What is Heated Yoga?
Heated yoga is traditional yoga which takes place in a room whose temperature is increased to between ninety five and one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The style used is often linked poses which are vigorous and promote increased sweating while raising the body temperature.
Heated yoga is a low-impact exercise which reaps many benefits for your mind, body, and soul. Hot yoga is a series of linked yoga poses which are done in a room with a temperature between ninety five and one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. This is done so that your body sweats more during the yoga exercise, leading to increased results and ridding your body of toxins.
Doing yoga in a heating room feels much the same as a sauna. The heated room increases the pulse, metabolism, and the flexibility of the blood vessels. The latter increases blood flow to each of your limbs during the exercise and eases circulation. If your muscles are cold they are prone to injury, but keeping them warm (hence the reason athletes "warm-up" before exercising) can help your body move freely. When you do hot yoga, your body will sweat profusely and this sweating will control the internal body temperature.
The series of flowing postures used during heated yoga allows your muscles to remain flexible as the body moves from one pose into the next. Hot yoga offers the same benefits as traditional yoga, but forces you to truly focus your thoughts. You have to push yourself beyond what is normal for yoga, because of the extreme heat conditions.
There are psychological benefits associated with incorporating heated yoga. By doing yoga your flicker fusion frequency improves, as well as your depth perception, symbol coding, learning efficiency, and your concentration. Doing yoga daily or weekly can also increase your memory and attention. You can increase your mood, self-actualization, social skills, and your overall well-being by doing even a basic yoga workout each day for just fifteen minutes. By doing yoga you can increase your somatic awareness, kinesthetic awareness, and self-acceptance. Yoga leads to increased social adjustment and decreased hostility, anxiety, and depression.
The biochemical benefits of heated yoga will decrease your glucose levels, your sodium levels, as well as your total cholesterol. By implementing yoga you will also decrease your triglycerides, your LDL, and VLDL. You will increase your HDL, cholinesterase, and ATPase. When doing yoga you will decrease your catecholamines and total white blood cell count. You will increase your total serum protein, vitamin C, as well as thyroxin. When you incorporate yoga into your daily life you can enjoy an increased lymphocyte count, hemoglobin, and hematocrit.
The health benefits of heated yoga are better than traditional exercise for many reasons. Firstly, when you exercise with yoga your parasympathetic nervous system dominates. At the same time, the subcortical regions of your brain will dominate.
Doing yoga in lieu of other exercises will produce slow and dynamic yet static movements while you enjoy a normalization of your muscle tone. By doing this you can decrease your risk of injury while minimizing the total effort your body puts out during each work out or session. You will also cause your mind to be aware of the internal things such as breathing while working out in a process-oriented and non-competitive environment. In such a state, your energy is controlled through the process of yoga breathing.
Yoga for Perfecting the Self
Most people who hear about yoga think that it is just another kind of exercise routine, but in reality yoga is much more than what it seems from the outside. Unless you get the core idea of performing yoga, you will not be able to tap the benefits that it provide. The first thing for a beginner to know is that there are different kinds of yoga to be practiced. Different types of yoga include Hatha, Ashtanga, Iyengar, Power, Bikram and Vinyasa yoga. Though the birth place of yoga is South India, there are many variations of yoga found in different parts of the eastern countries. One such practice is that of the Hatha yoga. This from of yoga was developed in the northern part of India.
Learning the practice of Hatha yoga starts from reading the 'Kundalini'. It is more like a basic expression of yoga practice. The practice sessions are slow, serene, and very beneficial for a beginner. The men and women practicing it will be achieving balance, concentration, strength, and flexibility. Reading the Kundalini will make you realize the sole purpose of performing yoga; it is for achieving union of one's self with God.
Most of the western practices of yoga are more concentrated towards the postures that are achieved during the yoga practice. It doesn't always seem to be calm and appeasing. In some other cases the trainers will make a fusion of postures with various dance forms and give the participants a 'new package'. This is commonly called as the 'power yoga', a western interpretation of Ashtanga yoga.
For achieving the real benefits of yoga, it is important to follow the rules written by ancient scholars regarding them. Each movement and the breathing practices associated with it are very important. The best form of yoga, if you are going to practice is regularly, will be the Ashtanga yoga. 'Ashtanga' in Sanskrit means 'eight limbs'. This is a fast paced practice which progresses from one 'asana' to the other in a synchronized sequence. The breathing and the muscle movements are all fast paced.
There will be improvement of strength, stamina, and flexibility with this type of yoga. The 'power yoga' which is common in the western world is actually derived from 'ashtanga'. 'Iyengar yoga' gives more importance towards holding a pose for a longer time and the 'vinyasa' place more importance on the various basic and complex breathing patterns.
No comments:
Post a Comment