Yoga is a form of movement meditation that can be dated all the way back to Ancient India. There are well over 100 different forms and styles of yoga, but most involve performing a variety of postures and controlled breathing techniques designed to promote awareness, strength, and harmony in both mind and body.
You may think that in order to start practising yoga you need to already be naturally flexible, or be of a certain ability or fitness level — but this could not be further from the truth! Kundalini yoga instructor Dr. Natalie Nevins explains that there’s a form of yoga out there for everyone, from couch potato to professional athlete — “size and fitness levels do not matter because there are modifications for every yoga pose and beginner classes in every style”.
Just practising yoga for 15–30 minutes per day can create noticeable differences in our lives. Here are 8 proven benefits of yoga to get you out of your seat and into a downward dog!
Improves Flexibility
Almost every form of yoga typically consists of assuming postures and positions that work to stretch different muscle groups in the body. Through a combination of breathing exercises and manipulating your body to go as deep into each pose as possible, you create a system of muscle memory in your ligaments and connective tissues that will ‘remember’ poses you’ve been in before and allow you to move deeper into them the more you practise.
A lack of flexibility in the body leads to muscle tightness, balance issues, joint aches, and pains, and can leave you far more vulnerable to fatigue and injury — which is why it’s so important to stretch before and after exercise! Yoga is a proven method of improving flexibility and ridding you of all the problems that may come with being inflexible. Get practising, and you’ll be touching your toes in no time!
Alleviates Stress
When we are stressed, our adrenal glands release a hormone known as cortisol into our bodies. Prolonged periods of stress can lead to a build-up of the stress hormone, potentially causing an array of negative health effects including high blood pressure, depression, and rapid weight gain. Long-term stress also leads to tension being stored in the body, making you feel tight and causing various muscle aches and pains.
Like any other form of exercise, yoga helps to relieve stress through the release of endorphins — naturally occurring hormones that boost our happiness. Multitudes of research studies into treatments of anxiety and depression have found that cortisol levels in groups of patients administered with treatments including a month of yoga therapy dropped more significantly than in other groups. Further research concluded that yoga has powerful antidepressant effects, and can be implemented as an efficient tool to combat stress and anxiety. This effectiveness is likely due to yoga being equal parts exercise as it is a meditation technique — so start stretching regularly and deliver a double whammy to your stress levels!
Good for your Heart
Prolonged periods of physical inactivity have been associated with a higher rate of cardiovascular problems, and living a sedentary lifestyle could double your risk of dying from heart disease.
Hugh Calkins, director of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Service at Johns Hopkins, recommends yoga as a method of keeping the heart in check, explaining that there has been a “major shift in the number of cardiologists and other professionals” that recognise the benefits of yoga for heart health to be real. Multiple studies have provided support for Calkins’ assertion, finding that regular practise not only lowers blood pressure (a significant contributor towards heart attacks and disease) but also helps to slow and even sometimes completely halt the progression of heart disease.
The beneficial effects of yoga on the heart, like its alleviation of stress and anxiety, are due to its combination of physical exercise, controlled breathing — which acts to bring more oxygen into the body and lower blood pressure — and meditation techniques that calm our nervous system. Try some yoga poses designed to improve heart health and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing your ticker is getting some well-deserved TLC.
Catch More Z’s
Tired? Most of us are nowadays. 67% of adults in the UK suffer from disrupted sleep, and almost a quarter manage no more than five hours of sleep per night. Sleep is known to aid several restorative processes that take place within the body, and prolonged sleep deprivation or poorer sleep quality has been linked to an increased susceptibility to obesity, headaches, memory loss, and an array of other illnesses and negative health effects.
Through its ability to release built-up tension, practising yoga before bed can help us wind down and combat restlessness and insomnia. In fact, a study conducted into the relationship between yoga and sleep in older people — a group associated with a decreased ability to stay asleep — found that those who began to practise yoga reported a significant decrease in the time taken to fall asleep as well as an increase in the total number of hours slept and the feeling of being well-rested upon waking in the morning. Yoga is known to stimulate the secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin, helping us feel more relaxed and ready for a full night’s rest.
If you, like most people, struggle with getting to sleep or staying asleep, try some relaxation poses intended to ease you into a slumber. Gone are the days of counting sheep!
Eases Chronic Pain
According to The British Pain Society, there are around 28 million people across the UK suffering from chronic pain or inflammation of some kind. Not only does dealing with constant pain trigger changes in brain structure associated with depression, anxiety, and impaired cognitive functioning — chronic inflammation also leads to some dangerous illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, and some forms of cancer.
