Yoga was developed over 5,000 years ago in India as a comprehensive system for well being on all levels: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. While Yoga is often equated with Hatha Yoga, the well-known system of postures and breathing techniques, Hatha Yoga is only a part of the overall discipline of Yoga. Today, many people use various aspects of Yoga to help raise their quality of life in such areas as fitness, stress relief, wellness, vitality, mental clarity, healing, peace of mind, and spiritual growth.

There are the reasons why you need to begin a yoga practice if you haven’t already started one.

29 Benefits of Yoga

• Improves your flexibility. Improved flexibility is one of the first and most obvious benefits of yoga.

• Builds muscle strength. Yoga protects us from conditions like arthritis and back pain, and it helps prevent falls in elderly people. And when you build strength through yoga, you balance it with flexibility.

• Perfects your posture. Your head is like a bowling ball i.e. it’s big, round, and heavy. When it’s balanced directly over a straight spine, it takes much less work for your neck and back muscles to support it.

• Prevents cartilage and joint breakdown. Each time you practice yoga, you take your joints through a full range of motion. This can help prevent degenerative arthritis or reduces disability by “squeezing and soaking” areas of cartilage that normally aren’t used. Joint cartilage is like a sponge; it receives fresh nutrients only when its fluid is squeezed out and a new supply can be soaked up. Without proper sustenance, neglected areas of cartilage can eventually wear out, exposing the underlying bone like worn-out brake pads.

• Protects your spine. Spinal disks are the shock absorbers between the vertebrae that can herniate and compress nerves. The vertebrae craves movement. This is the only way they get their nutrients.

• Improves your bone health. It’s well documented that weight-bearing exercise strengthens bones and helps ward off osteoporosis. Many postures in yoga require that you lift your own weight.

• Increases your blood flow. Yoga gets your blood flowing. The relaxation exercises you learn in yoga can help your circulation, especially in your hands and feet. Yoga also gets more oxygen to your cells, which help them function better. And twisting poses are thought to wring out venous blood from internal organs and allow oxygenated blood to flow in once the twist pose is released.

• Drains your lymph and boosts immunity. When you contract and stretch your muscles, move your organs around, and come in and out of yoga postures, you increase the drainage of the lymph. Lymph is a viscous fluid rich in immune cells. These movements help the lymphatic system fight infection, destroy cancerous cells, and dispose of the toxic waste products of cellular functioning.

• Increases your heart rate. When you regularly get your heart rate into the aerobic range, you lower your risk of heart attack and can relieve depression. While not all yoga is aerobic, if you do it vigorously or take flow or Ashtanga classes, it can boost your heart rate into the aerobic range. But even yoga exercises that don’t get your heart rate up that high can improve cardiovascular conditioning. Studies have found that yoga practice lowers the resting heart rate, increases endurance, and can improve your maximum uptake of oxygen during exercise.

• Helps drop your blood pressure. If you have high blood pressure, you might benefit from yoga. Two studies of people with hypertension, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, compared the effects of Savasana (Corpse Pose) with simply lying on a couch. After three months, Savasana was associated with a 26-point drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number) and a 15-point drop in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number—and the higher the initial blood pressure, the bigger the drop.

• Regulates your adrenal glands. Yoga lowers cortisol levels. Normally, the adrenal glands secrete cortisol in response to an acute crisis, which temporarily boosts immune function. If your cortisol levels stay high even after the crisis, they can compromise your immune system. Temporary boosts of cortisol help with long-term memory, but chronically high levels undermine memory and may lead to permanent changes in the brain. Additionally, excessive cortisol has been linked with major depression, osteoporosis (it extracts calcium and other minerals from bones and interferes with the laying down of new bone), high blood pressure, and insulin resistance.

• Makes you happier.  Sit in a Lotus pose when you’re feeling sad. Then rise up into a back bend pose. While it’s not as simple as that, one study found that a consistent yoga practice 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. More dramatic left-sided activation was found in dedicated, long-term practitioners.

• Helps you create a healthy lifestyle. Yoga can help on both fronts: diet and exercise. A regular practice gets you moving and burns calories, and the spiritual and emotional dimensions of your practice may encourage you to address any eating and weight problems on a deeper level. Yoga may also inspire you to become a more conscious eater.

  

   

• Lowers your blood sugar. Yoga lowers blood sugar and LDL or bad cholesterol and boosts HDL or good cholesterol. In people with diabetes, yoga has been found to lower blood sugar in several ways: by lowering cortisol and adrenaline levels, encouraging weight loss, and improving sensitivity to the effects of insulin.

• Helps you with focus/concentration. An important component of yoga is focusing on the present. Studies have found that regular yoga practice improves coordination, reaction time, memory, and even IQ scores. People who practice Transcendental Meditation demonstrate the ability to solve problems and acquire and recall information better. This is probably due to the fact that they’re less distracted by their thoughts, which can play over and over like an endless tape loop.

• Relaxes your system. Yoga encourages you to relax, slow your breath, and focus on the present, shifting the balance from the sympathetic nervous system (or the fight-or-flight response) to the parasympathetic nervous system. The latter is calming and restorative; it lowers breathing and heart rates, decreases blood pressure, and increases blood flow to the intestines and reproductive organs—comprising what Herbert Benson, M.D., calls the relaxation response.

• Improves your balance. Regularly practicing yoga increases proprioception (the ability to feel what your body is doing and where it is in space) and improves balance. People with bad posture or dysfunctional movement patterns usually have poor proprioception, which has been linked to knee problems and back pain. Better balance could mean fewer falls. For the elderly, this translates into more independence and delayed admission to a nursing home or never entering one at all. For the rest of us, postures like Tree Pose can make us feel less wobbly on and off the mat.

