How Yoga and Integrative Health Exercises Keep You Physically and Mentally Fit

Many of you might have heard about yoga exercises. It’s a multidimensional discipline that deals with cultivating your positive values, and wellness through connecting your body, breathing, and mind.

Physical and mental stressors are present in our day-to-day life. Office workloads, politics, international threats like terrorism and diseases, and environmental changes make everyone anxious and stressed. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that nearly 25% of the world’s population suffers from mental or neurological disorders. 

Practicing yoga and integrative health helps improve not only your physical well-being but mental health as well. Here's how yoga exercises impact your system with regular practice:

Benefits of Yoga to Your Physical and Mental Health

1. Physical benefits

• Increases Flexibility

Adding yoga to your daily routine can visibly improve your flexibility. It’s one of the obvious benefits of this discipline. Constantly doing the “asanas” or poses will slowly loosen and stretch your joints and muscles. The first improvement that you will notice is the ease of movement from one pose to another. You won’t feel any stiffness around your joints and you won't get tired easily. You will also notice that the pain from every pose will disappear. 

Your joints are like a sponge and you need to squeeze it out so that new fluids will soak up on the joints. It’s like adding oil on a machine part to keep it moving and prevents it from rusting. Yoga allows you to sustain the movements around joints and prevent problems like arthritis.

•  Increases Muscle Strength

Yoga can help build muscle strength and endurance. It also protects you from having back pains and arthritis as you grow older. There are yoga styles that are very physical that greatly benefit your body. 

Ashtanga yoga focuses on the improvement of muscle strength. This exercise requires vigor from your arm and core. Continuously doing this will gradually improve your stamina and tone your core and the muscles in your upper body.

• Improves Breathing

Pranayama or the control of breathing is one of yoga’s main focus. During the exercise, you have to pay attention to your breathing for you to be relaxed. Yoga helps you increase your oxygen intake up to five times. Blood that is rich with oxygen allows your brain, heart, lungs, and other organs to function well.  

Yogis breathe with their nose to prevent dirt from entering the lungs. It also improves the flow of your lymph system and eliminates toxins from your body. Doing this breathing exercise regularly will not only enhance the functionality of your respiratory system but also prevents and cures problems like asthma, shortness of breath, sinus, and the like.

• Improve Cardio and Circulatory Health

Regularly doing yoga exercises improves your blood flow. Yoga poses are designed to keep your blood from flowing from the different parts of your body back to your heart to pump and have it oxygenated to your lungs. 

The exercise also helps you slow your heart rate. A slower heart rate can help you maintain the rhythm of your heart and prepare it to respond properly to the activity you are doing. With yoga, you will make your platelets less sticky and to make your blood thin to prevent you from having heart attacks.

• Help Lose Weight

Intense yoga exercises can burn calories which then results in losing weight. A great example of an exercise that helps burn calories is Vinyasa yoga. It is a type of yoga that requires a vigorous workout that ranges from standing to seated. The movements on this exercise are typically fast-paced which you need to constantly move to help burn calories. 

• Promotes Deeper Sleeps

With yoga, you can achieve at least six to nine hours of deep sleep every night. It is after you regularly practice this exercise. According to studies, yoga can make you less tired and stressed which promotes better sleep.

You can lessen your stress by doing Yoga Nidra, a guided relaxation. With this exercise, you can give downtime to your nervous system and still achieve deep relaxation while having a full consciousness. 

2.  Mental Benefits

• It Makes You Happier

Yoga poses combined with deep breathing exercises help your body to boost the production of your happy hormones. With the constant practice of this physical exercise, your body produces dopamine and serotonin. 

Dopamine is a “feel-good” hormone that is associated with pleasurable sensation, learning, and movements. Serotonin is a hormone that helps you regulate your mood, appetite, and memory. 

• It Keeps You on Focus

With proper breathing and meditation, your body will stay calm and focus more on your body and posture. This helps improve your coordination, reflexes, grasp information, and remember things faster because it makes you less distracted by the thoughts. 

Yoga helps you reduce stress and anxiety to do better with your decision-making activities. Balancing postures like headstands and shoulder stands promotes better concentration since it forces you to be present for you not to fall. 

• It Gives You Peace of Mind

Yoga can reduce the verbal chatter inside your brain and keeps you away from frustrations, regrets, anger, fear, which reduces stress. Doing simple yoga poses will naturally diminish mental distractions. Subtle changes in poses let you think less of what action to do next. 

Lotus pose also known as “cross-legged pose” is great for meditating. Doing open positions like this one opens your mind faster in meditative thoughts and promotes peace of mind.

• Placebo Effect Promotes Change

Your mind is so powerful that just believing that makes you feel better. Creating a strong connection to your body and mind, and positive thinking gives you a perception that you will heal. 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps cure anxiety, depression, OCD, and other mental health issues. It believes that you can change how you feel by changing the way you think and changing the way you do things. With this way of thinking you can improve your emotions and develop personal coping strategies to find solutions to your problems.

Conclusion

The practice of yoga is not just about doing the postures on your yoga mat. It’s more than that. Yoga makes your body fit and prepares you to do your daily activities with ease. It also helps your mind to be fit and face things that cause your stress and depression. These physical and mental issues are timely nowadays, and you need to prepare yourself for illness with the help of yoga.