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Yoga: A Gentle Path to Fitness
No matter your age, weight, or fitness level, yoga can provide an excellent workout that helps you stretch, tone, and strengthen muscles while promoting stress management and cardiovascular fitness. What's more, equipment and space needs are minimal.
Yoga is a 5,000-year-old Hindu bodywork practice intended to promote control and balance of the mind and body. It usually includes slow breathing and a series of stretching exercises. Though originally intended as a spiritual practice, yoga has become a popular fitness routine and a meditative method for healing mind and spirit.
Benefits to Mind
Yoga offers a range of meditation practices, including breathing techniques that exercise your lungs, calm your nervous system, or charge your brain and body with energy. Through these practices, yoga can become a powerful means of psychological integration, making you aware that you are part of a larger whole, not merely an island unto yourself. Once your mind and body are in sync, you will feel better and have more energy. Which may explain why so many people, including celebrities such as athlete Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Madonna, and Sting, consider yoga an important part of their lives.
Georg Feuerstein, author of Yoga For Dummies, (IDG Books, 1999), instructed the British women's ski team in yoga exercises in preparation for the Winter Olympics in the early 1970s. He writes that "these athletes understand that the secret of yoga lies in the control of the mind, be it through postures, breathing, or meditation."
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