Yoga is absolutely one of the healthiest activities you can undertake. Here we will look at a few of the numerous benefits you can get practising yoga.
1. Flexibility – flexibility is important to maintain good movement patterns, posture, and maintain the integrity of joints and muscles. Many of us spend the majority of our lives sitting; behind desks, in cars, on the sofa, and we tend to get short and tight muscles.
Our body begins to adapt itself to the postures we spend a lot of time in. Unfortunately, the body is not well designed to be in this sitting posture all of the time, and it needs to maintain flexibility and muscle length to remain healthy.
2. Stress relief – Life is stressful. Yoga is one of the best ways to de-stress. It’s one of those things where, we all know stress is bad, but very few of us do anything to actively combat it.
We look at it as something that is a problem for other people, but not us. In reality, this is not the case. We could all benefit from controlling our stress levels. It’s good for our mental and physical health, mood, energy, sleep, weight and so much more.
Yoga is a great way to de-stress, because it happens as a by-product of doing something enjoyable. You will get a great endorphin rush and leave the yoga studio feeling great.
3. Deep breathing – Most of us don’t breathe very well. We take short, shallow, chest breaths. It should be the most natural thing in the world, but through bad posture and spending too much time sat down, in combination with high stress; we forget how to do the most fundamental of human things – breathe.
Yoga will teach you how to breathe properly, and importantly, make you aware of your breathing. When you start to become more attuned with your body and aware of it, you can start to improve your breathing, and with it, your health.
4. Balance and coordination – Balance and coordination aren’t especially ‘sexy’ topics, but they’re important all the same. Having the ability to exercise safely, without the risk of injuring yourself is important.
One of the best ways to build your body awareness and learn how to control movement, is with yoga poses. The purposeful movements will condition your nervous system to be better able to control the body.
5. Core strength – Similar to the previous point, core strength is important for protecting the lower back in everyday life, and while exercising. Yoga is very challenging for the core muscles, and when you begin, you will often find that you hurt in places you didn’t even know you had muscles.
This is because those muscles have been essentially shut down and not working properly to fulfil their function of stabilising and protecting your spine.
Yoga is great, and these 5 benefits are really just scratching the surface of the many, many great reasons to practise yoga.
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