The Health Benefits Of Yoga Stretching
Yoga stretching exercises are very good for the body. Faithfully performing yoga stretching exercises can improve muscle flexibility which bestows the benefit of grace and fluidity in movement. Aside from being very easy to perform, it takes only a relatively small part of your time. You can do these yoga stretching exercises preferably in the morning just before you start your day or in the evenings before settling down to bed. You can even do yoga stretching your office. To relieve shoulder and neck tension, start out with shrugging exaggeratedly. Bring your shoulders up as close as you can to your ears and then suddenly relax you muscles so that they drop back. 10 repetitions of this yoga stretching exercise should do well for starters. Another yoga stretching exercise for the shoulder is the elbow ring. Position your fingers on your shoulders so that your elbows are bent. Move your shoulders to make it look like you are drawing circles with your elbows. A complete set for this yoga stretching exercise would be 5 times each in clockwise and counter clockwise motions. Do 10 repetitions of the whole set. Breathing exercises are a very important part of yoga stretching; indeed, it is an integral part of yoga as a whole. It removes tension and relaxes the body as well as renews the oxygen content in the respiratory system. Sit upright with proper posture like those of a soldier. Close the eyes and relax your body. Establish a rhythm to the breathing exercise. Breath in slowly for about 5 seconds, hold it in for 15 seconds and then count to ten as you slowly exhale. As you try to hold the breath in, you will experience some difficulty. To address this difficulty, a meditative mantra is used as a focus. Think of something positive about life in general to use for your mantra. Another yoga stretching exercise that can be performed in your home or office is the spine twist. Sitting down in an erect posture with your legs stretched in front of you, slowly fold your right leg as you cross the left foot with your thigh at about the middle. Slowly release the position by letting each section of your spine relax one after the other. This yoga stretching exercise is designed to relieve neck stiffness by stretching the spine and the nerves within while at the same time exercising the muscles of the lower abdominals. For those of you who have heard people say "Om" when referring to yoga or to meditation in general, you should know that it isn't a joke to yoga practitioners. It is, after all, their basic mediation technique. Together with breathing exercises, the Om exercise removes tension and dissipates negative energies. To the yoga expert, Om exercises gives them peace and a generally good feeling of well-being. Om is sequenced into four parts with Om just being one of them. The meditative mantra actually starts with Ah and then Om and then mmmm and then silence. Inhale and then exhale counting to 8 each time. As you exhale, begin chanting the mantra. Pause for a few moments after exhaling, then begin again. To really know about the full benefits of the Om exercise, you will need to talk to a yoga instructor. The yoga stretching exercises that have been cited here are just a few among the many yoga stretching routines in existence. It was only with respect to location that these exercises were used for this article. You can perform these yoga stretching exercises anywhere you are comfortable. |
