Yoga has been around in some form for centuries, and its positive effects on the body are not just the opinion of a few. Many of the benefits it provides have been scientifically proven, and there’s simply no way to argue against the benefits it provides the body and mind.
There are very few limitations to starting yoga. You don’t even need a yoga mat when first trying it out. Simply pick a basic routine with simple poses and start striking them.
As you get better, you’ll enter the positive spiral that yoga presents, and you’ll be able to take on more challenging poses and experience even more benefits.
So check out the following benefits of yoga, and make a commitment to getting started.
Amazing Benefits of Yoga – Connect Your Mind and Body
1. Better Sleep
When you start practicing yoga you’ll be releasing pent up energy that could prevent you from falling asleep, and sleeping soundly once you do get to sleep. Yoga helps relax your nervous system, which is the part of your body responsible for restful sleep or a night of tossing and turning.
The meditative aspect of yoga is apparent here, and if a racing mind is what keeps you from getting to sleep, you may benefit greatly from performing yoga at any point during the day to quiet the mind and free yourself from the constant loop of thoughts that keeps you awake at night.
There are specific poses you can do that are specifically geared toward helping you sleep better. Try the Uttanasana, Halasana, or the Savasana before retiring for the night. These should put your body in a relaxed state, making it easier for you to drift off.
2. More Energy
If yoga seems like it would use more energy than it would create, you’re not looking at it in the right light. When first starting out, yoga may seem like a challenge, and you may exert a lot of effort just to hold basic poses.
As you continue on with it, the poses will get easier, and you’ll actually feel more refreshed and exhilarated than when you started. There are certain poses that are meant to help boost your good energy, and help you shrug off negative energy that is trapped in the body.
Try the Utthita Trikonasana, Utkatasana, and Salabhasana poses. Once completed you should feel better than before, with a flush of energy you can apply to your next daily task.
3. More Strength
Yoga requires you to get into and hold positions that will naturally strengthen your muscles, using only your bodyweight for resistance. This is a very unique approach because as you do more yoga, your body weight should naturally decrease, which logic would say should make the poses more easy to complete.
But the beauty of yoga is that you can try more advanced poses as your abilities improve and your body gets stronger and lighter. That’s why there’s potentially no better exercise to start off with since you can begin at any level of ability and improve over time.
Every yoga pose will provide you with strength if you perform them with regularity, but try the plank, bakasana, and various headstands if you particularly want to focus on strength.
4. Better Sex
This is perhaps one of the most popular benefits associated with yoga, and it’s something that you don’t really have to focus on in order to get these benefits. By performing even the most basic of yoga poses, you’ll be helping to build your body into a super sexy machine.
The first thing that yoga helps with is your flexibility. Not only will you be able to get into more positions than you could before, but you’ll be able to hold them for longer periods of time without getting tired. You’ll have more strength, more balance, and more flexibility, which all translates to better performance.
All yoga positions are inextricably linked to the sexual act, so you can literally choose any sequence and you’ll be improving yourself greatly. Choose poses that resonate with you and build from there.
5. Lower Blood Pressure
Doing yoga should lower your blood pressure, even though it may be frustrating at first and you feel like it’s raising it. But it is actually a good workout for your heart, and will improve your cardiovascular function over time. The key is sticking with it long enough to get these benefits.
You don’t have to do any extreme yoga poses or do hot yoga to get the benefits of lower blood pressure. It’s the calming nature of yoga that provides this benefit, so focus on feeling good, and only push yourself far enough for continual growth, and not the point of frustration.
For lowering your blood pressure try to focus on meditating while you hold your poses. Perform them to the best of your ability and then work on freeing your mind from its incessant chatter.
6. Less Pain
The pain we experience is largely do to the lack of motion and activity we face. It’s the body’s answer to atrophy, and many times just getting moving will make many of those aches and pains go away. If the pain you’re experiencing is from a trauma you can use yoga to help as well.
The calming nature of yoga done right will help you manage the pain better. You may find that yoga helps get your body into its proper alignment, and when that happens you may see much of your chronic pain dissipate over time.
