Benefits of Practicing Yoga. It is no secret how yoga can increase strength and flexibility, ease body aches, and improve bone health. But there is so much more to it than you already know. Over the years, yoga has become more popular with the help of social media but it is not just setting up the mat and doing physical poses–it is way more than that. Yoga is an entire lifestyle, it involves a wide range of meditative and self-disciplinary practices like chanting, meditation, breath work, and even selfless action.
The word “yoga” comes from the root word “yuj,” which means “to yoke” or “to bind.” It is an ancient and complex practice from Indian philosophy. Many practitioners use activewear to enhance their overall performance in every yoga session and make them feel good about themselves too. So whether yoga is something recommended to you by a physical therapist or you are just someone looking for new ways how you can improve your overall well-being, go and grab that mat because we have summed up the essential benefits of practising yoga.
What Are The Health Benefits Of Practicing Yoga?
- Improves Your Flexibility
Flexibility is the ability of the muscle joints to move in a range of motion efficiently and pain-free which makes it the most important component of physical fitness. Practising yoga, especially for adults ages 65 and older can drastically improve overall physical fitness for one of the natural effects of ageing is the reduction in flexibility.
- Improve Cardio and Circulatory Health
Yoga can be a heart booster. Doing yoga may help improve blood circulation, and lower blood pressure, blood glucose levels, cholesterol, respiratory function, and heart rate. Grandmaster Akshar, a yoga expert, says that mindfulness-based exercises like meditation and yoga aid in the prevention, management, and recovery of stroke in people.
- Improves Sleep Quality
Yoga does not just improve your physical health, it is also good for one’s mental health. Practising yoga before bedtime is an incredible way to alleviate insomnia, and improve sleep quality and duration. Make it a habit every night to get your favourite fitness clothes and do some yoga before falling into a deep sleep.
- Relieves Stress and Reduces Anxiety
There are a lot of things that can stress us out every day, this is why finding something that can help us improve our mood is very important. Dr. Nevins, an osteopathic physician says that yoga can create mental clarity and calmness, increases body awareness, relieves chronic stress, relaxes the mind, centres attention, and sharpens concentration.
- Promotes Better Body Posture
Poor posture can cause neck, back, and other joint pain especially if you are someone who sits for hours in the office or hardly moves around. One of the main focuses of yoga is doing each movement with proper posture. Yoga poses such as Tadasana, tiger pose, cow face, and many more can reverse bad posture over time. Go get the mat along with your awesome activewear, sis!
- Enhanced Cognitive Performance and Memory
When you do yoga, your brain develops new connections. There are days when the brain becomes overwhelmed with emotions, which makes little space to perform activities of daily living well. Practising yoga is a good choice for stress management. By reducing stress, the brain has the freedom to execute duties at its full capacity. Through this, your brain becomes sharp, strengthening the part of your brain that plays a crucial role in memory, alertness, positive thoughts, and processing speed.
- Treats PTSD and Chronic Pain
Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder is very unfortunate and challenging, which can affect both physical and emotional health. Yoga therapy can be an effective treatment for PTSD since it works with both the mind and the body. Yoga therapy may help people return to a baseline physiological state more quickly after a distressing memory is triggered. It’s thought that regular yoga practice trains the ANS to be more dynamically adaptive (1) and that mindfulness meditation (a component of yoga) can lead to positive changes in neural functioning, including the reduction in the size of the amygdala and increased hippocampal volume (2).
- Yoga Can Ease Menopausal Symptoms
There is so much more to yoga than what we already know. Your body will go through a lot of changes during the menopausal period—your stomach and digestive system may be upset often, your emotions are off, your mind feels foggy, and you may encounter trouble sleeping. If you are someone going through these symptoms, you do not have to be scared anymore. There are a lot of yoga classes you can sign up for that help you with your menopausal discomforts.
- Helps Your Body To Recover From The Negative Effects Of Smoking
Smoking is probably one of the most harmful practices in the world. Like all forms of addiction, smoking provides an illusion of escape—a pastime that certainly comes at a very expensive price. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to beat this addiction and one of them is doing yoga. Most medical experts recommend this exercise as it helps heal your body, mind, and emotions, all at the same time. It detoxifies your body, lungs, and blood. Some of the physical poses that you can do if you are someone trying to recover from your smoking habits are eagle, tree, cobra, bow, and cat-cow poses. All of these poses are designed to further open the air pathways in the body and encourage fuller and deeper breaths.
- It Makes You Happier
We all deserve to be happy even if it means adding more fitness clothes to your closet or eating the whole cake in the fridge. Practising yoga is a mind-body exercise. It helps you connect to nature and yourself. It calms your thoughts and improves the quality of your life. It can help you boost your self-confidence and make you a better version of yourself—for yourself.
Wrapping It Up
Yoga can be one of the most therapeutic and valuable things you can give to yourself. It does not require much from you—only an open mind and the willingness to learn and take it all in.
So if you are planning on doing this, you must know the importance of wearing proper fitness clothes. Check out our endless choices of activewear at Kate Galliano online!
