Have you already started practicing yoga? Still on the fence? In this issue of our magazine, we introduce you 38 reasons to love yoga, including health, happiness, harmony, and other aspects of the relationship, each reason will make you excited to start practicing yoga!
Table of Contents
1. Flexibility
Your flexibility will be greatly improved, which is the most important and obvious benefit of practicing yoga for the first time. In the first class, you may not be able to touch your toes with your hands, let alone lean back and lower your back. But if you keep going, you’ll find your ligaments softening and eventually, you’ll be able to do poses that seem impossible. At the same time, you will also notice that those physical ailments are slowly disappearing. This is no coincidence.
Due to the improper use of muscles and shins often brings a lot of pain, such as the tension in the buttocks will also lead to more tension in the knee joint, but also lead to the flattening of the spine in the lower back, which will bring back pain. The inflexibility of the muscles and ligaments can cause the person’s body posture is unsightly.
2. Muscle strength
Strong muscles do not just look good, they can also save us from arthritis and back pain and can make you more youthful and fit. If you practice yoga and become more powerful, your flexibility will also be enhanced; if you simply go to the gym and do some weight lifting exercises, you may only increase your strength, but not get the flexibility exercise.
3. Flexible joints
Every time you practice yoga, you will be fully moving your joints. This will prevent your chances of arthritis and also enhance the mobility of your otherwise less mobile cartilage areas. The cartilage at the joint is like a sponge, and only when the fluid in it is squeezed out does he have room to absorb fresh nutrients. Without the right substances, the cartilage area is often neglected, leading to strain, and the bones it protects can also strain, like worn-out brake pads.
4. Healthy spine
The intervertebral discs – the shock-proof tissue between the vertebrae – help the body reduce the time it takes for nerves to pulsate after an external blow. This is also the only part of the spine that absorbs nutrients. If you have a good foundation in practicing yoga postures, you will improve the flexibility of the discs by being able to do backward bends, forward bends and twists.
5. Avoid Osteoporosis
It is well documented that weight-bearing exercises can prevent osteoporosis. Many poses in yoga require you to lift your body upward. Some poses, such as upward dog and downward dog, can help strengthen your arm bones. Arms are the most susceptible to osteoporosis. An unpublished study at UCLA showed that long-term yoga practice can increase the density of vertebral bones. Yoga has the amazing effect of reducing hydrocortisone, a stress hormone while helping to preserve the calcium in the bones
6. Regulate hydrocortisone
Practice yoga can reduce the level of hydrocortisone in the human body. Normally, the adrenal glands in the body secrete hydrocortisone, which has the function of preventing acute illnesses and improving the immune system. If your hydrocortisone levels remain high after each illness, they can crisis the immune system.
Temporary high hydrocortisone levels help to maintain long-term memory, but relatively long-term high hydrocortisone levels can harm one’s memory function, and in severe cases, even the brain. In addition, high hydrocortisone levels can lead to depression, osteoporosis, hypertension, and insulin resistance. Studies have also shown that high levels of hydrocortisone can lead to “hyperphagia” (overeating when you are nervous, angry or upset). This can cause abdominal swelling, obesity, diabetes and heart disease and other health risks.
7. Upright Posture
Your head is like a bowling ball – big, very round and heavy. When everything is normal between him and the spine, then the pressure on your neck and back muscles is relatively small. Stretch your head forward a few centimeters, you will let the relevant muscle tension. If you have been maintaining this posture for 8 to 12 hours a day, you will certainly feel particularly tired. And fatigue and exertion are not just the only problems.
Unsightly posture may lead to problems in the back, neck, and other muscle tissues and joint areas. As you slowly get older, wrinkles will appear on your body, in your neck and under your back, and these can also lead to pain as well as age-related joint or spondylitis.
8. Enhanced Lymphatic Function
When you contract and stretch your muscles, when you move your internal organs, when you begin or end your yoga practice, yoga helps enhance the ability to consume lymphatic fluid (a viscous fluid in immune cells), helping the lymphatic system to fight off germs, destroy cancer cells, and remove toxic waste products excreted by normal cell metabolism.
9. Powerful Heartbeat
When you regularly keep your heart rate in the aerobic range, this will help reduce the chances of heart disease and relieve depressed moods. However not all yoga is aerobic, but if you practice flow yoga or ashtanga, this can raise your heart rate to aerobic levels. But even yoga is not able to raise your heart rate to a very high rate, he can still improve the blood circulation of the heart vessels. Studies have found that yoga practice lowers the heart rate, increases the persistence of the heartbeat, and while practicing, it expands the capacity of the heart to absorb oxygen – all reflecting the aerobic way yoga improves the heart. One study found that those who practiced only Pranayama could complete their yoga practice with less oxygen intake.
