Benefits of Yoga and other Meditative Techniques
Benefits of Yoga and Meditative Techniques
There are many many benefits of yoga and other meditative practice and I have experienced this first hand as well as observing this in others. From my personal experience, my sleep and energy levels are are significantly improved when I regularly practice these techniques as well as my mental health, flexibility and strength. I feel a calmness following a yoga practice or meditation and I can return to tasks that I was previously frustrated with, with a new sense of understanding and productivity.
Mental Health and Wellbeing
Each week there always seems to be something that has taken its toll whether it be work, personal, you over did it on a run or in some kind of training, whatever it is we all could be better at recognising when we are driving our bodies and minds to exhaustion. Taking this time to reconnect mind and body is key to reduce stress, depression, anxiety and combat what is commonly known as burn out. Rather than waiting till that pinnacle moment of a break down or when burn out significantly impacts your life, take this time to reduce those feelings and manage your mental health.
Also, the way we practice yoga and use meditative techniques can translate across into your everyday life. The more you learn and regularly partake in yoga and meditation the better you become at controlling emotions in high pressure or triggering situations.
Sleep has also been shown to benefit from regular meditative practice. Therefore, yoga can also have an improvement on mental health and wellbeing as well as many more aspects of health that sleep improves.
Physical Improvements
Strength: within a yoga posture we tend to work the muscles eccentrically and a number of large muscle groups work in unison to maintain the posture. This training is beneficial for functional activities such as sport and helping maintain joint health and stability.
​
Endurance, general fitness and cardiovascular systems are all improved with regular yoga practice. In particular the breathing techniques used in yoga can help our respiratory system and relax our blood pressure and heart rate.
​
Balance improves as your awareness of your body develops through the mechanism of proprioception. This helps to reduce falls and allows you to have better understanding of where your limbs are in space.
​
Flexibility and mobility is in some way limited by our physical make up and anatomy, this cannot be changed. However, tightness into the muscles can be lengthened and relaxed giving us more range of motion at a joint and improving flexibility to a degree. When people say they cannot do yoga because they are not flexible they will have a combination of muscle tightness and an anatomical restriction but ANYONE can practice yoga we just need to adapt and modify the posture to fit your anatomical make up.
​
As yoga helps to improve all of the above aspects it therefore acts as an injury prevention, if you continue to improve and maintain these aspects through yoga then the risk of injury or more the likelihood of you taking your body past the point of ability is reduced. Your awareness of the limitations means you will know when to rest and when to change position or stance to best reduce risk of injury.