Yoga is a great way to stay in shape. More than most exercises however, yoga also has a profound impact on mental health.
Why Do Yoga?
No matter how you look at it, it’s hard to overstate the benefits of yoga. Whether you seek physical, mental or spiritual benefits, taking up yoga is sure to bring a whole host of benefits.
Benefits of Daily Yoga Practice
The simplest reason to start yoga is that it feels good. It’s exercise, mixed with stretching and meditation. It’s stretching and exercise for both the body and mind.
The benefits quickly compound with a regular yoga practice, transforming your mind and body. You will feel the benefits more intensely over time.
Body Benefits
As it hardly requires any equipment and can take as much or as little time as you like, yoga is one of the most convenient forms of exercise.
You are in control and can follow a yoga routine for any specific benefits you like.
Find yourself a mat and a yoga taster exercise and get yourself started!
Flexibility
The body tends to become stiff as we grow older. This is especially true when much of our lives are relegated to sitting and standing in similar postures.
One of yoga’s key benefits is improved flexibility, as itmakes the body’s muscles and joints more flexible.
Many poses are designed specifically for improved flexibility, loosening the muscles and making you more flexible.
Yoga might even lead you to learning the Lotus pose, one of the richest poses for meditation, which often requires months of dedicated stretching.
Strength
In addition to the stretching element, yoga is an exercise.
Many positions are isometric exercises, which tone your muscles and build strength. Yoga can even help you lose weight.
Granted, if your only goal is building muscle or losing weight, yoga might not be as effective as weight-lifting or regularly jogging 10K.
However, with all the benefits yoga offers, it’s more of an “all-in-one” package that can easily accompany another exercise regimes.
Posture
They say sitting is the new smoking. We sit all day at our desks, on the sofa, hunching forward or generally practicing poor posture.
Yoga is an ancient remedy to this modern problem. In addition to strength and flexibility, yoga promotes good posture.
Various poses elongate the spine, allowing you to stand straighter and feel more comfortable in your body.
Mind Benefits
In addition to physical benefits, yoga also offers mindfulness benefits. Many of these benefits fall along similar lines to meditation.
That’s no surprise for seasoned yoga practitioners, who should know yoga as a form of meditation in its own right.
You should realise that yoga is far more than a trendy exercise fad. It can become a part of our optimal routines.
Awareness
Yoga helps you become more aware of your body in the present moment. This dichotomy allows you to feel at peace with the world around you.
You also become more aware of your breath during yoga. This helps you improve your breathing, which (perhaps surprisingly) brings confidence into your daily life.
Awareness is a powerful skill. Knowing how you feel and being aware of the present situation allows you to reap all sorts of benefits. The awareness we acquire from yoga is a source of rejuvenation.
After all, awareness is the essence of mindfulness.
Focus
The calming aspects of yoga, which focus on how your body feels, are incredibly mindful. As you change poses, we focus completely on what our mind and body are doing. Body scan meditations offer similar benefits from a meditation mat.
Regular yoga helps you develop “focus muscles”, which beyond the yoga mat, you can use to be more productive in daily life.
Your focus will improve as you become aware of your body and breath – one motion at a time.
Anxiety
Worry and anxiety can be crippling for the mind. As it is often simply not understood by the beholder, anxiety damages the mind while offering no value of its own.
Yoga provides stress-relief by distancing ourselves from our thoughts and asking ourselves how we feel in the moment. This, in turn, helps us wind down and find our inner peace.
One of the most life-altering benefits of yoga, and mindfulness generally, is to reduce anxiety.
I’ve personally found anxiety to be a destructive mental pattern that has a profound impact on my own quality of life. Mindfulness and yoga have helped me move past such destructive thought patterns.
Mindful Yoga in a Nutshell
One of the biggest benefits of yoga is how adaptable it is.
If you’re new to yoga, you’re entering a whole new world. There are so many different kinds of yoga, you can’t limit yourself to trying just one.
Think of it as a buffet. You should start by trying everything. Then, grab more of what you really like. Once you’re more familiar with yoga, you can start building your own routines into your daily practice.
At the end of the day, yoga’s key benefit is its adaptability. You can try different yoga styles for different purposes, depending on what you need from it at any moment.
Enjoy mindfulness exercise with yoga and Mind & Practice today.