Benefits of Yoga
Benefits of Yoga is no more an alien term to any of us. Everyone is aware of benefits of Yoga and it’s growing popularity in the west. Indians know yoga as an integral part of their upbringing. Deep breathing and pranayam are a part of the daily routine for every Indian child and all of us are enjoying the benefits of Yoga for a long time.
Benefits of Yoga are uncountable and it definitely has both short-term and long-term health benefits. Yoga is an ultimate medium for improving and developing one’s mind body and soul. Children, adults, men and women, nobody has remained untouched from the benefits of Yoga once adapted in the lifestyle.
Benefits of Yoga are both external as well as internal and individual experiences a complete transformation in himself/herself.
One of the most wonderful benefits of Yoga is that it doesn’t require the help of any external equipment. Yoga is designed in such a manner that it uses the body parts of the yogi to master the various exercise.
So, for practicing Yoga, all you need is your will-power, a mat and here you go!
Health Benefits of Yoga
The health benefits of Yoga are in-numerous. Yoga in the first place targets the physical health of a yogi, then it proceeds towards overall development of the personality. Several among many benefits of Yoga are listed below.
The yoga exercises have a sequential order to detoxify each and every part of the body and ensure that it functions properly. Let’s take a look at major health benefits of Yoga:
- Benefits of Yoga include increasing the immunity of the individual so that he/she can fight the diseases that prevail in the environment and stay healthy irrespective of the germs and infections spread around. Increased immunity directly results in better strength and the productivity of the person.
- When the person is immune to the infections around him is less likely to fall ill in comparison to the people around him. He is considered stronger and can also withstand adverse physical conditions better than the others.
- Flexibility is one of the most amazing benefits of Yoga, once you start practicing yoga you will feel that your body has turned flexible and you are feeling surprisingly free. Your body including arms, thighs, muscles, hamstrings and wrists become flexible and you experience yourself as a better and wonderful person.
- Increase in the flexibility also helps you to boost up your confidence as the stiffness of the body often blocks the thought process of a person. Increase in flexibility helps the person to curb issues like arthritis, osteoporosis and other problems related to bones.
benefits of yoga
- Practicing Yoga makes your body language more composed and proper. The one who practices Yoga automatically looks aligned, sophisticated and mannered. He need not to be taught the ways to sit, stand, walk or sleep. Healthy body habits come naturally to the one who practices yoga as it teaches him to be composed and calm. This one of the best benefits of Yoga so far.
- Yoga is said to have a direct effect on body and increasing muscular strength. The yoga exercises have a series of yoga asanas that works upon your biceps, triceps, muscles of thighs and hamstrings. They increase your muscular strength and give them a proper toning. The muscles are tightened in a natural way and become stronger than earlier.
benefits of yoga
- Provides strength to your spine: The Yoga asanas directly act on your spine and works upon strengthening it. The yoga poses and bends help the yogi to strengthen his backbone and as a result get rid of backpain, spondylolysis and other backbone-related issues. It tones your shoulder muscles and help you get rid of fat deposits on your back.
- Various asanas like shirshasana and sarvangasana direct the blood flow towards the brain and hence regulated the flow in the entire body. Regulation of blood flow is one of the most crucial benefits of Yoga as blood flow is an important factor in determining the strength of an individual person.
- When the blood flow is not proper in the body of any person, it leads to many internal uneasiness including nausea, headache, dizziness and discomfort. Proper flow of blood helps in better focus, steadiness of the mind, increased flexibility and reduces level of anxiety.
- Ease constipation and loose-motion as well: The Yoga asanas are designed to release air from your bowels and make your digestion proper and balanced. It detoxifies your stomach and bowels so that it naturally culls out the toxins from your body. The problem of constipation gets reduced to a large extent once you start practicing yoga and you will observe amazing synchronization in your daily digestion chart.
- Increases metabolism: Practicing Yoga increases metabolism and indirectly helps in weight-loss. It also helps in increasing the levels of HDL (good cholesterol) and LDL (harmful cholesterol) and keeps your weight in check.
