Yoga

Improve Your Body and Mind With Yoga

Yoga is a holistic system that improves your body and mind. It can benefit people of all ages and fitness levels.

Studies show that yoga can help relieve stress, strengthen bones and joints and improve flexibility. It also increases your heart rate and lymphatic flow, which helps your immune system fight infections.

Strength

Yoga is often seen as a relaxing practice but the practice can also be used to strengthen your body. It increases muscular strength as you develop the capacity to carry and move your bodyweight in all possible movement patterns.

New yogis can build strength naturally as they practice a range of poses consistently over time. This is called functional strength and a great benefit of the practice.

Some yoga styles are designed to work on strength-building postures, including Iyengar. These styles use props to facilitate poses that hold for long periods of time, and they also include many inversions, which increase upper-body strength.

But, it’s important to understand that you can’t train for muscle growth solely with yoga, and that there are areas of your body that don’t need as much strength as others. For example, even yogis who practice vigorous vinyasa can lack strength in their shoulders.

Flexibility

Yoga increases flexibility, which improves mobility, posture and muscle coordination. It also reduces injury risk and muscle soreness.

Flexibility is the ability to move through a range of motion without tearing. Physiologists believe that healthy muscles can stretch to approximately 150 percent of their resting length before tearing.

Increasing the elasticity of connective tissues–the cells that bind muscle fibers together, encapsulate them and network them with other organs–is an important factor in enhancing flexibility. But most physiologists believe that the “stretch reflex,” the brain’s response to stretching, is also a key factor in increasing flexibility.

Some yogis are now embracing an approach to increasing flexibility that combines Western methods of enhanced flexibility training with yoga. Such methods exploit the GTO (gluteus tertius obliquus) reflex, which activates when muscles are fully extended and under extreme tension.

Stress Reliever

There are a variety of yoga techniques that can be used to reduce stress. Some are more effective than others, so it’s important to find one that works for you and your lifestyle.

For example, yoga nidra, which is a guided meditation that you do in person with a teacher or via a recording, promotes deep relaxation and alleviates stress. It also helps you sleep better and is a great option if you’re too tired for an asana (moving through poses) or seated meditation practice but want to incorporate yoga into your daily routine.

As mentioned earlier, yoga is a holistic approach to stress relief that includes meditation, breath work, and auditory rituals like chanting and sound baths. These practices can be very effective at relieving stress, especially when combined with other tools that you might use to relieve stress, such as exercise and spending time outdoors.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is an important aspect of yoga and meditation. It is a way to develop a sense of awareness, a focus on the present moment, and the ability to observe and accept thoughts, feelings, and emotions without judgment.

It is a form of meditation and a very good stress reliever for both physical and emotional health. It helps reduce chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and insomnia.

A simple mindfulness practice involves sitting quietly, and noticing your breath. Also, focusing on body sensations like an itch or tingling, or the touch of a hand or foot.

Another basic practice involves naming things that are happening in your life: “sight,” “sound,” “smell,” “taste,” or “touch.”

The idea is to not judge these experiences and to be present with them moment by moment. This type of mindfulness can be applied to any activity, from walking to showering to driving to cleaning the house.

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