When you think of exercising, chances are, the mental image you get is someone running on a treadmill, someone sweating as they lift weights, or a heart-pumping aerobic workout. But not all forms of exercise are so exhausting.
If you're looking for a way to calm down your day, increase your flexibility and personal awareness, and to get your heart rate elevated without draining you for the rest of the day, yoga may be a great fitness routine to work into your day. It can not only help stretch your body and allow you time to meditate and focus on you, but it can help burn calories and fat without the high impact running, exhausting endless crunches and weight-lifting.
Yoga has many benefits, which extend from just the average fitness angle. Yoga is a great way to increase the flexibility of your body. Certain yoga positions rely on working and lubricating certain joints, tendons, ligaments and muscles that work together in harmony. By participating in yoga, the positions and activity of the poses can be a great way to stretch your body without being too strenuous.
Yoga can have a detoxification effect on one's body. During yoga poses, you are stretching muscles and massaging internal organs, which allows complete blood flow and supply throughout your body, and helps to flush out any toxins from your body, giving you a refreshed feel. This boost in energy will follow through in your day-to-day life, allowing you to be calm, energized, and feeling younger!
During yoga, you are utilizing the poses to help you become stronger and more flexible, which in turn will help you develop a stronger core and better posture. This will help ease back and neck issues in those who have been experiencing issues centered around their core. In fact, yoga is known for helping relieve the symptoms of common chronic medical conditions, such as joint pain and arthritis, back and neck pain, insomnia, and asthma.
Not only are you toning muscles during yoga, you are massaging all of your body organs and increasing your flexibility. But the other benefit of yoga is what happens on the inside: when you're practicing yoga, you are also spending time focusing on you, and meditating. Though yoga and meditation are often confused as being similar, they are not. However, yoga can give you that calm, inner quiet and peace, and can help relieve stress and center your mind, body and spirit together as one. This can help keep depression and anxiety at bay, and allow you to harbor better moods and increase your levels of concentration during the day.
Yoga can benefit anyone at any age and fitness level, and should not be overlooked when one is looking to start a fitness regimen or routine. Yoga, though low-impact, slower, and more calming than a run or weight-lifting session, can be just as good for your outside appearance as it is for your inside emotional well-being.