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If you practice yoga, then you know the ahh sensation of taking a twist after a long day of sitting or the feeling of utter relaxation in Savasana. But the benefits of yoga reach far beyond what you experience on your mat. The beauty of this practice is that it contributes to your well-being long after you’ve left the yoga studio.
19 Benefits of Yoga That Can Improve Your Life
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence to support the physical and mental benefits of a regular yoga practice. Of course, as you practice, you may find even more ways yoga enriches your life in addition to the benefits below.
1. Improves Your Flexibility
Improved flexibility is one of the first and most obvious benefits of yoga. Over time, you’ll find more ease of movement and relief of everyday aches and pains. That’s no coincidence. Everything in your body is connected: Tight hips can cause misalignment of the thigh and shin bones, which can strain your knees. Tight hamstrings can lead to a flattening of the lumbar spine, which can cause back pain. Yoga helps stretch those muscles and prevent short- and long-term pain.
2. Builds Muscle Strength
Having strong muscles helps prevent injuries, reduce pain from conditions like arthritis, improve back pain, and reduces the risk of falls in older adults. If you just went to the gym and lifted weights, you might build strength at the expense of flexibility. But when you build strength through yoga, you balance it with flexibility.
3. Improves Your Posture
Poor posture can cause back, neck, and other muscle and joint problems. As you slump, your body may compensate by flattening the normal inward curves in your neck and lower back. This can cause pain and health problems over time. Yoga helps you build better posture by strengthening your back, chest, and core muscles.
4. Prevents Cartilage and Joint Breakdown
Research shows that yoga can help prevent cartilage degeneration. Practicing yoga allows your joints to use their full range of motion, which helps circulate synovial fluid. Your joint cartilage is like a sponge; it needs synovial fluid to stay lubricated and prevent wearing out, which could lead to conditions like arthritis.
5. Protects Your Spine
Spinal discs crave movement. If you’ve got a well-balanced yoga practice with backbends, forward bends, and twists, you’ll help keep your discs supple. Long-term flexibility is a known benefit of yoga, but one that remains especially relevant for spinal health.
6. Betters Your Bone Health
It’s well documented that weight-bearing exercise strengthens bones and helps prevent osteoporosis. Many postures in yoga require that you lift your own weight. And some, like Downward-Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana) and Upward-Facing Dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana), help strengthen the arm bones, which are particularly vulnerable to osteoporotic fractures.
7. Increases Your Blood Flow
Many of the poses you practice in yoga can improve your circulation. Practicing yoga also thins your blood which can help reduce your risk of heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots.
8. Boosts Your Heart Health
Yoga is heart healthy in many ways. It can help lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels. Some types of yoga are considered aerobic exercise, which keeps the heart functioning at its best. Yoga also helps reduce stress, which can help prevent heart disease.
9. Reduces Stress and Boosts Your Mood
Yoga is known as a complementary approach to conditions including stress and anxiety. There’s a scientific reason for this: Practicing yoga helps increase levels of endorphins and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the brain. These are neurotransmitters that produce feelings of well-being.
10. Relaxes Your Nervous System
Yoga encourages you to relax, slow your breath, and focus on the present, decreasing activity in the sympathetic nervous system (aka the fight-or-flight response) to the parasympathetic nervous system. The latter is responsible for the body’s ability to “rest and digest.”
11. Releases Tension in Your Body
Do you ever notice yourself holding the telephone or a steering wheel with a death grip or scrunching your face when staring at a computer screen? These unconscious habits can lead to chronic tension, muscle fatigue, and soreness in the wrists, arms, shoulders, neck, and face, which can increase stress and worsen your mood. As you practice yoga, you begin to notice where you hold tension: It might be in your tongue, your eyes, or the muscles of your face and neck. If you simply tune in, you may be able to release some tension in the tongue and eyes. With bigger muscles like the quadriceps, trapezius, and buttocks, it may take years of practice to learn how to relax them.
12. Improves Your Sleep
Another by-product of a regular yoga practice, studies suggest, is better sleep—which means you’ll be less tired and stressed and less likely to have accidents. Sleep is one of the key benefits of yoga that nearly every practitioner can experience no matter what their skill level.
13. Helps Your Lung Function
Yoga has been shown to improve various measures of lung function, including the maximum volume of the breath and the efficiency of the exhalation. One study found that yoga can be used as a complementary treatment for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD).
14. Boosts Your Self-Esteem
Practicing yoga allows you to get to know yourself on a deep level. When you practice yoga, you are also practicing the many yogic principles that allow you to spend time with yourself in a state of self-acceptance such as non-violence (ahimsa) and truthfulness (satya). Spending Certain yoga poses can also help you feel empowered and energized, studies have shown.
15. Can Help Ease Chronic Pain
Asana, meditation, or a combination of the two, has shown to reduce pain in people with arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other chronic conditions. When you relieve your pain, your mood improves, too.
16. Builds Mental and Emotional Awareness
Yoga increases feelings of compassion and interconnection by calming the nervous system and the mind. It also increases your ability to step back from the drama of your own life, to remain steady in the face of bad news or unsettling events. You can still react quickly when you need to, but you can take that split second to choose a more thoughtful approach, reducing suffering for yourself and others.
17. Benefits Your Relationships
Cultivating the emotional support of friends, family, and community has been demonstrated repeatedly to improve health. A regular yoga practice helps develop friendliness, compassion, and greater equanimity, which can help improve your relationships with others.
18. Soothes Your Sinuses
Some types of breathwork (pranayama) have been found to improve drainage in the sinuses and prevent the accumulation of mucus. This may help those who suffer from seasonal allergies in the spring or congestion in the winter months.
19. Encourages Self-Care
Practicing yoga consistently is an act of self-care. If you feel better after you practice, then that’s all the more reason to keep doing it. Among the many benefits of yoga, perhaps the most important is the gift you are giving yourself when you show up to your mat.
This article has been updated. Originally published July 27, 2021.
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