Yoga: A Gentle Path to Fitness

No matter your age, weight, or fitness level, yoga can provide an excellent workout that helps you stretch, tone, and strengthen muscles while promoting stress management and cardiovascular fitness. What's more, equipment and space needs are minimal.
Yoga is a 5,000-year-old Hindu bodywork practice intended to promote ,control and balance of the mind and body. It usually includes slow breathing and a series of stretching exercises. Though originally intended as a spiritual practice, yoga has become a popular fitness routine and a meditative method for healing mind and spirit.

Benefits to Mind
Yoga offers a range of meditation practices, including breathing techniques that exercise your lungs, calm your nervous system, or charge your brain and body with energy. Through these practices, yoga can become a powerful means of psychological integration, making you aware that you are part of a larger whole, not merely an island unto yourself. Once your mind and body are in sync, you will feel better and have more energy. Which may explain why so many people, including celebrities such as athlete Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Madonna, and Sting, consider yoga an important part of their lives.

Benefits to Body
Yoga can help you become fit and trim, control your weight, and reduce your stress level. Kathleen Wright, Director and Yoga Instructor at the Very Near Yoga Studio in Wilmington, Delaware, thinks that more people should practice yoga, especially if they are involved in any type of athletics. "Because athletes put a lot of stress on their muscles and joints, yoga can help them begin to move their body in natural ways," she said. And, "it can actually help prevent injuries," Wright says.
Athletes accustomed to using their bodies and muscles vigorously on a regular basis are advised to practice some type of stretching exercises such as yoga. When regular stretching exercises are neglected, the strenuous activity strains the muscles, joints, and tendons, and has actually forced many active people to give up their favorite sport or activity. It can also lead to permanent muscle damage.

Athletes, dancers, weight lifters, and body sculptors who incorporate yoga techniques into their activities discover that the benefits go beyond the effects of simple muscle stretching. Those preparing for any type of sporting event can help increase the torque, or rotating power, of their joints through yoga. For example, yoga might help a baseball pitcher improve his pitching speed. "Athletes are torquing their joints," said Wright, "and that range of motion helps to keep those joints lubricated."

Yoga can also help with overall muscle balance. In fencing, for example, athletes tend to develop their muscles unevenly because the front arm and leg work harder than the others. Yoga can help even out and balance the muscle development.

People who are involved in yoga assert that yoga has not only given them extra muscle conditioning and development beyond what their regular activities had provided them, but that it has also prevented the recurrence of old injuries.