After a busy week, you’ll quickly realize how often you’ve held onto every ounce of stress you felt in your body. Your muscles are achy and your mind is beginning to get clouded, anxiety-ridden, and restless.
You’ve heard about the alleged benefits of practicing yoga. Many people claim to have spiritual or physical benefits from their morning stretches or yoga classes. Whether you practice yoga or not, you might be skeptical about its benefits.
What does science have to say about the health benefits of yoga?
What Yoga Does
Modern yoga has a few notable characteristics that help with your mental and physical health. Many studies show the ways that yoga helps to change you for the better.
Physical postures help your body stretch to release those toxins trapped in your muscles and relax those muscles after a long week. Stretching changes the water-content in your muscles which helps build up your muscles over time.
Twisting your body in yoga positions stretches multiple muscle groups at once. This increases your flexibility and physical tone.
Physical Benefits
Low-impact exercises like yoga can also be used as a therapeutic tool. Studies show that regularly practicing various stretching positions improves mobility, flexibility, pain tolerance, and health.
Yoga is more effective at healing and reducing pain than other forms of low-impact exercise, making it perfect for your achy, stress-filled muscles.
Because of its incorporation of regulatory breathing, yoga also improves lung and body health. Breathing exercises relax the muscles that constrict oxygen pathways in your body, allowing your bodily systems to work properly.
Mental Help
Although there is no solid evidence that yoga helps mental illness directly, healing your body and regulating your breathing can’t hurt! It’s proven to reduce stress, which helps with a variety of mental health issues.
Regular stretching is a great way for you to exercise, reflect, relax, and heal.
