7 Reasons to Add Yoga to Your Fitness Routine

For some reason we see a lot of people either practice Yoga or participate in cardio and weight training activities, but not necessarily combining both regimens to compliment their healthy lifestyle. We'd like to challenge that thought process with 7 reasons to include Yoga as part of your fitness routine:

1. Yoga adds flexibility: As we age  our muscles, tendons, and ligaments lose their springiness, and become more prone to sprains and tears. Adding a consistent stretching and balance routine like Yoga keeps these parts well ‘greased,’ and will significantly cut down on injuries from your other activities.
2. Yoga can soothe and strengthen your back: Proper body alignment and good posture through Yoga, which helps maintain the natural curvature of the spine, is an important part of reducing or avoiding lower back pain. 
3. Yoga provides a wider range of unfamiliar movements: Holding unfamiliar positions through several breaths strengthens and loosens areas that typically aren’t touched during normal weight and cardio routines.
4. Yoga improves your endurance: Because of the deep, mindful breathing that yoga involves, lung capacity often improves. This in turn can improve your endurance.
5. Yoga increases your sense of balance: As we get older, we tend to lose our ability to maintain our center of gravity. Yoga provides a number of movements forcing us to hold our balance for several breaths. Learning to balance while standing on one leg, or while twisting in strange positions, will teach your body to recenter itself, and this will translate to your daily routines.
6. Yoga helps make your body more resilient: Improvements in balance and flexibility, will make your body much more durable. Not just for your weight and cardio routines, but in most other activities as well. Thanks to your new found flexibility, you won’t spring your back the next time you bend the wrong direction to pick up something heavy.
7. Yoga will increase your overall fitness: By gently working the muscles and ligaments, your blood supply begins reaching areas of the body that haven’t seen much oxygen over the years. This helps flush out toxins and provides nourishment to these nooks and crannies.

Yoga classes will emphasize the need to build and maintain the strength, length and flexibility of both the spine and thirteen main bodily joints, build and maintain upper body strength, and the maintenance of bone density and muscle mass, noting these areas as vital to maintaining general health and wellness. So consider adding to your fitness routine or use as a way to get started back into exercising.

Yours in Health & Fitness,

Lori Murphy