Top Reasons to Incorporate a Yoga Practice Into Your Workout Routine
Yoga and mindfulness offer a great addition to your daily routine. Yoga provides countless physical, spiritual, and emotional benefits. It can be done by individuals at any level, and your practice is a solo journey all about you. It's not a competition against others and should never be viewed that way. Yoga can help in several ways to get in touch with yourself inside and out.
7 Reasons You Should Practice Yoga
1. It's just all-around good for you
Physically speaking, yoga is great for the body. There are numerous physical benefits including increased flexibility and mobility, building strength, adding muscle tone, improved balance, building core strength, and circulatory health, it helps prevent injury and increases energy, and respiration, to name just a few.
- It’s free
It can be done virtually anywhere at any time. There’s no special equipment needed. Practicing yoga is easy to start no matter what level of “in shape” you are. All you need is a mat, a space to put it, and just a little bit of time. No gym membership required. Add yoga into your routine and you will feel your mind and body change.
- It encourages mental stability
Yoga is a form of meditation. It centers your body and emotions helping clear your mind and control your thoughts. It is the secret sauce to organizing your mind and aligning it with your physical body. Learning how to control your emotions without being overrun by them takes time and constant effort and yoga is the magic that can bridge that gap.
- Relaxing
Practicing yoga with good breathing techniques helps regulate the heartbeat and deliver oxygen to the brain. Controlled breathing during yoga relieves tension in the body and has a calming and quieting effect on the mind. As you improve, hold the poses for longer to activate the muscles to improve muscle flexibility and create a stronger mind-body connection.
- Reduces stress and anxiety
There have been countless studies to show that yoga reduces stress and anxiety. This function has a natural calming effect and works to reduce feelings of anxiety, fear, depression, and stress. Something as simple as 10 minutes a day can decrease stress and create a stronger mind for stress response.
- Anyone can do it
Yoga is not limited to any specific set of individuals. You don’t have to have any special skills to do it. It is much less physically strenuous on the body. Starting and practicing beginner poses like down dog, child’s pose, or sitting mountain, you’ll invite stillness into your mind and body, release tension, and relieve internal pressure as you move. Yoga will help improve your range of motion and joint mobility and is shown to lead to quicker recovery.
- You can travel with it
You can take it with your wherever you go! All you need is your mat and a little bit of time. Traveling for work, the holidays, or for fun, you can practice yoga whenever and wherever you want. You can practice in the airport when a flight is delayed, you can stop at a rest area or scenic overlook for a quick session to relax the body and mind on a long road trip. You can do it in a hotel room, or outside a tent, you literally can practice almost anywhere.
Yoga is one of the oldest forms of exercise and has been around for centuries. It has been studied and studied to learn and understand the effects it has on the human body and mind. It should be viewed as an integral part of any exercise routine for its physical benefits. If you incorporate yoga into your physical workout routine, you will see an increase in performance in all workouts you do.
Then there’s the mental aspect of yoga. It will calm and center you on a mental level, it will slow things down and help organize thoughts and help you create calmness within your mind. Mental and physical health are connected in ways that we still do not understand fully. Yoga can play an imperative role in the connection between physical and mental aspects for every individual.