It’s important to remain optimistic and realize that it’s likely not going to be an overnight process. There are specific poses you can do for pain management, but these will vary depending on what is hurting. You can do routines for back pain, arthritis pain, as well as any specific body part that’s giving you trouble.
7. Better Metabolism
Yoga helps improve your metabolism, which has many trickle down benefits, not the least of which is effortless weight loss. With all of the tempting foods around us and all of our creature comforts it’s easy to fall into a state of a sluggish metabolism.
The good news is you have the power to make it better with yoga and other methods. Yoga increases your lean muscle, and makes you more flexible. This alone is enough to get your metabolism going, but it also gives you more energy, making you more likely to be active through the day.
An improved metabolism means you’ll be burning calories even while you’re sitting on the sofa or sleeping in your bed. Try the locust, bridge, and shoulder stand if you want to directly work on revving up your metabolism.
8. Better Immunity
Doing yoga will make your immune system better, which has plenty of benefits to it, including less chance of getting the common cold, or the flu during flu season. If you do manage to catch a cold it will reduce its severity and get you back into the action more quickly with a shorter recovery period.
Your immune system also helps keep you free of diseases like cancer, so it’s important to keep it at the top of its game. Almost every yoga pose you do will be helping you to improve your immune system, but a few of the better ones are the bridge, shoulder stands, and head stands.
9. Better Respiration
Yoga is great for those suffering from any sort of respiratory ailment or condition. It can help open up the airways and gets your lungs to do their job better.
One of the main facets of yoga is your breathing. You’re consistently asked to focus on your breathing, and work at making it better. Taking deeper breaths, expanding your lung capacity, and being more conscious of your breathing are all part of the process.
The cow pose, cobra pose, and gate pose are all ones that you can do to boost your respiratory health. There are also several more as you get better and better at performing yoga, but it’s best to start with the easy ones to build confidence and move up from there.
10. Better Circulation
Your circulatory system is one of the most important parts of your body, and all too often it is the victim of a sedentary lifestyle and improper eating. Yoga can play a bit role in getting it back to peak performance, since it helps you stretch out your muscles and gets your heart pumping.
Yoga is also self-regulating, so you’ll find the more complex poses too hard to maintain if your circulation is not very good. But as you stick with it you’ll notice that you can do more poses, and that you can hold them longer without getting tired. This is a sign that your circulation is improving!
The chair pose, the downward dog, and the warrior pose will all help your circulation, but remember that this doesn’t occur the first time you do it, but is a result of continuation and repetition.
11. Better Posture
Yoga will give you better posture in a very natural way. All of the poses you’ll be performing are geared to get your body back into proper alignment, but to do so in a way that doesn’t force you into any unnatural positions.
Sure, they may seem unnatural at first because they are hard to perform, but that’s just because your posture is so bad it now feels like the “right way” to be.
As you continue on with yoga you should find that your posture improves. This is one reason why a before picture is recommended, because improved posture generally isn’t something that you’ll notice by looking in the mirror, but others might notice you appear taller and healthier.
The great thing is that all yoga poses work on your posture, as posture isn’t just getting your shoulders to stop slouching, it requires the entire body to get involved.
12. Better Balance
If you’ve noticed that you don’t have as much balance as you once did, it’s important to start to correct that, and yoga can be very helpful in this quest. Yoga requires concentration and focus to hold the poses.
But a funny thing happens as you do yoga more and more. You have to concentrate and focus less on balancing. This is because your balance has naturally improved.
Every yoga pose helps improve your balance, even the ones that don’t appear to require any balance. When you are sitting or leaning you are still required to balance yourself, and center your body.
13. Lower Weight
All else being equal, yoga should help you come down to your natural body weight. If you are currently heavier than what you should naturally be, yoga will be something that you can do to get to where you need to be. It does this in a few different ways, all of them synergistic.
It’s building lean muscle, which improves your metabolism so you’ll It also helps burn calories in the actual act of performing the poses.
If you start to eat more wholesome foods while performing a daily yoga routine you’ll be more likely to see the pounds come off in a shorter amount of time than if you maintain unhealthy eating while doing yoga.
