Yoga is one of the oldest disciplines as far as fitness, health, and wellness are concerned. In addition to benefiting your physical fitness, yoga is known to have tremendous benefits to one’s mental and spiritual health. Especially when combined with meditation and breathing exercises, the benefits of yoga poses are a powerful way to achieve a balanced overall state between your mind, body, and spirit.
From improving balance to enhancing flexibility, conditioning the muscles, improving strength, promoting weight loss, improving circulation, and promoting cardiovascular health, the reasons to start practicing yoga are endless. This is not to forget that it makes an awesome activity to relieve stress, curb anxiety, and promote mental function.
Science has also shown that yoga can help promote better sleep. In other words, we’d run out of time listing the numerous physical health benefits one can get from just a few minutes of yoga every day. As the guys from https://www.889yoga.com point out, yoga is gaining popularity around the world to emerge as one of the most widely practiced exercises. For this reason, the demand for good yoga clothes and yoga gear is increasingly going up.
To delve a bit deeper into this, here are some amazing benefits of yoga to your mind and body.
Mind Benefits of Yoga
Stress Relief and Fighting Depression
One of the mental benefits of yoga is that it promotes a calm and relaxed mental state. According to scientific studies, yoga has been shown to reduce the secretion of the stress hormone cortisol by the adrenal gland, which leads to a stress relief effect. It even works better when used alongside other stress-alleviating techniques such as meditation. The anti-depressant effect of yoga can also help reduce the symptoms, progression, and severity of depression.
Promote Sleep Quality
Sleep quality is a fundamental aspect as far as human health is concerned. People with poor sleep quality are often at a higher risk of suffering from a wide range of health issues, including depression, weight gain, and high blood pressure, among other disorders. Through its calming, anti-depressant, and relaxation effects, yoga can help promote better sleep, especially when done regularly. It is also thought to improve the secretion of melatonin, the hormone responsible for sleep regulation in humans.
Anxiety Relief
Many people get into yoga in search of a solution to their fears and anxieties. Well, this is because research has shown that indeed, yoga could help with anxiety relief, especially when used alongside breathing exercises and meditation.
Spiritual Healing
Many different types of yoga, like Kundalini, is usually used for spiritual healing. Its classes may incorporate chanting, meditation, and other spiritual elements. This can help in managing phobias, insomnia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and grief. To find out more about the spiritual side of Yoga check out this Chakra Guide.
Body Benefits of Yoga
Stronger Muscles
As a form of exercise, yoga can also help strengthen your muscles. In addition to looking good, stronger muscles can also help protect your joints from excessive impact, as well as disorders such as arthritis.
Better Posture
Since junior school, we’ve all been urged to maintain proper posture. It’s good for your confidence levels but it goes further than that. It can help prevent chronic ailments, disorders, and health issues such as neck pain, back pain, and joint problems. By engaging in yoga regularly, your muscles and joints become stronger and more flexible enough to promote better posture.
Improves your Flexibility
As mentioned above, yoga also promotes flexibility, and this is one of the major benefits of the practice to your body. The various yoga poses, also known as asanas, help promote proper alignment in various joints throughout your body, thus making it more flexible. With improved flexibility, bodily aches, strains, and sprains could become a thing of the past.
Immunity Boost
Just like with most other forms of exercise, yoga also promotes your natural defenses against disease pathogens, infections, and inflammation. This is specifically because yoga stretches promote the drainage of the lymph, the viscous fluid where most of your immune cells live. It also promotes circulation, which is always a plus as far as immunity is concerned.
Improved Heart Health
The importance of a heart function to the human body’s overall health cannot be overemphasized. The supply of nutrients, oxygen, and other important biochemicals to various organs and cells throughout the body depend on how healthy your heart is. Yoga can help make your heart healthier while reducing various risk factors for heart disease.
Truly, yoga is a beneficial practice that anyone can incorporate into their routine. As long as you have the appropriate guidance, it’s an activity you can take up regardless of your age group or gender. The above are just a few of the many benefits you stand to gain by making yoga your next hobby or passion.
