3 Major Benefits of Adding Yoga Into Your Workout Routine
By now, most of us are aware of some of the benefits of Yoga, even if we’ve never tried a class before. What most people don’t realize is how incorporating some Yoga into your workout regime can help you make gains in your fitness goals, and in your overall health.
Here are 3 major benefits of adding Yoga into your workout routine:
1. Increased Flexibility
Most people think that you have to be flexible to do Yoga…This is very untrue, but is a pleasant side effect of regular practice. Yoga can improve your posture and your balance, strengthen muscle groups, as well as increase flexibility and range of motion. The more flexibility you have in your muscles, the greater you’re protected from injury.
Yoga also helps relieve the stress accumulated in your muscles from exercises such as weightlifting, leaving you more relaxed and helping you sleep better at night. Although most other forms of exercise physically exhaust you, Yoga will help energize you.
2. Increased lubrication of joints, ligaments and tendons
Yoga postures and exercises focus on all of the joints of the body, including joints you probably don’t use regularly. Yoga exercises can strengthen problem joints such as the knees, hips and ankles, can lead to increased spinal flexibility and core strength, and can increase your overall physical strength. Because yoga also exercises ligaments and tendons, your joints will lubricate more effectively, reducing joint pain.
3. The Emotional Benefit
Yoga places a level of focus on deep breathing that is designed to put your body into a relaxed state, allowing your muscles to relax and release tension.
Stress can be a huge burden on your overall health, and many people enjoy the movements and deep breathing of a yoga practice because of the effects they have at relieving tension and stress in the mind and body.
Using Yoga as a stress reliever, and a way to connect with your body and your breath may also help you lose weight, as we are now aware of the connection between stress and weight gain.
So, if you are looking for a way to increase your flexibility and strength in a new and fun way that is still challenging, Yoga may be the answer. Adding Yoga to your fitness regime will affect your body and mind positively, and can help you reach your health and fitness goals quicker.
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Jayne Cook is a Yoga trainer with 360fit in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. She lives in Lawerencetown.