Yoga isn’t just good for your body; it can also benefit your mind and spirit. Practiced regularly, yoga can help you cope with stress, improve your mental health, and even promote weight loss.
Yoga helps you to relax, slow your breath, and shift your brain’s reaction from the fight-or-flight response to the relaxation response. This can improve your mental and emotional well-being, and even reduce chronic conditions like high blood pressure and anxiety.
Improves Muscle Tone
When you do yoga consistently, it can improve your muscle tone. Some yoga styles, such as ashtanga and power yoga, are very physical, but even less vigorous yoga, such as hatha, can offer strength and endurance benefits.
Many of the poses in a yoga class target specific muscles to strengthen them and build strength. For example, downward dog and upward dog strengthen the hamstrings and quadriceps.
To get the most out of your practice, find a yoga studio with classes that meet your personal fitness level. It’s also important to choose a teacher who knows how to instruct your body.
In addition to toning your muscles, yoga can improve balance and flexibility, and improve mood and sleep. It can also reduce stress and tension.
Increases Flexibility
Yoga poses are a great way to increase flexibility and build strength. These stretches can be done in the comfort of your own home and are an effective addition to any workout routine.
Increasing flexibility takes practice, patience and a calm mind. While yoga focuses on physical movement, it also incorporates meditation and philosophy.
In a study of people who had no previous yoga experience, participants who practiced it twice a week for eight weeks showed improvements in muscle strength and endurance, flexibility and cardio-respiratory fitness.
This is because yoga teaches the body to hold positions for a longer time, which allows muscles to go deeper into the stretch. The yogis who developed yoga understood that a certain amount of passive tension is required to facilitate stretching, so they incorporated exercises that stimulated the erector spinae (the large muscles on either side of the spine) as they inhale and released them as they exhaled.
Strengthens the Heart
Many forms of exercise are linked to improved heart health, lowering blood pressure and reducing cholesterol levels. But there’s another form of physical activity that’s gaining attention as a way to improve your cardiovascular health: yoga.
The practice of yoga involves a series of body poses and breathing exercises that focus on improving strength, flexibility and balance. While cardio exercises like running on the treadmill and riding bikes can be high-intensity and strenuous, yoga is a gentle form of cardiovascular exercise that’s easy to fit into a busy schedule.
A 2015 study found that adding yoga to an exercise regimen can lower blood pressure and reduce your risk for cardiovascular disease. In the study, participants were split into two groups and given a three-month yoga and stretching regimen. The group that added yoga saw significant reductions in systolic blood pressure, resting heart rate and 10-year cardiovascular risk.
Reduces Stress
Yoga reduces stress through a variety of methods, including breathing and mindfulness practices. These techniques help shift the body’s response from the sympathetic nervous system, which is linked to fight-or-flight response, to the parasympathetic system, which is calming and restorative.
It also decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which can improve sleep, digestion, and immune system health. It also helps people cope with depression and anxiety by restoring dopamine and serotonin in the brain.
Yoga has recently received more research attention for its mental health benefits, especially for stress management. However, the mechanisms that explain these benefits are still unclear.
