It Can Decrease Stress
Stress in our lives seems almost as inevitable as Monday following Sunday, so finding ways to manage and reduce it can be quite helpful. Yoga has been shown to influence our serotonin levels that help balance our mood, shares Howe. It can help link the brain and nervous system, that feeling of balance helps reduce cortisola stress hormone. Brodie shares that breathing through the poses helps clear the mind. Mental clarity brings awareness to how we view ourselves, the world, and others.”
Yoga For Flexibility: 10 Best Beginner Stretches
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Yoga is amazing for flexibility.
With each fluid motion you being to feel each muscle of your body stretching.
And the more you practice, the more flexible you become.
Even if youre a beginner, youll begin to see positive changes in your body quickly.
As an avid fan of yoga, Im still so amazed by all of its benefits. There is no age limit, and in fact its a great workout to do as you get older.
It also compliments any other exercise you prefer to do, from running to Crossfit.
Spending time stretching out your muscles allows you to be more agile in every day life.
Yoga also helps you create balance and calmness.
There are just endless benefits to it!
I put together a list of my absolute favorite yoga stretches for flexibility.
Its recommended to practice yoga 3-5 days a week, but even if you just do it once a week your body will thank you.
The more you practice these poses, the more flexible you will become.
Lets get started
Can Men Do Yoga
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Yes! Anyone can do yoga. Yoga is wonderful for increasing flexibility and strength and boosting health and immunity. It is for everyone. World-renowned yoga teacher, Raghunath, shares why you should start doing it now.
We hope this helps make your journey into the world of yoga more exciting and less overwhelming!
And if you want more information on how The 28 Day Yoga For Beginners Program is helping others like you find success in practicing yoga every day, sign up here to start your journey on a new path to physical and mental well-being!
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Half Lord Of The Fishes/ardha Matsyendrasana
Stretches: hips, spine, abdominal muscles
How-To:
- Begin in a seated position, spine tall, and legs extended in front of you . Keep your feet flexed toward your body.
- Bend your right knee and bring the foot close to you. Lift the right foot and cross it over to the outside of your left hip. Your right knee should point up to the ceiling.
- Place the right hand behind you to help you keep the spine upright.
- Inhale as you raise your left arm to the sky.
- Exhale, hug the right knee with your left hand and twist your torso to the right.
- Look to the right over your right shoulder.
- To come out, shift your gaze to the front and slowly release the twist.
- Repeat on the other side.
Tips:
- Start twisting from your core, then turn with the upper back and the neck. To come out of the twist, lead with the neck, then upper body, and core.
- Keep your straight foot flexed.
- Press your buttocks into the mat. Both of your sit bones should stay on the floor while twisting.
- Don’t collapse on your back hand. Instead, press into the palm to create a lift in your spine.
- Keep your shoulders drawing back and down your spine.
Modifications:
- Sit on the edge of a yoga block to prevent slumping forward.
Yoga For Flexibility: 9 Best Yoga Poses To Be More Flexible
Flexibility could easily be described as both yogas blessing and its curse. On the blessing side, increased flexibility is an enormous benefit: it promotes the range of motion and joint health that help prevent back pain, repetitive-use damage, and sports injuries.
However, yoga is a lot more than flexibility. In fact, people that come to yoga with a lot of flexibility must be careful not to rush into advanced poses just because they can. Often, they need to work on their strength to compliment all that bendiness, build support muscles, and make sure that they are practising safe alignment.
Fear of flexibility, or, more specifically, a lack of flexibility, also keeps a lot of people out of the yogasphere . Its a common misconception that you need to be naturally flexible to even attempt to do yoga. So lets dispel that myth right now. Shout this from the rooftops: Yoga is not reserved for people who are already very flexible.
If you have tight hips, hamstrings, calves, shoulders, whatever, yoga is exactly what you need. Flexibility is not a prerequisite its a result. The person touching their nose to their knees does not win . The person who improves their flexibility safely over time wins .
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Gentle Yoga Stretches For Beginners For Head To Toe Flexibility
These basic yoga stretches for beginners will open up your entire body stretching your muscles and increasing blood flow.
Although yoga is in essence a spiritual practice, yoga for many of us is also a way to improve ones physical conditioning.
When we think about people that do yoga we instantly think, highly flexible, mobile and supple. With that image in our head of someone bending into positions that make you wonder how is that possible.
How did she even get to that position?
While some people are naturally better suited to yoga than others, such as that hypermobile friend we all have who is freakishly bendy, yoga is great for developing flexibility.
