Guest article by David Patel: If you’ve ever wanted to up the ante on your fitness you may want to consider trying out yoga. If you’ve considered such a prospect but you’re hesitate due to doubts or misconceptions, you’re not to blame, as sometimes even something like yoga can make a lot of people wonder just what it is. In this article, a brief background on yoga and the health benefits you can gain from it will be covered. And after reading through everything, you may hopefully have the kind of background knowledge you need in order to check if yoga really is something for you to try out.

Yoga: What Does The Data Say?

Interestingly, yoga has become steadily popular through the years. In fact, many countries around the world have started to adopt and love yoga as a fitness practice, with 36.7-million yogi or yoga practitioners existing in America alone as of 2016. In fact, 80-million more people plan on trying out yoga that year because of what they’ve heard about physical and mental health benefits, which include strength and flexibility increase, athletic performance boosts, and stress relief, among others. In fact, 97-percent of people who practice yoga do so in conjunction with other workout routines as well, meaning yoga can in fact be quite the innovative fitness innovation you may need. If you’re looking for a way to start yoga, perhaps a yoga getaway can be your perfect entry into the craft.

Yoga And Its Health Benefits: Can You Gain Something From The Practice?

If there’s anything from the above that may have shared, it’s that yoga is in fact shaping up to be quite the extremely popular workout option for a lot of individuals. Interestingly, you can try out yoga for yourself and experience its numerous health benefits:

• Maintain your overall stability, balance: Yoga in itself relies on proper and sustained meditation and stretching to achieve relaxation and wellness. As such, continuous practice will help make sure your body gets used to being more flexible, and in turn improve overall stability and balance. This is why a lot of yogi tend to be able to do complex poses while meditating, as these go hand in hand with yoga’s mental and physical benefits.

• Yoga in itself ensures you have the tools you need in order to find ways to relax – these include breathing techniques, focusing methods, and ways to achieve better balance with your parasympathetic nervous system which motivates restoration and calming. In turn, yoga makes sure the breathing techniques, stretching, and meditation you do are built to optimum relaxation and stability.
• Regular yoga practice helps improve and increase proprioception. This means yoga actually helps you maintain your balance, which in turn helps manage back pain and knee pain. This helps you gain better independence in the long run, which then can even avoid you having to be admitted to a nursing home or becoming weaker.

• Release tension for relaxation: If you’ve ever found the notion of massages and spas attractive, yoga allows you to do the very same to your body, albeit in a different way. Meditating and stretching via yoga actually allows you to release a lot of tension in your body, pushing your physical and mental frustrations away in order to let “positivity” breathe in. This also helps ensure you get a better sleep, be more focused with tasks, and be more confident with yourself.

• Doing various meditative poses and stretching not only helps you relax, but actually releases tension from various areas of the body. These include the muscles of your face, your eyes and tongue among others.
• Many yogi are able to help manage their body in many different ways. In fact, some have observed yogi being able to apply meditative techniques to create specific patterns of brain waves, change heart rhythms, and even increase their hands’ temperatures. This means, you potentially have the ability to release enough tension to relieve pain during pregnancy, or to help you sleep.

• Improve overall internal bodily functions: Stretching and meditating, alongside other varied activities with yoga, forces your body to start adjusting to various situations. These more or less have something to do with maintaining poses designed to stimulate better blood flow and better breathing, which in turn allow you to facilitate better functionality throughout your internal organs. One of the best benefits of yoga is its ability to improve internal organ functionality, which in itself improves overall health.

• Meditative techniques and relaxation methods in yoga can actually help improve immune system functionality in various ways. These include the release of various hormones, or helping other parts of the body function better. For instance, “complete breathing” in yoga actually helps people with lung problems, and proper yogic exercise can promote overall bodily function.
• Another instance where yoga can help bodily function is its ability to help mitigate the symptoms of digestive problems such as irritable bowel syndrome. Particular yoga stretching and posing techniques can help stimulate the better flow of waste products and food to the body.

• Stimulate and create pain relief: Yogi admire the practice of yoga in its varied methods of continued and focus relaxation and meditation as it helps stimulate and create pain relief. This is important, as a lot of treatment and rehabilitation options today tend to be costly or complicated. Yoga offers a more natural way of coping with sickness or other forms of physical and mental pain.

• Yoga can actually help relieve pain through meditative stretching, posing, and even reflection. Those with chronic conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome, fibromyalgia, back pain, and arthritis can experience relief thanks to yoga.

• Create a transformative environment: One cannot simply say yoga is a physical wellness practice, however, as yoga is built to help create mental and physical unity among practitioners. This means yoga offers opportunities not just to achieve physical and mental balance, but also find ways to direct such balance and control over one’s mental and physical state in order to transform one’s life.

• Yoga can help relax the mind through meditation, thus giving you the kind of peace that other forms of exercise can’t. This isn’t metaphysical either, as using yoga for stress relief is very capable of treating health problems such as heart attacks, high blood pressure, eczema, lupus, migraines, and insomnia.
• Doing yoga for wellness and health can better improve not just your health, but your self esteem. Practicing regularly, as well as doing regular rounds of self-examination, can help you experience and understand different feelings with much better quality than before.

Conclusion: The Power Of Yoga For Your Health

When you first encounter yoga, you’re likely going to think it’s just an activity designed for stretching, meditation, and weird poses. If there’s anything the above could tell you, however, it’s that the combination of proper breathing, meditation, and posing incorporated in yoga can actually be extremely beneficial to your health. Understanding how these elements may greatly affect your health can inspire and motivate you to try and take up yoga, and it’s something worth a shot if you’re looking for a break from your usual fitness and workout routine. If there’s anything yoga can teach you, it’s that there’s always a way to find balance even while relaxing.

David Patel

David Patel is an avid yoga practitioner and fitness enthusiast which, combined with his passion for writing, allowed him to write his own unique take on the health and medical niche. As a contributor for sites such as Blooming Lotus Yoga, David ensures that his readers get a healthy dose of informative, entertaining, and enjoyable writing whenever he posts his pieces. Aside from yoga, David also loves cooking during his free time.