Five Reasons to Incorporate Yoga Into Your Fitness Program

The experts at UW Health's Fitness Center at offer tips to help you stay active and healthy no matter your age.

Madison, Wisconsin - There are many reasons why we exercise and incorporate activity into our life.

We want to stay healthy, fit, flexible, calm and in charge of our lives. There are several methods used to accomplish these things. Yoga can be one of them.

Yoga has been around for thousands of years, yet it seems that recently people are realizing the many benefits that a yoga practice provides.

5 Reasons Yoga Helps Improve Your Fitness

Here are 5 reasons yoga should be a part of your fitness program.

1) Yoga improves your flexibility, balance, strength, and posture.

Holding your body in a balanced pose for a period of time challenges your body’s strength and flexibility. A regular yoga practice will improve both and in turn assist in improved posture.

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2) Yoga can help your mental endurance – learning to breathe through physical challenge.

Cultivating a breathing practice helps foster an inward shift and focus on the present which can improve coordination and reaction time.

3) Yoga can help develop body awareness.

Positioning your body in poses, especially without the use of a mirror, takes a mind’s eye to know where your body is in space and alignment. That improves your proprioception – your awareness of your body in space.

4) Yoga can help you relax and quiet your mind.

Part of a yoga practice is learning to slow your breath and focus inward which quells the fluctuations of the mind and brings about mental clarity and calmness.

5) Yoga helps your body by moving in all different directions.

Many fitness pursuits have us moving repetitively in one direction – forward. Activities such as running, biking, and swimming tend to move our bodies over and over in the same pattern which can possibly accumulate into muscle imbalances that can contribute to overuse injuries. Yoga poses put you in different positions which not only use your muscles in different ways but also contribute to joint heath.

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Five Reasons to Incorporate Yoga Into Your Fitness Program