Why Is Practicing Yoga Beneficial To Our Body

March 2023

Patajali, a Hindu scholar, compiled the Yoga Sutras, a collection of 196 texts that formalized India’s traditional meditative traditions. These writings defined yoga as the ‘yoking’ or restraint of the mind from dwelling on external objects in order to achieve a state of pure consciousness. Over time, yoga began to combine physical aspects of gymnastics and wrestling.

There are many different approaches to modern yoga today, but the three essential parts of Patajali’s practice remain the same: physical postures, breathing exercises, and spiritual contemplation.

This unusual combination of physical and mental exercise is thought to provide a number of health benefits, including increased strength and flexibility, improved heart and lung function, and improved psychological well-being. Despite numerous academics’ efforts, it is difficult to make concrete claims about yoga’s benefits due to its unique combination of exercises. Furthermore, yoga studies frequently use small sample numbers with little diversity, and outcomes are highly subjective due to the substantial dependence on self-reporting.

Multiple muscle groups are stretched by twisting your body into yoga’s physical poses. Stretching can modify the water content of these muscles, ligaments, and tendons in the short term, making them more elastic. Stretching on a regular basis activates stem cells, which develop into new muscle tissue and other cells that produce elastic collagen over time.

It has also been demonstrated that the technique can be used as a potentially effective therapeutic strategy. Yoga was found to be more effective than other kinds of low-impact exercise for lowering pain and improving mobility in studies involving patients with a variety of musculoskeletal conditions. Adding yoga to an existing fitness regimen can help people with difficult-to-treat diseases, including chronic lower back pain, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, gain strength and flexibility.

Yoga’s combination of physical exercise and controlled breathing has also been shown to be beneficial to lung health. Lung disorders such as chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma reduce the number of oxygen-carrying airways while weakening the membrane that delivers oxygen to the bloodstream. Breathing techniques like those found in yoga, on the other hand, relax the muscles that constrict those passages, allowing for better oxygen diffusion.

Increasing the oxygen level of the blood is especially beneficial for people who have weak cardiac muscles and have trouble pumping adequate oxygen throughout the body. For people with healthy hearts, this practice can help lower blood pressure and minimize cardiovascular disease risk factors.

The most well-known advantage of yoga may also be the most difficult to prove: its psychological impact. One of the most popular assertions is that yoga helps people with depression and anxiety disorders. It’s difficult to measure yoga’s influence because the diagnosis of these diseases, as well as their genesis and severity, differs widely. However, there is evidence that yoga, as well as meditation and relaxation, can help alleviate stress symptoms. The study of yoga’s impacts is still in its early stages. We will need larger studies with more diverse people in the future to assess the influence of yoga on heart attacks, cancer rates, cognitive performance and other factors. However, yoga can continue to be practised as a way to exercise, reflect, and relax for the time being.

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