Connect with us

Health

Why Yoga Is Great For Women

Published

on

Why yoga is great for women

It is time to break any misconceptions you might have had about yoga. It is not a lot of mediation. No chanting is involved (unless you want to). Regardless of how calm and relaxing yoga may look when you see it being done by professionals in pictures, it isn’t. Yoga is hard work and a darn good workout.

There are combinations of things that make yoga very appealing to women. To start with, most yoga classes are filled with women and very few men. This makes it easier to relax and work hard because there is less concern about looking bad in front of the opposite sex. From a physical standpoint, it helps with muscle strength, tone, endurance, flexibility, and balance. A lot of women don’t want to bulk up, but they want to tone up. The ideal body type is one of a dancer than a bodybuilder. Think lithe and graceful.

Also, there is an aspect of yoga being gentler and less impactful compared to other types of exercise. With the stretching of the muscles and connective tissue, you gain flexibility that helps prevent injuries as well. Because of these reasons, yoga is ideal for mothers after birth as a way to ease their bodies back into shape.

Read: 4 Benefits of Gaining Muscle Weight

Differences in Yoga vs. Other Exercises

Most cardiovascular exercises tighten and contract muscles as they flex. This causes the muscles to keep a shorter shape that can be uncomfortable. While most people perform static stretches before and after things like running, it does not have the same effect as yoga. Yoga, on the other hand, involves stretching multiple muscle groups at once to loosen sections of the body up. In conjunction with that, there is not the same type of tight, contraction movements in yoga to tense the muscles back up.

While you build muscle strength and tone from weight workouts, again, it is through muscular contractions. Yoga uses a different method by having muscles support body weight in various poses without being in a full decrease.

Benefits of Yoga with Other Workouts

Yoga will make your body feel better by itself or in conjunction with other fitness programs. As the goal of yoga is to stretch and strengthen, there is not a single type of exercise that it doesn’t compliment. Many women (and men) enjoy just doing yoga as their sole fitness option because of health and mental (calming) benefits. But others use it as a form of recovery from more strenuous activities such as running, climbing, or biking.

No matter how you want to use it, the bottom line is that you should use it. Overall there are some growing pains when learning the poses, but then it can quickly be done any time or any place with only a limited amount of space and a yoga mat. What isn’t there to love about that?