postures that were seemingly difficult will start becoming easy and the pains will also disappear.

The initial pains are no serious conditions and as mentioned they will eventually disappear. They are usually caused by stretching tight joints.

• Perfects your Posture

With increased body flexibility, you will be able to correct most if not all of your postures. If you experience neck, back and other muscle and joint pains, it could be possible that they are caused by bad postures, and the only solution is correcting it.

With yoga, you will be able to erect and align your head and neck to the spine, with the effect of reduced fatigue at the end of the day, neck and back pain, and other joint problems.

Improved posture has also been proven to prevent illnesses such as degenerative arthritis of the spine, all the more reason to start correcting your posture.

• Increased Muscle Strength

Unlike building muscles through lifting weights, yoga enables you to build body muscles without losing flexibility.

Building muscles is essential to maintaining good health since they protect our bodies from conditions such back pain, arthritis, and also maintaining upright posture during old age.

• Increased Blood Flow

The relaxation exercises practiced in yoga definitely improves blood circulation especially to the feet and hands.

The deep inhales and exhales also increases uptake of oxygen by the blood to the cells, by boosting hemoglobin levels and red blood cells, hence increasing performance.

Poses such as inverted head and handstands are believed to promote flow of toxic blood back to the heart where it is in turn oxygenated in the lungs. This can be essential for people with heart or kidney problems.

Other poses such as the seated twist which feature extreme organs twisting, are believed to squeeze out venous blood from the organs and allow flow of oxygenated blood back to the organs once the twist is over.

• Increased Body and Self Awareness

The sole purpose of yoga is aligning our body system to the mind leading to relaxation. Through this, you are able to learn and understand more about how body works and get to like it more, hence increasing your confidence.

This is being achieved nowadays through the rising practice of nude or naked yoga. The other benefit as stated by Dr. Nevins is that you are able to detect physical problems early enough and take the necessary preventive actions.

• Improved heart Rate

Most people believe that increased heart rate can only be achieved through cardiovascular exercises, but this is not so.

Although not all yoga is aerobic, if done vigorously, or take ashtanga or flow classes, it can elevate your heart rate up into the aerobic range.

From another perspective, practicing the slow yoga stances can also boost your ability to perform better in cardiovascular exercises.

It has further been proven that yoga increases your endurance, improves oxygen uptake during exercises and also lowers the resting heart rate.

• Makes You Happier

This is pretty obvious and expected. One study has proved that consistent yoga practice reduces depression by significantly increasing serotonin levels (a chemical associated with regulating mood, and social behavior). It also reduces levels of monoamine oxidase and cortisol.

Apart from this, the improved management of stress and anxiety will also definitely make you happier and enjoy almost everything in life.

• Better Eating habits

One thing yoga will help you do is start appreciating food as just fuel. You will start managing eating habits by eating only what will power your body and leaving out the rest.

You will also be able to avoid emotional eating habits, hence avoiding weight gain.

Furthermore, the constant body movement also burns calories though not to such levels as of cardiovascular exercises.

• Improved Focus

One of the key components of yoga is meditation, which emphasizes on focusing at the present. Studies have proved that regular meditation boosts memory, creativity, body coordination, problem solving and IQ scores among many others.

There are so many other benefits that come with yoga and these are just but a few.

If you have not yet made up your mind to start yoga, I hope you will find some other motivation to start, but I would really encourage you to.

However, if you are beating your chest saying am starting this tomorrow or next week, check out some of the poses you can start doing right now at home, to give you more flexibility and a taste of what to expect.

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