Jul 17 2008
Yoga Exercises For All Round Fitness
Physical fitness, as it relates to yoga exercises, can be defined as a state of physical readiness, resilience and relative agility, with a capacity for endurance. Health and fitness go hand in hand: overall health is an essential foundation of physical fitness; and fitness promotes overall health.
Cardiovascular fitness (and respiratory and circulatory health) supports the maintenance of a balanced, healthy metabolism for stable energy levels and weight regulation.
Physical fitness through yoga exercises can help you get moving – literally and metaphorically. Physically it boosts your energy levels and metabolic rate, which helps you achieve your ideal weight. Metaphorically it gets you moving because feeling fit is inherently motivational.
In Hatha Yoga, physical fitness is the basis for achieving balanced, comfortable posture. This is conducive to sustained spiritual awareness. It is also helpful for sitting for long periods of time in meditation if one so desires.
Body Tone
Body tone serves by sculpting your body into fine form. Muscle tone helps improve circulation in those areas that may have excess fatty deposits. It also firms up areas of low muscle tone. Body tone from yoga exercises is not only aesthetically appealing, it also promotes health by ensuring good posture, which supports the positioning, and therefore efficient function, of internal organs.
Yoga Posture
Balanced posture is centered between the opposing forces of grounding and uplift. Healthy posture can help prevent excess fat accumulation by avoiding postural imbalance or sagging, which can compress certain body areas, making them prone to fatty deposit accumulation.
There is also a link between posture and self-confidence, which plays a role in achieving and maintaining your ideal weight and shape.
Toning Inside And Out
Yoga is a system designed to tone the body inside and out. On the inside, Yoga exercises and postures massage and tone the internal organs, improving blood and lymph circulation and generally supporting healthy body system functioning. This is achieved through exercises, postures and posture combinations where opposing body parts are set up to stretch, compress or twist each other in support of healthy functioning. This improves circulation to and from all body tissues.
Breathing practices in Yoga promote health by enhancing lung capacity while oxygenating and energizing all body systems and promoting healthy circulation.
Yoga exercises and postures balance strength building and flexibility training. This physical agility is discernible on the outside as fine posture and body tone relative to your body type.
Fitness, For Life
The kind of physical fitness promoted through Yoga exercises is not seen as preparation for improved performance on any particular playing field. The playing field is life in general.
Hatha Yoga exercises are seen as a system for improving your performance when walking, moving and functioning in life. Yoga practice, maintained on a regular basis, can improve your energy levels, endurance and sense of being physically comfortable in your body. It also fine-tunes posture and movement to achieve optimal health and to enrich your experience of being alive.
Physical Endurance And Yoga
Physical endurance requires a strong heart muscle, as well as strong skeletal muscles.
Hatha Yoga exercises are designed to improve physical endurance through the holding of postures. Breathing practice increases lung capacity and promotes oxygenation of body and brain tissues. The combination of postures and breathing improves blood and lymph circulation throughout the body. You will notice over time, with the regular practice of Yoga exercises, that your capacity for aerobic exercise increases, as will your performance in any physically challenging activity or sport.
There is another factor that affects physical endurance: your thoughts and the way you react to them, can deplete your energy reserves and thus reduce physical endurance.
In this regard Yoga exercises can help by increasing awareness and promoting mental emotional resilience, clarity and calm. This is achieved through the practice of postures executed with breath awareness, and meditation.
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