30 Physical Benefits of doing Yoga

Yoga centers, challenges, and changes the human body in more ways than can be described in a single reading. We have listed 30 physical benefits of doing Yoga in this article. The list of benefits is by no means complete. Practice awakens us to how wondrously complex our physical existence is, teaching us to cherish and nourish our beings whenever we have the opportunity.

“The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being”. - Sri Aurobindo

My experience inspired me to pore over the scientific studies I have collected in India to identify and explain how yoga can both prevent disease and help you recover from it.

1. Improves your flexibility: Improved flexibility is one of the first and most obvious benefits of yoga. During your first class, you probably won’t be able to touch your toes, never mind do a backbend. But if you stick with it, you’ll notice a gradual loosening, and eventually, seemingly impossible poses will become possible.

2. Builds muscle strength: Strong muscles do more than look good. They also protect us from conditions like arthritis and back pain, and help prevent falls in elderly people. And when you build strength through yoga, you balance it with flexibility.

3. Perfects your posture: Poor posture can cause back, neck, and other muscle and joint problems. As you slump, your body may compensate by flattening the normal inward curves in your neck and lower back. This can cause pain and degenerative arthritis of the spine.

4. Prevents cartilage and joint breakdown: Each time you practice yoga, you take your joints through their full range of motion. This can help prevent degenerative arthritis or mitigate disability by “squeezing and soaking” areas of cartilage that normally aren’t used.

5. Protects your spine: Spinal disks; the shock absorbers between the vertebrae that can herniate and compress nerves, crave movement. That’s the only way they get their nutrients. If you’ve got a well-balanced asana practice with plenty of back bends, forward bends, and twists, you’ll help keep your disks supple.

Forward Bend

6. Betters 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. And some, like Downward- and Upward-Facing Dog, help strengthen the arm bones, which are particularly vulnerable to osteoporotic fractures.

7. Increases your blood flow: Yoga gets your blood flowing. More specifically, 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 function better as a result.

8. Drains your lymph and boosts immunity: When you contract and stretch muscles, move organs around, and come in and out of yoga postures, you increase the drainage of lymph (a viscous fluid rich in immune cells). This helps the lymphatic system fight infection, destroy cancerous cells, and dispose of the toxic waste products of cellular functioning.

9. Ups your heart rate: Studies have found that yoga practice lowers the resting heart rate, increases endurance, and can improve your maximum uptake of oxygen during exercise, all reflections of improved aerobic conditioning.

10. Drops your blood pressure: Regulation of blood pressure is one of the easiest to attain physical benefits of yoga.

11. Regulates your adrenal glands: Yoga lowers cortisol levels. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider this. 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 the immune system.

12. Makes you happier: Feeling sad? Sit in Lotus. Better yet, rise up into a backbend or soar royally into King Dancer Pose.

Wide Leg Forward Bend Pose

13. Founds a healthy lifestyle: Move more, eat less - that’s the adage of many a dieter. Yoga can help on both fronts. 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.

14. Lowers blood sugar: 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. Get your blood sugar levels down, and you decrease your risk of diabetic complications such as heart attack, kidney failure, and blindness.

15. Helps you focus: 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.

16. 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. Yoga meditation is the technique used by Dr. Herbert Benson in his studies to analyze the "relaxation response".

17. 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.

18. Maintains your nervous system: Some advanced yogis can control their bodies in extraordinary ways, many of which are mediated by the nervous system.

19. 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 lots of practice to learn how to relax them.

Forward Bend Lotus Pose

20. Helps you sleep deeper: Stimulation is good, but too much of it taxes the nervous system. Yoga can provide relief from the hustle and bustle of modern life.

21. Boosts your immune system functionality: Asanas and Pranayama 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.

22. Gives your lungs room to breathe: 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.

23. Prevents IBS and other digestive problems: Ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, constipation:- all of these can be exacerbated by stress. So if you stress less, you’ll suffer less. Yoga, like any physical exercise, can ease constipation, and theoretically lower the risk of colon cancer, because moving the body facilitates more rapid transport of food and waste products through the bowels.

24. Gives you peace of mind: Yoga quells the fluctuations of the mind, according to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. In other words, it slows down the mental loops of frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress.

Twisted Forward Bend Pose

25. Increases your self-esteem: Many of us suffer from chronic low self-esteem. If you handle this negatively - take drugs, overeat, work too hard, sleep around - 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.

26. Eases your pain: Another of the many physical benefits of yoga. According to several studies, asanas, meditation, or a combination of the two, reduced pain in people with arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other chronic conditions.

27. Keeps allergies and viruses at bay: Kriyas, or cleansing practices, are another element of yoga. They include everything from rapid breathing exercises to elaborate internal cleansing of the intestines. Jala - neti, which entails a gentle lavage of the nasal passages with salt water, removes pollen and viruses from the nose, keeps mucus from building up, and helps drains the sinuses.

28. Benefits your relationships: Love may not conquer all, but it certainly can aid in healing. Cultivating the emotional support of friends, family, and community has been demonstrated repeatedly to improve health and healing. A regular yoga practice helps develop friendliness, compassion, and greater equanimity.

29. Helps keep you drug free: If your medicine cabinet looks like a pharmacy, maybe it’s time to try yoga. Studies of people with asthma, high blood pressure, Type II diabetes (formerly called adult-onset diabetes), and obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown that yoga helped them lower their dosage of medications and sometimes get off them entirely. The benefits of taking fewer drugs? You’ll spend less money, and you’re less likely to suffer side effects and risk dangerous drug interactions.

30. Encourages self care: In much of conventional medicine, most patients are passive recipients of care. In yoga, it’s what you do for yourself that matters. Yoga gives you the tools to help you change, and you might start to feel better the first time you try practicing. You may also notice that the more you commit to practice, the more you benefit. This results in three things: You get involved in your own care, you discover that your involvement gives you the power to effect change, and seeing that you can effect change gives you hope.

The physical benefits of yoga are only a part of the deal. We haven't really covered all the mental or spiritual benefits in this article. Yoga can be a holistic way of improving your physical and mental health.