Practicing yoga has now become a fad.
Many people embrace the practice of yoga not only because of its positive and measurable benefits, but because yoga is now taking on cult stature due to the relentless pressure from its various gurus who are traveling and espousing its virtues across the four corners of the world.
Different people practice yoga in its diverse forms for various benefits like relaxation, breathing, stretching, meditation or simply because it is the in thing of the day.
Yoga has several manifestations in the form of power yoga or the difficult Bikgram yoga or the gentle Hatha yoga, but there is no controversy about the fact that it does devolve health benefits to the practitioner.
You can read some of these benefits below: Yoga involves using all the muscles in the body to hold and balance the various postures, which are part of it.
The diverse postures (Asanas) of yoga, work to strengthen your shoulders, legs, lower back, abdominal, hands and your feet.
Flexibility is another great gain from practicing yoga.
The stretching and breathing exercises have a positive impact on the body, helping to relax the joints and muscles.
The positive impacts of the right postures in yoga for osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis have given great relief to the sufferers.
Appropriate yoga poses, especially Hatha yoga, contributes to lowering blood pressure and enhancing blood flow and lowering hypertension by lowering your heart rate.
Some people claim that their cholesterol came down by practicing yoga.
Power yoga imparts cardiovascular conditioning and strengthens the heart muscles, which helps in improving blood and oxygen circulation.
Yoga's benefits as an effective psychological therapy helps to reduce anxiety and stress, promote better moods and concentration during the day.
In general, it helps to control several mental and emotional disorders like anxiety, mood swings and depression and trauma by ushering in a sense of inner peace to the sufferers.
Yoga also contributes to eradicating headaches and migraines due to better blood and oxygen flow and strengthening the body's immune system by boosting anti-oxidants.
Power yoga, which is vigorous, helps to burn calories, and induces weight loss.
The regular practice of the right Asanas in yoga promotes comfortable deep sleep and liberates you from the problem of insomnia.
Fatigue is another causality of regular yoga practice.
Symptoms such as fatigue, stiffness, malaise and weakness are normally associated with autoimmune diseases, which yoga can successfully treat.