10 Things You Should Know About the Energizing Benefits of Yoga

10 THINGS you should know about the

ENERGIZING

benefits of

YOGA written by Sophie London

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It reduces pain.

It gives you a healthy heart.

It helps you have better sex.

It helps your brain stay sharp.

It improves your overall range of motion.

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It strengthens your muscles.

It makes your immune system rock.

It helps to maintain a healthy weight.

It makes you happier.

It helps you rest easy.

Introduction yoga gives energy. The practice of yoga makes efficient use of the mental and physical resources available to the human body. Although the practice has been glamorized in more recent years through decked-out yoga studios and apparel too beautiful to sweat in, the classical Indian science has been around for centuries, and for good reason, too. There is huge value in practicing yoga; humans are composed of the body, mind, and soul, and yoga helps to bring together each facet of how we think and act.

Modern society faces problems that counteract the balance of body, mind, and soul. Technology

is both a curse and a blessing, providing us with convenience and speed, but at some cost to our physical health. Sedentary lifestyles cause a number of aches and pains, along with the headaches and eye strains that come with extensive use of visual media.

Yoga provides an enlightening opportunity to relieve these problems. Practicing postures helps the physical body, while it psychologically sharpens our ability to concentrate and center our emotions. It brings us to a common ground, and above all, can supply us the energy we need to go about our everyday tasks with grace and fulfillment.

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01 It reduces pain.

Yoga can help to relieve certain kinds of chronic pain. According to German researchers, when they compared Iyengar Yoga with a self-care exercise program among people with chronic neck pain, they found that yoga reduced pain scores by more than half. UCLA researchers were examining yoga’s effects on young women suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, an often debilitating autoimmune disorder in which the immune system attacks the lining of the joints. They found that about half of those who took part in a six-week Iyengar Yoga program reported improvements in measures of pain, as well as in anxiety and depression.

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It’s estimated that 60-80% of us suffer from lowback pain, and there is excellent evidence that yoga can help to resolve certain types of back troubles. In one study at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, researchers worked with more than 200 people with persistent lower-back pain.

Some were taught yoga poses while the others took a stretching class or were given a self-help book. At the end of the study, those who took yoga and stretching classes reported less pain and better functioning, benefits that lasted for several months. Another study of 90 people with chronic low-back pain found that those who practiced Iyengar Yoga showed significantly less disability and pain after six months.

02 It gives you a

healthy heart.

Many studies have been conducted that have convinced cardiac experts that yoga and meditation may help reduce many of the major risk factors for heart disease. Heart disease, despite advances in prevention and treatment, remains the no. 1 source of death of both men and women in the United States. It is caused by high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and a sedentary lifestyle. Fortunately, practicing yoga can aid with all of these elements. One review of 70 studies even concluded that yoga shows promise as safe, effective way to boost heart health. In one study this year by researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center, patients who participated in twice-weekly sessions of Iyengar Yoga (including pranayama as well as asana) significantly cut the frequency of episodes of atrial fibrillation, a serious heart-rhythm disorder that increases the risk of strokes and can lead to heart failure.

Yoga is effective because it gets your blood flowing. The relaxation exercises learned in class can help your circulation. It gets more oxygen to your cells, resulting in a better-functioning body. Poses involving twists are thought to get blood from the veins out of internal organs and allows oxygenated blood to flow in once the twist is released. Inverted poses, such as Headstand, Handstand, and Shoulder-stand, encourage blood from the legs and pelvis to flow back to the heart, where it can then be pumped to the lungs to be freshly oxygenated. This process can aid with heart or kidney problems. Practicing yoga boosts levels of hemoglobin and red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the tissues, and thins the blood by making platelets more accessible and cutting the level of clot-promoting proteins in the blood.

In the end, this can lead to a decrease in heart attacks and strokes since blood clots are often the ones at fault.

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In India, women who took part in a 12-week yoga camp reported improvements in several areas of sexuality, including desire, orgasm, and overall satisfaction. Yoga (like other exercise) increases blood flow and circulation throughout the body, including the genitals.

Some researchers think yoga may also boost libido by helping practitioners feel more in tune with their bodies. Studies show that most women feel they have a problem staying focused, one reason why sex may be boring or unemotional for them.