Yoga is the ideal practice for beginners to improve flexibility and a lot of the basic beginner poses are stretches or require a degree of flexibility to get into the poses.
Yoga is commonly just a series of well put together stretches and poses that anybody can do with a little modification here and there
When it comes to improving your flexibility, the more you practice these beginner yoga stretches the better you will become at doing them, you will get stronger more flexible and more confident.
The more that you can make time do these gentle yoga stretches for beginners, the quicker you will improve your flexibility and nail that downward facing dog pose.
To begin, start with 10 minutes every 1-2 days increasing to once every day if you want to see noticeable improvements in your flexibility.
The 28 Day Yoga For Beginners Program
If you have been looking for a way to get into yoga but dont know where to start, this is the perfect program. Designed by one of the worlds leading yoga instructors, Kristin McGee, this program will help you feel comfortable in each session.
The 28 Day Yoga for Beginners Program has everything that beginners need. This course is designed for the complete beginner, so if you have no previous yoga experience theres nothing to worry about. It will guide you through each step of your journey with easy-to-follow instructions.
Moreover, Kristins approachable style of teaching will make you feel like she is your friend guiding you on your first steps so theres no pressure involved at all!
This free yoga program for beginners might just be exactly what you needed right now: A fresh start one filled with peace and balance as well as renewed energy levels, emotional stability, strength both physical and mental.
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Bridge Pose/setu Bandha Sarvangasana
Stretches: abdominals, chest, shoulders, neck
How-To:
- Lie on your back with the arms alongside your body, palms facing down.
- Bend your knees and place them about hip-width apart.
- Inhale and root through your feet. Breathe out as you lift your pelvis towards the ceiling.
- Flex your buttocks, abdominal muscles, and outer arms to lift yourself higher.
- Broaden your shoulder blades and keep the chin away from the chest.
- To release the pose, exhale and slowly lower down the spine to the ground one vertebra at a time.
Tips:
- Keep the thighs parallel with each other.
- Don’t harden your buttocks, but keep it engaged.
- Relax your jaw and avoid moving your head in the pose.
Modifications:
- Place a blanket under your shoulders to protect the neck.
- Take a bolster or a yoga block and slide it under your tailbone for support.
Reasons Men Should Do Yoga
1. Relieve stressWe all find ways to deal with stress. But Terrence Monte, a managing teacher at Pure Yoga, says, going to amped up gyms or punching a punching bag can make you more aggressive or more tired. Yoga, on the other hand, employs a number of relaxation techniques, which, with regular practice, can make you calmer overall. Sadie Nardini, host of Rock Your Yoga, adds: Along with training your body, yoga trains your mind to see the bigger picture and act from integrity instead of freaking out. If you want to be more James Bond than Charlie Sheen, get yourself on the mat. Being forced to unplug from text, calls, and email for 60 to 90 minutes doesnt hurt either.
2. Get flexibleMost series of yoga asanas include one or more spinal twists to loosen the many joints that make up your spine. This can improve your tennis game and golf swing, as well as promote detoxification and good digestion. Yogi Cameron Alborizan, Ayurvedic healer, yoga guru, and author of The One Plan, says: Think of the body as a sponge filled with dirty sink water. Gentle twists help to wring the sponge out and purge toxins.
3. Build more muscleYoga widens range of motion and increases access to more muscle fibers, allowing for more substantial hypertrophy in any given muscle group, says Kate Abate, a certified trainer and yoga teacher. Hypertrophy is when a muscle is enlarged because its cells are enlarged .
The 3 best yoga tips for beginners
1. Stay in the back row
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Tips For Yoga Beginners
What Does Yoga Work
One of the greatest benefits of yoga is that it can provide a low-impact, total-body workout. Some poses help increase the strength and flexibility of your arms, shoulders, back, abdominals and core, hips, glutes, and legs.
In yoga, you are using your bodyweight to build strength, tone muscles, and increase your flexibility, explains Brodie. This practice is phenomenal for core strength. With a strong core comes the improvement of posture and reduction of injuries.
Building core strength by breathing into and out of each pose helps support the spine, which encourages good posture, adds Howe. When we stand tall, not only does that affect our joints, it affects our self-esteem. We feel uplifted.
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How To Increase Your Flexibility
Do these yoga stretches for beginners as a routine one after the other as a full 10-minute yoga sequence or break them up and do them on the go when you get a spare minute or so.
Increasing flexibility through doing these yoga stretches is achieved through being consistent and doing these stretches every day and multiple times a day for the fastest results.