• Maintains your nervous system. Some advanced yogis can control their bodies in extraordinary ways, many of which are mediated by the nervous system. Scientists have monitored yogis who could induce unusual heart rhythms, generate specific brain-wave patterns, and, using a meditation technique, raise the temperature of their hands by 15 degrees Fahrenheit. If they can use yoga to do that, perhaps you could learn to improve blood flow to your pelvis if you’re trying to get pregnant or induce relaxation when you’re having trouble falling asleep.

• Releases tension in your limbs. Do you ever notice yourself holding the telephone or a steering wheel with a death grip or scrunching your face when staring at a computer screen? These unconscious habits can lead to chronic tension, muscle fatigue, and soreness in the wrists, arms, shoulders, neck, and face, which can increase stress and worsen your mood. As you practice yoga, you begin to notice where you hold tension: It might be in your tongue, your eyes, or the muscles of your face and neck. If you simply tune in, you may be able to release some tension in the tongue and eyes. With bigger muscles like the quadriceps, trapezius, and buttocks, it may take years of practice to learn how to relax them.

• Helps you get a deeper sleep. Stimulation is good, but too much of it taxes the nervous system. Yoga can provide relief from the hustle and bustle of modern life. Restorative asana, yoga nidra (a form of guided relaxation), Savasana, pranayama, and meditation encourage pratyahara, a turning inward of the senses, which provides downtime for the nervous system. Another by-product of a regular yoga practice, studies suggest, is better sleep—which means you’ll be less tired and stressed and less likely to have accidents.

• Boosts your immune system functionality. Asana and pranayama probably improve immune function, but, so far, meditation has the strongest scientific support in this area. It appears to have a beneficial effect on the functioning of the immune system, boosting it when needed (for example, raising antibody levels in response to a vaccine) and lowering it when needed (for instance, mitigating an inappropriately aggressive immune function in an autoimmune disease like psoriasis).

• Gives your lungs room to breathe. Yogis tend to take fewer breaths of greater volume, which is both calming and more efficient. A 1998 study published in The Lancet taught a yogic technique known as “complete breathing” to people with lung problems due to congestive heart failure. After one month, their average respiratory rate decreased from 13.4 breaths per minute to 7.6. Meanwhile, their exercise capacity increased significantly, as did the oxygen saturation of their blood. In addition, yoga has been shown to improve various measures of lung function, including the maximum volume of the breath and the efficiency of the exhalation. Yoga also promotes breathing through the nose, which filters the air, warms it (cold, dry air is more likely to trigger an asthma attack in people who are sensitive), and humidifies it, removing pollen and dirt and other things you’d rather not take into your lungs.

• Prevents digestive problems. Some digestive problems such as ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, and constipation are caused by stress. So if you stress less, you’ll suffer less. Yoga, like any physical exercise, can ease some of these digestive issues.

• Gives you peace of mind.  It slows down the mental loops of frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress. And since stress is implicated in so many health problems i.e. from migraines and insomnia to lupus, MS, eczema, high blood pressure, and heart attacks; if you learn to quiet your mind, you’ll be likely to live longer and healthier.

• Increases your self-esteem. Many of us suffer from chronic low self-esteem. If you handle this negatively—take drugs, overeat, work too hard —you may pay the price in poorer health physically, mentally, and spiritually. If you take a positive approach and practice yoga, you’ll sense, initially in brief glimpses and later in more sustained views, that you’re worthwhile or, as yogic philosophy teaches, that you are a manifestation of the Divine. If you practice regularly with an intention of self-examination and betterment, you can access a different side of yourself. You’ll experience feelings of gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness, as well as a sense that you’re part of something bigger. While better health is not the goal of spirituality, it’s often a by-product, as documented by repeated scientific studies.

• Eases your pain. Yoga can ease your pain. According to several studies, asana, meditation, or a combination of the two, reduced pain in people with arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other chronic conditions. When you relieve your pain, your mood improves, you’re more inclined to be active, and you don’t need as much medication.

• Gives you inner strength. Yoga can help you make changes in your life. In fact, that might be its greatest strength. Tapas, the Sanskrit word for “heat,” is the fire, the discipline that fuels yoga practice and that regular practice builds. The tapas you develop can be extended to the rest of your life to overcome inertia and change dysfunctional habits. You may find that without making a particular effort to change things, you start to eat better, exercise more, or finally quit smoking after years of failed attempts.

• Connects you with guidance. Good yoga teachers can do wonders for your health. Exceptional ones do more than guide you through the postures. They can adjust your posture, gauge when you should go deeper in poses or back off, deliver hard truths with compassion, help you relax, and enhance and personalize your practice. A respectful relationship with a teacher goes a long way toward promoting your health.

• Builds awareness for transformation. Yoga and meditation build awareness. And the more aware you are, the easier it is to break free of destructive emotions like anger. Studies suggest that chronic anger and hostility are as strongly linked to heart attacks as are smoking, diabetes, and elevated cholesterol. Yoga appears to reduce anger by increasing feelings of compassion and interconnection and by calming the nervous system and the mind. It also increases your ability to step back from the drama of your own life, to remain calm in the face of bad news or unsettling events.
  

Starting and/or maintaining a yoga practice can be challenging from both a time and energy standpoint.

If you prefer to practice yoga in the comfort of your home, YogaDownload offers online yoga and meditation that you can take anywhere and do anytime! You will have access to a library of over 1000 online yoga classes you can do at home or on the go. YogaDownload features world class instructors teaching classes from super relaxing to more vigorous, in a wide variety of lengths and levels. The versatility of YogaDownload is perfect for your busy schedule and makes it easy to get your yoga practice in, even on those days when you only have 20 minutes to spare!

Source: https://www.yogajournal.com/lifestyle/count-yoga-38-ways-yoga-keeps-fit