by Isla Careno

You’ve heard of yoga. Everyone’s talking about it — from the New York Times to your next door neighbour. But it isn’t just hype; science is proving that yoga really is good for you. And if you do a lot of strong physical exercise, yoga can play a powerful role in:

  • Supporting healthy muscle repair
  • Controlling your physiological responses to the stress placed on the body by intense training
  • Preventing injury

But it’s not all about the physical. Yoga adds a spiritual element to your wellness practice; it provides an opportunity for self-reflection and a chance to acknowledge the profound impact your physical work on your overall well-being. As well as working out because we want to look good, we all want to feel good, too. So give yoga a chance: you might be surprised by how much it improves your life.

The Physical Benefits

There are a huge number of different forms of yoga practised around the world today — from intense and sweaty Power Yoga and Vinyasa Flow to slower methods like Yin Yoga and Restorative Yoga, which use gravity and props to assist the body into long, deep stretches.

The intense, dynamic styles build up heat in the body, develop holistic and functional muscular strength, and lengthen the muscles with active stretches. The gentler styles also build strength and stability in the muscles and joints, and promote flexibility with unhurried passive stretches.

This report by Milind Bhutkar and his team shows that yoga Sun Salutations (typically repeated 5-10 times at the beginning of a dynamic yoga sequence) are highly effective for improving muscular strength, body endurance, and overall body composition. A participant group of 49 males and 30 females took part in the 24 week study, and all of them experienced significant improvements in their holistic fitness.

And this 2012 review of hundreds of studies of the effects of yoga highlights extremely encouraging outcomes, including:

  • Significant improvement in cardiovascular endurance
  • Improvements in blood pressure
  • Increased lung capacity — most notably in the reviewed studies which include pranayama, or yogic breath control techniques
  • Potential for yoga to improve glucose regulation in some people
  • Enhanced musco-skeletal function
  • Reduced muscle pain

Crucially, practising yoga regularly helps to develop your skills of proprioception; that is, your embodied understanding of the way you move in space. It teaches intelligent, thoughtful movement — and you can take this away from the yoga mat into every aspect of your life. You’ll learn to feel when a particular way of moving is damaging to you. So you’ll be better equipped to avoid injury by listening to the signals that your body gives you — rather than powering on through a workout, only to realise later on that you’ve hurt yourself and need weeks out to recover.

Yoga also helps the body to regulate its response to stress – both physical and emotional. A number of physiological studies have shown that yoga practice activates the parasympathetic nervous system — that’s the ‘rest and digest’ response of the nervous system, rather than the ‘fight or flight’ response. When the parasympathetic nervous system takes the lead, levels of stress hormones in the body drop significantly, and signals are sent to your brain to tell you that everything’s fine. This allows the whole body to relax, giving it a chance to rest deeply, restore energy, and heal injury.

In a world where we’re increasingly on the go — and often working out at high intensity — it’s vital for long-term health to give the body and mind some time to become steady, still, and calm.

Going Deeper

That leads neatly into the benefits of yoga for the mental and emotional well-being. When the parasympathetic nervous system is at work, the physical rest translates to mental rest. With a drop in stress hormones, you’re able to enter into a state of deep relaxation — and yoga classes actively encourage this by including a pose called Savasana right at the end.

In Savasana, you lie still on your back with your legs and arms wide and relaxed. Your eyes are closed, and you breathe in a natural, easy rhythm. Your mind is completely awake — but your body is soft and effortless, supported by the ground beneath you. When you enter this posture at the end of a physical practice, you can feel all of the work that you’ve done settling into the body.

And as the body becomes still, the mind becomes quieter.

Increasingly, researchers are showing that yoga is a powerful tool for managing a number of mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety. It can help to boost energy and give the space and time to develop resilience and a change of perspective. And certain yoga practices are known to relieve fatigue and even chronic pain that come with — or cause — low mood.

Your yoga practice is time for you. As you become familiar with the movements and rhythms of your practice, you find that it becomes increasingly introspective. The challenging postures are an opportunity to learn about how resistance manifests itself in your mind; and the whole practice is an opportunity to notice patterns in your movement and in your thoughts.

Some of those patterns might be healthy, and supportive of the life you want to live — for example, your reaction to attempting a really difficult posture might be I know I’ll do this one day if I keep practising. But other patterns might be holding you back — for example, when you’re breathing through a challenging moment of your practice, you might notice that rather than staying present in the moment, you do anything you can to distract yourself and think about other things.

When you notice these patterns, you’ll start to recognise them in other parts of your life, too. And when you become aware of your habitual patterns, you can decide whether you want to keep them or change them.

So…

Yes. Yoga really is good for you. And the incredible thing about it is that there are so many ways to practice (in a studio, a gym, or at home with the help of YouTube!) and a plethora of styles of yoga to choose from. You can adapt your yoga to fit your personal intentions, both physically and emotionally.