14. Less Stress and Anxiety
Stress has been labeled as the silent killer, and that’s because low levels of stress may now be what you consider normal, and it works in the background to increase your blood pressure and release stress hormones that can lead to illnesses and diseases.
Yoga can help you kick big-time stress as well as that under the radar stress that can be just as problematic. By setting time aside each day to perform yoga you’ll notice that you are taking away time that you may have spent worrying, fretting, stressing out, or even having an anxiety attack.
Yoga gets you to quiet the mind, and it also gives your body an outlet to release energy blocks that may have you stressing out even more. Try the Balasana pose, also known as the child’s pose.
It’s hard to hold this pose and feel stress at the same time, the two are almost mutually exclusive.
15. Better Memory
Yoga can lead to a better memory, mostly because it is improving your blood flow, and that improves the blood flow to the brain making it work better. This is why yoga can be very helpful in staving off diseases like Alzheimer’s and other mental disorders.
In the short term, however, an improved memory can come in very handy when trying to place names with faces or remember where you parked.
The Padahastasana is one particular pose you can use if getting a better memory is at the top of your to-do list. It involves bending over so that your head eventually is near your knees with enough practice.
16. Lower Cholesterol
Impressively enough, yoga can actually help lower your cholesterol. You’ll want to let your doctor know that you’d like to use yoga in conjunction with their advice before starting any yoga routine.
Ways to help lower your cholesterol with yoga include performing any of the poses, and focusing on your breathing. There are specific yoga techniques that only involve sitting and breathing, and these can go a long way towards improving your cholesterol numbers.
The first time you see your cholesterol improve from doing yoga, you’ll be hooked. But it will take persistence and daily practice to achieve these benefits.
17. Lower Blood Sugar Levels
This is great news for diabetics and those that have been told they are at risk for developing diabetes. Yoga has the ability to lower blood sugar levels when practiced on a regular basis. Paired with proper eating this can go a long way towards keeping these levels within healthy parameters.
Diabetics are often advised to exercise, and yoga is one exercise that you can do all year long, no matter the weather, and without any extra equipment.
Pranayama is a great pose for lowering blood sugar, and it is one pose that anyone can do. First get into the quintessential meditative pose of an enlightened being, and focus on your breathing in the prescribed manner.
18. Lower Risk of Heart Disease
Yoga helps the heart in so many ways that it actually works to reduce your risk of developing heart disease of all types. It helps your heart do its job, increasing blood flow throughout the body, and improving the entire circulatory system.
Not only that but it helps with your mood and makes you feel better, which helps prevent diseases of all types. The combination of daily exercise, stretching, toning, and cardio means that you’re doing a big favor for your heart, and of course your self as well.
There aren’t any specific poses that will lessen your chance of heart disease, it is the act of yoga in general, holding any of the poses, getting the heart rate up, and keeping a healthy weight that does the trick.
19. Helps Prevent Osteoporosis
It’s amazing that yoga can actually help the health of your bones. It just gets back to the body’s natural need to move. Studies have confirmed that yoga can not only prevent osteoporosis, but can stop it if you already have it, and even turn the situation around.
That’s remarkable! If you’re already suffering from this disease, be sure to take it easy at the outset, since your bones are already in a fragile state. Only hold poses for a short time so that your body can get used to it.
The Parivrtta Trikonasana, Salabhasana, and Ardha Chandrasana poses will all help you prevent osteoporosis. Remember, you don’t have to be a yoga master to do these poses, or hold them for long periods of time at first.
Just trust your instincts and do what you can to start. Starting is the most important thing, not being perfect.
20. Alleviates Symptoms from Many Conditions
Yoga is a beneficial to all sorts of diseases and ailments, that there’s virtually nothing it can’t help with. From helping cancer patients recover from chemotherapy, to helping arthritis sufferers regain mobility in their joints, it can provide symptom relief when nothing else seems to work.
The great part about yoga is that no matter what state you’re currently in there are at least a few poses that you can perform. Some yoga exercises are just breathing, so even if you’re bedridden you can do these breathing exercises to help focus your mind and improve your respiratory function.
You’d be amazed at how much better you feel just by breathing more effectively. Depending on your symptom, you’ll want to do specific poses to help it. You may also find that a general yoga routine with some of the most popular poses works just fine.
