Nowadays, yoga is becoming a new trend. A lot of gym offers yoga classes for their members. By practicing yoga, you can create a balance between the body and the mind. It also helps you to maintain internal and external strength. Yoga symbolizes the balances of yin and yang. It teaches about balancing a healthy body with a healthy mind. In short, yoga keeps you healthy as well as the perfect way of meditation.
As described previously, yoga helps you maintain a healthy body and mind. There are a lot of yoga variants that can give you various effects. Yoga itself is divided into two big groups. They are body focused yoga and mind focused yoga. Just like their names, each group gives different effects. The mind focused yoga can also be said as meditation. One group will keep you healthy physically while the other mentally. Below are details of each group along with their advantages.
1. Body focused yoga
Body focused yoga includes bikram yoga, ashtanga yoga, lyengar yoga, and vinyasa yoga. They offer different benefits for your physical body. Body focused yoga can increase your muscle strength and flexibility as it emphasizes more on exercising the physical body. There are various movements of yoga; however, the basics are the same. First you need to do movements and then hold them for a couple of second so that you can feel your muscle contracting. You also need to control your breathing. It is just like pumping oxygen into your muscles. Maybe your muscles will not be as big compared to doing bench presses. But you will get some effective, flexible, and strong muscle. Even professional basketball players from LA Lakers, Jordan Farmar, do yoga to increase his muscle strength and flexibility. Jordan stated that since he started doing the yoga after his regular basketball training, he felt that he became much faster and much stronger.
2. Mind focused yoga
Mind focused yoga include bhakti yoga, mantra yoga, and raja yoga. The benefits of mind yoga are just as much as body yoga. For example, mind focused yoga allows you to be more patient, more focused, and relaxed. Mind focused yoga has similar effects than that of meditation. You will feel light and fresh after doing this kind of yoga. The mind focused yoga is usually done after a tiring day of work, as it can help you drown your fatigue and deal with frustration. It also helps clear your mind and manage your anger, so you have more control over your emotions. The most important thing in mind focused yoga is to control your breathing. It is just one kind of meditation that will give many benefits. The movements are minimalist and give little impact to your physical body, but the benefits for your mind are undoubtedly great.
There are lot more the benefits of yoga that cannot be explained. Yoga could be an alternative exercise for you, especially if you are the type of person who works in an intense and stressful environment or unable to do intense physical exercises due to physical restrictions. Yoga is also a great way to relax. You can do yoga anytime anywhere.
