It’s not surprising to see people get overwhelmed when it comes to choosing the right exercise. Some exercises are good for your muscles, some good for weight loss while others improve a certain aspect of your body, but what if you come across a series of exercises that could help in every aspect.
To be true, yoga is more than your normal exercise. The depth of yoga lies beyond the physical aspect and this beauty of yoga could ultimately help to uplift you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Yoga helps you in more ways than you think and here are just a few ways how yoga helps you to grow:
1.Physical well being
a. Improves strength, balance and flexibility
The slow movement, deep breathing, and continuous trial of stretching your body in a specific posture will make your muscle strong and give you the best flexibility without causing damage to your ligaments. Similarly, yoga seeks full focus and you cannot expect to do a challenging yoga posture without putting the needed focus, which ultimately improves your balance.
b. Increases blood flow
Did you know that the number one cause of death today is a heart attack? And heart attack results mostly due to inadequate flow of blood in the heart, which can easily be avoided by doing simple yoga. The simple desired movement of hands and legs increases the right flow of oxygenated blood to all the tissue of your body. Not only this but doing yoga prevents aggregation of platelets and can act as a blood thinner.
c. Prevents joint stiffness in time
Yoga focuses on slow moments and flexibility so doing yoga can prevent your joint stiffness in time which could prevent the chance of arthritis in general. In yoga there is a posture for each type of joint relaxation; therefore, yoga could be one of the best preventive measures for joint stiffness if you are prone to arthritis.
d. Ease Arthritis problems
Be it an elderly or a child, arthritis could affect all age group; however, elderly population have high risk of developing arthritis and doing yoga could help to ease your arthritis. The following arthritis could be easily relieved by doing appropriate yoga:
i. Severe back ache
ii. Knee pain
iii. Shoulder stiffness
iv. Neck rigidity
v. Hip stiffness
vii. Ankle pain
Caution- If the pain or stiffness is of high severity, you might consider consulting a doctor before you start doing yoga.
e. Improves posture
If you want to look smart, the first thing that will be noticed is your posture. And after ages and ages of sitting in a stooping position, it’s no wonder that you start looking like you have a camel with a hump on your back. Nonetheless, you can easily improve your posture in a matter of few weeks by doing the right yoga.
f. Builds your metabolism
For those who have a serious problem of indigestion or gastro-intestinal problem, choosing yoga could be the right step because doing yoga, stimulates your pineal gland which ultimately stimulates the hypothalamus, and then the pituitary gland to release thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) which activates your thyroid gland and increases your metabolism.
g. Helps you to lose weight and be in shape
Like any other exercise, doing strenuous yoga helps to lose weight and tone your muscles – ultimately giving you that toned body.
h. Release Tension of joints and limb
Have you noticed that sometimes you hold on to your cellphone or a door handle with all your strength unintentionally? All these unintentional acts build up so much tension in your body that doing even the simplest tasks could get very tiring and painful. Thus, doing yoga could help to relieve you of such tension.
i. Makes your respiratory muscle strong
For those having respiratory problems or those who are most likely to develop respiratory problems in the future due to family predisposition, doing yoga could make your respiratory muscles strong and can improve your respiratory function to a very high level.
j. Prevent limb edema (swelling), facial puffiness and varicose veins
Most of the time edema of the limb and face is due to obstruction of lymphatic channels of the body, so doing yoga regularly helps to move every part of your body causing good lymphatic flow and preventing swelling. Similarly, the same condition of stasis in the blood of veins results in varicose veins, and yoga could easily solve the grade 1,2, and 3 stages of varicose veins.
k. Improves Immunity
With a proper and intact lymphatic system and proper blood flow, yoga helps in activation and mobility of our protective cells (lymphocytes, macrophages, eosinophils) in the right place and right time.Thus, improving our immunity in tough times.
2. Yoga and Beauty
When it comes to beauty, yoga never fails to disappoint you as yoga helps to enhance the beauty of skin, hair and face from within.
a. Yoga gives you a glowing skin
b. can prevent pre-mature wrinkle formation
c. promote natural hair growth
d. promotes good flow of blood and good lymphatic drainage which can prevent acne formation
e. Tightens the skin and delay aging process
3. Mental Well being
a. Makes you happier
If you are feeling low, then doing yoga could surely elevate your mood! Yoga significantly increases serotonin levels and decreases the levels of monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters) and cortisol. The increase in serotonin makes you happier and also improves your immune function.
b. Helps you sleep better
The key to good mental health is getting a good night sleep. However, getting all drained out and tired is easy but actual act of peacefully falling asleep is one of the toughest thing! So, practicing yoga daily could maintain your circadian r thyme by stimulating your median pituitary lobe to secrete melatonin.
c. Helps you focus
With tik tok videos, busy life style, and all the multi-tasking – the world seems chaotic and it’s pretty easy to get out of focus from time to time. Nevertheless, if you want to increase your focus and increase your focus span, it’s better to start yoga on time.
d. Makes you mindful
Yoga takes you to focus from the outer world and chaos to the inner-self and inner peace. It helps you to take attention to every bend and stretch of your body which in turn gives you a bigger focus regarding yourself and your body. Similarly, it makes you aware of the surrounding and the people around you which ultimately making you mindful in every aspect.
e. Maintains your peace of mind
In the world full of people, problems, and opinion -one of the biggest flex is to be calm and maintain your peace of mind. Yoga slows down the mental loops of frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress. And since stress is implicated in so many health problems—from migraines and insomnia to lupus, MS, eczema, high blood pressure, and heart attacks—if you learn to quiet your mind, you’ll most likely be able to live longer ,healthier and happier.
4. Emotionally Stable
A human being experiences so many emotions in a single day. From being happy to being furious, humans have an easier time shifting quickly but a very hard time being stable. And once you give authority to your emotions, they will start controlling you and affecting each of your activities.
Yoga, however, helps to calm you down even when you are in height of your emotional turmoil. As yoga controls your blood flow, your breathing rate, and your hormonal orchestra, you will not have sudden mood swings and emotional outrage. And this stability of your emotion will help a lot in your day-to-day life.
5. Spiritual Well being
The physical aspect of yoga is just a superficial part of the whole thing. Yoga provides techniques to unite the body, mind, and breath, and connect to the inner core of our being – the spiritual aspect of our lives. It is believed that to attain our higher possibility as life, our body also needs to able to adapt to it and this is what yoga does. Yoga stabilizes the wobbly body and meditation calms the wobbly mind.
While stretching your body to your extreme limits, your mind will be focused on your inner self. Thus, this ignites the light of spirituality inside of us.
Moreover, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says,” Spirituality is not just some mumbo jumbo, sitting somewhere and doing something. It is revisiting the truth about ourselves.” And this is what yoga helps us in, to revisit our inner selves from time to time.