Ellen Barrett, the author of the book Sexy Yoga says “the mindfulness you learn during yoga can translate to other parts of your life, so you can enjoy lovemaking entirely for what it is, and not think or worry about anything else.”

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Great sex begins with deep relaxation, which concentrates blood in the central body (where it’s available to the genitals), instead of being directed to the limbs, which generally happens when people feel stressed. Deep relaxation triggers sexual arousal, and the arteries that carry blood into the genitals open. Generally speaking, anything that reduces anxiety or stress improves sexual function by aiding the relaxation fundamental to lovemaking. Sex therapist Marty Klein, Ph. D, recommends yoga, “Stress contributes to sex problems and sex problems cause stress. This can become a vicious cycle. Yoga reduces anxiety, so it enhances sex and helps prevent and treat sex problems.”

It helps you have better sex.

Asana, pranayama, and meditation are practices geared to train you to fine-tune your attention, whether by syncing your breathing with movement, focusing on the subtleties of the breath, or letting go of distracting thoughts.

Studies have shown that yogic practices such as these can help your brain work better. Recently, University of Illinois researchers found that immediately following a 20-minute hatha yoga session, study participants completed a set of mental challenges both faster and more accurately than they did after a brisk walk or a jog.

Studies have found that regular yoga practice improves a number of elements including coordination, reaction time, memory, and even IQ scores. People who regularly practice meditation demonstrate the ability to solve problems and acquire and recall information

better—probably because they’re less likely to be distracted by their own thoughts.

Researchers are in the earliest stages of examining whether yogic practices could also help prevent age-related cognitive decline. “The yogic practices that involve meditation would likely be the ones involved, because of the engagement of control of attention,” says assistant professor of medicine Sat Bir Khalsa, Ph.D, at Harvard Medical School. Indeed, research has shown that parts of the cerebral cortex—an area of the brain associated with cognitive processing that becomes thinner with age—tend to be thicker in long-term meditators, suggesting that meditation could be a factor in preventing age-related thinning.

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It helps your brain stay sharp.

People who regularly practice meditation demonstrate the ability to solve problems and acquire and recall information better–probably because they’re less likely to be distracted by their own thoughts.

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05 It may seem like an obvious reason, but yoga is about moving, and the more you move your body in the practice of yoga, you will gain strength and stability to control your overall range of motion.

Our bones fit together precisely to form joints, and our muscles help these joints move through space. Contracting our muscles provides physical motion. All of our joints have an optimum amount of motion, but specific joints in the body such as hip joints or shoulder joints don’t move the same way. When a joint moves more than the prescribed degree of normal movement, that joint is called “hypermobile.” When a joint can move less than the prescribed degree of normal movements, it’s called “hypomobile.”

Limitations in range of motion, which can be caused by muscle weakness, muscle tightness, arthritic boney changes where some barrier is stopping movement, inflammation and swelling

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It improves your overall range of motion. from injuries, yoga can be used as a therapeutic device for a normal range of motion. By taking joints, through their range of motion, asana helps keep them lubricated, which researchers say may help keep you moving freely in athletic and everyday activities as you age.

In addition to overall flexibility, yoga also assists with your sense of balance. As you age and you become involved in more sedentary activities such as driving and sitting, it’s possible to lose touch with the body’s ability to remain upright.

Balance poses are a core part of asana practice, and they become even more crucial for older adults. Better balance can be critical to preserving independence, and can even be lifesaving–falls are the leading cause of injury-related death in people over 65.

You’re putting your body in positions and orientations that you ultimately have to support with your muscles...

So, you’re lifting weights.

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06 It strengthens your muscles.

Yoga, like any exercise, strengthens your muscles.

Within weeks of practicing yoga, you’ll experience the thrill of being able to hold poses for long periods of time, stretch deeper, and lift higher.

Standing poses, inversions, and other asanas challenge muscles to life and move the weight of your body. Your muscles respond by growing new fibers, so that they become thicker and stronger.

Stronger muscles means simple living–lifting heavy items such as groceries becomes a much easier task with trained muscles. Muscles protect us from conditions like arthritis and back pain, and help prevent falls in elderly people.

