Benefits of Yoga
Enjoy the numerous benefits of yoga when practicing frequently.
Taking care of your body and of your mind improves your overall health,
makes you feeling great and looking better.
You obviously guessed it already, but numerous studies prove why you should integrate yoga into your daily life. When you turn to yoga at one stage in your life you want to taking care of a specific issue in your body. Many illnesses and chronic pains are caused by imbalances in your body and mind. And while you start practicing yoga for a specific issue, in most cases you will enjoy also the side-effects of feeling better and looking younger, and building strength and suppleness in your body. Based on a recent study, almost all yoga practitioners say they do it for wellness reasons or disease prevention.
Reduce stress
85% of yoga students report reduced stress levels after their yoga class. Stress is omnipresent in our modern lives and has a great impact on your health. By reducing stress you will feel more balanced and less prone to illnesses or chronic pains.
Instead of having a poorly regulated repsonse to stress, yoga reduces perceived stress and anxiety, as well as inflammations. At the same time, yoga decreases physiological arousal — like reducing the heart rate, lowering blood pressure, and easing respiration. As the Harvard Mental Health Letter states, yoga makes you live with less stress while increasing the tolerance to pain. By reducing stress you will equally increase your mental focus.
“… the yoga practitioners had the highest pain tolerance and lowest pain-related brain activity during the MRI. The study underscores the value of techniques, such as yoga, that can help a person regulate their stress and, therefore, pain responses.”
Eliminate back pain
80% of western people will encounter back pain in their lives. An expertly guided yoga class, will help you understand the proper alignment of your body and its limbs, as well as how the muscles are involved. An experienced senior yoga teacher will give you helpful advice and exercises to deal with acute back pain. Practicing yoga frequently in a class adapted to your level and with precise alignments will free your back from pain. Back pain may originate from different causes. Sometimes major mental stress makes your back ache, sometimes it comes more from physical issues.
Become flexible
Look at yourself being stuck in a sedentary position for a good part of your day. Your body stiffens and chances are that your mind suffers a bit, too. Practice yoga regularly 2 - 3 times per week and you will rediscover your flexibility. Yoga asanas also increase lubrication of the joints, ligaments and tendons. Yoga helps athletes and amateurs to keep their bodies supple. Not being flexible is the number one reason that beginners do not want to start practicing yoga. Remember: You practice yoga because you want to become flexible!
Improve Your Balance
The modern, sedentary lifestyle decreases the natural sense for balance. As you practice yoga barefoot, you learn how to control your feet, which contain 26 bones and 33 joints! By improving your balance with yoga, you will equally improve your athletic capabilities in your favourite sports, be it skiing, snowboarding or surfing.
Tone Your Muscles
The low impact routine of yoga offers a complete exercise for the entire body while using your bodyweight. By using your bodyweight, you also learn to trust your body and to move gracefully. Over the past decades more and more people are leaving the old gyms mentality to practice yoga exclusively.
Control your weight
When you practice asana based yoga, you will burn calories. Depending on your body and the intensity, in one hour of poweryoga approximatively 400-500 calories are burnt. Besides the loss in calories, the wholistic practice of yoga reduces food cravings. This leads to increased self-esteem and a better body image and the will in taking care of your body by feeding it healthy foods.
Cardiovascular Benefits
Dynamic yoga flow classes such as vinyasa, poweryoga or hatha flow will increase your heart rate, lung capacity, respiratory function and boost circulation. As the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology states, asana based yoga styles may significantly improve cardio-metabolic health.
Sleep Better
Improve your sleep as yoga helps you to control your breath and your thoughts. Many people suffer from stress related symptons such as anxiety which may lead to insomnia. This leads to a lack of sleep and inevitably to an overtired body and mind. Do you think you take the best decisions when being tired?
Being rested also improves your digestion.
Improve Mindfulness
Yoga focuses on the whole person – mind, body and spirit. While in a yoga class you work in a group, the focus of your practice is drawn internally. This creates heightened awareness within your body and mind. While you might think that this leads to a narcisstic egocentrical behaviour, quite the contrary takes place. People who practice regularly several times a week definitively improve their resilience to stress and expand their mindfulness from themselves to others.
Memory and Mental Focus
Yoga helps you increase your awareness and your focus. In short, yoga improves your productivity greatly. Besides the postural yoga asana, different breathing techniques help eliminate the chatter of the mind. After your final relaxation period at the end of class, your body feels reenergized and the mind refreshed.
Slow the Ageing Process
While our world is built on a cycle of life, from the creation to the decay, yoga may help slow down and even reverse certain aging processes. In a study published in 2012, by the University of California in San Francisco and Nobel prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn and the University of California in Los Angeles found that 12 minutes of daily yoga meditation for eight weeks increased the telomerase activity by 43 percent. Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age. They are combinations of DNA and protein that protect the ends of chromosomes and help them remain stable. When telomeres shorten, the cells age and die quicker. This is an indicator of slowing down the aging process as the more active longer telomeres enzymes are, the healthier a person is. Based on these findings, the practice of meditation may improve the cognitive ability, the positivity of our thoughts and an improved overall health and quality of life.
Yoga Therapy
While yoga offers tremendous health benefits and helps improving certain ailments, yoga should be mainly considered as a prevention technique. A experienced yoga teacher with at least 10+ years of practical experience can offer relief in case of minor boo-boos and give you helpful alternatives to deal with larger issues. However, in case of chronic pain or a serious disease, injury or ailment, you always should consult your doctor first. Unless a yoga instructor has an official medical background, yoga does not replace a therapy prescribed by your health professional.
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