At some point in your life you may have been told to “try yoga for *insert problem here*” or maybe you haven’t.  If you’ve complained about physical or mental problems around me, it’s likely I have told you “you should try yoga”.  Sometimes I feel like even suggesting it is pretty cliche and people are secretly rolling their eyes at me, but honestly if you haven’t tried it and given it 100% you likely will never know what you are missing out on.  Which is why I’ve decided to share my 5 reasons to start practicing yoga!

1. It’s STRESS relieving!

You can’t always control the things that stress you out.  If you are stressed, the first thing I would tell you to do is exercise.  Yoga is a fantastic tool for relieving stress.  Stress majorly affects your body and causes tension in the muscles.  Any time I have a stress or tension headache, I immediately hop on my mat and use my go to moves, which you can read about *here*.  You’ll be surprised to find taking *15-20 minutes a day to practice* can drastically reduce the effects of stress and clear your mind. Warming up your muscles and stretching the body does wonders for mental clarity, which leads me to my second reason, Anxiety!

2.  Anxiety Relief

Let’s be real, anxiety is a bitch.  It’s crippling, and makes you think nothing in the world will ever be good or the same again.  And it’s a lie, we all know it. Think of when your anxiety finally fades away, if you’re lucky, how much better you feel.  I often feel silly for even letting *nothing* bother me or how I reacted once I experience some sort of change. I’m terrible with change, but I’m learning to work through it 🙂  For me, I can’t get out of my own head long enough to enjoy the now, to be present- as they say in yoga.  And honestly some of the ideas of yoga seem so cheesy,  like being present but practicing yoga has been a game changer.  

Now, once I recognizing I’m starting to get anxious,  I will be sure to fit in a good yoga sesh even if I don’t feel like it and everything in me wants to just lay in my bed and do nothing.  I force myself to just do at least 15 minutes and usually end up doing more and feeling so much better afterwards.  I’d like to add in mediation here as well.  Meditation is a big part of yoga and being present as well. It has helped a TON as well for my anxiety.  Anytime I experience some serious anxiety I grab my phone and use my meditation app Headspace.  It’s a great app, that I definitely recommend!  I haven’t looked for many but there are tons of great apps for your iphone/smartphone for meditation.

3. Tones your body

This is probably pretty obvious, but yoga does tone your body.  Many times I hear that people will skip out on yoga because it’s too slow, and doesn’t provide some sort of cardio workout.  Yoga can absolutely tone and provide a cardio workout.  In a previous post, I shared several of *my favorite yoga videos* of which provide a cardio aspect to them as well as toning.  This was an added bonus for me,  I was mainly into it for the flexiblilty but once I started seeing baby abs peeking through I was pretty excited for that.

4. Flexibility

Another given, at least to me. You may care less about being flexible, but once you realize how good you will feel by being more flexible you will likely continue to do yoga.  I will admit, this is one of the reasons I challenged myself to start yoga.  But once I started feeling the difference in my body from gaining more flexibility, I really loved how I felt overall.  I felt more energized, had less aches and pains and especially less back pain from sitting at a computer.  The more flexible over all you are the better you will feel.  (side note: you DO NOT have to be flexible to start doing yoga, doing yoga is exactly how you BECOME flexible.  Trust me I was not near as flexible as I am now)

5. To Challenge yourself

When I first started yoga, I started because I was bored with what was going on in my life.  It felt stagnant and redundant.  I felt stuck. That’s not a fun place to be.  So I decided I wanted to challenge myself to start doing yoga.  The more I practiced, the more I read about it (and instagrammed) the more I realized there was so much more to yoga and how fun it actually can be.  Learning different poses, coming up with a flow, and finding that there are so many different styles.  If you will challenge yourself to give it a try, you may be surprised how much you enjoy it.  If you aren’t sure where to start you can read my suggestions here.

So there you have it!  Do you want to try yoga?  What are your favorite things about yoga if you already practice?