For many people, when they think of yoga, they think of it as something people do as meditation, a sort of spiritual experience. Others might think of it as just a way to be flexible.
However, once you really get involved with it, you realize just how great it is for your core and for your fitness as a whole. In fact, yoga is a great way to get in shape while providing you with a variety of other advantages.
The main thing that yoga helps you work out is your core. You might not feel it in some of the beginner positions, but a little later down the line, these exercises can become quite intense.
You’ll have to hold a position for minutes at a time that requires a strong core to maintain, almost in the same way that doing planks helps you work out your abs. Naturally, these positions help strengthen your core, but they also help tone it up to make your abs more visible.
It’s not just your abs that are benefitting from yoga, though. Given the insane number of poses that you can do in yoga, you’ll find that some poses will help your arms, while others will help your legs, and so on.
While yoga isn’t the best at building muscle per se, it can help you build strength, and more importantly it can help you tone up your body to reveal the existing muscles that you might have developed outside of yoga.
There are a wide variety of other benefits that you can get from yoga that can help you continue to do other forms of fitness, as well. For example, flexibility is extremely important.
It helps ensure that you’re able to do exercises such as squats with proper form, helping reduce injury and increasing the effectiveness of such exercises. Since yoga increases your flexibility, you’re able to do weightlifting like this with greater ease.
Another aspect of yoga that helps your fitness is preventing injuries in general. Yoga movements are meant to help your body – specifically your muscles as well as tendons and joints, stay active and prevents them from seizing up.
This helps reduce things like muscle cramps, joint pains, and worse, things like muscle tears or separations. These things can be very painful and are possibly the more dangerous aspects of weightlifting. By doing yoga, you can help prevent these and save yourself the future trouble.
