7 reasons to start yoga today
You are at the gym, sweating it out, lifting weights, spending hours on the treadmill to lose those extra pounds. It can be pretty exhausting and discouraging because of the amount of stress and strain experienced by your body. As a result, a week of quitting the gym and those love handles are back on your waist, leaving you demotivated. Can there be an all-encompassing exercise which is less punishing and does not involve gym equipment?

Improved flexibility
It is the first and the most obvious health benefit of practicing yoga. As a beginner, you might find it difficult to touch your toes on the first day, but it only gets easier if you stick to it. Yoga helps in gradually loosening of joints and muscles, letting you perform difficult yoga postures with ease. As a result, you might experience decreased pain in your joints and back.

Better body posture
Once your body becomes flexible, you achieve a better sense of balance. Practicing yoga daily can help you improve body posture. It takes much less work for an erect spine and back muscles to balance our skull. Maintaining bad posture for more than 12 hours a day can develop a slouch in your back, making you feel fatigued. As a result, the flattened inward curves near the neck and lower back can cause pain and develop into degenerative spinal arthritis. Hence, the importance of a proper body posture cannot be ignored, and yoga helps you achieve the same.

Stronger core muscles
A strong core keeps your spine aligned and supported, aiding to attain a better posture. Practicing yoga requires using a large and different set of muscles. Almost every yoga posture activates your core muscles. From Sun Salutations (Surya Namaskar) to Warrior Pose (Virabhadrasana), yoga helps in strengthening the core muscles in your abs, trunk, shoulder girdle, and hips.

Increased bone strength and cardiovascular fitness
As you are doing your high lunges, planks, and down dog split (Eka Pada Mukha Svanasana), you are putting your body through an all-encompassing body weight strengthening workout. These calisthenics type exercises stimulate and remodel bone growth, making them strong. Yoga is a slower-paced exercise than running. However, there are yoga poses that can elevate the heart rate, which can improve cardiovascular fitness.

While we are mostly aware of the physical health benefits, Yoga can also help us achieve a better mental state. Listed below are some mental health benefits of yoga:

Better sleep pattern
Excessive brain stimulation is not good for the nervous system. It can add to the stress and disturb your sleep. You can use yoga as a means to escape from the hustle and bustle of modern life. A guided form of mediation, restorative pose (asana), pranayama, yoga nidra, and Savasana among others encourage better sleep by providing downtime for the nervous system.

Improved awareness
Yoga involves both physical and metal form of meditation. It makes you more aware, helping you break free from destructive emotions such as anger. Yoga encourages a feeling of compassion and helps you connect with your inner self as it calms your mind and nervous system.

Improved self-esteem and reduced anxiety
A study suggests that yoga poses like the Mountain Pose (Tadasana), the Eagle Pose (Garudasana), and Upward Salutation (Urdhava Hastasana) make you feel more energetic and empowered. This directly affects your confidence levels and feeling of self-satisfaction. Researchers believe practicing these poses improves the feedback of the body to its parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates the body’s unconscious actions. Apart from this, controlled breathing and focusing on the same can make you feel less anxious. As yoga is a mindful practice, it helps our body release endorphins, which helps to boost our mood.