Yoga: How I do the Fitness Thing
With the start of the new year,
though I know it’s already February,* people are trying to start new habits. The two most common New Year’s Resolutions in 2018 deal with having a
healthier life style (1). So I thought I’d make a recommendation. Do you hate
exercise? I did. I thought most people did. I thought that was the guarantee.
Over the course of my life, I have tried soccer, swimming, gymnastics, tennis,
and Karate, but the idea of liking exercise was rather foreign to me. While I liked learning different moves in Karate in the form of Katas, or the floor routine in Gymnastics, or being in the water with swimming, I never actually liked physical activity itself. Until yoga that is.
I first started yoga, not this past
Thanksgiving Break, but the one before it, as a way to become better at
stretching. For the record, I have always been terrible at stretching and hated
it every agonizing second. However, I
had started exercising again and was already trying to improve at things I am
terrible at, like pushups. So I figured why not try to become better at
stretching as well? I had heard previously that Yoga was a good way to become
flexible so up in my bedroom, sitting on my fuzzy blue rug, I searched for a
10-15 minute beginner yoga video on youtube. I quickly found some and added
that 15 minutes to my 30 minutes of exercising. Surprisingly, I found that I
actually didn’t hate yoga. In fact, I enjoyed it. Connecting the poses together
into a sequence somehow distracted my mind from the fact that I was stretching.
I Fell in Love...
...with yoga. After a couple days a different video each day, I wanted to do yoga more than I
wanted to do the other exercises. But before I knew it, Thanksgiving Break was
over and I was back to State College and drowning in classes. Thankfully,
Winter break also came quickly and I was back at it. The videos in the series I was doing** grew longer and longer and I could no longer fit them before my
regular exercise. Plus, they were getting complicated enough that they were
their own workout. Switching my workout schedule, I would do one day of
pushups, sit-ups and other route exercises and the next day would be yoga. By
the end of winter break I had accomplished my original goal of getting over 10
rounds of the route exercises done.*** However, I still wanted to continue doing
Yoga. While I had finished the 30 day program for beginners, I felt as though I
should repeat it so I could really master the poses. As the Spring semester
rolled around, I planned to continue my yoga practice during the semester.
Unfortunately, like many new semester plans it faded into the background before
fading completely out of my schedule entirely by the 5th week.
Following the 5th week, I only practiced a total of 3 times for the
rest of the semester.
But
I didn’t give up completely. Once the summer started, I practiced yoga every
day 30-40 minutes per day, even managing to keep it up as I took 11 credits
over the course of the summer. During this time, I realized that I had a
problem with anxiety. Yoga was helping me not only in making me more flexible,
but also through eliminating a low-level day-to-day anxiety that I didn’t even
realize I had till it was gone and I felt relief. However, it still wasn’t
enough. The end of the Spring Semester had made me realize that I couldn’t keep
functioning or even living with anxiety that could keep me from doing anything
from hours on end. As I sought help, the professionals I was talking to
recommended exercising. I realized that that was partially why I loved yoga so
much. In trying so hard to focus on the poses and my breath and improving, my
brain literally could not bring up anything else, i.e. could not worry about
anything. For a blessed 30-40 minutes, my brain was miraculously silent.
Yoga Facts
Yoga lowering anxiety is not an
experience exclusive to me, but is collaborated by several scientific studies.
According to the Huffington Post, “A 2010 Boston University study showed that
12 weeks of yoga could help to reduce anxiety…” as well as increase a neurotransmitter,
that low levels of which has been linked to depression and anxiety (2).
Additionally, after a single class, participants showed improved brain
function, lower stress levels, and of course increased flexibility (2). The
benefits only grow the longer you practice yoga. After a couple of months, yoga
students have lower blood pressure, decreased anxiety, improved lung capacity,
boosted sexual desire, the improvement of neck pain and even more as the months
stretch into years (2). I generally practice something called Ashtanga Yoga,
which was founded by K. Pattabhi Jois (3). Yoga started around 5,000 years ago in
Northern India and the first systematic presentation of yoga was put together
in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sûtras (4). Moving over from the East to the West, Yoga
started out in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s (4).
However, Yoga was really popularized in the United States by Indra Devi in
1947, when she opened her Yoga studio in Hollywood (4).
Now
Both
my anxiety and my yoga practice have improved greatly. While I still worry more
than I should and I can’t straighten my legs in Bird of Paradise or Scissors
Pose, I am getting there. As each muscle in my body grows stronger, so do I
become better equipped at dismissing my brain’s irrational concerns. To be clear,
Yoga hasn’t eliminated my anxiety. I still work through my anxiety in other
ways and need help learning strategies to fend off the terror. But it does
help. I’m pretty much guaranteed to be a type A, got to have it all together,
type person. I no longer spend hours unable to escape the incessant berating
brain inside my head. I can touch my toes, hold crow pose, and breathe
freely.
Notes:
*I originally planned to write this post in the beginning of January, but never got around to it. So for the record I did try to get it out then.
**I don't get paid to link to this or any other websites, unless indicated.
(1) "The Most Common New Year's Resolutions for 2018" by Martin Armstrong on Statistica.com (2) "How Yoga Changes Your Body, Starting The Day You Begin" by Carolyn Gregoire on Huffington Post.com
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