Many individuals shy away from yoga because they think they can’t contort their body into pretzel-like shapes. However, yoga has many benefits and most of the twisted and difficult positions take years of practice to achieve.
If you need help with yoga, stretch therapy can help. If you need reasons why yoga is good for you, below are 10 astounding benefits of yoga that will make you want to get out a mat and strike a pose right now.
1. Eat More Mindfully
Exercise, especially gentle yoga, forces an individual to concentrate on their breathing and the different sensations your body is experiencing. This will help your brain to notice what is happening within your body, which helps you pay more attention to hunger sensations.
After a few local yoga classes, you will see food as a fuel and not a reward or something to satisfy an emotional emptiness. Eating for your body and not your mind or heart will become second nature in a short period of time.
2. Sex is Better
Once you begin to see a difference in your appearance and the way you feel, you will become sexier to yourself and your partner. This is naturally what exercise can do for you.
Yoga has a built-in sex-enhancing way that works well for women. By improving your muscle tone, your core stability, your flexibility, and your pelvic floor muscles, sex will become more satisfying than ever before.
3. Open Heart
You may hear your yoga instructor saying to “open your heart” and that isn’t only for the salutations to the gods. Yoga is good for reducing your risk for heart disease by shrinking stress, dropping bad cholesterol, and lowering high blood pressure.
Although yoga isn’t counted towards the recommended amount of weekly cardiac or aerobic exercise, it is beneficial for overall wellbeing and if this is your goal, you will reduce your risk for heart disease.
4. Body Love
Yoga promotes self-awareness and self-love like no other exercise you can perform. When doing yoga, you are forced to concentrate on your body, and you have to come to terms with its shape and size in order to gently move in and out of the positions.
Loving your body and self is a wonderful benefit of yoga, no matter what your size is. And after practicing yoga for a long time, you will see your shape change in ways you can’t imagine.
5. Makes You Smarter
Practicing a mere 20 minutes of yoga will improve your brain’s ability to accurately and quickly process information. Yoga helps you to remain in the present, zoning in rather than zoning out like some exercises.
You need to pay attention and be mindful which correlates with structural changes in the brain. This also boosts your ability to recall things, which is improving your memory. And everyone can use a boost in the memory department with today’s busy and fast-paced lifestyles.
6. Reduces Stress and Anxiety
Everyone knows that the relaxing of muscles and release of tension is a stress reducer and that is exactly what yoga provides for its participants. The mindfulness of the exercise helps with relaxation and ultimately, one cannot be calm and stressed at the same time.
Practicing yoga every day, even for a short period of time, can help you reduce stress and avoid anxiety. If you feel anxious and can’t find a place to practice a full round of yoga, just remember your breathing and to feel the sensations in your body.
Being mindful of where you are and what you are doing is part of the teachings of yoga and this is exactly what you need to do when you feel anxious.
7. Better Sleep
Yoga, because of its gentle and calm movements, can help improve your sleep. It is well known that exercise helps one sleep, but yoga goes one further.
By helping the body prepare for relaxing, yoga for sleep is one of the best natural remedies for insomnia there is. Adding yoga to your bedtime routine is a great way to get a good night’s sleep as well as wake up refreshed and ready for a new day.
8. Fights Bugs
Yoga can help you fight the flu or common cold by influencing gene expression. Yoga quickly has genes, at the cellular level, boosting your immunity and this helps keep “bugs” from bringing you down. And all this happens before you leave the floor.
When you begin to feel run down, take a few minutes to relax and practice a few gentle yoga poses. The cell repair you are giving your body will help to stave off any bad viruses you may have picked up earlier that day.
9. Ease Treatment Side Effects
The debilitating side effects of some serious illness treatments can be lessened by quite a bit with yoga. Cancer, kidney disease, and many other treatments can have side effects that can make a body worse before the treatments seem to help.
Yoga is a pain reducer is an all-natural alternative to more drugs and pain medications. Yoga will help patients feel healthier, more at peace, and stronger over a short period of time. If you are able, practice a few poses before, during and after treatments to help keep your body and mind in good condition while the treatment does its work.
10. Balance Hormones
Hormone imbalances aren’t just for teenagers and older women. Everyone has times in their life when hormones seem to go out on their own. Practicing yoga can help balance your hormones and save you from yourself.
There are many reasons to begin a yoga routine, but the best benefits are the ones you can’t see on the outside. You will feel better than you ever have before, and it will only take a short period of time to notice how well you feel. Keep practicing yoga and you will feel so good, you won’t want to stop.