If you are still considering doing Yoga or not, here are 9 Reasons Why You Should be Practicing Yoga. Yoga is an exercise that helps connect one’s body and mind through breathing techniques, meditation, and physical poses.
Some of you may already know about the spiritual benefits of yoga. But do you know that it is one of the best exercises for keeping fit? Practicing yoga isn’t just for fun, or mere body fitness, but there are other entangled benefits this brings to you.
9 Reasons Why You Should be Practicing Yoga
Yoga is thousand of years older and generations of Yogis have seen it to be the best form of exercise for physical, mental, and spiritual health. People that want to lose weight or maintain their fitness levels do not realize that yoga practices could be the key to their success. Keep reading this article to learn about key reasons why you should be practicing yoga either at your house or a yoga center.
Increase Physical Fitness
This is one of the main benefits of practicing yoga. It helps positively on your fitness and weight loss goals. In lot of the yoga poses, you are to shift your body weight using strength, poise, coordination and power. This can help lead to tone arms, shapely legs, and chiseled abs.
Some intense versions of these exercise like Bikram Yoga can help you loss about 300-400 calories per hour. The good thing is that it is a low impact exercise, so it’s great for people nursing muscle injuries.
Improve Focus and Concentration
Ability to focus is one of the major markers of excellence. Andrew Carnegie is quoted as crediting his ability to focus on tasks for more than 5 minutes as the reason why he has been the richest man of his time.
This modern world has so many distractions and challenges that an average person can only focus on one thing at a time for minutes. You can improve your focus by practicing yoga as well. Yoga trains you to be mindful of the moment and focus on your body and breath.
Strength Immunity
Yoga can boost your immunity. It is very much essential to have the highest possible immunity so that you can avoid getting ill from communicable diseases. Stress is one of the major reasons and cause of inflammation and lowered immunity and yoga is a proven stress-buster. So, it improves your body system from staving off diseases.
Help Posture
Improper posture can cause a long-term consequence on one’s life. If bad posture is allowed to go unchecked for long, you may end up with arthritis, inflammation, and aches and pains in your whole body.
With yoga poses, your body can be strengthened and muscles stretched leading to an improved posture with consistent practice.
Pain Relief
Another popular benefit of creating a healthy habit out of doing yoga consistently is that it is a great way to reduce muscle pain. Body aches and pains may come from athletic injuries, slips and falls, or chronic pain due to illnesses like arthritis. Yoga can help to reduce pain because of the stretching done at each session.
In fact, some yoga poses are specifically for reducing body aches and pains. Practicing regularly can lead to long-term and permanent improvements.
Sleep Better
The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) recommends Yoga as a better way that one could sleep better. Sleep deprivation can reduce the human productivity and increase chances of getting depressed. So, getting at least 7 hours of quality sleep is required for optimal health.
Yoga practices can help you fall asleep faster as well as sleep longer. Also, if you wake up at night, yoga practice will help you return to sleep faster. Great sleep quality had positive effects on your body such as improved strength, improved physical looks and better mental health.
Reduce Anxiety And Stress
The mindfulness aspect of yoga can help promote mental health by reducing human stress and anxiety. Many research and studies have shown that practicing Yoga could help reduce the amount of cortisol (hormone stress) in your body.
Usually, we get anxiety attacks when worrying about situations that may happen in the future. Yoga practice helps to prevent such thoughts by directing our focus to the present moment. Having to concentrate on our thoughts, breath, and physical movements and poses take human thoughts away from other things and focus yogis on the present moment.
Improve Flexibility And Balance
Yoga practice is a great way to improve your body flexibility and balance. Lot of people see the complicated poses yogis do and get discouraged to practice because they think they are not flexible enough. Anyone can increase his/her flexibility with consistent yoga practice.
If you are unable to bend down to pick something from the floor, then it is a sign that your flexibility can be improved by a yoga practice. When it comes to balance, yoga can also help to improve it by strengthening your feet and ankles. Having great balance is important especially as you grow older due to the reduced possibility of slips and falls.
Increase Bone Strength
Women can benefit a lot from yoga practices as it can help them fight off osteoporosis. 2015 research found that yoga practitioners had stronger bone density than non-practitioners. The increased bone strength is as a result of all the yoga poses that need the person exercising to hold their body against gravity. The resistance is what leads to increased muscle and bone strength.
Try Yoga to Experience The Benefits
Yoga practice is one of the oldest forms of exercise and is proven to offer numerous mental, physical and spiritual benefits as explained above. But all this are just words until you put it to the practice yourself. You can start a daily routine to enjoy the long-lasting benefits of yoga in your life.
