Yoga offers a wide range of benefits. Oftentimes, we see yoga as purely a physical exercise that helps us with stretching, balance, and flexibility. Additionally, yoga offers mental and spiritual balance through relaxing your body and helping you come into the present moment through intentional movement.
Below we dive into a few reasons that yoga is so beneficial for fitness:
1. Yoga improves flexibility, physical strength, and balance
Yoga is all about slow and intentional movements aligned with deep breathing exercises. This increases blood flow to necessary muscles which over time helps you build flexibility and strength. In this way, yoga practice will help you maintain stamina in the other areas of fitness that you enjoy. Yoga is one of the best forms of exercise on earth to develop an overall sense of health and wellbeing. To get the most out of yoga, you’ll want to have a few pairs of comfortable yoga leggings.
2. Yoga helps with pain relief
There are many forms of yoga and the gentler versions offer gentle and basic stretching for easing and improving chronic pain. Through simple poses that you practice on a daily basis, your chronic low back pain, for example, may begin to dissipate!
3. Yoga helps with arthritis
Yoga strengthens your joints. Gentle yoga practices like Yin Yoga are a great way for arthritis sufferers to ease discomfort in inflamed, tender, or swollen joints. Yoga is used by many integrative doctors as a part of a holistic approach to reducing pain and inflammation from arthritis.
4. Yoga is great for cardiovascular health
Yoga is a great stress-reducer. If you begin to practice yoga every day for a week, there is no doubt that you will begin to see a calm ripple effect in your daily life. Additionally, yoga has the capability to reduce high blood pressure and help you lose weight.
5. Yoga helps you sleep better
Practicing yoga before bed is one of the best ways to ensure a great night’s sleep. Yoga helps us mentally unwind from the day and be present with what is. If you practice on a consistent basis, you will see how your thoughts begin to come and go more easily rather than cause you more anxiety that ultimately affects your sleep habits.
6. Yoga boosts your mood
After practicing yoga, you may feel more energy running throughout your body. A yoga practice like Vinyasa Yoga can be energizing and stimulating for your mind and body. It is a great choice for when you are feeling lethargic.
7. Yoga helps reduce stress
Yoga is not about how long you can hold a pose or how flexible you are. It is more about: how mindful and intentional can you be in this moment? Yoga is meant to help you unwind and relax so that your mind, body, and spirit is in alignment with your largest goals and dreams.
8. Yoga increases self-love
Through yoga, you get to know yourself on a deeper level. It is just you, your mat, and what you bring to the mat. You may be feeling tired and just want to lie in pigeon pose, or you may be ready for a Vinyasa flow sequence—whatever it may be, it is yoga and you showed up for yourself. This is the ultimate form of self-love.
