What is Yoga? Most 27 Health Benefits of Yoga in Daily Life!
Yoga is a form of exercise which originated in ancient India and now it is practised widely across the world. Yoga not only enhances your physical strength but also contributes largely towards your mental health and spiritual growth.
Yoga gives you the tools to help you change. You might start to feel better the first time you try practicing. You may also notice that the more you commit to practice, the more you benefit. Which results in three things: You get involved in your self care, you discover that your involvement gives you the power to effect change, and seeing that you can effect change gives you hope. And hope itself can be healing.
The very best time to practice yoga is first thing in the morning before breakfast or most conductive time is early evening, around sunset.
There are more than 100 different forms of yoga. Some are fast-paced and intense. Others are gentle and relaxing.
Examples of different yoga forms include:
Hatha: The form most often associated with yoga, it combines a series of basic movements with breathing. On average, a typical one hour hatha yoga class can burn between 175 and 298 calories.
Vinyasa: A series of poses that flow smoothly into one another. You can burn an average of 550 calories for an hour long vinyasa class.
Power: A faster, higher-intensity practice that builds muscle. You can expect to burn between 270 and 300 calories per hour-long class.
Ashtanga: A series of poses, combined with a special breathing technique. You can expect to burn between 450 and 550 calories per hour-long class.
Bikram: Also known as "hot yoga," it's a series of 26 challenging poses performed in a room heated to a high temperature. It usually involves a 90-minute class where you can burn 330 calories.
Iyengar: A type of yoga that uses props like blocks, straps, and chairs to help you move your body into the proper alignment. An hour of Iyengar yoga typically only burns around 175 calories.
Yoga not only keeps you fit but also has a lot of long-term benefits when you make it an integral part of your lifestyle. Some benefits of yoga include:
Improves your flexibility
Improved flexibility is one of the first and most obvious benefits of yoga. During your first class, you probably won't be able to touch your toes, never mind do a backbend. But if you stick with it, you'll notice a gradual loosening, and eventually, seemingly impossible poses will become possible. You'll also probably notice that aches and pains start to disappear.
Builds muscle strength
Strong muscles do more than look good. They also protect us from conditions like arthritis and back pain, and help prevent falls in elderly people. When you build your strength through yoga, you balance it with flexibility. If you just went to the gym and lifted weights, you might build strength at the expense of flexibility.
Better posture
Yoga helps in keeping the spine erect, enabling you to sit straight and not slouch. It also helps alleviate the stress on your spine, exerted through incorrect posture. Poor posture can cause back, neck, and other muscle and joint problems. As you slump, your body may compensate by flattening the normal inward curves in your neck and lower back. This can cause pain and degenerative arthritis of the spine. Consistent practice of Yoga helps in keeping the spine strong and prevents fatigue.
Prevents cartilage and joint breakdown
Each time you practice yoga, you take your joints through their full range of motion. This can help prevent degenerative arthritis or mitigate disability by "squeezing and soaking" areas of cartilage which normally are not used. Joint cartilage is like a sponge; it receives fresh nutrients only when its fluid is squeezed out and a new supply can be soaked up. Without proper sustenance, neglected areas of cartilage can eventually wear out, exposing the underlying bone like worn-out brake pads.
Improves your bone health
It is well documented that weight-bearing exercise strengthens bones and helps ward off osteoporosis. Many postures in yoga require that you lift your own weight. Some, like Downward- and Upward-Facing Dog, help strengthen the arm bones, which are particularly vulnerable to osteoporotic fractures. Yoga's ability to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol may help keep calcium in the bones.
Increases your blood flow
Specifically, the relaxation exercises you learn in yoga can help your circulation, especially in your hands and feet. Yoga also gets more oxygen to your cells, which function better as a result. It also boosts levels of hemoglobin and red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the tissues. It thins the blood by making platelets less sticky and by cutting the level of clot-promoting proteins in the blood. This can lead to a decrease in heart attacks and strokes since blood clots are often the cause of these killers.
Drains your lymphs and boosts immunity
When you contract and stretch muscles, move organs around, and come in and out of yoga postures, you increase the drainage of lymph (a viscous fluid rich in immune cells). This helps the lymphatic system fight infection, destroy cancerous cells, and dispose of the toxic waste products of cellular functioning.
Improved heart health
When you regularly get your heart rate into the aerobic range, you lower your risk of heart attack and can relieve depression. While not all yoga is aerobic, if you do it vigorously or take flow or Ashtanga classes, it can boost your heart rate into the aerobic range. But even yoga exercises that don't get your heart rate up that high can improve cardiovascular conditioning. Studies have found that yoga practice lowers the resting heart rate, increases endurance, and can improve your maximum uptake of oxygen during exercise.
Drops your blood pressure
If you have got high blood pressure, you might benefit from yoga. In 3 months, the savasana (corpse pose) helps people with hypertension and great improvement in their high blood pressure.
Regulates your adrenal glands
Yoga lowers cortisol levels. Normally, the adrenal glands secrete cortisol in response to an acute crisis, which temporarily boosts immune function. If your cortisol levels stay high even after the crisis, they can compromise the immune system. Temporary boosts of cortisol help with long-term memory, but chronically high levels undermine memory and may lead to permanent changes in the brain. Additionally, excessive cortisol has been linked with major depression, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance. In rats, high cortisol levels lead to what researchers call "food-seeking behavior" (the kind that drives you to eat when you're upset, angry, or stressed). The body takes those extra calories and distributes them as fat in the abdomen, contributing to weight gain and the risk of diabetes and heart attack.
