Whether you’re flexible or not, into health and fitness or not. Yoga should be done by everyone as it has so many health and wellness benefits – both physically and mentally. Of course yoga isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s well worth giving it a try, you might find you learn to love it. Plus, there are so many varieties to try to find what works for you – vinyasa, restorative, prenatal, even breathe yoga. Whether you’re a beginner, or more advanced, yoga can offer you some great benefits.
Benefits Of Yoga – Quick Overview
- Improves posture & flexibility
- Safe on the heart
- Increases balance
- Builds muscle strength
What Is Yoga?
Simply put, yoga is a workout for your mind, body and soul. It’s known to be a spiritual discipline that focuses on bringing harmony between your mind and your body. Balancing it out to make it work together in a more effective way. Working on both your mental and physical health.
Types Of Yoga
It’s said there are 8 different types of yoga
- Vinyasa Yoga – Considered the most athletic yoga style.
- Hatha Yoga – Physical-based yoga.
- Iyengar Yoga – Focuses on alignment and precise movements.
- Kundalini Yoga – Equal parts spiritual and physical yoga. All about releasing energy.
- Ashtanga Yoga – The modern-day form of classical Indian yoga.
- Bikram yoga – A sequence of set poses in a hot room.
- Yin Yoga – A slow-paced style of yoga with seated postures held for longer periods of time.
- Restorative Yoga – Focuses on winding down and relaxing your mind.
- Prenatal Yoga – Carefully adapted for moms to be, working on strengthening the pelvic floor and breathing work.
- Anusara Yoga – The modern-day version of Hatha yoga, focusing on alignment of the mind-body-heart connection.
- Jivamukti Yoga – Vinyasa flow style classes infused with Hindu spiritual teachings.
- Breathe Yoga – Suitable for all levels of experience. Connecting your mind and body to your breathing.
Fitness Benefits Of Yoga
But does yoga provide any fitness or lifestyle benefits? And if so, what are they?
It’s important to understand yoga is diverse. There are many different approaches, and each fitness instructor will have their own unique way of guiding you along. Plus, this type of exercise is simple to do in your own home at your own pace and when you can fit it into your schedule.
However, some yoga techniques lean more towards the athletic side than others. For example, ashtanga and vinyasa are two such styles, although, it’s nothing like going to the gym. When going to the gym, people will tend to focus on muscle groups and do specific work on just upper or lower body exercises.
With yoga it’s much different, and for the most part you’ll need all the muscles in your body to do most of the poses. Basically, with yoga, you’re teaching your muscles to work together, by placing your body in positions you wouldn’t normally be in. So, you’re not going to build muscles per say, but you will develop muscle strength, flexibility and better muscle connection.
Yoga Must Haves
You really don’t need much in the way of equipment when it comes to practising yoga – which is great if you don’t have a huge budget.
So, what do you need? All you really need is enough space to lie down and stand up in, and a yoga mat. Over the years we have tried and tested MANY styles of yoga mat to see which ones work best for practising yoga on.
The material yoga mats aren’t great as they don’t give you much grip – especially if you get a bit sweaty. The best ones seem to be the non-slip memory foam or thermoplastic mats.
- Easy to wash/wipe clean
- Non-slip
- Cushioning for pressure points (great for boney people)
Of course, as you get more into yoga, you might also want to get a yoga ball, or bricks to practise more difficult exercises on. However, as a beginner, you really don’t need much more than yourself and a good floor mat.
The Benefits Of Yoga
Enhances Flexibility & Posture
If you find touching your toes hard, or every time you go to stand up you make grunting noises, you really should consider doing yoga! You know that feeling after you wake up when you have a long stretch which makes you feel great, that’s what yoga can do for you – and more.
So many people focus on building muscle and looking good, but they forget about the one element that makes everything else worth it, namely flexibility. Flexibility is what’s going to help fight old age better than anything else.
All the stretching you’ll do while practising yoga will make your body more limber and capable of staying functional. And just like some yoga styles have an athletic focus point, others have flexibility training at the core.
It’s Safe On The Heart
If you can’t take the chance with high intensity training due to heart issues, yoga is the perfect alternative. Instead of speeding up your heart, it slows it down. So, while your body is building more strength and gaining flexibility, your body is calm through it all.
Plus, yoga is very effective in fighting day-to-day stress by helping to relax the mind and connect with your thoughts and emotions. If that’s not a fitness quality, nothing is. Stress is known as the silent killer and yoga can help kick it to the curb. Yoga can even help to improve sleep due to its ability to help people relax.
Increases Balance
Yoga will better your relationship between the brain and your muscles, better known as neuromuscular training, or the mind muscle connection.
It will improve your balance over time by giving you all the tools you need to achieve this inner strength. Yoga is more about slow, controlled movements, allowing you to feel the movement and the positioning of your body. It’s these slow and controlled movements that will help your balance go from strength to strength. Whether it’s holding your body through your core for longer periods of time. Or leaning to squeeze your glutes in a more effective way. It will even help with things like ankle strength to aid balancing on one leg.
Builds Muscle Strength
OK, so doing yoga won’t make you put on muscle like say body building, or lifting weights everyday would. However, yoga is great for building strength in the muscles you have and can also help to make you look more toned.
Exercises such as weight lifting will generally shorten your muscles, whereas yoga will help to lengthen them again. A long muscle is much less likely to tear, or cause injury. A combination of both weight lifting and yoga would be the perfect partnership.
What You Won’t Get From Yoga
Now that you know what you can expect yoga can enhance in your life, there are some things yoga won’t do for you.
- Cardio – It won’t get your the same results as going for a run would.
- Body Building – It won’t build muscle in the same way body building would.
So, as you can see, there isn’t really that much that yoga can’t give you that other forms of exercise might. Yoga would be great to do alongside any other exercise you do.
Yoga will build the strength of your overall body, make your more flexible, and extend your quality of life by giving you a more robust body from top to bottom.
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