Starting a yoga practice can feel stressful, frustrating, or annoying! But stick with it. It will improve your mind, body, and spirit beyond reasonable levels.
Maybe you’re wondering, what’s yoga? Is yoga an exercise? Why should you stretch your body? These questions are common among beginners.
If you ask those who’ve tried yoga, they’ll say, “Yoga is great, you need to try it.” You may think they’re avoiding answering your question. But that’s not true; they aren’t avoiding anything, it’s hard justifying the splendour of a feeling.
Understanding the merits of yoga requires you to feel them. Good thing, you can experience the feeling even from your first session. To gratify your curiosity, I’ll explain the reasons why you should enrol for yoga classes in Australia.
1. Improves your Flexibility
Enrolling for yoga classes in Australia helps improve your flexibility. During your first class, you may not be able to do a backend or even touch your toes.
However, if you stick with it, your muscles will experience gradual loosening. After that, it becomes possible to do seemingly impossible poses.
You’ll also realise that pains and aches will start to disappear. That’s no coincidence. Tight hamstrings may flatten the lumbar spine leading to back pains. Tight hips will have an improper alignment of your thigh and shinbones thus straining your knee joints.
Any inflexibility on your connective tissues like fascia and ligaments will lead to poor posture.
2. Improves your Blood Flow
Yoga for beginners emphasises on relaxation postures and exercises. These postures are essential in blood circulation to your feet and hands.
Yoga also assists in getting oxygen to your body cells. For instance, the twisting poses are known to get venous blood from your internal organs. Oxygenated blood can flow once you release the twist.
Inverted poses like handstand, headstand, and shoulder stand, allows venous blood to flow from your legs to the heart. The heart pumps blood to the lungs for oxygenation.
Enrolling for yoga classes in Australia helps boost the level of haemoglobin and red blood cells that carry oxygen to your body tissues.
Yoga makes platelets less sticky in your blood eliminating blood clots in your body. It’ll, therefore, decrease strokes and heart attacks as lumps are the main reasons for these killers.
3. Betters the Strength and Health of Your Bones
Weight-bearing exercises help strengthen your bones. It also acts to ward off osteoporosis. Many yoga postures require one to lift their weight.
Some postures like upward and downward facing dog assists in strengthening your arm bones. These are the ones that are vulnerable to osteoporotic fractures.
4. Lowers Cortisol Levels in Your Body
Your body produces cortisol hormones in response to a severe crisis. It’ll temporarily boost your immune system. But why do you need to lower cortisol levels?
If cortisol hormones stay high after a crisis, it’ll compromise your immune system. Also, a temporary rise in cortisol level is suitable for your memory. If the surge persists, it’ll undermine the mind leading to permanent changes in your brain.
Additionally, higher cortisol levels lead to higher depression, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, and osteoporosis that extracts minerals like calcium from your bones.
Higher cortisol levels lead to ‘food-seeking behaviour’ where people tend to eat more when they’re angry, upset, or stressed. Your body then redistributes the extra calories as fat in your abdomen leading to weight gain; increasing the risk of heart attack and diabetes.
5. Improves Functionality for Your Lungs
Yogis take few breaths of higher volumes that are highly efficient and calming. According to a study published in the Lancet in 1998, ‘complete breathing’ a yoga technique helped people with lung problems emanating from their congestive heart failure.
After one month of yoga, their exercise capacity and oxygen saturation in their blood increased. However, their respiratory rates went down from 13.4 to 7.6 breaths per minute.
Further, yoga helps to improve the lung functionality including the efficiency of your exhalation. It also promotes the usage of the nose to breathe that filters and warms your air. Remember, cold air is not suitable for asthmatic people.
Breathing through the nose humidifies the air, removing dirt and pollen, alongside other things you don’t want in your lungs.
6. Increases Your Self Esteem
A lot of people suffer from low self-esteem. Unfortunately, the majority handles the situation negatively- overeating, working too hard, taking drugs or sleeping around. The price of all this is poor health physically, spiritually and mentally.
Where you take a positive approach like yoga, you’re able to experience feelings of empathy, gratitude and forgiveness. It makes you appreciate the fact that you’re a part of a greater thing.
Conclusion:
With age, tendons, muscles, and ligaments are likely to lose their flexibility. In most cases, this stiffness is due to in activeness in your body. Yoga practices are known to improve flexibility in your body and offer a horde of other health benefits.