10. Relax your limbs
Have you ever noticed that your arms are tense every time you pick up the phone or the steering wheel, have you ever noticed your expression as soon as you turn on the computer and its nervous staring at the screen? These unconscious habits can lead to chronic tension, muscle fatigue, soreness in your wrists, arms, shoulders, neck, and face, and affect your inner emotions. If you are simply adjusting yourself, perhaps you can slowly relax yourself by relaxing your tongue and the muscles around your eyes; for those relatively large muscle tissues, such as quads, obliques, hip muscles, etc., you may have to exercise slowly to learn how to really relax them.
11. Refine Blood Flow
Yoga can keep the blood flowing smoothly. To be more precise, yoga relaxation exercises can help you to better your metabolism, especially the blood flow to your hands and feet. Yoga practice can bring more oxygen to your cells. Those bending poses are to squeeze out the venous blood from the internal organs, while the stretching poses are to allow the oxidized blood to flow back into the heart again, and that blood will be squeezed into the lungs to get freshly oxidized. If a person has swollen legs due to heart or kidney problems, practicing yoga can be very beneficial. Yoga also increases the level of hematocrit and red blood cells in the blood, which brings more oxygen into the tissues and cells. This also lowers the platelets in the blood and the protein levels that help reduce blood clotting, which reduces the chance of heart disease and stroke due to blood clots.
12. Happy Hour
Having a bad time? Then do a lotus sit, or simply do a wheel pose or dance king pose. But it’s not that simple. A study shows that people who regularly practice yoga will relieve depressed moods and increase the level of compound amines in the blood. Lower levels of the oxidase enzyme meta-amines as well as hydrocortisone. Dr. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin found that. Meditators will have a more intense sensitivity in their left prefrontal cortex, and one study found that they will have higher than normal levels of joy and immunity, while those devout yoga practitioners who have been practicing for a long time show a more surprising left prefrontal cortex response.
13.The ideal weight
More exercise, and less food – this is the motto of many dieters. Yoga is helpful in doing both. Regular practice of yoga will help you burn more calories, and your mental and soul horizons are wider, and you think about eating and weight with a deeper mind. Yoga will also make you more and more aware and careful about what you eat.
14. Lower blood sugar
Practicing yoga can lower the sugar content of your blood as well as your LDL cholesterol level and raise your HDL cholesterol level. In those patients who have diabetes, yoga practice usually reduces the sugar content in the blood in several ways – reducing the cyanocortisone as well as adrenaline levels in the body, motivating weight loss, increasing sensitivity to insulin, and lowering your blood sugar content. This way your glycemic index goes down and your likelihood of developing diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure go down at the same time.
15. Relaxed Body
Yoga encourages you to relax yourself, to soothe your breathing, to focus on the present moment, and to adjust the balance of the sympathetic nervous system. The nervous system has a self-healing and calming function that lowers people’s breathing and heart rate lowers blood pressure, and speeds up blood flow to the gut and reproductive organs, allowing you to enter a relaxed state of yoga.
16. Stay away from medicine
If your home medicine cabinet looks more like a pharmacy, maybe it’s time for you to try yoga. In a study of asthmatics, hypertensive patients, compulsive psychotic disorder patients and diabetics, it was found that practicing yoga could help them reduce the amount of medication they took and sometimes even quit taking it altogether. What are the benefits of taking fewer medications, you ask? You’ll spend less money and you’ll suffer less from the side effects of medication and the dangers of medication interactions.
17. Good Teacher
A good yoga teacher can do wonders for your health. A good yoga teacher doesn’t just teach you the postures, they correct them for you and make them more accurate. They will tell you the hard truths in a kind tone, help you relax, and create your own personal practice plan based on your unique characteristics. A good respectful relationship with your teacher can help improve your health over a long period of time.
18. Build Up Heat
Tapas, the Sanskrit word for “heat,” means fire, and it is an important element of yoga practice. Tapas in yoga is also very useful in life to help you overcome inertia and change your chaotic habits. You’ll find that it doesn’t take much effort and you’ll already start eating healthier, exercising more, and even succeeding in quitting after many failed attempts.