- Prevents heart diseases: Yoga is said to be extremely beneficial for people struggling with heart issues as breathing exercises and pranayama techniques are helpful in curbing heart related problems. Doctors have testified that besides the medicines, practicing yoga is extremely beneficial in regulating blood flow and oxygen towards the heart, curing the heart-related issues.
Benefits of Yoga for Women
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task as your body goes through many changes in your entire lifetime and so does your lifestyle. From getting your first periods to experiencing menopause, each physical change in a woman’s body is associated with a bunch of hormonal changes and emotional imbalances.
Yoga comes as a saviour to deal with all these issues and make your life easier and comfortable in any phase of your life. Below is the list of amazing benefits of Yoga that are introduced once a woman starts exploring the deep after-effects of practicing Yoga.
- Regulation of menstrual cycle: The most cherished benefit of Yoga for women is the regulation of menstrual cycle. We often struggle with irregular periods, uncomfortable cramps and weakness. Yoga helps you to deal with all such discomforts by regularising your periods and making the period pain easy.
- Relief from stress and depression: Women tend to overthink and take more stress in their daily lives. Yoga helps you to tackle your daily issues in a calmer manner relieving your mind from unnecessary stress and depression.
- Blood Pressure: Doing pranayama and other exercises oxygenates the body and all the internal organs. This advances the circulation of the blood in the body and improves on your blood pressure. Women suffering from low blood pressure experience improvement in their blood pressure counts and the ones suffering from high blood pressure experience and reduction.
- Better libido: Exercises like Setubandh Asana, Ustrasana and other exercises of pelvic muscles increases the libido. Once you start practicing Yoga you will start experiencing the subtle changes that happens in your body. Practicing Yoga is known to have increased the libido in women and also help them express themselves.
- Ease during pregnancy labour: Women who practice yoga during their pregnancy and post their pregnancy are reportedly more stable during their delivery. Practicing yoga helps in normal and natural delivery. The labour pain also eases and the mother is able to give birth to a healthy baby. The woman who practices yoga is said to give birth to a smarter baby too. The post-partum depression is also lessened if you regularly practice yoga.
- Improves the health of breasts and uterus: Yoga has proved to reduce chances of breast cancer in women and also vitalizes the reproductive organs of the body. It strengthens the uterus and provides proper nourishment to a female body.
- Weight loss: Yoga can be extremely beneficial in weight loss and doesn’t have any side effects also. Besides triggering weight loss, yoga also enhances metabolism in women therefore maintaining the figure and keeping the body in shape.
- Toned Body: Practising the yoga asanas tightens the muscles and the skin gets toned. It is best for women who are ageing and are troubled from the problem of sagging skin.
Benefits of Yoga for Men
In the developing world of equality where division of labour and pleasure is becoming equal for both men and women, all we are left with just the anatomical differences.
Men, just like women, have to go through a lot of stress all along the day and sadly, unlike women, there troubles are not even talked about.
Men have their own share of stress, pressure (both physical and mental), anxieties, insecurities and problems.
Yoga can come as a boon for men, to help them overpower the daily struggles that they have to deal with and shine as the winning warrior.
Let us take a look at some amazing benefits of Yoga for men. Read on…
- Stress buster: The most wonderful benefit of Yoga is its instant stress busting power. You feel the difference just after a single session. Yoga fills you with calmness and peace of mind. Rather than an exhausting cardio, a calmer mind is what you need to begin your day with. Yoga helps you relax so that you can sort out the day’s plan in your head and head on to achieve your goals for the day. It helps your mind clear through the doubts and challenges troubling you internally.
- Confidence Booster: When you are done with a complete session of yoga and have been able to perfect all the asanas included in the sequence, you are left with a more confident you and, trust me, the feeling is great. Yoga helps you to boost your self-confidence for the day and you feel charged.
- Strengthening muscles: What can be wished more for a man to look perfect and yoga gives you that perfect body. Yoga works on your body and tones your muscles to look just perfect. Unlike other forms of exercises, yoga uses your body weight for all the asanas that means you don’t require any external equipment to practice yoga and also you won’t ever regret missing out on a class because you will be actually covering your best asanas at your home and maintaining your muscles. Regular practice of yoga has also proved to improve your posture and your overall appearance.