Makes you happier
Do you feel sad? Sit in Lotus. Better yet, rise up into a backbend or soar royally into King Dancer Pose. While it is not as simple as that, one study found that a consistent yoga practice improved depression and led to a significant increase in serotonin levels and a decrease in the levels of monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters) and cortisol.
Lowers blood sugar
Yoga lowers blood sugar and LDL ("bad") cholesterol and boosts HDL ("good") cholesterol. In people with diabetes, yoga has been found to lower blood sugar in several ways: by lowering cortisol and adrenaline levels, encouraging weight loss, and improving sensitivity to the effects of insulin. Get your blood sugar levels down, and you decrease your risk of diabetic complications such as heart attack, kidney failure, and blindness.
Helps you focus
An important component of yoga is focusing on the present. Regular yoga practice improves coordination, reaction time, memory, and even IQ scores. People who practice Transcendental Meditation demonstrate the ability to solve problems and acquire and recall information better—probably as they are less distracted by their thoughts, which can play over and over like an endless tape loop.
Relaxation and Deep sleep
Yoga can help you relieve the stress of modern life and helps you sleep deeper. Yoga encourages you to relax and slow your breath and to focus on the present. It shifts your focus from sympathetic nervous system to parasympathetic nervous system. Restorative asanas and meditation also encourage a turning inward of the senses, which relaxes the nervous system.
Improves your balance
Regularly practicing yoga increases proprioception (the ability to feel what your body is doing and where it is in space) and improves balance. People with bad posture or dysfunctional movement patterns usually have poor proprioception, which has been linked to knee problems and back pain.
Improves your lung health
Yoga draws attention to your breathing pattern and makes you aware of breathing correctly which filters the air, warms it and humidifies it removing the pollen and the dirt, supplying fresh oxygen into the lungs.
Reduced digestive problems
Yoga like any other physical exercise can ease constipation and lower the risk of colon cancer. The movements that Yoga involves, improve the transport of food and remove waste through the bowels. This helps in getting rid of the waste from the system more effectively.
Gives you peace of mind
Yoga slows down the mental loops of frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress. And since stress is implicated in so many health problems - from migraines and insomnia to lupus, MS, eczema, high blood pressure, and heart attacks - if you learn to quiet your mind, you'll be likely to live longer and healthier. Yoga is also one of the best ways to calm a disturbed mind.
Increases your self-esteem
Many of us suffer from chronic low self-esteem. Some handle these negativities by taking drugs, overeat, work too hard, sleep around or may pay the price in poorer health physically, mentally, and spiritually. When you take a positive approach and practice yoga, you'll sense, initially in brief glimpses and later in more sustained views, that you're worthwhile. Once you practice regularly with an intention of self-examination and betterment - not just as a substitute for an aerobics class-you can access a different side of yourself. You'll experience feelings of gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness, as well as a sense that you're part of something bigger.
Eases your pain
Yoga can ease your pain and help people who suffer from arthritis, back pain and other chronic conditions. When you relieve pain, you are in a much better mood and are inclined to be more active, and you don't need as much medication.
Gives you inner strength
Yoga can help you make changes in your life. In fact, that might be its greatest strength. You may find that without making a particular effort to change things, you start to eat better, exercise more, or finally quit smoking after years of failed attempts.
Helps keep you drug free
If your medicine cabinet looks like a pharmacy, maybe it's time to try yoga. Studies of people with asthma, high blood pressure, Type II diabetes, and obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown that yoga helped them lower their dosage of medications and sometimes get off them entirely. The benefits of taking fewer drugs? You'll spend less money, and you're less likely to suffer side effects and risk dangerous drug interactions.
Benefits your relationships
Yoga can even help improve your relationship with your spouse, parents, friends or loved ones! A mind that is relaxed, happy and contented is better able to deal with sensitive relationship matters. Yoga and meditation keeps the mind happy and peaceful; and watch how your relations with those around you blossom!
Guides your body's healing in your mind's eye
If you contemplate an image in your mind's eye, as you do in yoga nidra and other practices, you can effect change in your body. Several studies have found that guided imagery reduced postoperative pain, decreased the frequency of headaches, and improved the quality of life for people with cancer and HIV.
Keeps allergies and viruses at bay
Kriyas or cleansing practices, are another element of yoga. They include everything from rapid breathing exercises to elaborate internal cleansings of the intestines. Jala neti, which entails a gentle lavage of the nasal passages with salt water, removes pollen and viruses from the nose, keeps mucus from building up, and helps drains the sinuses.
Helps for weight loss.
Desire of many! Yoga helps here too. Sun Salutations and Kapal Bhati pranayama help lose weight with yoga. Moreover, with regular practice of yoga, we tend to become more sensitive to the kind of food our body asks for and the time we take. This can also help keep a check on our weight.
Improves intuition.
Yoga and meditation have the power to improve your intuitive ability so that you spontaneously realize what needs to be done, when and how, to yield positive results. It does work! You only need to experience it yourself.
