Tuesday, January 19, 2010

My First Yoga Class



Last week, I attended my first yoga class at the Recreation Center in West Sacramento. Yoga is one of those things I’ve always been interested in but never had an opportunity to attempt. I enjoyed my first class, although my brain did cross-associate the music with my favorite Indian restaurant and leave me craving Chicken Tikka Masala.


The class I attended was a beginning one, just challenging enough but not too discouraging. I hope to attend the class once a week to balance it with my cardio the rest of the week. I found an interesting article about the health benefits of yoga on a health web site, which are:


Flexibility
Strength
Posture
Breathing
Stress Reduction
Concentration and Mood
Heart Benefits
Other Medical benefits


Here are a few of the more interesting tidbits from the article I wanted to share:


"Yoga has been practiced for more than 5,000 years, and currently, close to 11 million Americans are enjoying its health benefits. Yoga can hardly be called a trend.


"The series of yoga poses called asanas work by safely stretching your muscles. This releases the lactic acid that builds up with muscle use and causes stiffness, tension, pain, and fatigue. In addition, yoga increases the range of motion in joints. It may also increase lubrication in the joints. The outcome is a sense of ease and fluidity throughout your body.


Yoga stretches not only your muscles but all of the soft tissues of your body. That includes ligaments, tendons, and the fascia sheath that surrounds your muscles. And no matter your level of yoga, you most likely will see benefits in a very short period of time. In one study, participants had up to 35% improvement in flexibility after only eight weeks of yoga. The greatest gains were in shoulder and trunk flexibility."


I was very surprised at all of the medical benefits of yoga. If you’d like to read more of this article, it can be found at:
http://www.webmd.com/balance/the-health-benefits-of-yoga


Even if yoga’s not your thing, I hope that you will try something new that you’ve always wanted to try! Go for it!

4 comments:

  1. I am so excited to hear you doing yoga! I want to make it a part of my life because I know the benefits are countless. Yay!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Didn't you say you hated holding poses one time on your blog? ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Absolutely! I hate it to the max. Then I learned there are different types of yoga that don't require you to hold poses for a long time. BUT... I still feel a little claustrophic when I think of yoga... that is until I recently danced with someone who was extremely toned and buff. I asked her what she did and she said "yoga." Sold!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Really? I wonder if that's all she does - like, I always wondered if someone can really get that way from yoga alone.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me!