The basis of yoga relies on eccentric contraction, where the muscle stretches as it contracts, which elongates muscle fibers and increases flexibility in the muscles and joints. Without proper stretching, the muscle fibers heal close together, which results in the compact, bulging look.

Yoga serves as a form of functional fitness, meaning it moves your body in ways designed to help ensure that your body keeps functioning properly.

However, yoga fanatic and expert Rodney Yee explains, “You’re putting your body in positions and orientations that you ultimately have to support with your muscles...So you are lifting weights.”

Practicing yoga tones muscles all over the body in balance with each other, while weight training exercises typically isolate and flex one muscle or muscle group at a time. Rodney Yee explains that certain types of yoga poses build muscle tone in various ways.

“Challenging arm balances and inversion poses are very effective for building muscle strength because they flex groups of smaller muscles—not just the major muscles you work with a weight machine—to support the body’s weight during the pose. Holding standing poses such as the Warrior Pose and Triangle Pose is great for strengthening the leg muscles. And in balance poses such as Tree Pose, one leg has to hold up your entire body.

So you’re increasing your strength just by putting your weight on that leg.”

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Many studies have suggested that yoga can fortify the body’s ability to ward off illnesses. More and more, it seems that science supports this observation. According to William Mitchell, N.D., a Seattle-based practitioner who teaches advanced naturopathic therapeutics at Bastyr University, studies show that many already-present viruses and bacteria quietly reside within us until something within the body’s internal environment becomes unbalanced. Then, they rally into action and attack. As many longtime practicers of yoga can attest, asana practice provides a gentle, natural means of supporting the immune system on a day-to-day basis, no matter how hectic your schedule might be.

Yoga helps lower stress hormones that compromise the immune system, while also conditioning the lungs and respiratory tract, stimulating the lymphatic system to oust toxins from the body, and bringing oxygenated blood to the various organs to ensure their optimal function. “Yoga is unlike other forms of exercise that

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focus only on certain parts of the body,” says Kathleen Fry, M.D., president of the American Holistic Medicine Association in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Yoga works on everything.”

One of the first studies to look at how yoga affects genes indicates that a two-hour program of gentle asana, meditation, and breathing exercises can alter the expression of dozens of immune-related genes in blood cells. Meditation appears to have a beneficial effect on the functioning of the immune system––boosting and lowering it when needed.

It’s not clear how the genetic changes observed in this study might support the immune system, however the study provides striking evidence that yoga can affect gene expression.

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It makes your immune system rock.

Yoga works on everything.

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It helps to maintain a healthy weight.

Yoga provides a basis for maintaining a healthy weight, even aiding in the process of weight loss.

The calorie-burning factor is not as intense as aerobic exercise, but surveys and studies have been done to support the theory. In 2005, medical researcher and practicing yogi Alan Kristal along with his collegues led a trial involving 15,500 healthy middle-aged men and women. Each participant completed a survey recalling their physical activity and their weight. Researchers then analyzed the data, and ultimately found that yoga could indeed help people shed pounds, or at least keep them from gaining weight. The scientific reasons are somewhat unclear, but the effects are subtle and effective. Yoga forges a mind-body connection, so that can help with self-awareness and helping you to be aware of what you eat and

how it feels to be full. One of Kristal’s collegues adds, “Yoga makes you more susceptible to influence for change––so if you are thinking you want to change your lifestyle, you want to change the way you think about food, you want to get over destructive eating patterns, yoga will give you the spiritual connection to your body that can help you make those changes.”

In a separate yearly review of 17 clinical trials, it was concluded that a regular yoga practice including pranayama and deep relaxation in Savasana (Corpse Pose), practiced for 60 minutes three times a week, is an effective tool for maintaining a healthy weight, especially when home practice is part of the program.

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Yoga simply asks one thing of us:

TO SHOW UP.

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It makes you happier.

Much of what makes us unhappy as humans comes from our own thoughts and feelings. Experiences are judged in terms of good or bad. We go through feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness, embarrassment, humiliation, which essentially weigh us down. A full practice of yoga, including meditation, gently removes these weights from our minds and our bodies. Yoga simply asks one thing of us: to show up. Being present in your mind, body, and spirit. It is not always easy to be mindful in our everyday activity, so practicing yoga is an excellent reminder to do so.

