Why is Yoga Good For Us?

Yoga is recommended as adjunct therapy for mental and physical health conditions. Sometimes it seems there’s nothing yoga can’t do, according to the claims. Why does everyone say yoga is so good for you? There’s a plethora of reasons and ways in which yoga can be incredibly healthy for us that can change depending on your particular needs, and what kind of yoga you’re doing. In our modern age, we’re finally getting scientific research to back up anecdotal evidence yogis have been experiencing for centuries. On a more basic level, yoga is good because it conditions both the body and the mind, and it has the ability to disrupt habit. More and more in scientific research we are seeing that health requires change and dynamism.

Our daily activities are less and less varied. Driving, working, relaxing, communicating… most of those activities involve the same set of movements, primarily seated, mostly in front of us. Part of that is simply a function of the way our bodies are made, but more of it is comprised of habits. What happens over time when we have habitual movement and resting patterns is that the soft tissues of our bodies become casted into the shapes they take all the time. This means that other movements become painful, impossible, or both. For example, because our eyes are in the front of our heads and we rely on them so heavily, most of what we do is in front of us. We reach forward for the steering wheel, for the computer, for our phones. When the occasion arises when we try to reach our arms out the sides, or overhead, we encounter resistance. Habitual movement patterns also create muscle imbalances. If we practice running or cycling a lot, our hamstrings and quads will probably get very strong. But the inner and outer muscles of the legs will stay weak - too weak to work in synergy with the quads and hams. This kind of structural instability can lead to a multitude of problems in posture and movement, and lead to chronic pain. Thus, you see the importance of breaking our bodies out of those habits. Yoga does that for us. Very rarely (if ever) in our day to day lives are our bodies in anything resembling a Warrior I, for example. Why would we have one knee bent, the other straight? Especially with the foot flat on the floor? And the hips squaring? Especially with the arms overhead?! It’s a strange position for our bodies to be in, and that’s precisely why it’s good. Those strange, funny, weird, creative positions we can get into in a yoga class help to counteract the years of habitual and unavoidable positions we adopt in our daily lives.

Moving differently than we’re used to also forces us to engage parts of our brain we may not often use. A significant body of research shows that one of the best ways to stay healthy as we age is to continue learning and using our brains for critical thinking and problem solving. Learning new movement patterns is another way to activate the brain. It creates new neural pathways between the brain and the body, improving proprioception. Proprioception, or lack thereof, is a big contributor to injury at any age. It is our ability to sense where our body is. A lack of proprioception might mean that we can’t tell that our knee is bent at an unhealthy position and turns into an injury. It might mean that we have very little balance and we have a propensity to falls. Putting our body in new orientations in a safe environment (and with a good teacher) is a great way to develop heighten proprioception, enabling us to better care for our bodies.

Beyond the purely empirical, yoga has the ability to show us what our mental habits are. Maybe you never noticed that your brain is constantly writing a to-do list, or telling you a story about all the ways you could be better, but when you’re holding Warrior II, away from so many distractions, that can become abundantly clear. Maybe you never realized that when people talk you’re not really listening. Until you find yourself lost in a yoga class because you weren’t listening to the teacher’s words. Maybe yoga helped you change your perception of yourself and you can now see yourself as more capable, or more humble than you did before.

Maybe you’ve experienced all three of these in a yoga class. Maybe not. The thing about yoga is it doesn’t need us. Yoga is. But we can use it as a tool to break through our habits and cycles to become more dynamic, healthy, and aware than we were before.