- Improves your sex drive: Definitely, yoga has the power to improve your libido and work wonders for you. It increases your stamina and vital forces and you feel more excited and rejuvenated!
- Relieves you from insomnia: Handling stress in daily life may sometimes lead to insomnia and it may turn into a regular disorder over a period of time. Yoga helps you to keep your mind calm and sort out the disturbing thoughts in your head. This automatically leads to reduced stress and sound sleep. When you get a sound sleep at night, your productivity for the day increases and you feel energetic and fresh all through the day.
- Takes care of your cholesterol and blood sugar level: Irregular lifestyle and hectic schedules can make you neglect your health and diet but practicing yoga will look after that as practicing yoga automatically changes your lifestyle and the way you eat. It keeps your blood sugar level in check and increases your metabolism so that you can practically digest all that you eat all round the clock.
Benefits of Yoga for Kids / Children
Yoga can prove extremely beneficial for kids, as they say the earlier the better; same goes for yoga practitioners also. If you start at an early stage, it is obvious that you will be the one who gets the maximum benefit.
The first and the most important benefit of yoga for children is mental sharpness. Yoga induces calmness and stability that leads to mental sharpness.
Practicing pranayama and meditation from a younger age develops concentration and the ability to focus. Children who practice yoga are mentally stronger and more observant than the children who don’t.
The kid becomes smarter and has better memory power. He is able to understand things quickly and correctly.
Benefits of Yoga for children include making the body of the child more flexible and strong. The Yoga asanas are designed in such a way that they use the body’s own weight to carry out the exercises. This saves the child from running into any risk of physical damage as there is no external equipment to harm them. Also, as the child’s own body weight is involved, you need not worry about adjusting work-out weights.
Practicing Yogasanas can make a child’s body flexible and it also increases muscle and bone strength.
As Yoga requires a lot of breathing exercises the child learns to breathe deeply, this becomes one of the most important benefits of Yoga. This practice ensures the proper blood flow in the body. Many of our diseases are borne just due to improper breathing. Deep breathing automatically eliminates the possibilities of common diseases like cold, cough and seasonal fever.
Practicing Yoga regularly automatically develops self-discipline in a child and he/she learn to behave morally and ethically on his own.
The Ashtanga Yoga or the eight limbs of Yoga, comprise of physical and moral ethics that a human being should follow in order to lead a healthy and a peaceful life style.
When a child is subjected to this knowledge at an early stage, he/she automatically develops sensibility, mind-control and sense of differentiating between right and wrong.
Benefits of Yoga also includes refining the eating habits of a child and he develops immunity as a result. The child learns to eat healthy food for his/her overall growth.
Improved immunity helps him/her fight common diseases that can be caught easily from the surroundings. The child feels stronger and the parents need not worry while exposing him to different surroundings.
As benefits of Yoga also include fighting obesity, obese children can find a wonderful solution by practicing yoga. Being over-weight in childhood can lead to body shaming.
When a child is constantly pestered about his weight, he may just lose his self-confidence. Yoga has some comfortable and fun-to-do exercises like kaak-asana and pawanmuktasana that help the child to lose weight in a playful manner.
Also, by performing the exercises well, the child boosts his confidence and feels energetic and light in himself.
Many of us may not know that performing some asanas of Yoga also involves chanting of mantras with each inhalation and exhalation. When a child is taught yoga in its classical and pure form, he is made to learn those mantras too.
These mantras not only improve his pronunciation skills but also have a subtle deep impact in his sub conscious mind.
The child develops internal powers within himself and unknowingly trains himself for the challenges that life has to throw on him.
Psychological / Mental Benefits of Yoga
As Yoga is not just a set of physical exercises for a healthy body but a complete structure for the overall development of a human self, it has more psychological benefits than the physical ones.
Yoga impacts your mental self to such an extent that a person who is suffering from a mental trauma or depression can heal himself/herself with yoga.
Yoga soothes the nerves and relaxes your mind making it clear to think in a better way. Many time we are surrounded with problems that make us feel trapped and we fail to find an answer. As a result, we grow frustrated and directionless. This is where yoga comes into picture and rescues us from all these troubles.
