health benefits of yoga

 In this very commercialized world that we live in there seem to be an endless number of things out there telling you that you will just "take this pill" or "do that routine" you will have found the fountain of youth in some way. It turns out that it may actually take a little time and effort to be in good health, to say nothing of being in great shape. But of all the pursuits and products you might be trying to decide between, there may be no more complete answer then yoga.

While there is no one form of exercise or diet that can solve everything all at once, yoga is about as close as you're likely to get. You'll never see a Yogi bench pressing 200 pounds. But you are not likely to see a 300 pound Yogi either. When it comes to good overall health and fitness, you really can kill all of your birds with one stone in just a few minutes of yoga practice every day.

You see, there are four aspects of physical fitness you need to be aware of. They are: strength, endurance, flexibility and performance. Unfortunately, most people base their workouts around performance and end up never doing a very good job with the other three parts. While a yoga workout will not leave you in the kind of shape required to do any serious lifting or the endurance to run a marathon, it is a fantastic flexibility style of exercise. And the thing about flexibility is that it improves your strength, endurance and performance. Although all four parts work together, the one that you should never ignore is flexibility. But in fact, that is exactly what most people do.

 With that being said, if you learn one of the more aggressive yoga styles such as Vinyasa or even Ashtanga, there is a certain amount of strength and endurance you were going to have to develop along with the flexibility in order to perform those particular yoga styles. In other words, while you might not get to the point where you can pick up a refrigerator by yourself, that's probably also not something you necessarily want to be able to do. But for every day fitness for most people, yoga will do more to give you a complete level of fitness than almost any other single type of exercise.

Now, you can find sales pitches for yoga that declare it can cure you of your every ailment. We're not here to either debunk or sell you on those. But what is obvious is that yoga will promote excellent posture and will certainly realign your body and do wonders for your joints. These benefits have been shown to improve back pains, arthritis and a number of other health issues related directly to the bones, muscles and joints.

Almost any form of exercise is going to give you some help benefits. Almost everyone could use to do a little more exercise and be in better shape. It only makes sense that being in better shape will improve your health. The nice thing about yoga is that it's cheap, fairly easy to learn and doesn't take a lot of time. You also don't have to be particularly athletically gifted in order to master yoga. We'll let other people sell you on the specifics of the health benefits of yoga, but we will say that if your choice is whether to exercise at all or do any one thing, yoga may very well be your best opportunity for the greatest health benefits in a single exercise style.