The Science Behind The Practice
The practice of Yoga is often seen as something that women do to become flexible, when in reality it is so much more than that. When practiced properly and regularly, the benefits of Yoga can be amazing for both your body and mind.
Many people that do Yoga will know how much it can improve your health through seeing the change in themselves since practicing. Although I can feel the changes too, I am so intrigued by the science behind this. I recently graduated university after studying Human Biosciences for 3 years, so understanding what is happening to me physically and mentally is something that I find super interesting.
Yoga is a very spiritual practice, and while a lot of what goes on probably can’t be explained with science, the physical effect it has on your body and mind can be studied to show the impact of asanas and meditation. So, I thought I would go ahead and do some of my own research on the benefits of Yoga. As you can see below I have already found some scientific research suggesting how Yoga affects the body…
What I have done
Here I just selected some common examples of how Yoga affects the body and found a scientific journal with supporting evidence for this. Now this is of course very surface level research and can only suggest what might be happening in our bodies, but I plan on going deeper into each of these aspects to find out as much as I can about the research into each. From there we will all hopefully have a better understanding of the scientific approach to Yoga.
Why?
But why am I doing this? To be honest, I think Yoga is widely underrated. And because of the spiritual aspect of the practice, it isn’t taken seriously by a lot of people when it comes to the genuine physical health benefits. Yoga has been miscommunicated to us in the western world, we are such logical thinkers so I reckon showing people the science will make them think differently about the practice.
So… I am going to take a scientific approach to proving that Yoga is much more than stretching, will you follow the journey? I’ll be posting blogs for each health benefit once I have studied plenty of journals, maybe we will all find out something new!
Hope you enjoy this series of blogs 🧡
Alison x