19. Relieve Stress
Too much stress may lead to constipation, ulcers,, acute gastroenteritis and other diseases. So if you learn to reduce stress, you will be spared from these illnesses. Just like any other form of exercise, yoga can relieve constipation and theoretically play a big role in reducing the chances of cancer.
This is because rotating the body and holding various yoga poses helps to speed up blood circulation and the bowel’s ability to excrete toxins. Although not scientifically proven, the twisting movements of yoga are considered the most effective way to remove internal waste from the body.
20. Meditation
If you conceive an image with your mind during yoga meditation or other practices, you can also make such changes work in your body, and several studies have found that controlled imagery can effectively reduce post-operative pain, decrease the frequency of headaches, and effectively improve the quality of life for people with cancer and AIDS.
21. Heal Your Broken Heart
Love may not control everything, but it can clearly assist in healing emotional problems. Cultivating emotional support among friends, in the family, and within the community has been proven time and time again to heal and improve health outcomes, and a regular yoga practice can help deepen friendships, increase compassion, and improve your level of calmness. The yoga philosophy focuses on not causing harm to others and only thinking of what you need, which can be very beneficial in improving your relationships.
22. Stay Away from Negativity
Yoga and meditation build good self-awareness, and the stronger your good self-awareness, the more you can get rid of destructive emotions, such as anger. Studies have shown that chronic anger and hostility can contribute directly to heart disease, as can smoking, diabetes and high cholesterol. Yoga practice can have a significant effect on reducing anger by increasing empathy and calming the mood. Yoga can also help you, in the face of frustration and bad news, to remain calm, step back and look at life from a distance. You can still react quickly to everything when you need to – yoga practice also improves your reaction time – but in that reaction time, you begin to learn to look at problems in a more thoughtful way, reducing the damage they can do to you 23. peace of mind
23. Inner Peace
According to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, yoga controls the fluctuations of the mind. In other words, it reduces all kinds of negative mental feelings, including frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desires that can cause stress. Stress is one of those things that can easily react to a variety of human health problems, including triggering migraines, insomnia, eczema, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. And if you learn to calm your mind, you can live a longer and healthier life.
24. Lifestyle
It’s possible that you haven’t had much thought of serving others before, but if you do, your health does improve. A University of Michigan study found that elderly volunteers who could spare an hour a week to practice yoga had a survival rate twice as high after seven years as those who did not. Doing good for others can bring meaning to your life, and when you see the problems others are facing, you will stop worrying about your own problems all day long.
25. Pacification
If you believe you will get better slowly, your body will get better slowly. Unfortunately, many traditional scientists believe that if a person’s health works by way of reassurance, it is not entirely proven to be effective. However, most patients just want the body to heal, so if chanting – that is, the chant you sing before the beginning and at the end of each yoga or meditation session – can have a healing effect, so what if it is only a soothing effect?
26. Sound System
The basic components of yoga – asana, attunement, and meditation – work together to improve your health, but there’s more in yoga’s wellness toolbox. Think about chanting, which prolongs the exhalation time. It improves parasympathetic nerves as well as the balance of the nervous system. When a group practices yoga together, chanting can be a very powerful physical and emotional experience. A recent study has shown that the sound of wooing during yoga chanting can improve metabolism.
27. Positivity
Many of us suffer from a chronic state of low self-esteem, and if you just deal with it in a negative way – taking drugs, overeating, overworking, spending the night – you will pay a heavy health price, both physically and mentally. If you have a positive attitude and practice yoga at the same time, you’ll feel that it’s all worth it. It may all be a vague feeling at first, but then you are so sure of the benefits, as your yoga philosophy teacher has been telling you, that you are also a good projection of the divine at this time. If you practice yoga regularly with the intention of self-reflection and self-improvement – rather than as an exercise similar to aerobics – you will be able to help yourself reach a different level. You will experience feelings of gratitude, forgiveness, and generosity of heart. Better health is not the ultimate spiritual quest, as many scientific studies have repeatedly proven, but is only one of many benefits of yoga.
28. Cleaning
Kriyas, the yogic cleansing exercises, is another important element of yoga. Jaia Neti, gentle irrigation of the nasal passages with salt water, removes dust and bacteria from the nose, prevents mucus formation, and drains the nasal recesses of dirt.
29. Integrated Health
You’ve learned about all the ways that practicing yoga can improve your health, and you may notice that a lot of these cross over. That’s because they are very closely related to each other. Changing your posture, changing the way you breathe, changing your nervous system, that’s the amazing thing about yoga classes: everything is connected – from your sit bones to your ankles, from you to your group of friends, from your group to the world.
