When some people think of yoga they think of stretching, funny looking poses, and maybe yoga pants. However, yoga is more than mastering postures and increasing your flexibility and strength.
Yoga has been practiced for more than 5,000 years. In Hinduism and Buddhism yoga means “spiritual discipline.” The traditional purpose of yoga has always been to bring about a profound transformation. Even though people often associate yoga with postures and stances, those have been a part of yoga for “only” 2,000 years.
Modern yoga is based on five basic principles:
Proper relaxation
Proper exercise
Proper breathing
Proper diet
Positive thinking and meditation
Based on these principles, people who train with yoga can benefit.
Yoga will most likely make you more flexible. That’s probably a good thing. It will also help with everyday mobility and flexibility. That’s especially true for people who perform repetitive motions, such as hunching over a computer. The stretching and strengthening in yoga may help manage body imbalances, as well as improve general flexibility.
Yoga improves your balance and body awareness. Many yoga poses can improve your stability and agility and your awareness of where your body is in space. Those skills are enormously helpful in sports, and in life.
Yoga can strengthen your core. Strengthening the muscles in your back, midsection, and butt will give you the stability to improve the power of your movements and reduce injuries.
Yoga provides a chance for active recovery, preventing overtraining. Yoga promotes active recovery, due to relaxation, slower movement patterns, and time off from beating yourself up.
Yoga improves your mental state. The mental attention and mindfulness that yoga teaches can help people learn how to relax, focus, and control breathing. Beyond improving performance, yoga promotes balance in life as well as body.
A word of caution: Yoga has the potential to hurt you, so take it easy. Yoga can push the muscles past their functional range of motion so be careful. Don’t assume that your ability in other sports means you can jump into an advanced yoga class. Start in a beginner class and make your way up to an advanced class to enjoy the benefits of this 5,000 year tradition.