Yoga benefits you in may ways

Some may surprise you! You can click on each benefit to learn more.

Balance

Weight reduction

Reducing Everyday Aches and Pains

Arthritis

Stress Reduction and Relaxation

Body Strength

Flexibility

Better General Health

Anti-Aging

Detoxification

Lower Blood Pressure

Rehabilitating and Healing Injuries

PMS Relief

Better Sex

Spirituality

Balance

Babies are born yogis. Once, we were all able to pull our toes up by our ears and laugh about it. Then we aged, got injured, and started carrying stress in our shoulders and back. In short, we lost our balance. Yoga is an ancient practice that unifies spirit, mind, and body. Many yoga poses will improve your physical balance and alignment, which makes you more graceful in other activities and day-to-day life. Proper balance and alignment improves your range of motion and reduces risk of injury. The stress reduction and concentration will sharpen your mental focus and moderate your moods, leaving you more mentally and emotionally balanced as well.

Weight Reduction

Hot yoga addresses the four main causes of weight gain: lack of exercise, stress, eating habits, and thyroid issues. The heated room elevates the pulse as the body works to cool itself. This creates a significant calorie burn in a low-impact form of exercise, which is gentler for the joints than running or jogging on hard surfaces. Yoga deep breathing increases the oxygen intake to the body cells, including the fat cells, burning them off faster. Yogic exercises induce more continuous and deeper breathing which gradually burns, sometimes forcefully, many of the calories already ingested. Stress (see Stress Relief below) increases cortisol production, which makes the body cling to fat. It inspires emotional eating or self-medication stress-management through alcohol. Exercise, breathing, and meditation reduce stress and regulate sleep, which prevents overeating due to sleep deprivation. Lastly, many yoga poses stimulate your thyroid, which is the gland that regulates your metabolism. It manages how quickly your body makes proteins, uses energy, and reacts to other hormones. Balancing these four aspects of your body will put you in control of your weight.

Reducing Everyday Aches and Pain

Yoga stretches muscles, as well as stretching tendons and lubricating joints. Many joints, including and especially vertebrae, stop lubricating as efficiently when a person enters their thirties. Yoga promotes joint lubrication which alleviates general feelings of stiffness and discomfort, both reactively and proactively. Practicing yoga provides chronic pain sufferers with useful tools to actively cope with their pain and help counter feelings of helplessness and depression. Meditation is a proven method of pain management, and challenging exercise releases the body's natural painkillers (endorphins). Breathing exercises reduce pain because muscles when you exhale; lengthening exhalation time reduces tension.

Arthritis

Yoga asanas are designed to provide relief to joints and effectively relieve arthritis. Yoga reestablishes a complete range of motion. Yoga's movements and gentle pressures lubricate and release troubled joints. Yoga asanas in conjunction with deep breathing exercises relieve the tension that binds up the muscles and further tightens the joints.

Stress Reduction and Relaxation

One of the most common complaints of modern life is stress. 70 to 80 percent of all illnesses in America today are stress-related, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and cancer. Yoga reduces stress through deep breathing, calming techniques, and detoxification of the body and mind. Your class can be a 90-minute meditation, as the mind must fully focus to maintain poses in a challenging environment, which creates a healthy distraction and distance from stressors. Lower stress levels allow for better and easier sleep, which improves the immune system and reduces risk of injury to the body. Lower stress levels overall reduce weight gain, reduce risk of illness and injury, lowers heart rate and blood pressure, and improves mood. Many hot yoga practictioners report a “high” after class, induced by endorphins and the sense of having sweated out all the bodily toxins. Not only does it temporarily reduce stress, but as the nervous system gains strength, your long-term stress level declines. You actually train your body to keep stress at bay.

Body Strength

Hot yoga will make your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints stronger. Classes include strength-building poses, balancing postures, and floor postures. Poses that incorporate an element of balance add another layer of challenge, a theory also espoused by balance ball and Pilates. Muscles have to work harder when they are already fatigued. As the body expends energy to cool itself, it has to expend more to hold the pose, because it has to balance and support the weight of the body. This allows for strength building in poses that have several variations to build from beginner to advanced level. Finally, all the muscle strength in the world won't protect you from injury if your joints and ligaments are weak, or if the strength is not distributed evenly in your body. Tribalance yoga addresses ligaments, joints, core strength, and full-body power.

Flexibility

The only way to get flexible is to stretch, and a flexible body is a more comfortable place to live. Stretching cold muscles will injure them, but stretching warm muscles allows for a better stretch. Emphasis on flexibility is the main difference between yoga and other forms of exercise. Limberness alleviates aches and pains from everyday life and allows for better range of motion in other forms of exercise. Your muscles and joints become resilient to the jolts and shocks of everyday life, preventing many accidents and injuries.

