How is regular yoga practice beneficial to your mental and physical health? Read this guide to learn more about these exercises and how they help.
Did you know that about 36 million Americans practice yoga regularly?
Having a yoga practice is much more than reaching physical goals and exercise goals. When you practice yoga, you also reap so many other benefits. From helping with your flexibility to your overall mindset on a daily basis, a yoga practice can truly transform your life.
Ready to learn more about the benefits of a yoga practice? Read on!
A Yoga Practice Improves Overall Flexibility
Yoga is known to improve flexibility. This is a very important part of physical health because it can reduce injuries when you take part in other exercises.
A great part about yoga and teaching your body how to be more flexible is that you can choose from different yoga styles and difficulties. If you are 25 and looking for a longer and more intermediate practice, you can do that to improve your flexibility. If you’re 70, you can still do yoga, but practice a gentle and slower type of yoga to achieve similar results.
Either way, having a daily yoga practice can definitely improve your flexibility.
A Yoga Practice Strengthens Your Muscles
As you get older, your muscle mass dwindles. And this can happen at the young age of 30.
When your muscles begin to weaken, you risk more injuries, gaining weight, and many other negative effects. But by practicing yoga, you can help strengthen these muscles to lessen the chance for injury.
Not only are you simply strengthening your muscles to increase bone density and build strength overall, but the strengthening of your back and core muscles can help you with your posture.
Since we spend a lot of our days driving, writing at a desk, or having our necks down looking at phones or books, posture can be easily distorted in a harmful way. But having good posture can help you in so many ways, and yoga can get you there.
Exercises like downward dog and child’s pose can elongate your spine and strengthen the muscles around it to improve your posture over time.
A Yoga Practice Reduces Chronic Stress
As we said before, yoga is much more than a physical activity. It can also benefit you in an emotional and psychological way. One of these benefits is by reducing your stress.
In our world today, 55% of Americans report that they feel stress on a daily basis—most prolonged over time. Prolonged stress can lead to chronic inflammation, which is a culprit for cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and so many other harmful diseases.
To combat that, you can do yoga to relieve stress. There are yoga poses for kids to try to reduce stress as well as adults!
A Yoga Practice Reduces Anxiety
With anxiety gripping many Americans on a daily basis, it’s no wonder that more and more people are turning toward yoga and other forms of meditation to help with reducing those feelings. And yoga is one of them.
While there are many treatments for anxiety disorders, a natural one that has been proven to work almost as well as other medical treatments is through yoga practice.
The repetitive practice can significantly reduce the feelings of anxiety you feel on a daily basis.
A Yoga Practice Reduces Chronic Pain in Your Body
Many Americans suffer from chronic pain. Luckily, yoga has been found to help reduce chronic pain. Because of its many health benefits, chronic pain can go away for many reasons.
For starters, because yoga has been known to reduce inflammation, this reduction of inflammation can help with the pain.
There are also many specific yoga poses to target back pain. A few yoga poses for back pain include:
- Cat-cow
- Downward dog
- Extended triangle
- Sphinx pose
- Cobra pose
- Locust pose
- Bridge pose
- Two knee spinal twist
By doing these poses on a regular basis, your back pain may start to go away.
A Yoga Practice May Boost Immunity
Because yoga can reduce stress, it can also boost your immune system. As yoga reduces the stress in your body, your immune response can be stronger since stress typically surpasses this system in your body. When you are more susceptible to illness, you can become more stressed as well.
It is a viscous cycle to break.
If you want to boost your immune system, you have to reduce your stress.
With regular yoga practice, you can boost your immune system over time by reducing your levels of stress.
A Yoga Practice May Improve Sleep
How many times have you hit the pillow as tired as can be, only to still be awake tossing and turning 2 hours later?
Nothing is more frustrating than that.
But yoga can help! Yoga can improve how quickly you fall asleep as well as how deeply you stay asleep once you are asleep. You could also try Yoga Nidra, which is the state of being between awake and asleep in a deep relaxation.
The calming effects of yoga and the fatigue that exercise can cause both play into potentially improving sleep. Additionally, reducing anxiety calms your brain, which allows you to fall asleep more easily without a constantly buzzing brain.
Adopt a Yoga Practice into Your Daily Routine
It can be difficult to give parts of your precious day to yoga when you aren’t sure what the point of it is. But now that you know that there are so many different benefits to yoga, it will be much easier to dedicate 20 minutes or even an hour to the practice.
While you may not feel the benefits right away, give it time. They’ll come over time as you stay consistent with the practice.
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About the Author
Mia Barnes is a health and wellness freelance writer and practicing yogi with a passion for holistic wellness. Mia has been covering yoga-related topics for over three years and is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Body+Mind Magazine, an online healthy living publication.