Yoga helps you become aware of your inner self as well as that of your surroundings. In this way you learn to observe and realize the potential solutions around you. This makes your head clear and your internal vision stronger.
Yoga helps you develop confidence so that you give your best and excel in every field of your life. Practising the yoga asanas not only make your body stronger it also boosts your confidence.
The breathing exercises are meant to direct the blood flow towards the brain resulting in better focus and enhanced concentration.
When your head is sorted and you are aware of yourself as well as the surroundings you start prioritising your tasks and start understanding relationships. You make sure that you make no mistakes in your day to day life and even if you do so, you accept and rectify them gracefully.
Yoga teaches you to be humble and accepting towards your own self and that of others. As you use your own body to practice the asanas you realize that your body has immense potential, power and endurance.
You also realise your weakness and how to overcome them. With Yoga you learn self-love, healing, endurance, confidence, power, acceptance, discipline and gratitude.
Yoga leads you away from ego, self-pity and guilt. It helps you become stronger by eliminating the feeling of competing with others and proving yourself. It teaches you non-violence and peace.
Benefits of Yoga in the morning
Although benefits of yoga can be availed at any time of the day and you can choose your time, morning or evening according to your will, but it is highly recommended that you should practise Yoga in the morning.
Practicing Yoga in the morning, keeps you energized all day long and you feel strong and healthy.
The best reason to practice Yoga in the morning is that generally Yoga begins with breathing exercises (pranayamas) and Surya Namaskar. Surya Namaskar, literally means salutations to the sun, so ideally salutations to the sun are best offered in the morning as the sign of welcome.
Starting your day with yoga makes you feel stronger physically and boosts up your confidence to zillion folds. Pranayamas like nadi shodhan and asanas like pawanmuktasana actually help you clean and detoxify your bowels and give your day a kick start.
Meditating and doing pranayama in the morning can keep you focused, calm and relaxed all through the day and you will find yourself more sorted.
As the body is fresh and receptive in the morning, all the benefits of Yoga be it physical, mental, emotional or psychological, will be the most effective.
Practising Yoga in the morning also help you to see the results quite quickly as compared to those who practice yoga in the afternoon or evening.
Also, the best time to practice Yoga is when you are empty stomach as Yoga asanas are also detoxifiers that help in eliminating out the toxins from your body in whichever form they might be.
Practising Yoga in the morning also helps you to sleep better in the night. Your muscles are stretched and your gain flexibility and get rid of the morning-stiffness if you experience it at all.
Benefits of Yoga for Weight Loss
Yoga can be extremely beneficial for weight loss the only condition being consistency. Yoga has just the perfect asanas to tone your body and help you get rid of the stubborn fat on your waistline and tummy.
When focusing on weight loss, Yoga primarily works upon your metabolism and helps you digest everything that you eat. This in turn doesn’t allow any fat to settle around your waistline.
In the next step, Yoga uses your body weight to perform the asanas so that each and every muscle is put to use and none of the organs of the body remain inactive. This makes your body flexible, practising yoga each day prevents body fat to settle around your body parts that are less used like waistline, tummy and hips.
Surya Namaskar is the best exercise for Yoga for weight loss. It consists of 12 asanas that are perfectly designed to work upon each and every part of the body and help you lose weight very quickly.
Benefits of Hot Yoga
Hot Yoga is nothing but a sequential Yoga done in a hot atmosphere, often in a hot studio or a room. Hot Yoga has many variations but the most popular is the Bikram Yoga mostly considered as the only Hot Yoga.
Hot Yoga was invented with a concept to enhance the benefits availed by regular Yoga. Hot Yoga follows the basic principles of traditional Ashtanga Yoga but the temperature of the studio and sequence of the asanas change with the change of the trainer.
Hot Yoga involves a lot of sweat and the heat of the room loosens your muscles as if you are in a sauna bath, the only difference being that you have to work-out rigorously in the former one.
Benefits of Hot Yoga includes strengthening of muscles at a quicker rate, toning of the body, endurance and capability.