Modern technologies such as MRI screenings have been used to give scientists an idea of how yogic practices such as asana and meditation can affect the brain. Researchers have confirmed that they have a much deeper understanding of what happens in the brain during meditation, and long-term practitioners see changes in brain structure that agree with their being less reactive and less emotionally explosive.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin have

found that meditation increases the activity of the left prefrontal cortex–the area of the brain associated with positive moods and emotional resilience. Additionally, small studies were conducted by researchers at UCLA, where researchers examined how yoga affected people who were clinically depressed and for whom antidepressants provided only partial relief. After eight weeks of practicing Iyengar Yoga three times a week, the patients reported significant decreases in both anxiety and depression.

One study found that practicing yoga consistently improved depression and led to a significant increase in serotonin levels and a decrease in the levels of monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters) and cortisol.

At the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, Ph.D., found that the left prefrontal cortex showed heightened activity in meditators, a finding that has been correlated with greater levels of happiness and better immune function.

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OUR WORLD TODAY

promotes a culture of always being

ON

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10 It helps you rest easy.

Our world today promotes a culture of always being “on.” Our bodies spend too much time in an overstimulated state, contributing to a plethora of various sleep problems. Restorative asana, yoga nidre (a form of guided relaxation), savasana, pranayama, and meditation encourage a turning inward of the senses, which provides downtime for the nervous system.

One study published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback found that yoga helped to relieve chronic insomnia. Researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston taguht 20 study participants yoga breathing, mediation and mantra in one training session. The participants were to practice the yoga treatment before bedtime on their own and with brief in-person and telephone follow ups for eight weeks. The subjects maintained a sleep-wake diary for two weeks prior to treatment and for eight weeks

during the treatment period. At the end of the study, researchers found that the participants had significantly improved sleep efficiency, total sleep time, total wake time, sleep onset latency, and wake time after sleep onset at the end of treatment compared with before the treatment.

One of the head researchers notes, “Yoga is an effective treatment because it addresses insomnia’s physical and psychological aspects.”

Additionally, a recent Duke University analysis on yoga for psychiatric conditions found promising evidence that yoga promises to be helpful for treating sleep disorders. Asana can stretch and relax your muscles; breathing exercises can slow your heart rate to help prepare you for sleep; and regular meditation can keep you from getting tangled up in the worries that keep you from drifting off.

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Conclusion If these reasons weren’t enough to get you into your nearest yoga studio, or at least off of the couch and googling other places to practice, I don’t know what will. This is merely a cross-section of the myriad of benefits. The advantages to practicing yoga are longterm, and will resonate with the mind, body, and soul for life. The final piece of wisdom I would like to share is about the accessibility of yoga. Anyone, regardless of age,

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size, health, circumstance of life, and religion, can practice yoga. Do not be put off by the daunting concept of flexibility. While the physical practice has been popularized, it is a beautiful conglomeration of art, therapy, philosophy, and science, and anyone can be inspired to learn more about it; everyone deserves to experience the beauty of yoga and reap the benefits it provides.

Sources Bouchez, Colette. “Yoga for Weight Loss?” http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/features/yoga-for-weight-loss Gavalas, Elaine. “Yoga Helps Relieve Sleep Problems” Huffington Post Lifestyle, August 8, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-gavalas/yoga-sleep_b_1719825.html Griffin, Katherine. “Good for You! 21 ways your yoga practice can improve your health”

Yoga Journal, September 2013 Minahan, Monique. “How Yoga Makes You Happy” Huffington Post Healthy Living, January 23, 2013 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/intent/yoga-happiness_b_2497077.html Pirisi, Angela. “Support Your Immune System” http://www.yogajournal.com/health/118 Turner, Kelly. “Can Yoga Replace Strength Training?” http://life.gaiam.com/article/can-yoga-replace-strength-training “Yoga for Better Sex!” Prevention Magazine, November 2011 http://www.prevention.com/fitness/yoga/yoga-moves-yoga-better-sex Yoga for Healthy Aging, Blog.

http://yogaforhealthyaging.blogspot.com/2013/03/range-of-motion-yogas-got- it-covered.html

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namaste

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