Why practice Iyengar Yoga?
There are eight positive improvements to look forward to when beginning yoga!
1. Reduce your stress and anxiety naturally.
The combination of asana (poses) pranayama (Breath-control) and meditation helps to regulate your heart rate. Lowering the heart rate reduces anxiety and therefore, stress. Daily practice has a profoundly positive effect on your day. Your response to stressful situations will be calmer, allowing you to make better discissions. Reducing stress also helps you sleep, and overall health improves.
2. A Healthy Way to Lose Weight
Yoga has proven to have many benefits when it comes to weight loss. Practising three or more times a week speeds up the metabolic system, which will increase the burning of the bodies fat. Yoga also regulates the hormonal system. Hormones such as cortisol affect the bodies blood glucose levels, thus making it easier to maintain healthy body weight.
3. Increase Energy Levels
Regular Yoga practice increases the bodies vitality, making you feel healthy and strong. Depending on what you are experiencing in your day, poses can be sequenced to prompt energy to remove heaviness or dullness in the body. Increasing vitality counteracts the exhaustion we feel during the day and allows us to take care of our daily activities.
4. Improve Concentration and Clarity
Yoga has a profound effect on the clarity, concentration and sharpness of your mind. By using the poses or the breath as a focus, the mind is drawn in and anchored becoming steady and quiet. The positive effect allows the body to relax and mind to be calm. With regular practice, you will improve your cognitive functions, thus improving memory recall and giving you organised thoughts able to carry out your daily activities more efficiently.
5. A Great Detox
Blood flow is greatly improved while practising yoga and for sometime after the body benefits from the effects. Elimination of wastes from the body is promoted. The poses and breath have a direct and indirect effect by adding pressure to the organs and stimulating the endocrine system, therefore, improving the body detoxification process and will promote a healthy body and mind.
6. Good Posture, Strength and Flexibility
By using the body's weight and intelligence, yoga stretches, tones and strengthens the muscles, bones, organs and nervous system. With regular practice, you will lose weight and improve your strength and flexibility. Pain that you may have experienced from bad posture gradually diminishes as your posture improves. Everyone can benefit from these effects of a daily yoga practice.
7. A Balanced and Energised Endocrine System.
Regular yoga practice nourishes, soothes and stimulates the organs of the endocrine system whose job it is to secrete the hormones we need. The rejuvenating effects of yoga can relax glands such as the adrenals or can stimulate glands such as thyroid to bring the body's system to equilibrium. Therefore lowering the bodies stress levels and provides an excellent platform for balancing and healing.
8. Becoming Confident
With regular yoga practice, there is a symbiosis of body breath and mind. Yoga develops the bodies natural intelligence and the breath's steady and regular rhythm. In effect, developing qualities of the mind such clarity, resolve, equilibrium and many more benefits besides. The result of all of these great benefits is feeling energised and confident in who you are and, therefore, better able to coup with life's ups and downs.