Some of the wellness benefits of yoga are widely understood, such as the ability to tone up your muscles and improve your core stability – but did you know it can also help to improve your heart health? Yoga can help to keep your weight and fitness under control, and through this can boost the overall wellbeing of your heart in numerous ways.
Whether you have problems with heart disease or simply want to make sure that your heart remains healthy, it is worth giving yoga a try. More and more research is showing that yoga can make a significant difference to the health of your heart.
Yoga is designed to improve your mental, emotional and physical wellbeing, and the research is showing that it definitely delivers on that. In fact, the most recent research is revealing that yoga can prevent or even reverse the signs of heart disease, and can impact on many other illnesses, too.
As well as heart disease, yoga is now thought to benefit those with diabetes, high blood pressures or who are suffering from or at risk of having a stroke. Yoga provides the tools and strategies that patients need to help get their conditions under control or prevent them all together.
If you are hoping to use yoga to improve specific heart-related health conditions, there are a few specific positions that you should try. A chair spinal twist, for example, is an ideal way to help you guard against these types of condition. You do this by sitting in a chair that has a flat seat and straight back (such as a wooden dining room chair). You sit sideways on the seat so that your feet are flat on the floor, and use a pillow under your knees or bottom if needed to make sure that your knees are level with your hips as your feet touch the floor. Put your hands on the chair back and stretch your rib cage upwards, allowing your body to twist as far as is comfortable. Then release and turn around so that you face the other way on the chair and try again.