by Tracey Lloyd

Created on: July 25, 2008

The Benefits of Yoga

If the mind's eye image you have of yoga is a roomful of people sitting cross legged or doing headstands chanting "ohm" you are doing yourself out of the opportunity to challenge your body and gain many important health benefits. Yoga, in all of its forms, can be practised by children, adults and seniors. There are many good DVDs, websites and local exercise classes devoted to the practice of yoga. Both your mind and body will benefit from regular yoga practice you even have the potential to decrease any wrinkles you might have.

Physical Benefits of Yoga

If you practice yoga regularly (for instance 2 or 3 times a week for between 60 90 minutes a session) you will notice improvements in the following areas:

* Muscle Strength

With regular practice, you will find that your muscles become stronger as yoga poses are a form of resistance exercises. Resistance exercises require you to carry weight while you are completing the exercise. For example when you are in the cobra pose and you are lying face down on the floor and then lift your chest off the ground, you are asking your abdominal muscles to hold the weight of your upper body.

Any improvement in your muscle strength will improve your overall fitness and make your day to day tasks, like carrying shopping or hanging out washing, much easier.

* Flexibility

Another physical benefit of regular yoga practice is increased flexibility. Over time, your muscles will become used to the positions that you are putting them into and you will find that you are able to stretch a little further each time.

In your day to day life, you will notice that increased flexibility means that you can now bend over and pick something up off the floor more easily or that you can stretch to reach something up high that you could not reach before practising yoga regularly.

* Pain Relief

Regular practice of yoga has been found to assist with the management of chronic pain including lower back pain and menstrual cramping.

The relaxation effect of yoga also assists in relieving pain.

* Aerobic Conditioning

Yoga is a total body workout and although it is practised in a slow, rhythmic and precise manner, your body gains aerobic fitness benefits. Increased aerobic fitness will again allow you to undertake your day to day life tasks with increasing ease.

A research project studying college students found that undertaking a 50 minute yoga class twice a week led to improved lung capacity.1

* Weight Management

Over a longitudinal study,

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