This week’s Thrive in Five is about yoga and mobility as a preventative health strategy.
We’re talking about preventative health strategies this month, our health coach Liz is sharing information about yoga and mobility. There are many health benefits to stretching and particularly yoga, which includes the asanas, so the poses that you hold.
In yoga, there’s a lot of stretches, there’s different types of yoga, but they all include:
- Breathwork (so connecting with your breath, connecting with your body)
- Being in the moment
- Moving your body, usually quite slowly, really focusing on that movement and how it feels, and then focusing on the different joints that are moving
Benefits of Yoga
The way that you move or hold the poses or asanas can really help with:
- Your balance
- Coordination
- Increased mobility
- Bone strength
- Focus
- Mental therapy (so reduce anxiety – the different poses do relate to different types of mental focus).
- Reducing anxiety
- Helping you to release stresses from certain areas of your body
- Helping concentration
- Improving your sleep quality
Yin yoga – is a type of yoga where you hold poses for a longer period of time. This can reduce aches and pains around the joints (being safe and doing what feels right for your body and your comfort levels).
Sometimes people try to push their yoga poses too far, so always keep within a limit of your own body, don’t try and push poses too far.
Yoga and Mobility as a preventative health strategy
As we age and get older we can lose our balance and coordination, we can lose a certain level of focus in our minds, and often we’re more sedentary than we were perhaps as children and teenagers, resulting in lost mobility. Yoga and stretching are a great way to release serotonin into the body, helping get that hormone balance back, calm the mind, connect with your breath and prevents any illness or dis-ease that might be coming on as would with a reduced activity level.
Osteoporosis becomes a concern later on in life, especially for women. Yoga holding poses and balancing for more than a few seconds can help to increase bone density. It also helps your oxygen flow and increases immunity.
We would recommend you look for your classes available to you in person or online and start learning. Please remember safety first and don’t try and push yourself too far. It’s a misconception we encounter that people think that you need to be very flexible to start, or that you must do the pose in the full form. Yoga is for anybody, for any shape or size, and you just go within your body’s limits and try to breathe and relax.
For those who are already of a good fitness and flexibility level more power yoga sessions are available where you can get a great workout as well. Let us know if you have any questions, keep with the preventative health strategies, and we’d love to hear from you with any photos or snippets.
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