What Are The Best Yoga Poses For Flexibility
The best yoga poses for flexibility are those that are done regularly. Weve already mentioned some of the major muscle groups where many people experience tightness. Hamstrings, hips, and shoulders tend to top the list so the following poses address those areas. Since yoga poses dont usually work one area in isolation, however, youll also get the benefit of stretching the calves, quads, intercostals, and pectorals, just to name a few. When appropriate, weve included details on how to adapt the poses with props to make them more accessible and also how to amplify for a deeper stretch. Each pose is described individually but they are sequenced so you can also join them together to make a flow.
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Why Is Flexibility So Important
Flexibility is a key component of physical fitness. Cardio and strength training are on most peoples radar, but flexibility often isnt until pain or injury arises. When they do, the treatment frequently involves stretching tight muscles that are limiting range of motion and putting stress on vulnerable areas like the joints.
We must also mention the mental benefits of increasing your flexibility. Flexibility is improved through stretching and stretching feels good. When you stretch, you relieve stress by releasing tension. Where the body goes, the mind follows. When you let go of physical tension, you also let go of mental tension. Thats one of the reasons yoga is so good at reducing stress, alleviating insomnia, and increasing a sense of well-being.
It’s Okay If You Can’t Do A Certain Pose
If you’re in a class environment, your teacher may suggest modifications to make various poses more or less difficult. If you’re following along with a video at home, or if you hit a pose that just doesn’t feel good, you can always feel safe to rest in Childs pose. There’s also absolutely no shame in simply resting on your mat and focusing on breathing. Yoga is all about cultivating the mind-body connection, so listen to and honor your body, especially when it needs a break. Let your body guide you on the journey it needs to be on and not where you want it to be, suggests Howe.
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Best Yoga Poses For Flexibility
You cant just become a yogi overnight, but there are plenty of in-person and online yoga classes that can help you develop a regular yoga practice to increase your flexibility. Try Vinyasa, Hatha, or Yin yoga to get started.
You can also ease into yoga by trying various poses at home. To help you get started, weve rounded up some of our fave flexibility-boosting moves below.
As with any yoga practice, flow at your own pace. Its more important to feel the benefits of the poses than to push yourself to rush through them. Dont let yourself get caught up in how you look instead, focus on how the poses make your body feel.
Try to do each pose correctly to reap max benefits and avoid injury. Repeat the poses as often as you wish, but release out of a pose ASAP if you experience any pain.
Benefits Of Practicing Yoga
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Engaging in regular yoga practice brings numerous benefits to your mind and body. Some of the benefits include increased strength, flexibility, and muscle tone in addition to improved mental clarity, pain relief, and a reduction in stress levels and blood pressure.
Lets have a closer look at what yoga can do for you.
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It Can Help Manage Anxiety
Howe says that the majority of her yoga students initially seek out yoga to help manage their anxiety. She says that the focus on breath work, in particular, makes yoga an effective means to become more present and have some control over your anxiety. When place focus on their breath and how a particular part of their body holding tension receives that breath, a student most often realizes they have control. They can choose how deep to take that pose, how to regress and be kind to the body, as they learn to listen more to what the body has to say, explains Howe. In essence, theyve taken control back, and often that, in and of itself, helps reduce the feeling of anxiety.
Why You Should Start With Yoga Poses For Beginners
For many newfound yogis, it can be tempting to try out inversions, arm balances, and other tricky poses you see on social media right from the get-go. But those postures require some serious strength and balance training, which is why Ashley Rideaux, a YogaWorks-certified teacher trainer in Los Angeles, recommends newbies stick with a handful of basic sitting and standing postures. “The bread and butter of a beginner’s practice are your standing poses,” she says. “They build strength through a lot of the larger muscles of the body. They’re accessible to a lot of bodies and that makes them a great place, not just to find strength and flexibility, but also to build confidence in the work.” These two types of yoga poses for beginners also help you develop a sense of where your body is positioned in space without actually seeing it, says Rideaux.
And though popular culture makes it seem that props are reserved solely for older folks, Rideaux encourages everyone from beginners to yoga veterans to use them while practicing if they’re available. “Props are so helpful in creating clean alignment and helping you avoid injury,” she explains. “And a lot of times, as you find the proper alignment, it actually gives you a greater challenge.”
To kick off your journey to becoming a seasoned yogi and start building up the necessary strength, flexibility, and confidence, try flowing through these yoga poses for beginners.
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