Whatever your age or current physical state, yoga can improve your overall health. Moving your body, focusing your mind and opening your soul on the yoga mat transforms your life off the mat. Yoga's many benefits include stress management, breathing efficiency; awareness, bone strength, and improved posture just to name a few. Yoga is not only for the young and flexible—yoga poses can be modified to suit every body type and level of ability. In fact, studies have found that 2.9 million American yogis are 55 or older.
Stress management: Yoga quells the fluctuations of the mind; it slows down the mental loops of frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress. Since stress is implicated in so many health problems—from migraines and insomnia to lupus, MS, eczema, high blood pressure, and heart attacks—if you learn to quiet your mind, you’ll be likely to live longer and healthier.
Breathing efficiency: Yogis tend to take fewer breaths of greater volume, which is both calming and more efficient. A 1998 study published in The Lancet taught a yogic technique known as “a complete breathing” to people with lung problems due to congestive heart failure. After a month, their average respiratory rate decreased from 13.4 breaths per minute to 7.6. Meanwhile, their exercise capacity increased significantly. As did the oxygen saturation of their blood. In addition, yoga has been shown to improve various measures of lung function, including the maximum volume of the breath and the efficiency of the exhalation. Yoga also promotes breathing through the nose, which filters the air, warms it (cold, dry air is more likely to trigger an asthma attack in people who are sensitive), and humidifies it, removing pollen and dirt and other things you’d rather no take into your lungs.
Awareness: Yoga increases feelings of compassion and interconnection by calming the nervous system and the mind. It also increases your ability to step back from drama or your own live, to remain steady in the face of bad news or unsettling events. You can still react quickly when you need to but you can take the split second to choose a more thoughtful approach, reducing suffering for yourself and others.
Bone strength: It’s well documented that weight-bearing exercise strengthens bones and helps ward off osteoporosis. Many postures in yoga require that you lift you own body weight. And some, like Downward-and Upward-Facing Dog, help strengthen the arm bones, which are particularly vulnerable to osteoporotic fractures. In an unpublished study conducted at California State University, Los Angeles. Yoga practice increased bone density in the vertebrae. Yoga’s ability to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol may help keep calcium in the bones.
Improved posture: Regularly practicing yoga increases the ability to feel what your body is doing, where it is in space, and improves balance. People with bad posture of or dysfunctional movement patterns usually knee problems and back pain. Better balance could mean fewer falls. For the elderly, this translates into more independence and delayed admission to a nursing home or never entering on at all. For the rest of us, postures like Tree Pose can make us feel less wobbly on and off the mat.
Nancy Adams Thai Yoga Therapist
And Ayurveda Consultant
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