Due to the sweat it results in detoxification, clear skin, improved metabolism and higher tolerance level. Exercising in a comparatively hot climate also makes you more flexible as your muscles are relaxed and nerves are more receptive.
During the meditation or the breathing exercise sessions, you breathe warm oxygen that induces energy in your internal body organs as well. You feel a sense of purity and you feel as if your toxins are being thrown out of your body when you exhale.
Practising hot yoga eases the back-pain like no other exercise does. Hot yoga is known to have cured back pain and spine related issues. Even long term back-pain problems are cured as soon as just 10 sessions of hot yoga.
People with serious spinal issues have sought refuge in Hot Yoga as the warm temperature of the room helps them soothe their nerves quickly.
Benefits of Yoga in Pregnancy
Yoga can be extremely beneficial during pregnancy, before and after delivery as well. Yoga helps you fight stress and discomfort that a woman goes through her pregnancy.
Prenatal yoga is useful for women who have a hectic lifestyle and a busy schedule. As yoga is a complete solution for overall development of a human body, it helps the pregnant woman to deal with her small and big challenges.
- Breathing techniques help the lady to be herself and conscious breathing helps her to keep her mind still. This also helps her to deal with cravings and bouts.
- Practicing yoga also helps to reduce the swelling and pain in the feet that a pregnant woman may suffer from. Small exercise involving movement of feet.
- Yoga improves the strength of pelvic muscles so that the pregnant lady does not experience difficulty during delivery and it eases the pain. Strengthening the pelvic muscles also help them after pregnancy as she is able to restore her strength quiet quickly as compared to the women who do not practice yoga.
- Benefits of yoga for pregnant women also include restoration of emotional health after pregnancy, strengthening of muscles, and regaining body strength.
Benefits of Yoga in Schools for Students
Teaching Yoga in the school can be very beneficial in long term. As implementation of yoga in daily routine of students as well as teachers can make their lives more disciplined and organised.
Discipline is one of the fundamental principles of any school. What can be better for a school management than having a strength of students that follow a proper and organised code of conduct.
Individual benefits of Yoga work collectively on students when they start practicing Yoga together. They feel a sense of belongingness and learn team-work.
The children from every age group begin to connect with each other, not only superficially but also spiritually and emotionally.
They learn to shed their egos and start sharing their material as well as emotional possessions with each other. They believe in the power of sharing and learn the refined ways of life.
The teenage students who are lost and directionless are said to become calm and sorted once they start practising Yoga. Yoga answers all the questions of their stifled mind and they start feeling grounded. This helps them to make better decisions in their lives and clear out the worldly noises.
Learning Yoga in school results in the overall development of the child and he feels more connected. The child develops a sense of awareness, of himself and that of his surroundings. He learns to live in the moment.
Needless to say, practicing Yoga in schools improves mental abilities and concentration powers of the students and they are able to perform better in the class. Practicing Yoga together also builds a sense of unity among the school students and they start believing in the power of unity and togetherness.
Long term Benefits of Yoga
Stating all the wonderful benefits of Yoga now we have come to the last segment that will give you your final cue to pick up Yoga right away!
Yoga has the power to transform your life completely. However happy or free we might feel ourselves to be but in reality, we all do carry the baggage of our fears and negative emotions with us.
Depression and stress is nothing but the realization of incapability within ourselves and self-guilt, benefits of Yoga help us get rid of all.
Yoga is not just an exercise but a complete detox plan to help you get rid of all these deteriorating factors of your lives and strengthen you to use your energy to the optimum level. Benefits of Yoga not only include curing you of your diseases and keeping your healthy, it transforms your lifestyle in such a way that you keep cherishing the benefits of Yoga for all your life.
If these reasons are not enough, just try watching a yoga series on the TV, observe the calmness on the face of the yogi, you will realise on your own about the magic of Yoga.
Experience the power of yoga by joining a class, practising easy asanas, breathing exercises, power yoga, hot yoga or go to a yoga retreat.
Believe me Yoga has the power to transform your life into a better one. Go for any version of Yoga and experience the magic. Don’t forget to mention your experience in the comments section. Keep visiting healthlove.in for more insights.
R. Devashree Gehlot
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