Yoga, Health, and Wellness Articles + Recipes

Online classes are not always given the respect they deserve. While they have plenty of differences than in-person classes, they nonetheless offer room for growth. My first experience with yoga did not happen in a studio or group setting. It happened with a Power Yoga DVD that I picked up from the store. Eventually I started going to a studio, but practicing yoga by myself with a DVD was my first step. Since then, I have enjoyed the wide variety of online classes available to explore other yoga styles and teachers. In every yoga class, online or in person, you learn something new. It ranges from the external, such as a pose cued by the instructor, to the internal, such as building self-awareness. I have been practicing yoga for nine years, and continue to learn new things from every teacher and class I attend. Online platforms bring the teachers, classes and learning experiences to you- you just need to be ready for them. Here are 5 of the ways online classes enrich you’re your yoga practice (in ways in-person classes do not).

Harry Potter yoga, goat yoga and now-- aqua yoga? The latest trend in yoga, Aqua Yoga adapts the principles and movements of yoga to a water environment. The water provides buoyancy and will let you concentrate more on strengthening and stretching your body rather than struggling to balance yourself. Practicing yoga in water also relieves joint and bone stress. If you have ever experienced difficulty in holding a yoga pose correctly, you will be surprised by how you can just float into that position under water with grace and ease.

You might be thinking, you already go to the gym, so why should you include yoga into your exercise routine, isn’t that just for relaxing? Although it is a fantastic way of finding some headspace and letting go of any stress in your body, yoga can dramatically improve your gym workouts. The perfect partner to any type of exercise, whether it’s cardio or weight training, it can boost your performance in the gym and enhance your overall fitness. The word itself actually means ‘union’, so think of yoga as the perfect union between health and fitness.

High Intensity Interval Training—often just called HIIT for short—is working its way into fitness enthusiast’s workout schedules everywhere, and not without good reason. In fact, Dr. Axe shares many different benefits of HIIT in addition to better physical fitness, a couple of which include its anti-aging effects and support of healthier levels of hormones like ghrelin (which affects your eating patterns) and leptin (the hormone responsible for making you feel full).

Common wisdom tells you to work on the postures that bring up resistance and challenge you. Personally, I’m okay with this sentiment—after all, there’s plenty of value in exploring the edges of your comfort zone. As a practitioner and teacher, though, I tend to emphasize the opposite—I choose to indulge the postures that I love with egregious frequency. I encourage the teachers that I train to do the exact same thing. We love the poses that we love for good reasons: they awaken us, they ground us, they soothe us, they challenge us, and they nurture our mind’s ability to focus and settle down.

Yoga and meditation can be used as a healthcare tool for healthy living. You have heard that yoga meditation is helpful or good for health. But how it is good for health or it works really? There are also many controversial stories about yoga. So, you should know scientifically about yoga meditation. There are a lot of studies shows you the proof behind the every benefits of yoga meditation. These are the 100 benefits based on the available researches.

It is widely known that yoga helps us conquer a long list of health benefits. Yoga eases anxiety and relieves symptoms of depression. It helps with back and neck pain and it reduces stress levels; it helps us be more in the moment and so much more. Despite knowing that yoga is good for us, it can still be hard for us to do yoga, especially when we have an already overpacked schedule. You don’t need a full hour to incorporate this exercise into your daily routine, however, and the following tips will show how you can do yoga every day, no matter how busy you are.

The recent Harry Potter yoga class took the Internet by storm, with participants pictured holding a wand as they practiced different yoga poses. They also had a sorting hat and listened to passages from the Deathly Hallows! While we might find it hard to find or attend a Harry Potter class, we can certainly bring some magic into our own home yoga practice. The Griffyndor wizards at BooKYogaTeacherTraining.com have just the right tips for you to work your magic into your own practice!

Flexibility, balance, strength, and equanimity—you’ve probably heard of all those reasons to practice yoga, right? Not just benefits for the body, but for the mind and soul as well. How about combating stress and delving into spirituality? Absolutely! The list goes on…

Fitness trends come and go all the time. Crossfit had its time in the spotlight, as did rail running and P90X. However, as studies are published across the fitness and medical industries, telling us which exercises will really get us into the best shape of our lives, there is one form of fitness that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Which one is it? You guessed it: yoga.

As a formally vocal sceptic that recently “found” yoga during a month long stay at Blue Osa Yoga Retreat and Spa, I was keen to do a little digging into the benefits that yoga could provide. The results were staggering!

One of the most powerful benefits of practicing yoga is that it creates space for you to work through negative emotions and the drama that might be weighing like an anvil on your shoulders. We all have samskaras or karmic tendencies and energy patterns and often we can get stuck in obsessing about the same few thoughts. Over and over again. Usually the thoughts that hold us back—you know those with self-doubt and self-pity? By practicing yoga with an emphasis on flow, vibration, dissolution, you can fire up your tapas and alchemize all that sh*t into positive energy.

Any time you can get to the gym is great. However, some times may have more benefits than others. Below are four reasons why exercising in the morning may be the best.

When you’re practicing yoga, do you ever wonder why you’re doing a particular asana or pose? Why the teacher emphasizes alignment in a particular way? What the benefits are?

It’s estimated that about 9% of the American population practices yoga. Most of them are women, but the practices is slowly gaining popularity with the male species among us as the yogic path becomes more and more necessary to live a full and balanced life in these stressful modern day times. But shouldn’t everyone be practicing yoga? Here are 5 compelling reasons why the 9% should become 100%!

When I first came to yoga, I thought it was about body movement. Sweating, moving, breathing, standing on your hands, you know, the usual.