Need a pick-me-up? It's tempting to go for a drink, order a pizza or treat yourself to some new shoes when you feel a bit low, but putting 15 minutes aside to practice yoga every day could transform your mood (and your health) in more ways than you could imagine.
Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, it's easy to squeeze in just 15 minutes of yoga practice a day. Here are 10 reasons why it will be worth it:
1. Improve flexibility, strength, and posture
Daily yoga practice will help stretch and tone your body muscles. Popular poses like the plank will simultaneously work on strengthening your arms, legs, shoulders and abs. You don't have to be super flexible to practice yoga, the beauty of yoga is that it can be practiced at all levels of ability.
A few minutes a day practicing poses like the warrior or the downward facing dog, will soon make you really feel the difference in your flexibility, whether you're pretty bendy already or not.
2. Better all-round fitness
When thinking of improving your fitness, most of us think of huffing and puffing away at the gym. But weights are not the only way to work out. Yoga gives you all that a gym can, but in a peaceful, safe and more holistic way. It combines aspects of cardio, functional and strength training all in one. What more could you ask for? The best part about this workout is that it can be done at your own pace, in your own home.
3. Weight loss
You don't have to practice Hot Yoga or be able to bend double in a yoga pose to lose weight. An everyday gentle yoga practice will fuel the metabolic system and will help burn fat, leading to weight loss. Daily yoga can also help restore the hormonal balance in your body, which can normalise your body weight.
Levels of cortisol, the hormone that is released in response to stress and low blood-glucose concentration, will be lowered, leading to less overeating. Daily yoga also strengthens the overall mind-body connection and helps you deal more effectively with unpleasant emotions rather than reaching for food to suppress those feelings.
4. Increase your energy
Just a few minutes of yoga every day will provide that much-needed energy boost in our busy lives and will keep us fresh for longer. Yoga, with its unique synergy of body and breath work, is perfect when your reserves are running low.
Daily yoga practice will awaken the main energy centres (called chakras) in our body. Great poses for extra energy are those that extend the spine, such as the tree pose, allowing energy to circulate throughout the whole body, and poses that open the chest, like the cobra pose, encouraging the intake of more breath.
5. Reduce stress
Many work places now offer lunch-time yoga sessions because it's been shown that yoga is an amazing stress buster. Any yoga practice, even a short daily one, should be made up of three elements; poses, breathing and meditation. Studies have shown that those people who regularly practice all three elements are better able to regulate their heart-rate variability (HRV). This generally means that their heart rate is lower, giving body the ability to respond to stress in a more flexible way.
Are you coping with so much stress that it's keeping you awake at night? Studies have shown that practicing daily yoga can reduce or even fully prevent insomnia. When experiencing insomnia, practice relaxing asanas or postures, such as forward fold (uttanasana) or lying on your back with your feet up the wall. Relaxing yoga poses such as the forward fold or lying on your back with your feet up the wall can calm both your body and mind.
Source:
https://uk.style.yahoo.com/10-health-benefits-daily-yoga-053000993.html
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