This post was most recently updated on July 25th, 2023
Overview
If you are doing yoga or are thinking about doing it, you may have heard about the benefits of yoga. But if you are new to yoga, the saying “Yoga helps blood circulation” can be a little hard to believe. Let’s learn about some of the physical benefits that you can see after a yoga workout.
Great benefits of yoga poses
Increase flexibility and reduce pain
Increasing flexibility is one of the most recognizable effects of yoga. It may be hard at first to practice yoga, but it can be hard to bend over to touch your toes, but if you’re patiently practicing, after a while, you’ll notice significant changes. Your body will gradually relax, and you will do things that previously seemed impossible.
As the body becomes more flexible, joint pains and muscle pains will disappear. The reason is that your ligaments and muscles are rigid, making movement difficult. For example, stretching your hip muscles can stretch your knee joints while stretching your hamstrings (tendons) can lead to back pain. Muscles and connective tissues such as muscle membranes or ligaments are stiff, which will cause you to have a bad posture and gait.
Helps muscles to be stronger and firmer
Not only does it increase flexibility, but the muscles in your body will also gradually tighten and look firmer. Healthy and strong muscles will help you avoid conditions like arthritis or back pain and limit falls in older people.
Lifting weights can increase muscle and tone muscles faster, but it will not give you the flexibility that yoga does. Also, increasing muscle mass will slowly give your body time to adjust or adapt. Even when you stop exercising, your muscles don’t sag too much.
Improve respiration, energy, and vitality
Yoga is a combination of postures and breathing techniques. When practicing yoga, you not only exercise physically but also learn how to control breathing and energy. Yoga helps you relax, slow down, and breathe deeper when performing postures.
Breathing control helps strengthen lung function. Breathing through your nose during yoga helps filter the air, warm it up, moisturize it, and remove any dirt or impurities you don’t want to get into your lungs. Through practicing yoga poses, your joints will also have a more excellent range of motion. These exercises will help prevent arthritis from worsening as well as improve your disabilities.
Maintain a metabolic balance and help with weight loss
A Washington University survey found that people who practice yoga pay more attention to their diets. Yoga enables you to discover inner connections and balance your emotions, helping you better control your appetite. The breathing exercises in yoga also help you think more carefully and make better choices when your desire comes.
Improve cardiovascular health and circulatory system
Yoga promotes blood circulation. When doing yoga regularly, the amount of blood circulating to the extremities will increase. Yoga works to speed up the heart rate, just like when you do aerobic exercise. Studies show that practicing yoga helps deliver more oxygen to the cells. Thus it also improves the heart health of a person.
Yoga helps regulate blood flow to places where it is challenging to reach blood flow, for example, from the legs and pelvis to the heart. Yoga helps the blood to thin by separating platelets from each other through cutting down the amount of protein that creates clots. This reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke because blood clots often form in the legs and flow back to the heart.
Yoga also increases the amount of hemoglobin and red blood cells that bring oxygen to tissues. According to the results of one study, people who only learned pranayama (breathing exercises in yoga) were able to exercise more with less oxygen.
Conclusion
Amid many early gyming trends, yoga is always a good exercise and has positive effects. Therefore, yoga is still the first choice for those who want to practice, both physically and mentally.
