The Benefits of Yoga on the Body and Mind
Everyone has heard about yoga, but do you know its actual effects? When you are less familiar with the full potential of the practice, it makes it harder to integrate yoga into a routine already packed with social commitments. Yet, yoga improves mobility, reduces stress, and contributes to our overall well-being. Read on to learn more about the many benefits of yoga and how it fosters our overall health… which will make you want to integrate it into your daily life.
What Are the Effects of Yoga on Our Health?
Yoga’s effects go well beyond just relaxation: Yoga stimulates various bodily systems and influences mental equilibrium. By learning more about yoga’s tangible benefits, we can clearly see how practising yoga contributes to improving our overall health. But what do the science and our experience tell us about yoga’s widespread benefits?
What Are the Physical Benefits of Yoga?
At the physical level, yoga allows us to form a deeper connection with and better control our body by developing a greater range of motion and muscular strength. In Yoga, relaxation et méditation, Audrey Caplette Charrette emphasizes how practising yoga improves key determinants of physical health: flexibility, cardiovascular endurance, stamina, and muscle strength.
Through a wide range of poses, yoga engages large muscle groups, particularly our core muscles and stabilizing muscles. By holding poses and executing sequences, these muscle groups work together, strengthening supporting muscles, relaxing the nervous systems, and helping to regulate blood pressure and heart rate.
This improved body control also has numerous benefits for athletes, who often use yoga as a complementary training method to optimize performance.
Claudette Rouisse, the YMCAs of Québec’s senior health, fitness, and aquatics advisor who has 30 years of experience and is an E-RYT 500 yoga instructor in her spare time, has observed the same thing.
“Among the great benefits of yoga are improved movement control, physical awareness, and flexibility. Movement control is part of mobility, which is the ability to actively move around a joint. Range of motion, on the other hand, refers to the ease with which we use the full extent of a movement, which feeds our perception of our body in space. Having greater physical awareness, trusting our body, and knowing that it has the flexibility to be used in different positions are a priceless advantage, both as a complement to sports and for life’s eventualities!”
What Are the Mental Benefits of Yoga?
In addition to physical benefits, yoga’s deep breathing and relaxation through moving meditation undeniably benefit our mental well-being. This approach is scientifically recognized as an effective complementary treatment to reduce stress and support mental health.
Circular movements accompanied by slow, deep breathing help release neuromuscular tension and promote relaxation. As these effects directly impact the nervous system, they are closely linked to mental well-being. Studies also show psychosocial benefits, including a better perception of one’s own health and body and greater self-acceptance, all important long-term effects.
“I was always quite sporty and for so long I refused to try yoga until I took a yoga class at the YMCA with some friends. To my great surprise, I discovered so many benefits: better health, a sense of well-being, a calm mind, better breathing, as well as flexibility and improved physical fitness. This experience led me to become a certified yoga instructor and now I teach at the Cartierville YMCA.”
– Anne Barrette
Certified Yoga Instructor, Cartierville YMCA
In fact, the decrease in anxiety-provoking thoughts and the feeling that you have better control of your body, yourself, and your breathing all contribute to reducing symptoms of anxiety, stress, and panic. Finally, yoga allows us to feel empowered, or, in other words, to come closer to letting our full potential shine.
Namaste!