1. Flexibility:
Yoga poses safely stretch your muscles, releasing the lactic acid that builds up and causes stiffness, tension, pain, and fatigue. Additionally yoga increases the range of motion in joints and the lubrication in the joints. The stretch is not limited to the muscles - it also reaches the soft tissues of your body, including ligaments, tendons, and the fascia sheath that surrounds the muscles.
2. Strength:
Practicing yoga will help improve muscle tone, strength and endurance. Poses like Downward Dog, Upward Dog and Plank Pose improve upper-body strength while standing poses build strength in hamstrings, quadriceps, and abdominal muscles. The lower back is strengthened through poses like Upward Dog and Chair.
3. Posture:
Increased flexibility and strength results in better posture. Most standing and sitting poses, which rely on the abdominal muscles as support, develop core strength. With a stronger core, you're more likely to sit and stand "tall." Another benefit of yoga is the increased body awareness, which helps you to realize when you're slouching or slumping so you can adjust your posture.
4. Breathing:
Because of the deep breathing involved in yoga, lung capacity tends to improve. This in turn can improve sports performance and endurance. Most forms of yoga emphasize deepening and lengthening the breath. This stimulates the relaxation response -- the opposite of the fight-or-flight adrenaline boost of the stress response.
5. Stress Relief:
People who participate in yoga tend to feel more relaxed than they were prior to practicing yoga. Some yoga styles use specific meditation techniques to quiet the thoughts that often underlie stress. Other yoga styles rely on deep breathing techniques to focus the mind on the breath and calm the mind. Yoga decreases the catecholamines, the hormones produced by the adrenal glands in response to stress.
6. Mood Elevator:
Yoga students claim they feel happier and more at ease after class. Yoga boosts the oxygen levels to the brain, which can help to alleviate depression.
7. Healthy Heart:
Yoga helps to lower blood pressure and slow the heart rate, which benefits people with hypertension and heart disease. Yoga was a key component to the heart disease program designed by Dean Ornish, MD that was the first program to partly reverse heart disease through lifestyle and diet rather than surgery.
8. Help with Preexisting Medical Conditions:
Yoga is recommended as an adjunct treatment for chronic medical conditions such as depression, heart disease, asthma, back pain and arthritis.
9. Concentration:By keeping the mind focused on a single object or mantra during a yoga session, you work to improve your power of concentration and focused attention in and outside of yoga practice.
10. Energy:
Yoga exercises, breath control training and use of yoga body locks all work to activate and balance your energy pathways, giving you the vitality and power you need to maximize your potential.
10 Reasons to Swim
1. Flexibility:
Swimming aids flexibility. Heated pools help the muscles to relax, which promotes flexibility and enables stretching of the muscles. An easy swim flushes out toxins that can build up after intense lactic-acid building endurance workout, which helps to prevent muscle tightness and soreness.
2. Strength:
Swimming uses nearly all of the major muscle groups. Water provides 12 times more resistance than air, so it takes more work to move through water than air. It tones and strengthens both the upper and lower body. Swimming not only helps to strengthen muscles but, too, it helps to build long, lean and flexible muscles, which help to boost metabolism.
3. Posture:
Your core muscles have a lot to do with posture. Swimming develops core body strength, which in turn improves posture and prevents lower back pain.
4. Breathing:
Studies have shown that swimmers have higher lung volumes and capacities than land based athletes and non athletes. Swim training studies have also demonstrated increases in total lung capacities in children and young adults. This is likely due to swimmers having to breath in a restricted breathing pattern with repeated expansion of the lungs.
5. Stress Relief:
Because swimming allows more oxygen to flow to your muscles and forces you to regulate your breathing, it is extremely relaxing. By focusing your attention on your body and physical self, you allow yourself a break from your mind.
6. Healthy Heart:
Swimming improves the body’s use of oxygen without overworking the heart.
Studies have shown that a workout routine that includes swimming can help reduce and possibly prevent high blood pressure, which lowers your risk for heart disease and stroke.
7. Help with Preexisting Medical Conditions:
The buoyancy provided by the water is beneficial to people with osteoporosis and arthritis as well as pregnant women. Swimming helps with asthma as well. In fact most asthma websites recommend swimming as one of the best forms of exercise for asthmatics. When you take deep breaths and hold your breath at regular intervals, you increase your lung capacity and train your lungs into steady regular breathing patterns, which helps asthmatics.
8. Low risk of injury:
There is little to no stress on the bones, joints or connective tissues while swimming because of buoyancy. Indeed, in the water you weight 1/10th less. On average a swimmer can burn as many calories per hour as a runner, however swimmers’ bodies are cushioned from the harsh pounding and stress on joints and muscles by the buoyancy of the water. With very little risk of injury, swimming is held as one of the safest forms of exercise and recommended as a form of rehabilitation for the injured.
9. Longevity:
Swimming promotes longevity. In a recent study of more than 40,000 men ages 20 to 90, swimmers were 50 percent less likely to die during the 32 year study period than were walkers or runners.
10. Endurance:
Typically you can sustain swimming longer than other activities. Swimmers with proper technique can swim for longer periods of time than runners and burn more calories as a result.
Equals 20 Reasons to Participate in Physique Swimming's First Swim Yoga Clinic
