Why I started Yoga.

The need to practice physical activity became necessary for me throughout the years. I could feel that being inactive was not helping my body and started to feel some aches in my joint. As a kid, teenager and young adult I use to swim a lot and stopping this activity certainly didn’t help.

I have been wanting to go back to swimming but finding a pool that’s a minimum of 25 meters is not always easy and when you’re on the move it can become challenging to find.

I needed something that is still low impact and that I could do on the go. That’s how I first got introduced to yoga. After my first session, I was very surprised to see that depending on the one you practice yoga can actually be challenging and has a few things in common with swimming. The focus on movement is something I absolutely love when I am in the pool. I like to think of how my arms enter the water, how they pull the water, how I regulate my breathing and many other things, the point being that I have a point of focus.

It has now been around 10 years that I have been practising yoga and here are some of the benefits

Enhance Flexibility.

This one is probably the one you’d expect the most, but yes the more I practised the more flexible I became, now it all depends on your own body. It is not because you train every day 4h a day that you’ll become extra flexible. We are all depending on our own morphology, by that I mean that we each have our own bone structure and this one simply limits us. If you feel you’re at your max, you probably are don’t force it.

Hips and back pain release.

I always had a bit of hip pain and more recently suffered from a back injury. Yoga really helped me to open my hips and release any form of tension and pain that was stuck there. Some pose especially the child position help me to stretch my back and leave more spaces in between my vertebras making the pain go away progressively.

Relaxation.

During your yoga session, you will need to focus on your breathing which helps to lower your heart rate and bring high relaxation benefits. I noticed that on my big streak of yoga, I get less irritable and less angry.

Of course, there are many other benefits to practising yoga regularly and each one of you will respond differently but it is a good way to get you moving even if you are just starting sport as there are many different types of yoga, from yin that focuses on deep stretching to vinyasa that is considered the most athletic form of yoga.