How Can Yoga Improve My Health & Wellness?

No matter your level of fitness, yoga is a completely uncompetitive, holistic approach to your mental wellness and general wellbeing. It can bring complete harmony to your environment and everything around you. Authentic yoga is a way of life for absolutely anyone.  Proven to be beneficial – and you don't need to be a yogi or yogini to reap the rewards.

Not only can the many styles of yoga bring true harmony to your mind, body and soul, but your flexibility, balance, digestion, energy levels and overall muscular strength will improve, and these are just some of the benefits.

What is Yoga?

Your poses are your building blocks. You start with what you feel comfortable in doing, and as your intuition grows, so will your confidence in trying other poses, and so you blossom from there. With the power to calm the mind and strengthen the body, it truly is a full self-experience. The meditation and breath-work are particularly helpful for the modern-day woman/man who is busy juggling their work, family and social life, and coping with all the associated stresses, strains, and distractions.

The benefits of Yoga

If you are going through an illness, recovering from surgery or living with a chronic condition, yoga could become an integral part of your treatment and potentially accelerate the healing process.

Improve your flexibility, balance and strength

Slow movements and deep breathing increases blood flow and warms up the muscles. Holding certain poses can increase your strength. Often when hitting the gym, you build strength at the expense of flexibility. This is why yoga is great - you’ll notice a gradual loosening of the joints, muscles and eventually you’ll become a pro and wonder why you hadn’t started yoga sooner.

Assist Back Pain

Basic stretching can ease pain in any area of the body, but for your back, you could improve mobility and strengthen your muscles, preventing pain from reoccurring in the future. To some physicians, yoga is often the first line of treatment when it comes to chronic lower back pain.

Benefits to your heart

There are many factors that contribute to heart disease, namely high blood pressure and being overweight. Yoga is extremely relaxing and can reduce the levels of stress in the body. It can also assist with the reduction of body-wide inflammation which in essence lowers blood pressure and assists the heart. By increasing your flexibility and practicing yoga often, you could lose excess weight too.

Get better sleep

A consistent yoga routine before bed can help you to ease the mind and get you into the correct state required to fall asleep. Likewise, feeling more relaxed and at peace could aid you in sleeping better and waking up more refreshed in the mornings.

Better blood flow

Twisting poses are thought to wring out venous blood from internal organs and allow oxygenated blood to flow in once the twist is released. Yoga also boosts levels of hemoglobin and red blood cells, which carries oxygen to the tissues. It thins the blood which can lead to a decrease in heart attacks and strokes since blood clots are often the cause of these killers.

Ease Arthritis

Gentle yoga has been shown to ease some of the discomfort with arthritis, specifically with tender, swollen joints. Each time you practice yoga, you take your joints through their full range of motion, which can help prevent degenerative arthritis or mitigate disability by way of “squeezing and soaking” areas of cartilage that normally aren’t used.

Increase your energy and mood

Yoga provides your body with a boost in feeling more alert. The endorphins that are released with exercise are shown in yoga too, and as a result, you will increase not only your physical, but mental energy. This in turn should make you feel more enthusiastic about facing the day, with fewer negative feelings and emotions.

It helps to build your sense of self

Through yoga, many people have expressed the ease in which you get to know yourself. You begin to build self-trust, and when you exercise and eat healthier your unconscious mind tells you that you are worthy and deserve better for yourself. It is important to have a great relationship with yourself, as this helps you to develop confidence along with a health, balanced ego and willpower.

When you become more centered and at peace with yourself, you become the same way with your partner. This therefore allows you to view them in a more compassionate light, with more unconditional love.  The same goes for family, friends and even work colleagues. Having more compassion for those that surround you will in essence make you more at peace with your surroundings and will allow you to live a more positivity-filled life.