Health benefits of yoga

As a form of meditation and getting one’s body into balance,peace and calm, yoga has been around for thousands of years, but has onlylately become increasingly popular in the Western world. Besides its incredibleeffect on one’s psyche, yoga is also a great and approachable way to improvethe state of one’s body and general health.

Yoga as the improver of flexibility

Practicing yoga helps you form long and lean muscles, butmost of all, it makes your body much more flexible. Furthermore, yoga is themost effective way for improving flexibility since 35 percent of people who practiceyoga see a change for the better in their flexibility after only 8 weeks ofpracticing, and it largely improves the flexibility of not only their muscles, butalso, tendons and ligaments.

Yoga helps with strength increase and weight loss

There are many different styles and forms of yoga, and eachof them focuses on another way of enhancing your physical abilities. Certainstyles concentrate mostly on flexibility, while some concentrate on strengthand others on balance. Certain styles of yoga that are massively being used byathletes of different kinds are very physically demanding and can be a greatway to help with weight loss. It is important that one eases themselves intothem so as not to get hurt and to also avoid making the whole experienceunpleasant. Once they have progressed to a certain level, some people decide totry their hand at Bikram yoga, which is a type of yoga where participantsrepeat the same 26 yoga poses throughout the session, all the while beingexposed to heat above 100 degrees F (38 degrees Celsius). It is important,though, that you consult your doctor whether Bikram yoga would suit you.

Yoga improves posture

Yoga helps improve posture in various ways. First of all, bymaking the body stronger and more flexible, it pulls the person into properalignment. Furthermore, paying attention to the body, posture and movementsduring sessions, makes people more aware of their bodies and thus aware whenthey are practicing bad posture.

Yoga helping in stress reduction

One of yoga’s aims is meditation, doing the poses while themind is calm, relaxed and quiet, which in turn means a rest from anything thatcould possibly cause stress. Also, during a yoga session, the body producesoxytocin which keeps our bodies relaxed, and it decreases levels ofcatecholamine which is the hormones the body produces when exposed to any kindof stress.