21. Improves Your Mood
Most yoga practitioners report feeling better after performing yoga. In fact, if you feel worse afterward you didn’t do it right. With it’s strong focus on quieting the mind and finding inner peace it’s just a matter of performing the poses in a way that makes you feel good, and not bad.
What’s so important about your mood? Everything! Your mood dictates how your day goes, and stack together enough days and you make a year. Stack up enough years and you have a lifetime. So why not do something to improve your mood so that you in essence improve your life.
You can perform any yoga exercise to experience a natural mood enhancer. Keep a list of poses that make you feel best and turn to them whenever you need a mood adjustment.
22. Provides an Inner Calmness (Eventually)
When starting out with yoga you may find the poses hard to get into, and even harder to hold. Your state of inner being might be all chaos and confusion, mixed with frustration and exhaustion.
But you have to have faith that as you stick with it you’ll get better at it, and can eventually turn your mind inward, which produces the calmness you typically hear attributed to yoga.
It’s a good idea to have an instructor if you’re just starting out. They work wonders on keeping you in the moment and stopping you from being so hard on yourself. Just don’t fret when you aren’t able to perform the poses as effortlessly as they are.
23. Moves Lymph Fluid
Your lymphatic system is interesting because it doesn’t have a pump to move its fluid, the way the heart pumps the blood. It relies on you to get enough movement throughout the day to get the lymphatic fluid moving.
There is a virtual epidemic today of lymphatic problems caused by improper drainage of lymphatic fluid. It’s because as Americans we simply don’t move enough during the course of a day to get that fluid moving. All it really takes is some specific poses to get the job done.
For example, try anything that gets you inverted, like a should stand or a head stand. These are pretty advanced moves, so you’ll want to work your way up to them or use a wall for support.
24. Lowers Sodium Levels
The Standard American Diet has us consuming so much sodium, it’s borderline preposterous. All of that sodium gets stuck inside the body, and unless we sweat it out and drink enough water it can lead to things like high blood pressure and stroke. It’s important to get those levels down.
Cutting back on your intake of sodium is also a good idea, but it can be hard when nearly every packaged food is loaded with it, and these foods literally bombard us each day. But a combination of dietary changes and lifestyle changes like starting yoga can be a huge help.
You may want to try hot yoga, yoga performed in a room with sauna-like temperatures, to really sweat it up and get rid of a lot more sodium.
25. Improves Your Outlook on Life
Getting a better outlook on life can help you in nearly every aspect of your life. You may feel like not even trying some days, or you may get stuck in a cycle of unhealthy thoughts that yoga can help you break free of.
The importance of improving your outlook on life can’t be overstated. It can help you break free of symptoms of depression, and could even prevent you from becoming clinically depressed. It can get you to take on new projects with a renewed sense of vigor and zest for life.
But you’ll never know unless you get started, and the good news is even the most basic yoga poses can get you there.
26. Tones the Body
One really great aspect of yoga is that it works to tone your body without the need of weights or exercise equipment. Like a push-up or a pull-up yoga uses your own body weight as the resistance, which not coincidentally is the perfect weight for you to lift.
You really don’t need to lift more than your own bodyweight to get a lean, muscular physique. And with yoga you don’t have to worry about bulking up if you’re a woman, as it will only give you a nice lean figure. The same goes for men, it will elongate your muscles, giving you a natural looking figure without getting overgrown.
The poses that work best are the ones that pit your body weight against you, so go for any pose that has you lifting any body part in the air and holding it there. You’ll definitely feel the burn.
27. Boosts Your Mental Faculties
Yoga improves the flow of blood to the brain, so it helps you perform all sorts of mental functions more easily. This ranges from simple things involving dexterity and hand to eye coordination, to more elegant tasks like creativity and imagination.
You might not even notice that these improvements are taking place, but studies have shown a direct link between them, so you sort of have to trust that it’s working. On the other hand, you might notice more bursts of inspiration, or just a keener mind in general.
Any yoga pose can help get you to a better functioning brain, which may be the number one reason to start doing even a basic yoga routine each day.
Till than take care.