Better General Health

Both exercise and heat improve your immune system. Increasing core body temperature creates an artificial fever that kills viruses and bacteria and strengthens the immune system by raising the level of white blood cells. The cell production and the rate at which they release into circulation both increase. Your body will produce more interferon, which cranks up antibody production. Breathing exercises oxygenate the blood, cleanse you of toxins, and give you healthier skin. The asanas compress and then replenish blood flow to your organs and glands, improving their function as richly oxygenated blood brings nutrients to the vessels and capillaries.

Anti-aging

The flexibility of the spine, not the number of birthdays, determines a person's age. Stand in front of a mirror and slouch – see how it makes you look older and gives you more chins? The better posture, muscle tone, and spine elasticity of yoga practice will subtract years from your appearance. Hot yoga's detoxifying effects on the skin help it retain elasticity, and lower stress means fewer wrinkles (you may get some laugh lines, but you won't mind!). Meditation and focus will keep your mind sharp, and the endorphins and cardiovascular benefits will keep you feeling young. Yoga will take years from your body add years to your life.

Detoxification

The skin is the body's largest eliminating organ. Sweat purges the body of many drugs and heavy metals, as well as flushing residue from smog and cosmetics. Yoga is perhaps the only form of activity which thoroughly massages all the internal glands and organs of the body. By stretching muscles and joints as well as constricting and releasing blood flow to internal organs, yoga improves blood flow, which helps in the flushing out of toxins. The process of sweating increases blood flow to and from the kidneys, to help purge toxins from the system. The stress relief and sharp focus will give you a mental detox as well, improving your mood and overall happiness levels.

Lower Blood Pressure

Yoga asanas combat the causes and effects of high blood pressure. Asanas calm the mind and regularize the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls stress. Consistent exercise of any form improves the cardiovascular system. Hot yoga raises your pulse, and dilates surface vessels as blood is shunted from the internal organs. Repeated practice decreases blood pressure by enhancing elasticity of the arteries, removing toxins from the kidneys, and reducing excessive sympathetic nervous system activity. Even gentle yoga practice lowers your resting heart rate, increases your endurance, and improves oxygen uptake during exercise. A combination of lower heart rate and improved oxygenation to the body (both benefits of yoga) results in higher cardiovascular endurance or stamina.

Rehabilitating and Healing Injuries

Yoga used therapeutically can rehabilitate and heal problem areas. Individuals recovering from serious physical injury often have a severely limited range of motion, and find the heated environment makes it easier to stretch without aggravating the injuries. Talk to your instructor to select exercises that do not re-injure already weakened areas and then find appropriate exercises to strengthen the injured area.

PMS Relief

Yoga naturally addresses the common complaints of PMS: cramps, mood swings, and appetite changes. Dry heat aggravates already inflamed muscles, but the humid heat in a hot yoga room will soothe cramps, as will gently stretching back, abdominal, and core muscles. Yoga's emphasis on core strength and organ detoxification will make your system and muscles more resilient to premenstrual discomforts. The relaxation techniques and endorphin release will combat irritability and regulate your mood. Reduced stress, better sleep, and improved thyroid function are long-term benefits to regulate appetite, while the major calorie burn is an immediate benefit for indulged cravings and appetite spikes.

Better Sex

Yoga has a rejuvenating effect, improving sexual health for men and women. Sex is a natural function, an expression of love that is very beneficial in a loving relationship and, of course, essential for the continuation of the human race. Since yoga relieves stress, you can feel more relaxed and open while having sex. People with a healthy, active sex life have healthier hearts and reproductive organs, lower instances of psychological problems, increased sexual vitality, higher confidence and reduced stress. Yoga has a marked positive effect on the pituitary, thyroid, adrenal and sex glands. This produces well-being, prevents premature aging and extends sexual virility well into old age.

Spirituality

For many students, yoga is practice of uniting with the Divine. Yoga is not a religion but rather a meditative practice that can help you experience this in your own way. At Tribalance, we believe this aspect should be accepted, nurtured, and never forced – you can always inquire about the spiritual aspects, but no one is going to push an agenda on you. It doesn't matter what your faith is or whether or not you have one: God, Buddha, Allah, Siva, respect and love of the human spirit, or tremendous awe for the complexity and elegance of our world – these and more are Divine experiences, and all are welcome here if they bring you comfort and peace. Through yoga practice, we become aware of the interconnectedness between our emotional, mental and physical levels. Gradually this awareness leads to an understanding of the more subtle areas of existence. The ultimate goal of yoga is to fuse together the gross material (annamaya), energetic (pranamaya), mental (manomaya), intellectual (vijnanamaya) and spiritual (anandamaya) levels within your being. The value of discovering one's self and of enjoying one's self as is journeys into being rather than doing: practicing yoga “off the mat." When you achieve the yogic spirit, you can know yourself at peace.

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