As a CrossFitter, intensity is my friend and lifting heavy weights off the floor never gets old. So there is always this moment when I am unrolling my yoga mat in the dimly lit studio that I think, “What am I doing here?” It’s true that yoga is slow paced and when I first started doing it I thought it was boring. In fact, I thought it was so boring that I couldn’t do it at home by myself and had to be in a class in order to complete the workout. As I continued to practice yoga, I found that I actually did enjoy it and found it to not only be a great workout but also very cathartic. I also realized that it wasn’t necessarily that the class was boring, but that I was impatient. I was too impatient to hold the poses and to focus on the breath and just wanted to move onto the next thing.
The American lifestyle has morphed into a frenzied pace where we are almost always doing more than one thing at a time and are constantly filling up our schedules well beyond capacity. So it’s no wonder that when some of us try to downshift into a yoga class that we can’t help but twiddle our thumbs and grow restless. In 2016 an estimated 34% of the American population tried yoga (that’s 80 million people just FYI), and an estimated 15% of Americans practice yoga regularly.
I try to attend a yoga class once a week and have found it very beneficial to my fitness and also my overall well being. Let’s take a look at what draws over 200 million people to this practice worldwide, and four ways of perhaps what it can do for you as well.
1. Mindfulness
I feel like this word has come up a lot recently within the health community and I’m glad that it has. In an age where we are more connected to our phone than to the people in our lives, this lack of being mindful plays a key role. The act of being mindful is simply being in the moment and not allowing yourself to be distracted from things that are not currently present, and focusing on what it is you are there to do. This could be a yoga class, but it could also be eating dinner with your family, cooking, reading, spending quality time with a friend… but it is just committing to that moment and not letting the outside world take away from it.
In yoga class, the instructor will often prepare you for class with a short meditation and/or breathing exercise. During this they will often urge you to leave whatever you came into class with at the door and to just focus on yourself, and often, your breathing. They will sometimes give this cue several times during class as a reminder that if your mind starts to wander (IE to your to-do list for the day) to bring it back to the pose you are doing or how your body is feeling. Being mindful has been shown to decrease stress and increase life satisfaction. It might sound silly but learning how to become mindful in a yoga class allows you to carry that out into other areas of your life, therefore increasing happiness and decreasing stress not just while you are in class, but all of the time - and who doesn’t want that?
2. Focusing on your breath
Yoga also teaches you how to breathe from your diaphragm which if you’ve never been taught how to do, you probably don’t. Breathing from your diaphragm is the most efficient way to breathe because it increases your lung capacity and gives you more power to empty your lungs. Because yoga poses are designed to be moved through within confines of inhalation and exhalation, it forces you to move with the pattern of your breath and to learn how control it. This can be carried over into any fitness regime and will be very helpful. Controlling your breath or merely knowing when to breath can be critical to increase performance.
3. Holding static poses
When was the last time you held a wall sit? Or maybe a plank? It hurts, doesn’t it? In yoga, you often end up holding poses longer than you would in a typical workout setting. Increasing time under tension has been shown as one of the best ways to increase muscular strength and muscular endurance. You are also often holding these poses in an untraditional format, perhaps involving more than just the sagittal plane (which almost ALL traditional exercises are done in) so your body is learning how to bear loads in different ways which overall decreases chance of injury.
4. Mobility
Throughout yoga, as previously mentioned, you will be holding poses focusing on your breath. While you are focusing on your breathing your body begins to loosen up into that pose allowing you to push further into the posture. Flexibility is not something that can be forced and uncomfortable positions must be held in order to increase mobility in a joint. Because we often do not have the patience to hold a pose or stretch for a significant amount of time, yoga is great for increasing mobility and flexibility because the holds are built into the class and therefore unavoidable. Having greater mobility and flexibility allows for greater movement integrity and decreases chances of injury and also promotes longevity.
Is yoga for everyone? No, of course not. But does it embody many aspects which would be beneficial to your life? YES… like a resounding YES.
I’m not telling you that you have to go to yoga if you hate it- it’s important that you spend your time wisely doing things that you enjoy. So if doing yoga is equal to stabbing yourself in the eye, don’t do it- but DO try and incorporate the four items above into your life in some other way.
I think at the end of the day we are all just trying to live our best lives, and if one of these items can help you do that… then what are you waiting for?