5 Reasons to Add Yoga to Your Workout Regimen
Yoga is a full body workout that creates long, lean, toned muscles, as well as increased core strength and flexibility. It also incorporates breath work, balance, and meditation, which reduces mental and physical stress, You don’t have to be able to stand on your head, twist yourself into a pretzel, or balance while holding one foot above your head to enjoy the benefits of yoga. There are many styles of yoga to choose from, and classes that cater to beginner through advanced levels. Here are 5 reasons you might want to incorporate yoga into your workout regimen.
- Increased Flexibility: While it’s important to get enough cardio and strength training to stay in shape, some exercises, such as weight lifting and cycling, can create tight hamstrings, quadriceps, biceps,and more. Yoga incorporates both dynamic and static stretches that increase flexibility and elongate muscles.
- Increased mobility: Yoga poses employ full range of motion, which creates better mobility, making your body more functional for all other workout formats and daily activities.
- Improved core strength: Yoga strengthens the entire major core muscles, including pelvic floor muscles, transversus abdominis, internal and external obliques, rectus abdominis, and erector spinae.
- Enhanced balance: Many yoga poses and transitions between poses work your stabilizer muscles, smaller muscles that don’t get much acclaim, but are important to your balance and stability.
- Stress Reduction: Aside from the physical benefits yoga offers, it is one of the few forms of exercise that calms the mind through focused intention and breathe control (pranayama). Reducing stress helps reduce many physical maladies, such as high blood pressure, belly fat, and more.
To learn more about the myriad benefits of adding yoga to your workout schedule, and learn the basics of yoga to get you started, join me this Saturday at Mt. Yoga in Poway for my Introduction to Yoga Workshop. For more details, click on the Workshops icon.
Namaste