How Yoga Increases Your Overall Health & Wellness

Yoga has been a popular way to better health for quite some time. You may have walked past the yoga class at your gym, or giggled when you read about the beer yoga class, but yoga really does have some fantastic benefits for your overall health and wellness. 

If you’re not the most flexible, not to worry. Yoga can help you with that and so much more. They say if you simply try yoga twice a week to start, you’ll soon notice plenty of positive changes, both physical and mental, that will keep you coming back for more. Here are just some of them!

Better flexibility

If you can’t touch your toes or wish you could do a backbend, doing yoga will get you there. You’ll need to practice of course but by continuing to do the poses, you’ll find aches and pains vanishing away. Tightness in your body is released by the very specific moves of yoga, allowing you to feel better.

Enhanced muscle strength

Even avid weightlifters like getting some yoga time in. It helps strengthen muscles while incorporating balance and flexibility to fine-tune your body and help all those muscles work together gracefully.

Keeps your joints healthy

As yoga helps you become more flexible, it also helps keep your joints from breaking down. Because yoga takes your joints through their full range of motion, it utilizes areas of your cartilage that you don’t usually use, keeping them healthy and functional.

Helps your bones

Because many poses in yoga require you to lift your own weight, you’re helping your bones. Weighted exercises, even those that require only your body weight, have been shown to strengthen your bones.

Better blood flow

Certain relaxation techniques that are commonly used in yoga help get your blood flowing and increase circulation, particularly for your hands and feet. It also boosts your red blood cells and thins blood out to keep it moving to all your parts, reducing your chances for heart attack or stroke.

Aids in immunity

By using the simple exercises taught in your yoga class, your muscles enjoy contracting and stretching. Your organs move around too and it allows your lymphatic system to drain which helps your body fight off infections, remove toxins, and destroy cancerous cells.

Restores order to your adrenal glands

Cortisol is a hormone your body secretes when it feels threatened. But when it stays elevated, it can cause major problems. By doing yoga, your adrenal glands are reset, keeping them from causing depression, high blood pressure, and extra weight around the waist, to name a few.

Helps your mental health

When you do yoga on the regular, it helps increase your levels of serotonin, making you feel more content overall. More reason to incorporate a few yoga poses into your day!

Lowers blood sugar and bad cholesterol

If your doctor has told you that you’re at risk for type 2 diabetes, practicing yoga can help you manage your blood sugar. It lowers cortisol and your adrenaline levels, making it easier for your body to manage the effects of insulin. When you balance these things out, you lower your risk forthe many complications that arise from type 2 diabetes like kidney failure, blindness, and heart attack.

Releases tension

You may not even realize it, but you may have unconscious habits that cause chronic tension. Things like gripping your phone or steering wheel too tightly are a prime example, and when you do them too often, your muscles become fatigued and so too does your whole body. With yoga, you learn wear the tension in your body lies and how to release it. Every time you practice yoga, you let go of more and more of this tension, bettering your body.

Deeper sleep

Can’t sleep or have trouble staying asleep? Regular yoga practice can help prime your body for sleep. There are certain yoga poses you can even do in bed before crawling under the covers. Try them and you might find yourself sleeping better than you have in years.

Eases digestive issues

With the movements in regular yoga practice, you will soon find that digestive problems you’ve faced like IBS, constipation, or even ulcers are relieved. The intricate poses and twists that are involved in yoga help move things along and bring harmony to the digestive system.

Calms your mind

One of the biggest killers out there is stress. It can manifest itself in physical ways in our body that go well beyond the mental torment of looping through reliving moments of anger, regret, or fear. Yoga allows these things to release from your mind and opens you up to the calmness to let positive energy flow through both your mind and body.

Gives you a healthy outlet

While we’re on the subject of calming your mind, yoga also gives you a healthy way to deal with anger instead of squelching it deep down. When you feel aggravated by work or in a relationship, heading to your yoga class is a wonderful way to deal with the stress you feel in a healthy way. By the time you finish, you’ll wonder why you felt so upset before.

You don’t even need to dive right into a class if you’re not ready, but if you start practicing simple yoga poses in your own living room, you’ll surely feel the benefits. From there, you can go deeper and head to a yoga class at your local gym to learn how to do more complex poses. You’ll find the best organic, eco-friendly yoga attire at Green Apple Active to help support your newfound love of yoga in a stylish and comfortable way too!