- Exercise & Fitness
Mind-Body Intervention: Maximizing Yoga Benefits
Yoga is a universally popular practice due to its holistic approach at wellness. Indeed, health conditions can be brought about by a combination of physical, mental, and emotional factors. This is one reason why yoga is intended not just for healing but also in promoting well-being.
Yoga is composed of different stages that are intended to address different aspects of the human body for a holistic attainment of benefits.
This stage in yoga performance following discipline and breathing exercises. It targets the physical body and is responsible for producing a wide range of health and fitness benefits. In fact, this is the most common association of yoga, especially for those who only have minimal knowledge on yoga.
Generally, there are 26 poses or yoga asanas that are performed in a sequence. It follows a stage since the current pose is intended to prepare your muscles and joints for the succeeding poses. Eventually, these poses are going to become more complex than when you first began practicing them. The idea behind performing these poses is to enhance your body by adding flexibility, building strength, and enhancing stamina.
As a result, your body functions well and it can produce consequential benefits to the entire health system.
Benefits to the Body
The benefits offered by practicing yoga on a physical level is astounding. Although it has been categorized as an alternative form of medicine, many prefer it over conventional medicine approaches given that it is more effective in treating diseases without posing risks of side effects.
Expert yoga practitioners would point out that the physical and health benefits derived from practicing yoga is actually just a side effect. The real benefits come in the form of bringing harmony to mind and body. Indeed, yoga has managed to establish the connection between mind and body using a combination of techniques for holistic healing and health promotion.
Read more below to learn about the physical benefits of the yoga practice first.
Detoxification of the Body
Yoga is considered an effective cleansing method that helps in releasing harmful toxins from your body. There are various styles of yoga that range from gentle to intense workouts. Some of these intensive yoga styles can result to profuse sweating for its participants. The more you sweat, the more you are able to release body toxins along with your sweat to eliminate them from your body.
When performing gentle stretching exercises, it also helps to massage the various internal organs that boosts the supply of blood all throughout the body. This helps to properly assimilate helpful nutrients and ensure that all organs are functioning properly.
Yoga for Flexibility
Depending on the specific pose you are executing, it affects various joints in the body. The more you workout these joints and muscles, the more flexible they become. This is helpful in improving your muscle reflexes and avoid injuries. Therefore, yoga does not only work by relieving any form of pain in the body but also improves your muscle and joint function for injury prevention.
A few other yoga positions were known to target the ligaments and tendons in the body, lubricating it to add more flexibility.
Improved Overall Function
There is probably no other external health practice that is capable of massaging the internal organs of the body as yoga does. In this process, those internal glands and organs are acted on in a non-invasive manner and stimulating them to prevent diseases. Some experts would even point out that practicing yoga helps create a sense of awareness of your body and its internal organs. Through that awareness, you are able to detect any abnormalities or dysfunctions. Since awareness and recognition of a disease is the first step towards its treatment, then you can help maintain and restore body functions.
YOGA FOR PEACE IN NEW HAVEN
Benefits to the Mind
Some devoted yoga practitioners would opt to make a conclusion that the biggest benefits that can be derived from yoga are not manifested physically but mentally. The connection between mind and body is reestablished here such that these two must go together. Several research have pointed out the fact that the pain one experiences during a physical health condition or injury is all a state of mind. Indeed, when you learn to address those pain through your mind, you can certainly overcome that feeling of pain.
Meditation is an integral part in yoga and here is where one experiences the mental benefits. One needs to combine meditation with proper breathing exercises though in order to calm your tensed nerves and muscles. The more relaxed you are, the better you are able to enter the meditative state. If you are able to do that, then you can enjoy the following mental benefits of yoga.
At its core, meditation is basically done to relax both mind and body. This is the very basic reason why meditation preempts the performance of yoga asanas since the ability to relax your body is important in the precise execution of complex yoga poses.
There are two aspects to the kind of relaxation that you can attain through yoga. Physical relaxation is achieved by performing gentle stretching exercises that help soothe tired muscles, especially after an exhausting day at work. The mental aspect of relaxation can be achieved through meditation and visualizing images or memories that bring about positive thoughts for enlightenment.
Regular practice of yoga also contribute in developing one's mental strength. It is undeniable that performing complex yoga poses can take its toll on your body. Sometimes, you feel the desire to go back to starting position when they are too extreme to hold on for even a few seconds. This is when your mental strength comes in as you have to fight through that feeling of discomfort to hold onto your position for as long as required. In the process, you are also exercising your will power to overcome impulses of your physical body.
Unlike common misconceptions, stress is more of a mental rather than a physical condition. Therefore, your ability to improve mental health will enable you to combat the effects of stress.
One of the common methods for stress relief require you to close your eyes and meditate for a few minutes. As you meditate, you focus your mind on pleasant images or ideas. Even if you do this only for a few minutes, you will notice its incredible impact on mind and body that can last you for the rest of the day without feeling weary or mentally and physically exhausted.