The Benefits of a Regular Yoga Practice

YOGA – not just popular but good for your body, mind and soul. Even 15 minutes of yoga a day can have a profound impact on your overall health, making you not just physically healthier but happier too. Whatever your preferred type or style of yoga, and wherever you choose to do it – in a class with friends or alone in the bedroom – yoga has a plethora of positive benefits.

Daily yoga practice helps you improve your flexibility, strength, and posture, as you stretch your muscles and tone your body. You will soon find yourself standing up straighter and sitting at your desk in a much more upright manner, which in turn will help relieve skeletal aches and pains caused by poor posture.

Your overall fitness will begin to improve as yoga combines elements of strength, functional and cardio training altogether, in a more peaceful and serene manner than found in most gyms.

And you do not need to be a highly experienced advanced practitioner pf yoga to start seeing weight loss benefits with your daily yoga routine – the simple repetition helps trigger your metabolic system to step up a gear and get using up excess fat.

Yoga helps your body in reducing the amount of the main stress hormone cortisol that it creates, which can help curb the urge to overeat and lets your mind return to a more positive state of balance, making it easier to handle stress and unpleasant emotions.

Energy levels rise after a brief yoga session, an ideal boost in our busy lives when we have so much to do – yoga helps you synergize your body and breathing to help keep our energy lasting as long as we need.

With reduced stress and better physical shape for our bodies, yoga helps calm both body and mind – which means we sleep better. Sleep – as we all know – is simply essential to a healthy life but our 24/7 lifestyles and constant use of electronics are wreaking havoc with natural sleep patterns. Insomnia is increasingly a problem but can be successfully combatted with regular yoga workouts, even bringing basic moves into the bed to relax you when the sandman does not come quickly.

With yoga heavily focused on breathing patterns, you soon find you are using all your lungs every day, taking longer and deeper and slower breaths, allowing oxygen into your bloodstream at higher levels. This, in turn, helps you deal with stressful situations with more confidence.

Not only do stress levels reduce with less cortisone being pumped around your body, but yoga encourages your body to secrete more serotonin – the hormone linked to our feelings of happiness. Yoga can actively change your brain chemistry for the better and improve feelings and mood, helping combat depression and anxiety.

With yoga’s different poses and postures comes a boost to mindfulness – as you practice each move, your mind will focus on an awareness of your body, and your feelings both physically and mentally, helping you stay happy and on track.

In turn, linked with the breathing, you will find you can concentrate for longer on your daily tasks and jobs, giving you an opportunity to marshal your thoughts in a more organized and deliberate manner – giving you a greater sense of calm and being in control of the world around you.

And when all these factors come together – better physical health, better mental health, better mindfulness, better control – then you are likely to feel the benefits for a much longer time, as yoga can add several years to your lifespan.

If you think you might be interested in adding a regular yoga practice to your wellness routine, Holistic Massotherapy & Wellness is now partnering with Daybreak Yoga to provide a monthly yoga and massage package. Each month you get access to four yoga classes at Daybreak and one 60-minute massage with Raven of HMW. You can find more details and sign up for your membership on the Daybreak Yoga website today!