Time for a guest post. This time this is by Krista Harper.
In its most simple terms yoga is a practice incorporating physical, mental, and spiritual disciplines. While lying under a broad term, yoga actually has several schools of thought, practices, and goals.
While yoga’s mindful benefits are well known, what many people don’t realize is that yoga also provides physical benefits such as flexibility, pain relief, weight management, and strength. Yoga provides a full range of benefits tackling nearly all of your body’s needs.
Here are 5 amazing benefits of yoga
1. Helps improve posture
One of the components of yoga is moving your body through different poses and postures. This helps to strengthen your muscles, tendons and joints, as well as improves your posture in areas such as your neck that supports your head, and your spine which supports your full bodies weight and protects your spinal cord.
By improving the strength in your posture areas, yoga helps prevent common aging related issues such as lower back pain, neck pain, and spinal curvature disorders.
2. Strengthens bones
Much like how performing squats will help to increase strength in your core and leg muscles, yoga utilizes postures which require you to lift your body weight. The process of weight bearing in slow methodical movements helps to improve joint flexibility as well as strengthen bones which helps to prevent bone fractures and reduces the chance of a person getting osteoporosis.
Some thoughts are that limited cortisol production created by yoga helps your bones maintain their calcium and thereby increase bone density.
3. Helps you sleep
About a quarter of adults experience acute insomnia every year, while a large percentage of adults such as those suffering chronic pain, mental health, and even parents of young children experience chronic insomnia.
Yoga is a practice of mindfulness that helps relax both the body and mind which reduces the stress that often results in insomnia. In addition, yoga has been shown to reduce cortisol levels resulting in hyper-arousal that is triggered by a fight or flight response.
4. Boosts Immunity
Physical exertion of yoga helps to improve physical strength and blood flow which improves the body’s cardiovascular and immunity systems. Though, it is the meditative aspect which seemingly has the most benefit to improving the immune system by raising antibody levels when the body is attacked and regulating immune function when your immune system should be relaxed.
5. Reduces Stress
Likely, when someone thinks of yoga, they picture mindful meditation. Yoga is one of the most beneficial exercises that can be done to help reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. Mindful yoga helps a person focus on their current state of being by creating awareness of the world around you. This enables a person to realize that the past cannot be changed, and the future is highly unpredictable. Awareness helps to regulate the mind’s fluctuations that can result in emotional extremes.
Yoga practiced regularly can improve your physical and emotional health. The benefits are far reaching and deeply routed in our body’s needs with the ability to improve posture, bone strength, immunity, stress-relief, and how we sleep.
💗 Jennikatja
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