These internal connections are all very important to understanding the essence of yoga. The whole body system works simultaneously with many individual mechanisms that play multiple roles at the same time. This collaborative effect is the most important element of the yoga healing modality.
30. Healing
In conventional medicine, most patients are treated passively. In yoga, you take the initiative to heal yourself. Yoga gives you the tools to help yourself change, and you may be able to feel the progress in your body the first time you practice. You may also notice that the more you practice, the more you will benefit. The result is this: the more you will care for yourself, the more you find that the more you practice brings you more progress and change, and the more change brings you more hope, and hope itself is therapeutic.
31. Banish Pain
Yoga allows you to reduce physical pain, and according to several studies, yoga postures, meditation, and the cross-practice of both can reduce the number of people suffering from arthritis, back pain, muscle pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other chronic conditions. When your pain is relieved and your mood improves you find yourself becoming more active and you won’t need more therapy.
32. Good spatial awareness
Regular practice of yoga increases one’s spatial awareness (the ability to feel what one’s body is doing and where it is in space) and increases balance. People who are poorly groomed or poorly coordinated usually have only a weak proprioception, so they are prone to knee and back pain. Better balance means less chance of falling. For those who are elderly, this will allow them to move more freely and independently, without the need to go to a custodial ward in their old age. For all of us, maintaining a tree-like standing posture makes us feel more balanced and stable.
33. Control Your Body
Some yoga practitioners are able to control their own bodies in special ways, such as through the nervous system. Scientists have studied people who can sense the rhythm of their own heartbeat, generate special brain waves, and use meditation to raise the temperature of their hands by 15 degrees Fahrenheit. If they really can make themselves do these amazing things with yoga, maybe you can start learning yoga too. If you are expecting a child, then you can learn to let the airflow run to your pelvis, and if you are an insomniac, then you can learn how to ease your emotions.
34.Regulate blood pressure
If you have a hidden problem of high blood pressure, practicing yoga will work well for you. two articles published in the British medical monthly Scalpel, which studied patients with high blood pressure, carefully compared the difference between jerking in yoga and simply lying on the couch. after 3 months, patients who practiced jerking had a 26 point reduction in their cardiac systolic blood pressure and a 15 point reduction in their cardiac diastolic blood pressure. And the higher the original blood pressure was, the more it was lowered after practicing yoga.
35. Enhance Immunity
Immunity increase Asana and breath control have been considered the two most immune-enhancing yoga practices, but recent scientific studies have proven that meditation is the most effective form of yoga. It has a significant effect on the way the entire immune system works, increasing the immune system’s response when necessary (e.g., increasing antibody levels in the body after vaccination) and decreasing the immune system’s response when specifically needed (e.g., decreasing overactive immune function when dealing with autoimmune diseases, such as psoriasis).
36. Peace Your Mind
A calming remedy Motivation is good, but too much stimulation and motivation can interfere with the normal functioning of the nervous system. In today’s busy modern life, yoga can provide a way to soothe you. Restorative asanas, yoga meditation, and breathing techniques encourage the internal feeling of self, which in effect gives the nervous system a break. Studies have shown that the regular practice of yoga has the added benefit of improving the quality of sleep, which will prevent you from appearing very stressed and tired in your daily life, thus avoiding many accidents.
37. Breathing and Peace
The deep and long breaths of yoga reduce the number of breaths, which increases the frequency of breathing and allows for a calmer state of mind.
A study published in Scalpel in 1988 taught patients with lung problems due to heart congestion how to use the “complete breathing” style of yoga for self-healing. After one month their average breathing rate had decreased from 13.4 breaths per minute to 7.6. At the same time, their ability to practice breathing and oxygen saturation in the blood also improved significantly. In addition to this, yoga has been shown to improve several functions of the lungs, including maximum breathing volume and breathing rate and quality. Yoga can likewise improve the quality of nasal inhalation by filtering the dust and dirt from the air inhaled into the nose from the lungs through improvements in heat and humidity.
38. Strengthen memory
An important concept of yoga is that of focusing on the present moment. Studies have shown that practicing yoga can enhance one’s coordination, responsiveness, memory, and even IQ. Yoga practitioners who practice a priori meditation demonstrate extraordinary problem-solving skills, and they are also better able to access and recall information – probably because they are more attentive, so it’s like a tape that can be played back and forth over and over again.