Regularly practising yoga increases the strength and tone of the muscles, and helps to alleviate pain associated with arthritis, fibromyalgia, migraines, and many other chronic pain conditions. A 2005 study found that an 8-week yoga treatment for sufferers of osteoarthritis of the knees led to significant reductions in chronic pain. A similar treatment was also found to reduce inflammation in breast cancer survivors over a 12-week period.
Dr. Catherine Bushnell has identified reductions in grey matter volume and the degradation of white matter integrity in the brain as significant players involved in the development of chronic pain. Using diffusion tensor brain imaging, Bushnell found that yoga appears to strengthen both grey matter volume and white matter connectivity through the processes of neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, respectively, helping to reduce pain perception.
Remember that different yoga poses can be modified to accommodate your strength and flexibility, as well as any health conditions you may have. Be sure to notify a yoga instructor or relevant health professional of any limiting health problems so that they can best advise you on what positions and modifications are available to you to help soothe any chronic pain you might have.
Promotes a Healthier Lifestyle
Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year? Was it to exercise more regularly..? Are you still sticking to it..? Don’t worry, no one really does. According to a survey, the 3 most popular New Year’s resolutions for Brits are to exercise more, lose weight, and improve their diet — and only 24% of people claim to have kept these resolutions for a whole year.
The fact is, staying motivated to live a healthier lifestyle is difficult — especially with our packed schedules and the ease at which we can get fast food delivered straight to our doors. So why not try living the healthy lifestyle you keep promising to yourself one baby-step at a time? If you were to start your mornings with a short yoga session, you’d be surprised at how much more motivated you may feel to continue your day in as healthy a way as possible after making such an active and mindful start.
Studies have shown regular yoga practise to be associated with increased consumption of fruits and vegetables and reduced consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, snack foods, and fast food. Subjects reported that yoga would support their healthier eating through improved management of emotional eating, more healthy food cravings, and the support and influence of the yoga community surrounding them. Not only this, but yoga practitioners also reported increased motivation and capacity to take part in other forms of physical activity after their sessions.
Get your Body Confidence Back
If one of the things stopping you from joining a yoga class is body insecurity, you might take some comfort in the fact that you’re not entirely alone with this feeling. In fact, a staggering 46% of Brits struggle with a negative body image.
Yoga teachers aren’t unaware of any feelings of embarrassment you might have put yourself into sometimes-compromising poses in a room full of people — most of them completely understand this. Most yoga studios are built without mirrors to aid practitioners with focusing all of their attention inward, rather on how they look — and recent studies on university-aged women have found yoga classes to create large reductions in the amount of time and energy spent preoccupied with appearance, as well as significant improvements in appearance evaluation and satisfaction with specific body areas.
Yoga has proven to be such an effective method of improving self-image that it has become an integral part of the treatment and prevention of eating disorders and programs that promote a positive body image and self-esteem to disordered eaters. With its tenets of self-compassion and acceptance, yoga teaches us to not be so critical of ourselves and our bodies — and in this age of unrealistic beauty standards and Instagram fitness videos, almost everyone is in need of a little more self-love.
- Stand up Straight!
Now more than ever, the modern working individual’s posture is starting to pay for all the hours of sitting hunched over a desk or looking down at a phone. Staying seated for prolonged periods of time causes your hips to tighten, straining the joints in your knees due to an improper alignment of your thighs and shinbones. When your posture is out of alignment, your neck and back muscles have to work a lot harder to support your weight, causing fatigue, back pain, and eventually degenerative arthritis of the spine. We must act now to address the health risks posed by these modern desk jobs before William Higham’s shocking model of an office worker 20 years from now becomes our new dystopian reality.
The areas of the body most affected by poor posture and prolonged periods of sitting are the shoulders, back, chest, and abdominals. By stretching these particular muscle groups, we can begin to strengthen our core and combat the damage done by bad posture through increased awareness of our own bodies. You’ll find after picking up yoga that you will begin to notice very quickly when you are slouching or hunching over and adjust your positioning accordingly.
A good posture has been linked with many health benefits, including fewer headaches, increased lung capacity and improved circulation and digestion! Try some yoga poses designed to correct poor posture, and tell your mother she was right for telling you to stand up straight all those years!
Still Not Convinced?
Maybe you feel you have a good handle on your stress, or you’re already getting enough exercise.
If the wealth of research on yoga and its multi-faceted health benefits isn’t enough to get you onto the mat, then know this: on those days where you’re feeling unmotivated, unconfident, and uninspired, there’s a whole community of yoga teachers and practitioners out there who can get you back on track. Yoga is by no means a waste of time — not by any stretch of the imagination.
